success and failure
how will you judge me?
It’s important to understand your purpose and what success and failure look like. Not just at an individual level but also—and perhaps more importantly—when you’re part of a group. When you’re working towards something, you need to understand why you’re working towards it. Plenty of questions will emerge along the journey of solving your problem, so understanding why you are trying to solve that problem can help you choose the answer that’s most likely to be successful.
These questions can range from “Which wording is best for this slide?” to “Which solution to this problem will achieve our goal?” If the people trying to design and build the solution don’t understand how it will be judged, they could easily end up being unable to solve the problem entirely.
What I find worse than having no answer to these questions, though, is receiving a different answer from everyone I ask. Usually, when this happens, the answers are vague and fluffy. People either think they understand the destination or haven’t given it disciplined thought and so talk about how they feel about the problem instead.
When I engage with a new organisation, I make a point of creating my own goals within the first couple of months. These are goals for my personal development and my impact upon the organisation. I don’t share these goals with anyone inside the organisation, which allows me to be more honest about what I want to achieve, as I don’t have to worry about politics or positioning. I’ve done this both as a consultant (who has no manager to set goals with) and as a permanent employee (who has a manager but doesn’t want one).
My personal development goals have never aligned with what the organisation (or, more accurately, my manager) has wanted for me. As I have recently returned to permanent work, I have yet again found myself in the position of needing to declare my annual development goals. Ultimately, my goals are to leave gainful employment and return to the luxury of being self-employed. In part, this is because as a neurodivergent woman, I find it difficult to be confined to a job description and other people’s plans for how I spend my time.
I like having goals, but I want to find my own way to them in my own time. I want the work I produce to be work that I produce and not to be told that I can’t do that because it doesn’t fit in with the corporate style. As a change agent, this can be particularly frustrating when I’m forced to create learning resources in ‘the way we do it here.’ I’m here to change things, and if I can’t do things in a different way, how can I promote that anyone else can?
I have given myself a timebox for my tenure with my current employer and am starting to form opinions about what I can extract from them towards my personal development. However, I am still struggling to see what impact I can have within the organisation. My onboarding has come during the summer holidays, and so everyone is off. I’m learning about what is expected of me, who everyone is, and how they fit together, but little more at this point.
I’m always grateful for summer onboardings, as they allow a coach the luxury of a slow start, which is a necessity for effective change but rarely a given.
Apologies for the delay in this week’s post; illness had yet again spread through the family…
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