How Can I Address Uncertainty in My Contract/Position?

Get clarity on what the expectations are and measure your progress

There’s a couple conversations I like to have with my boss, or it’s someone I’m doing contract work for, to try to to get clarity on what the expectations are and what success looks like.

What is it that keeps you up at night? What are some of the pain points? It may be a thought exercise that they haven’t done themselves.

But get clear on what it is that the problem is? What the problem is that you’re you’re trying to solve. Why they hired you. Why they brought you in as a contractor.

What is it that you’re wanting to solve? And then, I’ll ask them what success looks like.

That gives us our point A, and our point B, and we can ask follow-up questions to get clarity on what that looks like.

Then, I’ll try to find some measure. It doesn’t even have to be a perfect measure, because, the perfect measure probably doesn’t exist.

And even if there’s some some subjectivity to it, have something as a focal point that you can see, if you’re making progress, and you can have conversations about, and in those conversations, to get frequent and early feedback so that you can course correct quickly and easily.

Finding a good measure is something I do for my own career. I do it for projects. I do it across the board. So that I have some mechanism to draw attention to whether or not we’re making progress, and that helps eliminate a lot of uncertainty.

Communicate with your recruiters

If you’re a contractor/consultant, you have to be open with your recruiter about what concerns and questions you have. The recruiters are that liaison between the client and the contractor. So if Suzanne is a data scientist on Jeff’s team, and I’m Suzanne’s recruiter, I want Suzanne to come to me if she is feeling like, hey, I don’t know where this contract’s going, I’m stressing out. It’s scheduled to convert permanent in two weeks. I haven’t heard of anything. I want Suzanne to reach out to me, schedule a zoom or a teams call, try to have that conversation with the visual component, if you can. Then, it’s my job to say, hey Jeff, this is where Suzanne’s at. It was going to convert to permanent. Where are we at currently with that? We are that liaison for you, that representative. Be open with them about what you need and what questions you have, so that we can help figure that stuff out and clarify it for you.