2024 Weeknote 12

March 18-24

This is my ongoing attempt at producing “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on my professional work. You can subscribe if you’d like to receive these via email or via Substack notifications.

While our team launched into GX+ Season 2 this week, I’m feeling a bit disconnected. Much of my time at present is being absorbed into organization-wide leadership efforts, leaving little time for working with my own teams. I’m hoping this is a short-term burst of work that will ease up over time.

Big Project 1: Telling Our Story

This work is absorbing a lot of my time and creative capacity. We’re doing two things to start telling the organization’s story this year:

1. We’re developing a monthly “impact report” in the form of a short-ish slide deck recounting accomplishments, but preferably accomplishments that point out the “business” impact we’re having for our agency partners. I’m creating this from scratch and pulling in managers and content from across our 90+ person organization. This will get easier once the “template” of what we’re creating is somewhat set.

2. I just finished our first “story card” to relate one human-scale story per month on a printed piece that we will distribute to our Board and other county leaders. This is more of a creative writing exercise where I try to relate our mission and values through the observed actions of an employee in contact with a client. The first one is done and off to the printer. We’ll release it April 1. (Why print it? Because no one prints anything anymore, so it actually makes the piece more meaningful because we’re literally handing them out, almost like business cards.)

These efforts will be sizable each month, but they are huge right now because we’re creating this from nothing. I’m creating the content calendar, the goals, design templates, and the first round of content on both pieces — all in one shot.

Plus we have no idea how this will all be received. I presume it will be appreciated, but… time will tell.

Big Project 2: Recognition Program

After creating a recognition program based on Mission Patches at the start of 2024 for the GX Foundry team, I’m now expanding it to the full organization, which requires capturing work efforts from across all teams and helping team leaders express those accomplishments in a mission patch format. So far, so good.

One of the things we’ve recently figured out, though, is that if you hand out mission patches in sticker format, there’s a limited list of options for what you do with them. Laptop lids? Sure, but when the laptop goes end-of-life, you have two problems: (1) you lose your stickers, and (2) someone has to clean the stickers off the lid to send the laptop into an electronics recycling program. Similarly, stickers on windows or doors don’t work because people move around and we don’t want to mar furniture.

Two possible sticker solutions

For the mission patches handed out to staff, our new HR manager had the idea to get plexiglass sheets and use those as mounting spots for the stickers. These are inexpensive and can be taken by the employee as they move around or even if they leave the organization. The particular sticker layout is up to them, too.

Meanwhile, large-format mission patches meant for team sharing on a visible wall could be mounted as magnets instead of straight-up stickers. Using a magnetic whiteboard or similar surface, you can do a “magnetic poetry” kind of thing that’s interactive for employees and allows for remixing over time.

Anyway, team leaders are assembling their “2023” awards now and we should be issuing Mission Patches and assembling our walls by May.

2025+ Planning

The boss has scheduled some off-site planning sessions next month, so we’re starting some “visioning” right now on the GX Foundry leadership team. All options are on the table. We have clear weaknesses to fill, including more BA capacity, lots of new UX research capacity, and of course more platforms and development capacity. We already have a multi-year plan to boost web-focused capacity.

This stuff is hard to do, but vital to ensure we can keep up with customer needs and build capacity for things that haven’t even been requested yet. There’s soooooo much government experience to improve.

Website “Content Rationalization”

Speaking of websites and improving experiences, this past week saw multiple hours of meetings with partner agencies as they start to get some training and are given deadlines to (a) look through all their current web content, and (b) decide what to keep, update, or delete as we move to a new content management system and redesign our web properties to meet the public where they are instead of asking the public to meet the agencies where they are.

This is perhaps the most important project in our area since the results, if done well, will reverberate years into the future. We need better design, better writing, but what we really need is to share information and resources in ways the public can intuitively understand. We are moving from agency-centric publishing to public-centric publishing. It’s a wholesale overhaul.

Leading individuals vs. leading organizations

In recent weeks I’ve been discovering there’s a spectrum of management engagement with employees. I tend to be on one end of the spectrum and a colleague of mine tends to be on the other end of the spectrum. Both are valid and valuable, but the best results probably come from mixing the approaches (which is hard to do).

My colleague tends to lead from private, personal interaction and coaching with each person he manages. It’s a deep, meaningful, and personal connection. It can be a powerful way to coach and develop people. But it’s limited in scale and can create unintended dependencies. There are only so many people you can coach deeply at one time, and there are only so many meetings you can attend personally to guide. And your presence is both deeply felt when you are there and deeply missed when you are not.

On the other hand, I tend to lead systematically rather than personally. I create big-picture mission concepts and frameworks, then try to teach those ideas and evangelize them, hoping to garner followers and leaders that extend these ideas into their teams. This is a very scalable model—presuming your models are accepted and used, and presuming the leaders following you are equipped to carry the vision forward with their teams. But it’s not a terribly personal connection between myself and those I lead, meaning if I need to lead intensely with an individual, that relationship is too light to sustain “heavy” coaching, where you’ll be processing a lot of emotional load along the way.

Again, neither approach is “right.” Both have plusses and minuses. The best thing to do is mix them in equal measure. Indeed, over the past few years I’ve been trying to move toward a more personal connection, but it definitely does not play to my strengths.

I’m thinking a lot about this lately.

I Voted

Yep, I voted in the primary election this week. I don’t think I’ve missed an election since 2015, no matter how “small.” Voting is a very big deal in local government, and a sizable swath of our organization works on various efforts to support our Board of Elections, including on election night. Our teams work on data analytics stuff, website updates, and specialty code that slices and dices voting results in various ways and posts the data online.

November 5 is gonna be wild this year.

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