Month: November 2023

Categories
Book Club

Book Club: Leadership and the New Science

For October’s Book Club session we read Leadership and the New Science by Margaret Wheatley. This book felt more like a metaphor than a guide. Dr. Wheatley pokes at what is wrong with the traditional 19th century leadership mindset (hierarchical in nature, where the organization runs best in an autocratic fashion–think Henry Ford and factories where every person performed a specific physical function in the line). She uses Newtonian dynamics to describe both why we are inclined to believe this is “the way”, but also what we have learned about how the world functions at the subatomic level invalidating this approach. The heart of her argument is that as descriptive and measurable as these kinds of cause and effect relationships are for describing the dynamics of large objects, it isn’t actually how humans, relationships, or organizations function.

Dr. Wheatley draws analogies between “new science” (chaos theory, quantum physics, and deeper understanding of biology) and organizational dynamics. In many ways we are chaotic, but our chaos is actually a path to self-organization, and her postulate is chaos is actually how we maximize creativity, learning, and fundamentally innovation. Chaos Theory is derived from the discoveries of “strange attractors” and fractals. “Strange attractors” prove that amidst seeming chaos and randomness, patterns evolve revealing an order that is at work in the universe. This evolution is non-linear which means that the slightest variation in the inputs can result in vastly different outputs. Applying this to organizations implies organizational behavior can be unpredictable (which anyone who has lived through change management knows).

On the other hand, fractals prove that the same simple pattern can be found repeated at many levels of observation forming an intricate object when viewed as a whole. Wheatley draws the analogy between an organization’s culture and fractals implying that “simply expressed expectations of purpose, intent, and values, and the freedom for responsible individuals to make sense of these in their own way” will enable individuals to self-organize without strict enforcement, and in fact that will be more predictable than a “structured” approach, since it is fundamentally how we all work. My engineering mind has a hard time believing values alone will enable self-organization, but I have definitely seen how clear goals with transparency around the measured results can rally people to a cause more effectively than tops-down micromanagement. Align with the team on what success looks like, and how we will measure; then see them execute.

One of my favorite sections was on Quantum Physics and its applicability to organizational dynamics. The analogy here is between humans and subatomic interactions “…no particle can be drawn independent from others (p. 34)” and “what is critical is the relationship created between two or more elements. Systems influence individuals, and individuals call forth systems (p.36).” This feels incredibly true in my observations. How someone shows up in a meeting depends on who else is present, and how that individual relates to those others. We are points on a wave, not individuals fixed in time and space. I have seen how teams can overdeliver (or under) relative to their intellectual capacity based entirely on the relationships between the individuals and their partners and customers. Our relative position is what matters most.

This book is an alternate paradigm to describe work and human relationships, and it is in no way a guidebook for managers. As such, I found myself seeing these analogies across work and life at every turn, but in no way felt clearer on how to execute effectively in that world. Sometimes uncertainty is the kind of discomfort that drives insight and breakthroughs. Nearly everyone in the book club enjoyed this book, and felt similarly around its lack of direct applicability, but beauty in terms of insight. I definitely recommend this book philosophically to question your assumptions about life and work. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotations from one of my favorite books of all time “Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer,” – Rainer Maria Rilke

Categories
Reflection

On Resilience: SWE 2023

Last week I was on a panel at the Society of Women Engineers Annual Conference on the topic of resiliency. This talk was not about system reliability (although I do love that topic); this was about personal resiliency. Resilience is a muscle I built over the past 20+ years in the industry, and speaking at a conference of 17,000 engineers who happen to be female on this topic was an honor. My hope was to help our upcoming generation of engineers find their strength a bit faster than I did, which feels ESPECIALLY critical for young people graduating now having had school interrupted by Covid and emerging into a tighter job market.

So first the baseline. What helps with resiliency?

  1. Authenticity: seek to know who you are, and get clarity on your personal values. Identify and optimize for your strengths. Work to cultivate a good level of emotional awareness and regulation (friends and mentors help a lot with this! So do coaches and therapists!)
  2. Purpose: seek purpose and a sense of belonging in your work. You cannot work where you don’t feel like you belong. You cannot work at a place whose culture doesn’t align with your core values and beliefs. If you are in such a place, you need to find a new home.
  3. Adaptability: find methodologies to be solution-focused when things go wrong. Try to reframe setbacks and challenges. Work to minimize the impact of negativity (personally and professionally).
  4. Self-care: You have to find the work and life routines that help you manage your everyday stressors. It takes work to create time for relaxation and recovery (which sounds totally unfair, but it is just the reality friends). When I was taking a parenting class they spoke about combating post-partum depression with the 5 ‘s’s: Sleep, Sunshine, Sweat, Social, and Snuggles. This stuck with me from that super stressful (and wonderful) time in my life, and is the heart of my personal approach to stress-management.
  5. Support: build a community that can provide you with advice and support, and seek to provide support readily to others. Many times the process of helping others may help you feel more connected than asking for support yourself, but it is brave to ask for help, and far better than letting yourself operate in the dark.
  6. Energy: maintain physical fitness with a healthy diet and adequate sleep. The analogy I would use is put your own Oxygen mask on before you help others. You really cannot be present if you are exhausted.
  7. Networks: develop and maintain the personal and professional support networks you need at home and at work in order to perform well in your job. These are not just about emotional support for today’s challenges, but this is about supporting you through the transitions of the future, be it new jobs, projects, or personal transitions and challenges.

I offer this as a framework, but each individual has to find their own recipe. You have to allocate time for that in your life, and recognize that the process is continuous. As your life, responsibilities, and needs evolve, you will need to reassess.

So that is the framework I’ve used, but the panel specifically asked three questions. The first was to share a career challenge or setback and how resilience came into play in moving through it. The example I shared was from a recent project launch. How upon the first review of my plan internally I was basically told that my plan wasn’t even worth discussing and how I had to pivot and expand the entire scope with fewer weeks than the lead time to acquire the components. I shared the approach I tend to use in high stakes scenarios when I could get triggered. 1. Take a deep breath. 2. Ask yourself why a reasonable, rational person would behave in this fashion? The trick is to get myself out of reacting and into thinking mode (a great book on this is Radical Candor, which I highly recommend). When we are triggered, we cannot be our best self (literally your amygdala is firing and you are going to be in fight or flight mode). If you can get yourself into “thinking mode” (activating your prefrontal cortex), then you can react in a thoughtful manner, and not out of fear or frustration. In every aspect of work I try to cultivate my curiosity. Most of the time one’s knee jerk assumptions of why something is happening are wrong (and that is largely because we tend to assume people’s behavior is because of something we did or said, and it rarely is). The person who told me my plan was insufficient was trying to lead a transformative change–he wasn’t trying to tell me I was insufficient. The sooner we get out of personalizing, and into problem solving, the more resilient we will be in executing.

The second question was about leading my team through challenges and how I role-modeled, built, and supported resilience in the team. What I really focused on here was the fact that resilience comes from self-care (which I cannot control, but I can encourage), and a sense of belonging and purpose (which is my responsibility to help build). SO, I focus on helping make sure my team understands how their work impacts our customers and overall business. I also try to make sure that they feel like they are cared about. A leader I truly admire, Rani Borkar, once told me that her motto is “people first, business always.” I have always loved that. Your people will know if you care about them, and hopefully if you are there and present for them in the good times, they will know to come to you in the tough ones. So I check in on them. I invest in skip level meetings. I pay careful attention to employee engagement surveys. I gather and analyze manager feedback. I ask the questions, try to reflect back what I have heard to make sure I really understand the perspective correctly, and then I make sure I am taking action based on the feedback.

The last question was about a time when things did NOT go well with respect to resiliency and in retrospect what you wish you had done instead. The experience I shared here was when I was coming back from maternity leave, exhausted and less capable of self-care because of my new role at home. It happened to also be a time when my husband was traveling a lot to be with his father who had been diagnosed with cancer, and he was trying to help manage his father’s care from the opposite coast.

This time was one of the most difficult in my career: everything got under my skin because I was often solo parenting with an infant and a two-year-old, not getting enough sleep, exercise, support, etc. There are many work experiences I could share where I wish I had been able to show up with more grace. I gritted through it, unfortunately my father-in-law did not make it, my husband’s travel slowed down, and our family entered the phase of mourning and healing, but every single day was so hard. I wish I had been willing to cut myself some slack: specifically get extra help in terms of childcare, reach out for more emotional support, seek coaching and mentorship at my company, etc. When I came through that experience, I absolutely learned what NOT to do, and have since handled periods of extreme stress much better.

My parting advice was this: engineering and product development are careers where you are constantly learning, and there will always be phases where you have to work through ambiguity, solve complex problems, and manage stressful situations (quality challenges, gnarly bugs, high priority launches with many moving pieces, stakeholders who disagree strongly, etc.) In order to do this work well, you HAVE to be able to show up as your best self, which means you need to prioritize resilience.