Thread by @rdonoghue

Having spent a career avoiding management like the plague, this was the year I took the plunge. I did so right before end of year cross-calibrations (that is, reviews) which was a great way to remind myself of all the reasons I didn't want to do this stuff.

Having survived cross cals I did walk away with a very palpable lesson about what sort of work I need to do to help insure the success of the people who work for me (And of why it's so important I prioritize that).

Logically, the thing to do is to look to my own lessons of success and try to impart that wisdom upon them. However, as it turns out, "Be a middle aged white guy and things will work out" is not actually a fantastic lesson plan.

Also, honestly, having now gotten to watch the sausage get made, I have an appreciation for how lucky I've been. This is not to undercut my competency or effectiveness - I'm pretty good at what I do - but I was very lucky that my inclinations lined up with what the system wants.

So, to some extent, I'm obliged to look to the roots of that "luck", which is humbling but also informative. I'm also obliged to be realistic about what tactics work for me (White, bearded, large well spoken dude) that might not be universally applicable.

Most obviously? I have had a lot more leeway to fail fast than some might because I have that combination of attributes that make failure less sticky. Which is great for me, but makes it terrible advice to give without awareness.

(I'm pretty mindful of this one, because I *love* failing fast as an approach to problems, and I was a vocal advocate of it for a time, and thought objections to it were coming from people who were "just" afraid to take risks. I had not considered the blind spot was mine)

Anyway, this has me thinking about how to help my team succeed, and as I think on it, it boils down to three things (as it so often does) which I'll loosely call knowledge, capability & purpose. I say loosely because there are a LOT of models like this, all roughly overlapping.

Knowledge & Capability are not easy, but they are straightforward. Do you have the skills and information to succeed? Knowledge. Do you have the tools and opportunity to succeed? Capability. If there are gaps with these things, there are tools for addressing them.

Those are problems I can solve.

Purpose, however, is definitely knottier. I look at my own journey through it, and it raises more questions than answers.

For me, Skills and Capability are things that have steadily leveled up as I've learned and done things, but purpose has sort of skittered and jumped. And I think that's probably as it should be.

Improving skills is a progression. It moves in one direction. But a similar narrative about purpose is...outright creepy.

To unpack, for a decent part of my career, purpose was very straightforward - a paycheck. One might categorize it as extrinsic motivation, but I just view it as logistics. When I was in the Senate, the purpose was making a difference, however small, and came with less $$$.

At some point, I decided it was fun to solve certain sort of problems and that gave a purpose. At other points, I determined that I'm uncomfortable letting problems lie and need to tackle them, and that was also purpose.

That last - see a problem and want to fix it - has been a very beneficial motivator for me in my current context because it translates into initiative (which pairs with capability into autonomy, thank you Daniel Pink) and that's great, but it's not a *progression*.

From a certain perspective, my purpose has become more "professional" over time, but that's looking at it backwards. My contexts have changed, and my purpose changes with it. If my situation changed, my purpose could ABSOLUTELY go back to "paycheck".

Which is 100% reasonable, but difficult to frame because progression narratives are so powerful that there's an instinct to frame that sort of context change as falling back to a lower "level". Hard instinct to fight, but naming it helps.

Worse, there is a toxic, reductionist flipside to this which is SUPER tied to the power dynamics of work. Yes, people need to get paid, and yes, people are expected to do their jobs, but if that dynamic is reduced to just the paycheck, then that's all it will be.

And that's a problem when, as in this case, the criteria for *success* rely on more than just compliance.

When I say I was lucky, this is exactly what I mean. My inclination (ooh, problem! Shiny! Let's fix it!) set me up for success because it produced the desired outcome (examples of initiative, problem solving, and helping others).

And the bit I need to wrestle with a bit is how to help my people reach similar outcomes WITHOUT assuming that the correct answer is "to have the same purpose/motivation I have."

That would probably work, in a classic managerial sense. I could push that motivation narrative, and it would work for some, and others would underperform and get pushed out, allowing me to bring in people aligned with my vision, and I could selection-bias my way to the top!

I say all this to make it clear how narrow-visioned and monocultured such an approach would be, it's still hard to resist. The self-narrative of "my experience, inclination and earned wisdom have created a template for success for others" is *super* compelling.

Which is why I'm going to need to do the much harder and, more critically, much more uncomfortable thing of figuring out how to help them find my kind of luck based on what works for *them*.

(And if you don't understand why 'uncomfortable' is more of a barrier than 'hard', that may be more than I can unpack in a tweet, so just accept that many brains are happy to do the *work*, but find the work the easy part)

Of course, part of the challenge is figuring out what makes that connection for them (one more reason it's SO MUCH EASIER to just use MY model), and to do *that* (with a nod to @kleenestar) I'm going to need to carve a space where that can be safely spoken to.

Seems like a small thing, and in the grand scheme it maybe it, but it's going to be a trick in and of itself.

But I have about one year before these people get to go through the grinder, and if they're not set up for success, that's on me.

So there's work to do.

(Coincidentally, this is also the year I've given myself to see if this management thing is something I genuinely want.)