What's stopping us?
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings.
I recently took two days off to spend a long weekend with my wife. I hope you had a relaxing weekend as well.
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Things I discovered in the past week
- I recently came across this Guide to San Francisco and found it very good. So, I'll use it as the basis for any new visits I get!
- Self-defense for change agents presentation by Amy Tobey, talks about how to make the practice of change agency sustainable. I've always learned so much from her talks. (You might need an account to log in).
I recently heard something like: "talking about the thing, is not doing the thing". After a bit of googling, I found it seems to be from this essay by Strangest Loop.
While the post seems to be related to doing creative things and how to defeat resistance, that's making us avoid doing the thing. I also thought about how often this happens at the company, with all the things that are "annoying" or "broken" but not broken enough to be the top squeaky wheel to solve.
Other times, the project might be an amorphous or lengthy one that a leader mentions randomly every quarter or yearly.
It needs someone to care enough to go and break down the project. Other times, the people might be discouraged by the amorphous shape and need to work with multiple stakeholders to break through. I've recently started asking people who seemed to care why they don't solve it. In some cases, they gave the same reason I stated above (i.e., they don't know where to start, and there are too many teams to talk with). In other cases, they believed that management should order it to be resolved.
While I agree that sometimes projects need a leader's backing to make them happen, other times, I think we need to make a compelling case to make leaders understand our why and give us authority to fix the problem.
With the recent tech landscape around layoffs, shrinking teams, etc., it also happens that burned-out teams are handed technologies or services that are orphaned. While they might acknowledge that improvement would be good, in practice, being burned out and with fewer people than optimal makes it impossible, neither mentally nor time-wise, to solve the problem.
Other times, we get so habituated to that being the status quo that we don't think twice if our actions could be improved.
Your turn!
Now that we're around calibration and promo season and I get multiple requests for feedback, I think I'll start proposing to people who aspire to get promoted to start looking into these areas. They might find some low-hanging fruit to showcase their leadership skills and drive significant changes.
Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email! I'll follow my advice and let you go now. I'm writing too much about the thing. Now, let's go do the thing!
Happy coding!
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