Craftsman and contract managers

Prepare yourself for a huge sweeping generalisation- In large organisations people tend to fall into one of two categories: Craftsman or Contract Managers.

Craftsman* create and build things. They take some raw materials and do some work to make something more valuable.  In today’s corporate world  this is not necessarily about building furniture or pottery because the raw material is most likely to be information. All large companies today rely on information technology and therefore depend on craftsman to be creative with it.

office by kirwilliam, on Flickr

When an organisation doesn’t have the right type of craftsmen internally, they contract the work out and employ contract managers make sure they get what they want within the time frames required. For the purposes of this post I want to extend this definition to say that contract managers are essentially “craftsman wranglers” whether they be internal or external.

“A” is a good example of a craftsman. “A”’s job title is a “Web Analyst” and what she does is look at website logs etc to measure how many people are viewing the company website and what they are doing while they are there.  She is a quiet genius when it comes to this task and is able to identify interesting usage patterns and predict how many visitors the website is going to get in any given month with amazing accuracy. Without her, the company would be flying blind regarding how their website is working.

“B” is a good example of a contract manager.  He leads a cross functional team that includes some craftsmen types like graphic designers and copywriters. While not being a designer or writer himself he is also very good at his job and makes sure the work is done on time and meets quality standards. He is exceptionally organised and excels at planning ahead to make sure his team is run well. He is making sure all the contracts are being fulfilled whether they be internal or external.

While both “A” and “B” both are good at their jobs and take pride in their work, there is a one thing that makes a significant difference: “A”’s work is not scalable while “B”’s is.  “A” can only do so much in a day while “B” can start managing other contract managers ie. A promotion means applying the same skills. “A” can also get promoted but this will mean wholly or partly turning into a contract manager which is not attractive at all to her She loves what she does and is not prepared to give it up.

What this all means is that in large organisations, people like “B” who are good, get promoted while people like “A” who are also good, seem to have limited progression opportunities.

This leads to an unfortunate outcome where companies are run by non-craftsman and think that their particular skills are the ones that are important and increase shareholder value. After a certain point corporate leaders have no idea how their company really operates and find themselves managing a black box that makes money but they are not really sure how. They choose to outsource as much as they can looking for cheaper ways to run the black box without realising that they are outsourcing the creativity which forms the real fundamentals of the company.

The real value of a business lies with the craftsman working there but this value cannot be fully realised unless you have good contract managers organising things and respecting the the work the craftsman do.

*(or “craftsperson” if you like but I assure you that even though I used the non-PC term here I mean it inclusively)