learning how to begin

unfortunately not at the beginning

This week, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting Madrid. My organisation sent me to attend some initiation training to learn about our ways of working and the frameworks we use. We acted out a scenario, playing the roles of the teams that directly interact with clients. I enjoyed the experience and meeting my colleagues from around the continent, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to understand how my organisation expects us to work.

For me though, I found the training amusing and a little simplistic. The first morning, I learned about brainstorming and mind mapping, and in the afternoon, we learned about converting these ideas into a slide deck. I would have appreciated this training twenty years ago when I was starting my career rather than having to work it all out and learn the hard way. It was clear that the majority of the people in the room did appreciate learning these techniques. However, the majority in the room were under thirty and this is their first or second job. They need these skills, and although the impact of this training is minimal for me, it speaks of greatness that my organisation wants to support its employees with such an expensive start to our careers.

I look back at the organisations I’ve worked for in my life. When I arrived at my first job, one of the directors handed me a can of polish, pointed at a desk covered with bits of computers, and told me that I would need to clear the desk for myself. A week into another role, I received an email informing me that I wasn’t allowed to wear headphones in the office from the director who sat two desks away from me; I quietly slipped them out and into my bag. In yet another role, I experienced a one-to-one with my manager wearing a t-shirt with a glamour model shot printed on the front.

Throughout my early career, I read the underlying subtext that I wasn’t appreciated and that no one wanted me to succeed. I either would or wouldn’t, and either way didn’t matter to my leaders.

I wonder what I have done differently to support the new joiners in companies that I have been in more of a leadership capacity. I certainly haven’t gone so far as giving a multi-day training about best working practices, but then it has never been in my power to do so as a freelancer. However, perhaps as the Scrum Master or Agile Coach I could have done better to explain the processes and working practices of the team. Perhaps I could have documented the team’s ways of working and spent half a day going over them with new joiners, rather than giving them a brief overview of each process immediately before expecting them to be involved in that practice.