2025 Weeknote 29 : Can leaders be individual contributors? (Technically, yes. But try to avoid it.)

July 14 – 20

My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, often focused on work, but with home life stuff, too. Learn more about weeknotes here.

Professional weeknotes

• Had a solid meeting with our legal folks this week and confirmed they are on board with making the case for brand new (permanent) investments into ADA accessibility. We need headcount and a bit of cash to pick up the pace in this journey. Our deadline is next April and we’re already late. We make the case to county leadership soon. I would love it if a moral case for serving “every resident, every day” (like it says in their preferred tagline) made the case for the investments. But I will accept the threat of lawsuits to help spur action and spending. We’ll see what happens next.
• I spent several hours prepping with one of our junior team members on how to make the pitch to our law enforcement colleagues for a major new investment in systems that will enable expanded and faster criminal investigations around CSAM (child sexual abuse material) traffickers and related predators. It’s basically a $2.5M ask, but it’s long overdue, so we’re hoping this request has legs and/or may be able to attract some grant funding. It’s essentially a ton of storage and compute to wipe away some of the workarounds the team struggles with all the time. Good use of taxpayer money… if we can get it.
• I also spent hours talking to and thinking about our Recorder’s office and the nature of digital archival activities in 2025 and beyond. They are facing a sea change: the end of microfilm as a viable storage technology for document images. We have to go all-digital at all stages of ingestion, storage, and retrieval. This is doable but risky. For now, I’m kinda surprised at how we don’t really have an “archivist” of any kind in this 6,000-person local government organization. I’m kinda nervous that it’s suddenly my job to figure all this out, learn a new industry (at least a little), and propose technology and process changes while retaining all the historical content. Whew. This is messy.
• And while I’m not a useful resource, I’ve been monitoring a major go-live effort in our Auditor’s office, led by two folks from our team. The go-live is shortly after this post goes out. It was a helluva week last week and it’s gonna be an even bigger deal this coming week. And just to “show the flag,” I stopped by the project site on Saturday to say hello and check in on the team. It was… not going great at that point. But it picked up on Sunday.
• After a great meeting with much of the GX Foundry team more than a week ago, I’ve had very little time to think about it or work up any new stuff. Turns out becoming an individual contributor (working on ADA stuff, working on ICAC stuff, working on RCDR stuff) isn’t helping. That still-nascent digital services team needs more of my time, and I’m fearful I won’t be able to provide it, especially not consistently.

Professional links

One

Oh man, this one hit home this week: Why Senior Leaders Should Stop Having So Many One-on-Ones (via HBR).

I’ve had a growing realization lately that the 1:1 meetings I’m having aren’t all “working.” I think some of that is not having enough time to prepare and just having too many direct report, plus having direct reports at multiple operating levels (some individual contributors, some managers). Between those factors and running from project meeting to leadership meeting and back again, I’m not doing the 1:1 meetings justice.

However, this article hits home in that there’s more to it than that. As a leader (not a manager) I should be having less of these meetings overall. It’s distracting me from a strategic level of thinking and it’s not helping the people I’m meeting with as much as I think.

If you’re in a managing-managers type role, check out the article.

Two

This piece also hit home a bit. From one of the pioneers of the weeknotes concept comes this new insight: How to be open while you test and learn. Working in government makes this both doubly “risky” but also doubly rewarding if you can work in the public eye effectively. So much of what government does is hidden from public view, despite political leaders talking up “transparency” in government.

There’s a lot of good stuff in this piece, but I especially appreciated this nugget:

“…it’s possible to find ways of explaining what went wrong without casting blame (intentionally or otherwise); it’s possible to shed good light on bad decisions; it’s possible to get better at sharing mistakes so that what you learned will benefit others who follow in your footsteps.”

The notion of perfection in finished work products is such a barrier to innovation. It’s why people have writer’s block when they look at a blank page. It’s why government so rarely improves, and even if it does, it doesn’t talk about it.

All that said, boy… is this hard. Being confident enough to say, “I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out and tell you what I learn” to peers is rough. To the public it feels impossible. Yet if we already had a dialogue with the public in place, it would be so much easier.

I’m hoping a new communications person joining our organization this coming week might help us start to break down the writer’s block we have in our organization and in the broader county.

Three

Finally in my links this week was this reminder for leaders: if you’re always solving the team’s problems for them, they won’t learn to solve them on their own. You are stunting their career growth and opportunities. Thanks to HBR for this one: Stop Solving Your Team’s Problems for Them.

I’m pretty guilty of this one. It’s a very hard habit to break. I value speed in decision-making and getting things done. And there’s no faster way to get things moving than to… figure it out yourself, make all the decisions, and hand out assignments (or just do it yourself, too!). Teaching others is always slower than doing it yourself! So annoying.

Yet if I keep doing this—and I don’t always do it—the team’s performance is throttled by my own participation. And that’s terrible. I’m only one person, so that’s one helluva throttle.

Leaders and managers have to live up to the story Simon Sinek tells about being a young go-getter in an ad agency. He’s working on a project, screws something up, goes to his boss and says, “Oh man, I really screwed up. What do I do now?” And the boss replied, “Wow. Yeah… that’s pretty bad. So what are you going to do now?” This surprises Simon until he realizes that if his boss solved the problem, then the boss wouldn’t need him. And if he wants to have more responsibility in the future, he has to do the work himself. The boss that refused to help in the moment made all the difference down the road for the company and for the employee.

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Personal weeknotes

The countdown is on for helping my parents make their transition into an assisted living facility. We’re making preparations and reservations and plans. It will be complex, but doable.

I’ve sometimes heard horror stories about how other families have handled these things—where siblings bicker amongst themselves over various decisions. Thankfully, we’re all doing pretty well with coordinating action and agreeing on best choices for the situation.

Meanwhile, I’m starting a purge cycle at home. Not in preparation to move, but in recognition that certain phases of my life are behind me now, and I’m doing new things. I was a backcountry backpacker for a bit when I was younger, and most recently took a solo trip during COVID. But with the Camino de Santiago coming up next year, and lots of other options similar to it around the world, it’s time to change up my approach. Plus, after my wife’s accident in 2019, there are some things we just can’t do together, and I don’t want to go solo.

So I’m purging some outdoor gear, and started that process this weekend. I’m going to try REI’s gear recycling process and see how that goes. Other stuff can go to Goodwill. And at some point I’ll get to the bigger items that need to be sold (like a pair of kayaks).

I also spent several hours this weekend perfecting my packing list for the California coastal hike this fall and the Camino next year. I also did a test-pack to see whether a roughly 30L backpack would work for those trips. Turns out: Yes. I might be able to squeak by with a 25L pack, but that would be pushing it awfully hard. So I’ll hold in the 28-32L range, and I have 2 packs I can test out in the weeks and months ahead.

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