Zweig’s ‘Invisibles’: An Ode To The Back-End Warriors
The better you do, the more you remain unseen.
Just landed an exceptional client? Commended for a super performance? Cue the open commendations, dinners (and drinks) and all the recognition you will ever need. This is the usual drill for most jobs and is the common practice for most organisations.
After all, if you don’t get recognised for your work, does that mean your work is acknowledged?
This may be true for a lot of front-facing jobs. The superstar sales executive. The frontman / frontwoman of the rock band. The director of a blockbuster movie. These are the roles that rightly live for attention.
What about the support staff?
But what about the guitar technicians or the web developers that thrive at the back and make things happen for people on the front? Is their work any less important or demanding of skill?
In Invisibles, Zweig shines a light on these unsung heroes. He interviews different ‘Invisibles’; Andy Johns, the sound engineer responsible for coming up with the recording technique for the distinctive drum intro in Led Zeppelin’s iconic song ‘When The Levee Breaks’, a cinematographer, a way-finder, a fact-checker for magazines, amongst other professions.
Part psychological analysis, part career biography, part ‘day in the life’ in-depth analysis of professions Zweig clearly admires and deeply respects.
What makes a profession one of the ‘Invisibles’?
- Ambivalence towards recognition: The better they do their jobs, the less you will see their work. Invisibility is a badge of honour. Invisibles want to do the work well and don’t actively seek recognition.
- Meticulous: They are driven to be experts of their respective fields. No stone is left unturned as they are “cautious, deliberate, self-disciplined, neat and well-organised”. They relish the level of precision and attention to detail their jobs require and love the challenge of ‘being in the zone’.
- Responsible: Although they are not in the limelight, they still hold a critical role to the project’s completion and success and love that they hold so much responsibility “True leadership and responsibility perhaps come from viewing oneself as part of a team … viewing your work as always in service of the endeavour”.
- Collaborative: Invisibles focus more on giving than taking and this trait contributes towards their success. Rather than try to shine as an individual, they are the ultimate team player and work towards serving the bigger goal.
- Curious: Invisibles want to learn and dig deeper or put longer hours even when they don’t have to
Way-finding, what?
Reading ‘Invisibles’ helped me learn about obscure professions and the complexity of their work. Have you even heard of way-finding and it’s importance for navigating the high-pressure, sometimes confusing environments of airports.
Or the art of simultaneous interpretation; where a translator has to hear one language, interpret it into another language and speak it in the new language while continuing to listen and interpret the next lines of the original language?
It’s astounding.
Zweig goes into journalist level of detail for each of his interviewees, accompanying them as they go about their work across different professions and industries.
This is both a strength and weakness of the book. While I appreciated the level of detail and in-depth analysis of each of the professions surveyed, especially if you already have some familiarity with their work. Other times I felt it became draggy and tiresome, as if he was trying to write to fill up pages.
Learn from the Invisibles, don’t aim for the spotlight
Zweig uses the work ethic of these Invisibles to speak against our current cultural context of prioritising popularity, self-promotion and the notion of ‘personal branding’. It almost sounds like it’s doing for back-end work what Susan Cain’s Quiet did for introverts. Spend less time drawing attention to yourself and more time getting amazing at your work.
This is all well and good when we talk to these profiled Invisibles who are all at the top of their game. But do these principles apply to people at different stages of their career? Or not involved in such high-pressure, high-profile work and still relegated to the back? There are stories of people who work their hardest, yet still stall in obscurity due to lack of recognition.
Yet, we can still learn many things from the Invisible’s work ethic. It’s okay to be in the background or a subordinate. You can still contribute and it doesn’t mean you are less valuable for the project. If not anything, this book teaches us how to be an excellent follower.
Additional Links:
Managing The Invisibles, article by David Zwieg in Harvard Business Review. So you’ve learned all about the Invisibles, how do you work with them? Useful for any manager or employee of Invisibles.
Originally published at www.bookwormsneverforget.com on November 25, 2017.
