June 10 – 16
These are my “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work, but with some personal stuff thrown in.
What a week. It was 5 days in the office with lots of meetings to keep lots of things moving forward, including whole teams, big projects, and so on. Very little time for personal stuff this week.
Rebooting a culture
In May 2024 I took on a new team, in parallel to the GX Foundry group. It’s a team that pre-dates my arrival in my role and a team that has struggled to consistently get great work done. There are a lot of reasons for this, all of which have nothing to do with the people on the team and everything to do with past poor management (that’s now gone). It’s now my job to lead the team through a “reboot” of both culture and processes. And culture comes first.
On Friday I presented my own perspectives on the past and asked the team to help me think about how we’re going to build the future—which will be radically different from that past. Everything is up for discussion, debate, and re-consideration. This is a team that’s had 133% turnover in the last 3 years. They’ve had 5 major leadership changes in the last 15 months (including reporting up through me last month). Any team that goes through all that is going to struggle in one way or another. And those are just 2 of the stats holding them back. We’ve got work to do.
To kickstart the reboot, I got help from the amazing Sarah, who facilitated an “expectations exercise” that began to pull from the team what we’re all going to expect from one another, in terms of behaviors and attitudes. It was my first time through the exercise, expertly facilitated by Sarah. (And we’re gonna do it again with another team next week.)
The result is a (draft) collection of expectations that (1) Leaders have of the Team, (2) the Team has of Leaders, and (3) we all have of one another in general. You can see the draft above (click for a larger image).
This is all subject to future revision, of course, as the team matures and we figure out what works, what doesn’t, and what’s missing. But this feels like a great start. Now we just have to live up to these expectations, values, and beliefs. I’m excited to see where we take this!
You can be undermined with or without intent
This week revealed some of our efforts were being undermined by forces beyond our organization, out in the broader government environment.
When there’s a person behind the undermining, making it happen, it’s easy to get mad at that person. But when there’s just cross-cutting priorities that conflict—without anyone’s intention—you can’t get mad, but it’s still frustrating.
In the first case this week we learned a former employee in one of our partner agencies was actively undermining our major new countywide project. We’re trying to switch public-facing websites and digital services from government-centric content to citizen-centric and service-focused. A laudable goal we thought everyone would support. But this person was mad it wasn’t happening in his department—despite (a) never having proposed anything even remotely similar, and (b) sitting in an agency that is not a neutral player in our broader government, and therefore cannot effectively host this kind of project.
It wasn’t really a surprise this person had done this—he was a known irritant on past projects as well. What was surprising was the extent of his success in deceiving powerful people in the upper echelons of our county. (Proximity to power is a power of its own.) He was communicating directly with certain leaders, and we were communicating indirectly. We assumed positive intent. He did not.
At least he’s gone now. Starting next week we must establish direct communication lines with the affected leaders to both give them the facts and ask for their support. Then we’ll have to keep those communication lines open.
In the other example, we have apparently bumped up against the aspirations of someone we’ve been working with for a while. But their personal aspirations and our team aspirations appear to conflict in ways we didn’t anticipate. It’s created some friction and we have to figure out a way for everyone to win. This is a problem I would much rather solve because there are usually ways for everyone to “win” either together or in parallel. The conflict still hurts, but it feels like we can make something good out of this.
Naturally, I’m being coy by not naming names or describing the situation clearly, as I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or create more conflict. My point? I’ve had to acknowledge some conflicts in the world are created by intentional negative action, but others are emergent properties of people working in close proximity. It’s important to know the difference and deal with them differently.
Another realization? The cacophony of modern work makes fully communicating intentions, goals, and actions really, really hard. Even if everyone wants to align it’s hard to establish and sustain the alignment. When you’re “done” communicating, you’re not.
Take me out to the ballgame
This was fun. 😎 Lucinda put together an outing to the Columbus Clippers this week, and several folks from the office took part. I did a lot of these games last year (and need to do more this year) because Huntington Park is an awesome venue and a baseball game is a great place for some casual socializing with workmates. Thanks Lucinda! And thanks also to Brian, Michael, Eric, Nora, and Tony for coming out to make it fun.
Miscellanea
- The Recognition Program I started earlier this year (with mission patches in the form of stickers) was paused a little while some other stuff got done, but it’s coming back. We’ll have stickers galore coming our way soon, with distribution to folks across the organization in July. Really looking forward to that!
- We’re hiring for a Project Manager role, and that always keeps me super-busy with calls, interviews, and discussions as we hash out exactly what our priorities are with each hire. I try to use every hiring event as a chance to diversify skill sets across the target team. It’s hard to do that with a 30-minute call and maybe 2-3 hours of interview time.
- We were making some high-level design decisions this week about the next wave of website overhaul work, slated to go live in early 2025. There’s definitely some disappointment out there that we’re building a kinda “generic” site. But when your focus is public service, “generic” is a plus — you don’t want people to have to learn how to use your unique cutting-edge website. We actually want them to find our services, not be dazzled by graphic design. We gotta remember our True North here.
Internet funnies
A roundup of stuff that made me chuckle this week, mostly from Bluesky.
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