Over the past several years, my career has undergone a metamorphosis. In the early days, I was convinced that my best contributions to work would be learning to solve hard problems, making things work, being helpful and understanding the systems everyone needed to do their jobs, making them better, and solving technical puzzles. I built an identity around solving problems, around understanding technology, around filling gaps in capabilities and knowledge and finding ways to make myself valuable. In many ways, I still do these things, but it manifests differently now.
Several years ago, I made a job change. The divisional leader had big dreams. He was leading change at his organization, he wanted to do things differently and he had a clearly articulated vision for where he wanted to go. I was excited.
However, when I joined the organization, it became clear that the behaviors inside the company did not align with the vision the leader espoused. The disconnect between the stated vision and the team’s behavior clearly signaled impending failure. One fateful day, I met with my leader and tried to discuss the ways in which lower level leaders were thwarting the vision. For example, one cannot say they want a “self-healing network” (whatever that means) and continue to demand the deployment of static routes (I digress).
My feedback was not well received. My divisional leader never spoke to me again and I found new opportunities and moved on.
We often don’t realize we’re in the middle of a sea change as it’s happening. Personal transformation becomes more clear in hindsight and we understand the narrative of our lives more as we look back. My toxic work experience birthed a new realization in me. While technical problems are often challenging and require tremendous skill and focus, toxic cultures and organizational structures will thwart even the most skilled engineers. I came to see I was wholly unprepared to address the cultural, organizational, and human components that were larger barriers to success.
As I struggled to make sense of my work world and find a better way, I discovered Westrum’s typology and began reading about effectives teams and organizational change. I became more concerned about influence and relational leadership and how I could effect change — for the good of my organization — without positional authority. I came to see that, in many circumstances, enterprise leaders listen to their vendors more than their employees.
I made the shift from enterprise network engineering to vendor customer engineering — leaning on over a decade solving real problems with technology in the enterprise. I observed the different personalities of enterprise organizations, what makes some relatively healthy and what makes others relatively sick. And, I continued to ask the question, how can I help?
These days, I find myself less enamored with the latest technical implementation details. These are important. But I find my thinking drifts toward business problems. How do we gain clarity and agreement across an organization around what problems we are trying to solve? How do we most clearly articulate what we’re trying to accomplish to reduce confusion, rework, unneeded expense, and ultimate failure? How do we marry technology to business problems and solve them in better ways? What barriers, technical and non-technical, inhibit success?
Earlier in my career, these questions and answers seemed obvious, simple, and not nearly engaging enough. Now, I believe ignoring them, or assuming they’re obvious, is the single greatest reason for technology failure.
Where does all of this leave me? I came into my own as a network engineer and the network engineering community has been good to me. At my core, I still view IT infrastructure through a lens shaped by networking and infrastructure. At the same time, I’m more comfortable focusing less on deeply technical implementation details and more on the larger organizational barriers the impede progress. I’m concerned about healthy teams and psychological safety and how we, as fully embodied humans, work in sustainable and effective ways to solve real problems.