What Leaders and Managers Can Learn from Range
Org charts and leveling systems push you to slot people into a single track fast, and quarterly targets reward keeping high performers exactly where they're already productive. That structure makes it easy to default to fast-tracking people into narrow specialties before anyone — including them — really knows if it fits, and to treat a request to try something different as a loyalty problem instead of useful information.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
0 of 5 selected
The core lessons, applied to you
Question "fast-track them into one lane now"
Narrow tracking works well for roles with stable, well-defined tasks. In ambiguous or fast-changing roles, though, pushing someone into deep specialization before they've seen the fuller shape of the work can lock in a mismatch that neither of you can see yet.
A manager fast-tracks a promising analyst straight into a narrow reporting specialty to fill an immediate gap, only to watch her disengage a year later once the novelty wears off and no one ever asks why.
Before assigning a new hire a long-term track, give them one deliberate rotation or cross-functional project in the first six months, and ask what they noticed about their own energy and results.
Let people, and roles, sample before you lock in structure
Build low-stakes ways for team members to test adjacent roles or projects before a formal track is set, since fit often only becomes visible through doing the work, not discussing it.
A department reorganizes around fixed specialist roles before anyone has actually tried the new responsibilities, and within months two of the four hires want to swap roles, but the new structure makes that look disruptive rather than expected.
Build a rotation or shadow week into your onboarding or project-staffing process, and treat a request to switch tracks afterward as data, not disruption.
Pull in perspectives from outside the team's usual toolkit
Some of the best fixes for a stuck process or stalled project come from people whose main experience is in a different function entirely, precisely because they're not anchored to "how we've always solved this here."
A team spends an entire planning cycle stuck on a customer-retention problem, using only the tools their own function has always used, and never once asks the person from a completely different department for a fresh read.
The next time your team is stuck, bring in one person from a different function for a single working session and ask them to describe the problem in their own words before offering a fix.
Let people change track
When a team member asks to move roles, shift functions, or pursue a different kind of work, treat that as legitimate information about fit rather than a loss to be minimized. Redirecting effort toward a better match usually serves both the person and the organization better than holding them in place out of habit or short-term convenience.
You need stable, predictable staffing to deliver on commitments, but you also need to stay open to letting people move. Hold both by scheduling structured points — after a project, at a review cycle — where movement is expected and planned for, rather than treating every request as an emergency.
Name one thing, honestly
Where on your team are you optimizing for a narrow, fast fit today at the cost of a better fit six months from now?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
0 of 3 selected
Run this for seven days
The next time your team is stuck, bring in one person from a different function for a single working session and ask them to describe the problem in their own words before offering a fix.