Workstream lead

Office anthropology™ →Go uptown The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Workstream lead
/wɜːkstriːm/ /liːd/ (n.)

Sounds glamorous; isn’t.

Firstly, “lead”, in this context, means, “a thing you tie a misbehaving dog to” and not “what Moses did to the Children of Israel”.

A “workstream lead” is one engaged, as a contractor, to prod unwilling employees along a manifestly pointless “business change” program, whereby outwardly useful staff will be distracted from whatever they are doing and instructed to strip paint off a bucket, so the bucket can be given to another employee to paint properly, so a third one can strip paint from it again. And so on.

Requires experience organising all-hands conference calls, walking through action logs and compiling dashboards full of RAG statuses. Until your contract runs out.

See also

• Legal operations
• LinkedIn job descriptions