The Question That Should Be Easier to Answer
Ask me what I do, and you’ll get an answer, but maybe after a pause or a sigh first. That’s while my brain spins away working out what I’ll say this time. I’ve never really had a clean answer I was happy with, and over time it turned into more of an internal question than a social one: how do I actually answer that? For a long time I took it as a personal challenge, something I hadn’t figured out but never fully prioritised working out either.
It’s a question that gets asked constantly at professional networking events, which I’ve never been much of a fan of either. I could blame that on supposedly scoring 78% introvert on one of those 16personalities tests, but that’s not really it. I never wanted to go to these events for myself; I’d go to pitch whatever business I was with at the time. If there was something that kept them interesting, it was a bit of a game in my own head, watching what happens in a group when somebody introduces themselves. Will they lead with their company name, their title, or their functional area? Which of the three do they think matters most in this room?
Then, whichever marker they pick, everybody standing there quietly runs a translation. Director of Sales at what size of company, selling to whom, with how many people in their team? None of that gets asked out loud, and all of it gets estimated anyway. The title or the company told the room roughly where the person works. What none of those markers could tell anyone is what they actually did, or what value they delivered.
So the question being asked isn’t really what do you do. It’s what is your professional status? The vocabulary we answer that with is usually a mix of title, company name or functional area. We take those few breadcrumbs and generate an answer in our own heads, running them through whatever mental model we’ve each built up from our own experience.
But that translation has broken down, because of the sheer amount of change in everybody’s professional life. AI has torn up the rulebook for professional status and responsibilities right across the board: every sector, every level. I’m not sure there has ever been a single change that unsettled this many people’s professional identities at the same time. When the foundations of somebody’s role move this much, their perceived professional identity can start to crumble. That brings real anxiety with it. I hear a version of this constantly, and it usually arrives as a very simple question: what is it that I actually do now?
That question always deserved a better answer than a title.
I’m not a qualified engineer. For many years I believed the coding and building gap to the really good engineers was too wide for me to ever close. So I spent a career finding other ways to be worth having around. Those kinds of work, and the modes they operate within, are what this piece is about.
The task I thought I’d missed out on is the one now being commoditised, along with a lot of other rote and repetitive work, and I take no pleasure in that. There’s a lot of uncertainty for people who built careers on tasks we’re being told AI will eliminate, and young people who were told certain professions were the way to succeed are now finding those paths far less certain as they try to even start a career. But what people are worth hasn’t gone anywhere. It has moved, and the words we use to describe that value haven’t moved with it.
Titles Were Never the Answer
I’m not arguing for getting rid of titles. They carry real information: a market signal, a pay band, something legible to say about where a person stands professionally. They’re a reasonable way of saying where somebody sits, and they’ll carry real weight for a long time yet.
What’s changing is the actual work. The roles people hold, and what they’re responsible for, are being reshaped by AI in a very fundamental way, and new ways of working are changing our view of what a title really means. Two people with identical titles in different companies are already doing genuinely different jobs, and neither of them can work out what the other actually does by swapping markers.
Deloitte is doing something about this in public. As Fortune reported, the firm is retiring analyst and manager as titles across roughly 181,500 US employees and replacing them with job families and sub-families, which group people by the kind of work they do rather than by rank. While I like the idea of shifting away from traditional job hierarchies, I don’t think what Deloitte is implementing will get them there. Give it two promotion cycles and I’d expect to find levels inside those job families again, under another name. And a job family is still something the organisation puts you in. It says which part of the business you sit in; it still doesn’t say whose outcomes you’re accountable for, or what you’re actually good at, which is exactly what a title failed to say. Aytekin Tank asked in Forbes whether this is the beginning of the end for traditional job titles. Probably not, but something is genuinely changing, and a relabelling isn’t it.
What we’re missing is a shared understanding with each other that doesn’t route through a job title first, and a better basis for deciding how people move and where they’d be best positioned. If you’ve ever sat in a conversation about somebody’s progression and spent the first stretch of it arguing about what a title is supposed to mean, you already know the gap I’m talking about.
Where I’ve landed is to stop describing people by where they sit, and start describing them by the work they actually do. There are only five kinds of that work.
The Five Kinds of Work People Actually Do
You go to work to deliver value to somebody else, and hopefully to take pride in what you’ve done. That’s it. All five kinds of work feed both of those. They are Doing, Coaching, Editing, Navigating and Strategising.
Doing is the hands-on craft. It’s the work that has to happen for the organisation to operate at all, and somebody has to actually do it. What’s changing here isn’t whether we do it, it’s what the Doing consists of. Less of the rote, repetitive tasks, and more understanding of the craft, more attention to who needs the work and what they need from it. Directing an agent, checking its work and knowing when it’s wrong is still Doing. It’s Doing with the grunt work taken out of it. None of that means the Doing matters less. It means the Doing has to land somewhere: work that produces an outcome somebody actually wanted, rather than work that produces an output and stops there.
Coaching is being genuinely interested in bringing somebody else along. Not reviewing them. Helping them get better as an individual and as a professional, so they’re more productive and delivering better outcomes than they were last month. I put Coaching ahead of Editing deliberately, and the reason is that I’ve never much liked the word manager. Nobody wakes up in the morning hoping for a bit of management to oversee their work. People want a coach and they want leadership, so I believe it’s better coaches and leaders that are needed. If you’re working hard at being a good manager, the odds are you already want to be a good coach. The word just never asked you to be.
Editing is shaping and correcting the work. Telling somebody what they’ve got right and what needs rework. It matters, and skilled Editing is worth a great deal. Editing with no Coaching underneath it is a different thing though. Sometimes it’s command and control with no empathy, no motivation, no meaning behind it. It can also be a way for some managers to keep a distance between themselves and their direct reports, which some may have seen as a form of job security. But it can just as easily come from somebody generous and good at the work, who simply never moves from correcting to teaching. Either way, the person on the receiving end eventually leaves if they’ve somewhere better to go, and the team is left with no succession planning either.
Navigating is setting the direction. Where are we going, what’s worth going after, and what do we need to keep an eye on along the way. Mostly it’s the work of choosing, and more specifically the work of saying no, because a direction that rules nothing out isn’t really a direction. I use Navigating rather than leading on purpose. A title might imply leadership; Navigating describes what somebody actually decides, whether they hold a leadership title or not. A person can set the direction for one piece of work without setting it for the company. Navigating is also worth more now than it used to be, because when building something gets this cheap, people can execute the wrong plan faster than they ever could before.
Strategising is working out how you actually get there once the direction is set, thought about as a cross-functional exercise. I keep Strategising separate from Navigating because the two fail in different ways. You can pick exactly the right direction and have no workable route to it, and you can have a beautifully argued plan pointed at the wrong place. Strategising also leans hardest on the other four, because somebody with no feel for the work or their team’s abilities can’t tell a hard plan from an impossible one. That doesn’t mean the team has to be able to deliver it today. A lot of the strategies being set in this new AI world take their teams out of their known craft, but that’s the work, and the gaps are worth closing for everyone.
Cutting across all five kinds of work is a second question, and for me it’s the question that tells you most about somebody: who the work is actually for.
Who the Work Is For
There are three answers to that: your own outcomes, your team’s, or the context everybody works inside. Those are the three modes: Doing, Enabling and Framing.
A mode is a way of working, set by the proportion of the work you do and who that work is for, over a substantial period of time, rather than by the task in front of you at any given point. Every mode contains all five kinds of work, and what changes is the proportion. Here is roughly how I’d split it, and these are my own gut figures rather than anything I can point to a study for.
Four of the five are counted in pairs, with Doing standing on its own. Coaching and Editing sit together because they need each other to generate growth and momentum. Editing somebody’s work without coaching them leaves the work better and the person exactly where they were. Coaching without ever editing anything is advice with nothing to point at. Navigating and Strategising sit together for a related reason: I look at them as distinct kinds of work because they fail in different ways, and that is exactly why they need each other. A direction with no route and a route with no direction are both dead ends. But I’ve never found it useful to split Navigating and Strategising into separate numbers.
Doing: The Outcome Is Yours
Doing is both one of the five kinds of work and one of the three modes, and that’s deliberate. It’s the only mode named after one kind of work, because it’s the only one where most of your time is focused on your personal work. My gut figure is that your personal Doing could be up to 85%, with maybe 10% going to Coaching and Editing and 5% to Navigating and Strategising. In Doing mode the work is your own, and so is the accountability for it, not for the output, but for whether your output turned into a positive outcome for whoever needed it.
Enabling: The Outcomes Are Theirs
In Enabling mode, the majority of your energy goes into enhancing somebody else’s capability. Coaching people to positive outcomes, Editing what they produce, and giving them what they need to succeed at executing the direction that’s been set for them and their team. It’s also the mode with the greatest balance across the mix: around 20% of your time could still be personal work and a further 20% Navigating and Strategising, leaving 60% for Coaching and Editing. The work is your team’s and the outcomes are theirs for you to influence. What you’re accountable for is whether your team members got better and reached their objectives.
Framing: The Context Is Everybody’s
Framing here means framing the challenge or the opportunity, in the same way you’d say let’s frame a problem and work out what we actually have to do. In Framing mode your energy goes into the context everybody else works inside, the direction and the boundaries they then work within. Navigating and Strategising are the primary kinds of work within Framing, and that could be up to 70% of your focus. It’s the mode with the least personal Doing, maybe 10%, with the remaining 20% going to Coaching and Editing. Set those boundaries well enough and the people working inside them can make good decisions without having to come back and ask.
Which Mode Are You In?
If you’re not sure which mode you’re in, look at how you spent the last couple of days, and ask whether that is how your time usually goes. Whichever of the three mixes above it comes closest to is your current mode. Then check it against whose outcomes you’re accountable for: your own is Doing, your team’s is Enabling, everybody’s is Framing. When the two agree, that’s your confirmation.
The Conversation a Title Can’t Help
Put the two layers together and you get a different kind of conversation about somebody’s career. The modes tell you where a person is mostly operating; the five kinds tell you what they’re actually good at, and that’s usually where the useful detail sits. So imagine how that conversation would go.
Two colleagues are talking about a third person, and let’s call her Amy. Nobody says Amy’s title out loud. There’s agreement that Amy is excellent at her craft. When people on the team get stuck, they go to Amy rather than to their own manager, Dave. The question on the table is why the team isn’t getting any better, and the obvious read is that Dave isn’t up to it.
Then somebody asks what people are actually going to Amy for. The answer is Editing. She’s great at making people’s work better. What they don’t come away with is any more ability to do it themselves next time. Amy is fantastic at Editing but delivers very little Coaching to her teammates, which is exactly why the work improves but the people don’t.
So there is a problem with Dave, not because people prefer Amy, but because the team isn’t improving. That needs acting on in its own right, but for now we’re focused on Amy. Amy is in Doing mode: most of her work is still her own craft. The Editing sits on top of that, so she’s now very stretched and finding it hard to juggle her priorities and workload. She isn’t accountable for any of the work she’s editing. That gap, between the work she’s carrying and the work she’s accountable for, is what nobody in the conversation has named. And the team isn’t getting any better, because nobody is Coaching them. What the team actually has is an Editing bottleneck and a Coaching gap, and those are two different problems with different fixes. Both of them sit in Dave’s mode: Enabling is mostly Coaching and Editing, and Dave is doing neither. What Amy is short of is time. Nothing here tells you whether she’d be good at Coaching, and whether she wants formal responsibility for Coaching at all is hers alone to answer.
In this example, you get to an answer everyone understands, including Amy, and now you can ask her about her Coaching ambitions. Try that same conversation through a job title and you spend the first ten minutes agreeing what the title is supposed to mean. That’s the networking-event translation all over again, only this time with somebody’s career riding on it.
One Mode Says Little About the Next
Amy hasn’t moved into Enabling mode. That move has to include Coaching, not just the Editing she’s already doing, and it’s why promoting your best performer doesn’t always work. Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue looked at sales workers across 214 firms and found that firms do promote their best sellers, and that the better the seller, the worse their team then does. Doubling your own sales before the promotion is associated with a 7.5% drop in the sales of the people who end up working for you.
A salesperson who makes their numbers is running hard in Doing mode, and often very well. The promotion moves them into Enabling mode, which runs on a different mix entirely, and being excellent in one mode says very little about the next.
Benjamin Artz, Amanda Goodall and Andrew Oswald found that people are happier working for somebody who could do the job themselves. Neither study tests the next part, so this is my read rather than theirs. Being good at the craft is not the same thing as being the best at it, and to make people happy you have to be able to explain things to them in a way they can understand. That is what carries into Enabling mode, and the best are often the worst at explaining, because they never had to work out how they learned. You can also understand a job without being any good at it, and people can tell the difference. What makes somebody worth learning from is that they’re good at the work and good at explaining it.
There Is No Top Mode
A mode isn’t a rung on a career ladder and it isn’t a box somebody gets put in either. Nobody stops doing the hands-on craft when they move into Enabling mode; it’s that Coaching and Editing are what have primacy while they’re in it. The same holds with Framing. For most of the time you’ll be focused on Navigating and Strategising, but you’ll still be Doing some amount of personal work and providing Coaching and Editing to your team, as you should. The Framing is simply the thing taking precedence. And Framing isn’t seniority. Somebody running one project sets the direction and the boundaries for it; somebody with a senior title can spend a whole week on Coaching and Editing and never frame anything at all. The mode describes what a person is actually doing, not where they sit.
There’s a staging to Doing, Enabling and Framing in terms of professional growth: your craft, your expertise, what you’ve actually seen work. That’s a sequence, not a ranking, and the difference matters. A ranking says one person is above another. A sequence says only that one thing has to come before another, for the same person and the same work. You need to be good at the craft before you can usefully enable somebody else, and you need a feel for the work before you can sensibly frame it. How much craft depends on the scope of what you’re framing: somebody can frame one project on a feel for that project, while framing for a company takes a feel for a company. That evolution isn’t time-served, though. Nobody has to put in a set stretch in one mode before the next one opens up. The situation decides, not the clock. And these modes aren’t one-directional either.
Modes Change Slowly, the Work Changes Constantly
People do move back and forth between kinds of work and between modes, but at different speeds and with different intent. You move between kinds of work constantly, possibly multiple times a day, as a standard way of working. When moving between modes, it’s much more intentional and should be for longer periods. A mode only builds momentum if you stay in it long enough for it to compound. A kind of work asks nothing of you beyond today.
The obvious objection comes from working in small companies, where you can be in all three modes inside the same week. I’ve spent a lot of my career there, and it does stretch the idea. When you’re juggling all three, the useful question stops being which mode you’re in. It becomes which mode you want to be operating in, and how you bring in others who can cover the rest.
So, What Do You Do?
Every August here in Ireland, it’s school exam results followed by college offers a few days later. Back in my day, career guidance was: do you want to do twenty hours a week of business or forty of engineering? I took the twenty. Wrong choice, I thought for a long time afterwards, and that is how I came not to be an engineer. What I’d hope for anybody making that choice now is that by the time they’re in their first few professional years, describing the work is a more ordinary thing to do than saying any title.
I still don’t have a one-line answer to what I do, and I’ve stopped looking for one. What I have instead is a way of describing what I do. Lately, more Doing mode time than I’ve had in a long while: learning AI methodologies, building new things I used to hand to somebody else, and creating my own workflows and pipelines. But more generally it’s mostly Enabling, because you wear a lot of hats in smaller companies and helping the people around me get better is the part I like most and where the multiplier is. Coaching through Editing is what I enjoy, being near the work with somebody. When I work with larger organisations, it’s predominantly Framing mode.
So, what do you do? Not the title version. Start with the mode you’re mostly operating in, Doing, Enabling or Framing, because that already says who the work is for. Then which of the five kinds of work you’re strongest at, and what you’re working on. A title is a full stop. A mode is a first sentence, and the ones after it are where somebody learns something about you instead of estimating off markers.
Have a think about where you’ve spent the last month, and see which mode you’re mostly operating in. If that doesn’t match what you’re accountable for, that gap is where to start, and if it’s split across all three, that’s an answer too. Is that where you want to be? Then ask somebody you work with every day what kind of work they think you’re good at. If their answer isn’t the same as yours, the gap between what you want and what people see is worth working on before your next conversation about where you go from here.
Improve the People, Not Just the Work picks this up: why Enabling is the mode most often missing, what AI takes from each of the three modes and what it can’t, and how open you are to working differently.
Sources
- Fortune, Deloitte is scrapping job titles like analyst and manager as AI reshapes Big Four consulting
https://www.fortune.com/2026/01/22/deloitte-job-title-change-ai-reshapes-big-4-accounting-consulting-firms - Aytekin Tank, Forbes, Is This The Beginning Of The End For Traditional Job Titles?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/aytekintank/2026/08/06/is-this-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-traditional-job-titles/ - Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue, Promotions and the Peter Principle, The Quarterly Journal of Economics
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/134/4/2085/5550760 - Benjamin Artz, Amanda Goodall and Andrew J. Oswald, If Your Boss Could Do Your Job, You’re More Likely to Be Happy at Work, Harvard Business Review
https://hbr.org/2016/12/if-your-boss-could-do-your-job-youre-more-likely-to-be-happy-at-work
