Time to go All in

I've spent the last couple of nights trying to answer a few questions that will guide conversations with my leadership about where I want to go in my career. I seem to view this opportunity to talk about my career plans as an opportunity to lay out my vision for a new function in the organization and the steps that I would take to make that vision a reality. That's too big of a bite at this point. The first step is to get a leadership position. I want a role where I can influence the organization by developing our science, our scientists, and a culture that embraces exploration and discovery as critical components of the product development process. I strive to make that impact in my current role, but my effect on these areas is limited by other responsibilities. I want a role where my focus is on enhancing our scientific capabilities by gaining greater insight into our products and methodologies while developing the research capabilities of other scientists.

The shift in emphasis is where I see the biggest evolution in my role. I want the things I do on the side in my current job to be my primary responsibility. Big organizations are rife with group think. Somebody states what's going on and everybody just follows along. I want to lead a group whose purpose is to root out these limits on our thinking before they lead us into trouble. Did you try this? What would happen if you did it this way instead? Why did you do it that way? Finding these holes in the development of new products would be our gateway to mini-research projects. These would be the leads that we need to build our knowledge, knowledge that we could use to come up with the Next Big Thing.

My trouble has clearly come about because I'm reading the question as an opportunity to write the job description of the job that I would like to have. Forget picking a role that already exists. I'm going after what I want. In rereading what I wrote above, I did a pretty good job of laying out the broad outlines of that vision. My concern going into this meeting with my manager and his boss is that I may be too ambitious for this stage of my career. Linking what I want to do with what I've already done may help my leadership see that what I'm proposing is the natural progression from where I am now. There's also the concern that it just may be too different from what is already in our organization.

I can see why big organizations develop a certain character and retain that character for as long as the company sticks around. The early leaders set the tone and culture. People who want to progress in the organization seek to become like their leaders because people like people who are like them.  New hires tend to have similar characteristics as the people in charge of hiring. Hiring is done by managers who have internalized the organization's norms. People who are predisposed to shake things up, those who see things a little differently, typically fail to reach a position where they can shift the organization because they either get fed up with status quo and take off (which was a place that I was very close to a couple of years ago) or are passed over for leadership roles because they're too different from the people who are above them.

This fear of being passed over for being too different is a very real fear for me at the moment. To quote a director that I spoke to earlier this week, my stock is high. Is this the time for me to throttle back and stick closer to the party line as I pursue a management role (new opens being posted soon, or so we've been told)? But my stock got high in the first place because I tend to deviate from expectations. Being a bit of a maverick (who makes an effort to present his outside perspective in a way that is friendly and not threatening) got to where I have a shot at making the move to management (which I'm convinced is where I need to go to do the things that I want to do). Will it keep me from taking that next step? I must not fear that possibility too much. I pretty much proposed developing a group that is intentionally counter-culture and oppositional in my little spiel above. If it's been working, why stop now? Must be a sign that it's time to go all in.

Doing to do or doing to improve?

Struggling implies improvement. You don't struggle with something to maintain your abilities. You have to struggle to get better. Using my organization as representative of most complex, bureaucratic organizations, organizational rewards are not reliably the result of a big struggle. Organizational rewards come from getting things done. I got something done today. It's the kind of thing that I'll note on my annual review. It wasn't a struggle. It was aggravating and frustrating, no doubt, but there was no meaningful expansion of my skills and abilities. It's something that needs to get done and I got it done. That's what my organization wants me to do.

I shouldn't be rewarded for simply getting things done. That's not enough. I should be rewarded for making the organization smarter and more capable. That will allow us to get new things done, things that we can't do now. We shouldn't be satisfied with simply cranking out the same things using the same approach over and over again. My annual review shouldn't be a list of things that I got done for the year. It should be a list of what I've done to expand our capabilities. Right now, I have to couch things that I do to improve our capabilities in the context of getting something done in order for them to really count on my review. Shouldn't their value be recognized outside of the project context? My manager is almost exclusively focused on meeting project milestones. That's a valid way to manage the group, but that's a poor way to the lead the group. We'll never get better focusing on meeting other's expectations. Some fraction of our effort must be towards getting better.

Simply getting things done is too passive. The order comes in and you execute it. Don't question, challenge, or demand to know why your doing something. That's not your job. Just do it for crying out loud! This is why I hate project management. Breaking complex tasks down into more manageable chunks is great for efficiency, but it robs the process of meaning. It takes the individual out of the process. You don't need to bring your heart and soul to work when you're simply cranking through tasks. The project gets done, but nobody involved is much improved by their effort. We should never be satisfied by a project that has no impact on the quality of the organization, regardless of its impact on the bottom line.

Struggle and Meaning

We've been looking for somebody to take a central role in a new group. The search has been going on for over 6 months. A good chunk of the discussion around each candidate has focused on whether or not they had a well-developed leadership philosophy. None of them have. What's been even more bothersome to the hiring manager for this position is the lack of evidence that these people spent time thinking about what they want to accomplish as a leader. We've yet to talk to anybody with a vision and a plan for making that vision a reality.

My insight that I really just want to do those things that I find meaningful (or at least find ways to make what I need to do more meaningful) holds the seed for my leadership vision. I want to free people to get more meaning from their time in the lab. Everybody I work with has good ideas, they're just afraid to pursue those ideas. They think they need permission or choose not to act on their notion for fear that something bad will happen if everything doesn't go right the first time. There is far more meaning in working on your own ideas and solving a problem on your own than simply doing what somebody else has told you to do. Too many of the people I work with think of themselves as somebody else's hands. I want to get people working on their own ideas.

Working on your own ideas, even if it's just spending a few hours working through a minor issue, is the first step toward making a discovery. Trying something that may not work just as you would like is a small exploration. Embracing exploration requires embracing ambiguity. There is nobody around who knows the answer just waiting to bail you out. Getting comfortable with working on something when you don't know how it will turn out is very unsettling for most of us. Getting comfortable with that feeling of not knowing how things will turn out is an essential skill in my business. You have to be willing to accept what the data tell you and move on from there. You have to remove your ego from the process and simply follow the clues where they lead.

I want to make it safe for people to struggle. Better yet, I want to make people struggle. Every worthy research project will require some struggle. The struggle gives the work meaning. You have to pull from your own resources to resolve an ambiguous situation with no easy answer. It takes some practice to get comfortable with trying something, seeing how it works, taking what you can from that experience, and trying again. The only person you have to rely on is yourself. Every small step towards resolution of the problem is a meaning gusher. Every problem solved is the foundation for solving the next problem.

The solving cycle is where the organization benefits. Working on safe struggles, little side projects with no direct impact on a product launch, gets you ready for solving the problem that does have a direct impact on a product launch. The more you struggle, the more you want to struggle. The more you push back The Edge, the more you want to see how far back you can push it.The more you push, the better you get at pushing. The opportunity to struggle supplies meaning. Learning how to deal with the struggle provides value. 

What do I mean when I said "working for myself" in the previous post? I want to find challenges and problems that give me a chance to struggle. I volunteered to lead a development project that had the right mix of challenges that make it appealing. One of the biggest aspects of this project was the fact that there were people who didn't think it could be done. That doubt of whether we could deliver was the most meaningful bit for me.

Rejecting expectations

How do I work for myself while working for a massive company?

After years of struggling to figure out how to balance my desire to do my own thing in the context of a large enterprise, that may be the closest I've ever come to putting my finger on a plan. The wrinkle in that statement is what I mean by "working for myself." That small phrase represents an effort to make my work meaningful. That means that I have to define my role and contribution (to reject the expectations and role that others in the organization want to give me) and pursue every possible opportunity to realize that role. It's not about pursuing organizational rewards. Sure, I could probably get a job in that new group that's going to get all the attention, but I won't be able to do meaningful work (at least the kind of work that I find meaningful) in that role.