At Sanctuary, we say “It’s our work, not my work.” Not mine, not yours, not the account manager’s. Everything that leaves this building has all of our names on it, whether or not they’re written down anywhere.
On the surface, the phrase is meant to do one specific thing. It makes sure nobody sits alone at 4:30 on a Friday, staring at an email they don’t know how to answer, quietly doing the math on whether asking for help costs more than guessing. That’s the whole job of the sentence. Nobody here carries a hard thing by themselves.
It’s a good promise, and I believe every word of it. It’s also the one I’ve watched get bent more than any other, almost always by people meaning well. “Our” is a wide word, and wide words drift.
When Everyone Owns It, Nobody Does
The first drift shows up wearing urgency.
A customer is unhappy. Within the hour there are six people on a call that need one or two. Everyone has an opinion, three of them are taking notes on the same sentence, and the account manager who should actually solve the problem has stopped talking.
Start with what that costs. Six people for an hour is most of a workday and a lot of company time. Everyone is pulled off six other clients who were perfectly content that morning and are now waiting a little longer for something they were promised. The fire got plenty of attention. Everything not on fire got less.
But the hour isn’t the actual expensive part. Everybody leaves that call believing it’s handled, and nobody leaves it holding the ball. Two people assume the account manager has it, because it’s her client. She assumes one of the senior people picked it up, because four of them were on the call and somebody said they’d look into it. Thursday arrives, nothing has moved, and the customer follows up in a noticeably cooler tone.
The correction is almost too simple to write down. Six people aren’t needed. And before that call ends, somebody claims the problem out loud and says what they’re going to do and when. Not “we’ll take care of it.” A name.
Most problems want one owner and a few people standing by in case they need support. Swarming creates confusion. It feels like care and reads like doubt.
The Drift That Looks Like Generosity
The second drift is much harder to catch, because from the inside it is indistinguishable from being a good teammate.
“Our work” turns into permission to take and own the work.
Someone’s struggling. Multiple people step in, plus their manager. Nobody’s grandstanding here. It feels like helping, and in most respects it is helping. But the problem has moved. It’s off their desk and onto somebody else’s.
We manage against this with a phrase. We don’t take other people’s monkeys. Somebody brings you a problem, you help them work through it, and then the monkey goes back where it came from. Not because you’re too busy or unable to hold it, but because it’s theirs, and it was never yours to keep. They solve it, and they get the credit.
It sounds a little ridiculous said out loud, which is most of why it works. Nobody has to accuse anyone of anything or call a meeting about who owns what. Somebody hands the monkey back with clear expectations, and the thing goes back across the desk.
There are other problems that taking someone’s monkey produces. You gave an answer, so now the customer or client knows where the answer came from. The next email skips the account manager and arrives in your inbox, and the one after that does too. The client isn’t unhappy with the account manager and isn’t trying to go around anybody. People simply route to whoever solved it last time, and that is very hard to undo.
So now she’s learning what her own client wants secondhand. She’s sitting in a meeting about an account she owns, being briefed on a conversation she wasn’t in. Meanwhile, you’re holding a piece of work you hired somebody else to do, permanently, without ever having decided to.
The Last Act of Support Is the Credit
When somebody solves it, say so. Out loud, by name, in the meeting, on the client email, in front of the whole company. Be specific, because “great job on the Henderson project” is a pat on the head and “she found the tracking error nobody else caught and rebuilt the report in a day” is a fact.
I want to be careful here, because this can sound like insincerity. A measured dose of recognition administered to keep morale up. It isn’t that, and anyone on the receiving end can tell the difference immediately. People always know when they’re being managed.
It’s simpler than that. In a company where the work is mine, credit is a prize. It’s scarce, people compete for it, and handing it over is an act of generosity. In a company where the work is ours, credit is bookkeeping. You say who did what because that’s what happened. Letting it settle on whoever was standing closest at the end isn’t modesty and it isn’t graciousness. It’s an inaccurate record.
Here’s the part that took me the longest to understand. The person who solved it often doesn’t know that they did. They know the version with the fumbles in it. They remember the two days spent chasing the wrong theory and the call where they had no answer, and they file the whole thing under a near miss. Left alone with that account, they conclude they got lucky.
Saying it out loud corrects the record they’re keeping on themselves. That isn’t a morale boost. It’s telling somebody what actually happened, because they might have been standing too close to see it.
We keep a channel in Slack called #thankful, and it does exactly one thing. People use it to name somebody else and why they’re thankful. Not the campaign, not the account, not the quarter. The person. The reason. Somebody caught an error before it left the building. Somebody stayed to rebuild a deck that came apart at four o’clock. Somebody covered a client’s call for a coworker whose kid was sick. It goes in the channel with a name attached.
It cost nothing, and I’d have bet on the channel going quiet within a month. It hasn’t. What I’ve come to appreciate is the distinction it forces on us, because celebrating our success and celebrating our people turn out to be two different activities. A company win is a pleasant thing to announce, and it belongs to nobody in particular, which is why it does nothing for anybody in particular. A name does.
The version that matters most is the one they never hear. What you say about somebody in a room they aren’t in is the only recognition that can’t possibly be for their benefit, which is exactly why it travels further than anything you say to their face.
It also does something I didn’t anticipate. The org chart says who reports to whom, and recognition tells everybody who actually knows what. Name the right person often enough, and the problem stops routing through you, not because you delegated it on paper, but because everyone watched who handled it last time.
What I Had to Unlearn
I spent most of my career alone with problems.
Early jobs where I was the only person doing what I did. Then the first years of this company, when there was nobody to ask because there was nobody else. Something broke, and I either figured it out, or it sat there broken. Nobody handed me a monkey in those years. There was also no one around to hand one to.
That isn’t a hardship story. It worked, and it’s mostly how things got done. I’d guess a fair number of people who start companies are wired the same way, and I still am. I do it at home constantly, to the mild exasperation of my family, where something breaks, and I’m already underneath it with a flashlight before anyone has asked me to be.
Here’s the part nobody warns you about. The habit outlives the conditions that made it correct. Jumping in was the entire job when I was by myself. In a building full of capable people, the identical move takes work off somebody’s desk and answers questions on their behalf. The instinct hadn’t stopped being useful. It had stopped being needed, and it took me an unreasonably long time to tell those two apart.
What you give up isn’t the drama. The client is still upset, the deadline is still Friday, the thing is still broken at 5:15. What you give up is being the one it happens to. You’re in the room when it turns; you can usually see the exact move that fixed it, and the move wasn’t yours. Nobody thanks you for that, and nobody should, because from the outside you appear to have stood there and done nothing. I feel that pull all the time, and some part of me still feels bad about not being the one.
Underneath it is a question that takes a while to look at directly. If they don’t need me, what am I for? That question isn’t only for owners. Every manager I know has had some version of it.
I don’t have a tidy answer.
Some days it’s uncomfortable to be the least essential person in a room full of our team members. But I’ve come to think the question is a leftover. It’s the voice of the guy who had to solve everything because there was nobody else in the building, still checking whether he’s earned his chair.
There are still times to step in, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. When someone’s underwater for reasons that have nothing to do with the job. When a problem requires knowledge or experience nobody on the team holds. When something falls in the space between two teams and belongs to nobody, where it will sit indefinitely until somebody gives it an owner. The big one is when the mistake is mine. Then I definitely have to admit it and own it.
The test I try to use is one question. Am I stepping in because they need it, or because I need it? It’s a harder question than it looks, and the honest answer isn’t always the flattering one.
The thing I didn’t expect is that the phrase covers me too. Nobody here carries a hard thing alone, and it turns out that includes the person who spent twenty years assuming he had to.
My lesson is that “our work, not my work” was never really about the work. It’s about a person at 4:30 on a Friday with an email they don’t know how to answer. Somebody should be sitting beside them. The answer should still be theirs when it’s finished. And when it works, the room should hear their name. Do that often enough and you stop being the person the company depends on, which is the only way it ever becomes a company at all.