Everyone Is Already An Understudy

Picture the newest people in a building that isn’t quite theirs yet. They didn’t apply for this job. They didn’t sweat over a cover letter or angle for the offer. Their whole team got folded into a new one through an acquisition, boxes and all, and one Monday they simply belonged somewhere else.

They’re still doing the job they came in doing. That much hasn’t changed. But a few weeks in, you’ll catch them sitting quietly in meetings that don’t need them yet, learning a tool nobody assigned them yet, shadowing a process three departments over that has nothing to do with their title…yet. Nobody is making them do this. They’re understudies who never auditioned for the part, and everyone in the room, without saying it out loud, has already agreed on the one true thing: it isn’t a question of if they eventually get moved into something else. It’s when.

That’s a strange thing to sit calmly inside of. Tell most people “you will definitely be asked to do a different job than the one you have, we just can’t tell you which one or when” and watch them get uneasy. But inside an acquisition, everybody nods along like it’s a weather forecast. Of course.

Obviously. That’s just how this works.

That exact certainty is true almost everywhere the acquisition isn’t. Your marriage will eventually ask you to be the strong one on a week you didn’t train for. Your body will eventually ask for a level of care you didn’t train for either. We only treat the shift as a sure thing when it’s wearing a lanyard and sitting in a boardroom. Anywhere else, we call it bad luck instead of the forecast it always was.

Businesses will write an entire slide deck called Succession Planning with a straight face, then act genuinely wounded when their own knees give out on a hike they never trained for.

I run a bar. Every new hire behind that rail learns something outside their own station in the first month, whether they ask to or not. Not because a manual tells them to. Because I’ve watched what a bad Friday does to a room that only trained people for their own job, and the nights that don’t fall apart are the ones where somebody spent a slow Tuesday back in week two learning a job they didn’t have yet, for no reason they could have named at the time.

Learning a skill you don’t need yet has a particular itch to it. It’s like practicing a chord that doesn’t belong to any song you’re currently playing. That itch isn’t proof you’re wasting the afternoon. It’s usually the tell that you’re doing the one thing that actually protects the people who’ll be counting on you later, on a night neither of you can see yet.

This is what investing in your team actually looks like on an ordinary Tuesday, not a benefits page bullet point.

It’s letting someone learn the part they’re not playing yet, while nothing is on fire, so that on the night something is, the room already knows what to do without a meeting about it. Teams that get handed that kind of investment take better care of the customer standing in front of them. Customers who get taken care of come back and invest in you. Most companies build the whole thing backwards, waiting for the crisis to teach, for free, what the slow Tuesday was already offering to teach for nothing.

I don’t know exactly what I’m currently under-preparing for. Nobody does. That’s the whole trick of the thing hiding inside the certainty. But given the choice, I’d rather spend a slow Tuesday finding out on purpose than wait for the Friday that makes me.

Stay Positive & Time To Prep