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TL;DR -

Measuring enablement becomes more straight forward as we look to the individuals in enablement roles. This requires us to know our team members and the kind of work they derive the most joy from and therefore most productive in. The best metric for measuring enablement is employee satisfaction.

Background

Enablement roles in the work place are notoriously hard to measure. Those who thrive in the role are probably naturally gifted ’enablers’ who don’t view this trait as a something valued in the workplace. Those who are asked to step into an enablement role who desire clearer metrics of tasks completed will probably be frustrated in their job.

Swyx describes this problem in his essay on ‘Enablement vs Ownership’ as follows:

Because enablement is about helping other people do the thing, rather than doing it yourself, your results are naturally not entirely within your control. The extremes are clear: if a team is knocking it out of the park in the area you helped with, that’s a Good Job. If nobody on the team thinks you’ve been helpful at all, that’s probably (not necessarily) bad. But the humdrum in-betweens, where we realistically spend most of our time, are entirely unclear. People in enablement roles must be able to live with this ambiguity, and genuinely take pride in the messy business of helping people succeed in things which, by definition, are not their main responsibility and therefore care less about.

Before we really dive into the problem, let’s get a quick understanding of the stages of work

Stages of Work

Stage 1: Ideation

The first stage is ideation/planning. If you’ve worked at a big company or have stakeholder’s who are intimately involved in the product, you know that this phase can be a perpetual broken record where we are looping over needs and proposing new solutions all the time. Ideation is necessary to begin but we must move on to take steps to activate a plan.

Stage 2: Activation

The second stage is activation. Activation is the stage of work that tends to get skipped over. Sometimes it happens and teams usually thrive when it does. Typically we jump from “this idea is awesome” to “alright, go make it happen” without much of an on ramp. We expect the good idea to take us into product delivery and we miss this crucial step.

This step is where the discerning of the idea, i.e. is it good or bad, happens. Once discerning has taken place, then there is the need for the hype and rallying the room to get going. Another typical example is we have some idea people who are throwing out ideas and we miss the discerning but we have a hype person who is all on board and tries to rally the room around an idea that hasn’t been under the scrutiny of discernment (because that’s what it can feel like).

To summarize activation, let’s just call it wisdom. Wisdom as to whether pressing the button is a good idea or not. When it has been decided it is a good idea, we can press the button with confidence.

A much longer, in depth analysis of this ‘activation’ stage is provided by the Working Genius Team.

Stage 3: Implementation

Here is where our beloved enablement comes into play. To pull a phrase from Swyx’s quote above, “enablement is about helping other people do the thing”.

Once in the implementation phase, it has been decided the idea is good, the enabler’s/enablement will kick in because helping do the thing is a core motivation of enabling. And then there are those who will drive the work to completion. These tenacious people are desperately needed otherwise implementing would fall short because enablers would simply want to help but help can take on many forms and finishing a thing requires those who are pointedly set on getting it done.

Measuring Enablement: The Problem

This quote from Jerry Seinfeld on marriage is perfect for measuring enablement:

It’s a bit like a chess game isn’t it. Except the board is flowing water and the all the chess pieces are made of smoke.

The main issue is that measuring it seems to elude us. Metrics don’t really work because it has more to do with how those on the receiving end of the enablement role feel.

If we accept for purposes of this article, that enablement has more to do with the person than the role, I think we can get a much better grasp on how to measure it.

But let’s go back one step further and realize that this is true of all jobs. If someone is an idea’s person, they are probably going to really struggle with always being asked to fix bugs and deliver features, even if their job title is software developer.

So, how someone is ‘productive’ may not fit their job title.

For the moment, let’s leave the discussion of ’they were hired to do a job’ aside.

Measuring Enablement: Towards a solution

Enablement as a gifting

Enablement roles, ‘helping others to do the thing’, and satisfaction from that role can be measured more from the person’s internal satisfaction. This requires team leaders to know their team really well.

If we use the Working Genius language, the enabler’s internal motivation to do this type of work is something they don’t consider to be a skill or gift. Why? Because they don’t have to be asked to help others do the thing. In fact, putting metrics and outcomes on the enablement role takes what is a gifting and tries to make it a skill that can be picked up by anyone with the job title.

So are you saying it cannot be measured? No. I am saying measuring enablement roles must look different than a kanban board and points completed for the week/month.

Team health check

So how do we look at our team and address this?

One simple way is to look at people in enablement roles and ask, “Are they perpetually frustrated and not interested in this role?” You could also ask the positive form of, “who is absolutely crushing it in this role?” This second person will be joyful in their work.

All things being equal between two employees and the work they are doing, if one is frustrated and one is joyful, you can assume the joyful person cares deeply about the success of the person/company they are helping. It does feel like a responsibility because this person’s internal motivation makes it so.

Because enablement roles are not measured predominantly by the amount of items in the completed column, the thriving enabler will be able to tell you, “I have helped x, y, z person, company, etc do the this they were trying to do or provide them with better resources.”

Conversely, if you hear them say something similar to, “I just don’t feel like I have been able to help anyone,” now we move to considering the work itself. The person who loves enablement but doesn’t feel like they have helped anyone, no matter how much work they have done, needs to communicate with those they are helping. They get much more from interaction and the inter-personal feedback than from tasks.

What does this look like?

Happy enablement-ers:

• Join communities and help others with problems, just cause.
• Always giving resources to help answer questions
• Probably have resources and ready to provide help as soon as they are asked.
• Don’t have to be asked to help others
• Don’t care about ‘measuring’ what they are doing
• Being able to talk with others and that other person express gratitude is fueling enough
• Are reaffirmed that they are an asset to the team even though what they do doesn’t have as tangible outcomes

Sad enablement-ers:

• Do not get to interact with others, company or community.
• Always being asked to provide hard metric for what they did, i.e. find some way to measure what they are doing
• Don’t feel they are able to be resourceful cause it isn’t valued

Not the full story

So this all seems great. Just find the enabler’s and hire them to do the enablement jobs. But we humans are more complex than that.

Here again is why I like the Working Genius. Someone may have a ‘working genius’ of enablement. But geniuses come in pairs. So you have another genius working alongside your enablement.

We also have working competencies. Meaning, “yeah I can do the thing but it’s not really my favorite and eventually I will look for something else.” So someone who has enablement as a competency may do the job well for a while but do much better in different role.

And lastly, we all have frustrations. These are the things that you are drained while doing. So if someone hates intangible metrics, they are probably going to struggle with enablement roles. If someone is an ideas person and they never get to dream and share their ideas they are really going to feel under valued and think they could bring more to the table. If someone is great at validating ideas but continually told, “stay in your lane,” it will be difficult for them as people keep doing stupid things with poor ideas that they knew wouldn’t work (this IS NOT me by the way 😅 I tend to be the dreamy person).

Again, we have two geniuses, competencies and frustrations.

So, it is not the full story to simply go all in on enablement. When we are looking at the role and the individuals who are in those roles, we have to ask, “what are things they are good at”, “What do they struggle with”, etc.

Knowing that people have areas they derive joy from, areas that they are perpetually frustrated in, and areas that they are just kinda ‘meh’ in, helps us look at our teams and start organizing them to help everyone be their most joyfully productive selves.