How to do what you want inside a company: find the overlap

Every company wants something from you. You also want something out of the work you do. The freedom you have inside that company sits exactly where those two things overlap, and how much of it you get depends on how well you find that spot and deliver results there.

That paragraph is the idea. The rest is about what the overlap looks like from the inside, and what to do when it seems to be missing.

The first time I said it out loud

There was a point in my career, in the hiring conversations with a company I was about to join, when I said it for the first time: let me use what I do, what I believe in, and what I like doing, to work for this company.

That sentence starts with me: what I already do, what I already believe, what I already like. The company comes in as the place where all of that gets put to work.

The magic of the whole thing, I think, is exactly this: you take what the company wants and cross it with what you want. Then you find the overlap. When you do that, you can literally do whatever you want inside the company.

The condition is delivery. The overlap is the region where the results you produce are, at the same time, what the company asked for and what you wanted to build. You deliver right there at the intersection. The freedom comes with the delivery, inside the work you were hired to do.

There’s also a personal reason the overlap matters so much to me: I have a hard time talking about things I don’t believe in. So, for me, the overlap has to hold what I believe in. When what the company needs me to say is the same thing I actually believe, that difficulty simply goes away.

When your audience changes the deal

My friend and Java Champion, Bruno Souza, once asked me:

“While you were working for that company, you built a community. You even built a business of your own, right? One that was able to survive all of those different things.”

And that’s where the relationship flips. Once you have an audience of your own, the invitation you get from a company changes. It used to be: come over here and talk to our audience. Now it’s: come over here, we want to talk to your audience.

From that point on, the company is hiring you to talk to your audience. What it’s after is the audience you built. The overlap is still there, and you still deliver at the intersection. What changed is who brings the audience to the table.

In practice, that means this: I have a freedom to do what I want that you probably can’t even picture. The company wants me talking to the people I already talk to, about the things I already believe in. The overlap doesn’t get any wider than that.

“But where I am now, there’s no overlap”

The objection I hear at this point is: OK, but where I am now, there’s no overlap.

My answer is that there is. Sometimes it’s hard to find. But hard to find and not there at all are two different things.

And if it really is impossible, then maybe it’s time for one of two moves: you change what you want to do, or you change companies. And that’s OK too.

Either way, the freedom has one source: the overlap between what the company wants and what you want, and the results you deliver right there. I’d like to know where yours is today.