The first time I was put in charge of something, I had no idea I was in charge. You can talk about how I was unaware but in the end I was not set up for what I needed. I was given a task. People were supposed to help. Or I was supposed to work with people. Great. Cool. The stuff got done but it was a broken process. I don’t think anyone thought that there should be a process.
[Wow…is this post going to deveolve to a systems post, maybe?]
I have come from many different companies that have tasks. Some have processes…. but nobody thought that there needed to be a fully architected solution in the true sense of the word. For the most part I don’t think that American companies are pre-disposed to that thinking unless they due modeling, or they have brought in multiple consultants.
My opinion is that those businesses that talk about architected solutions have no idea what the F they are talking about. They have a narrow lane of a software and maybe some integrations but they don’t think about the life cycle of what processes need to work together, what processes need information from another process… etc. Think about it as a RACI for processes. Design accordingly. I digress.
So here I was like 23 years old and working on a project. I did some work for professors in a futile attempt to get a masters (long story). I looked at everything like an assignment. But this time there was no sylabus it was just a task, or so I thought. A really hard complicated task by the way. As an engineer you are expected to be able to do hard things, so I did what any engineer would do… I went to the library. What I started was a literature search. This is what we do now every day with Google. So why go down this path. Education taught me how to start. Nobody told me what to do when I was part of a team. Sure there were group projects, but there were no leaders. Group projects identify the people who are not leaders. [This statement may likely be another post]
So pushing through, I was given a team but nobody called them that. I saw them just like all my other peers; students. I did not know what my role was. People were looking to me to establish what was next.
I had no F’ing idea. So back to my fundamentals.
Rather than bore you with an example, if I haven’t bored you already, my fundamentals worked. The task was completed and I was rewarded with another project.
So the next task was slightly easier. Still figuring it out day by day. By the 10th task (likely a lot sooner) I decided to stop repeating myself to my team members. It was the proto-ooze version of a system. Still no leaders in sight. Then came schedules. Then came predictability. Then came problems. When you have a team with a problem, the chaos and firefighting takes over the frontal lobe for most of the team. When you get to predictability, then there is a space for people to either innovate or to derail to get back to chaos. I don’t know why…it just tends to happen. I think it tends to be about control, but I am not a psychologist.
As the predicatability increases, the decrease of each team members span of control or as I was told once “the value” they provide through their experience tends to influence things in good but often ways that are not person agnostic. These are the systems that only work when a certain person is on shift or available. The indespensibility of a person is often passively put into a system through multiple touch points of control along the process.
They are not aware of the impact they provide, both good an bad. Truly unintended consequences because how the process evolved. It could be due to lack of foresight or investment. Likely it could be based on constraints of time or having the right experts in designing the system. How you get there is irrelvent. It is just true.
So in trying to fix the past systems I would do what I was trained to do as a mechanical engineer. Build a system with a purpose. Design the system to accommodate all common uses with the end in mind. Build the machine. As with any good machine you drive simplicity. But with typical company ways of thinking here come the constraints. You get to train, you may get to de-risk, and sometimes you get to continuously improve. I built many systems like this. And then you would have to hand them over.
That is where leadership started to bud. It was out of handover that I had to teach ownership, by detailing how to protect the outcome. My designs and my training were there to show how to get the collective results. How you treat the system is how you get the results. Stewardship. Thoughtful care.
Over the years then the reality and competency of people who run these things became my focus. The reality and competency is not about the negatives, it is purely on the perspective of who they are, their experience and training, their frame of mind, and lastly the information they have. This profile combined with their nature and their process to make decisions tells you a level of leadership success. This was regardless of if they are in management or not. Leaders are leaders. The systems ran better with people who cared. They are part of the system. What they value, people and the impacts of their decisions to the stakeholders along the way, made them a better leader and the system a better system. It was a self re-enforcing mindset. However, their care needed to be engineered as well so it was not just person dependent.
So fast forward 10 years, 15 years, and my journey of building systems and building people. Thinking with the end in mind I thought about sustainability and the one thing that until our alien or AI overlords take care of us all there will always be human brains in the mix. Some indirectly. So in the maintenance of the system you have to think about the maintenance and more directly the repeatability of those brains.
I invested in myself over those years. Productivity books, leadership books, podcasts, meditation, whatever. But you can sum it up in looking at a belief system that promotes balance. In yourself, and in your people. Balance stats from empathy. For yourself and then for other people.
I need to work for leaders that allow me to do be the complete person that I am. What we do every day is hard given our set of constraints. We lose sight of that. Even the best leaders do, but the best leaders know how to reset. They know when they can’t reset to step away to preserve the best resource they can, the people.
So if you want to lead, or start the journey, start with these simple things of note:
What am I doing?
Why am I doing it?
There are TONS of things that come from these questions. If you don’t know what you are doing, go back to your tools, experience, and problem solving process.
If you don’t know why, think about yourself and the people.
Best of luck. You got this.