Three things that hurt my career and soul
Not even I, dear reader, am perfect. It’s hard to admit, but I have problems you know, deep shit.
I do plenty at work that holds me back. However, I still choose to do those things because they are good to do, either good for my colleagues, or good in the sense that they manifest value. This isn’t a list about that, this is the stuff that hurts my career, and is, in my opinion, not good.
#1 – Public anger
If I have a cardinal emotion, it is most certainly anger. All my reviews throughout the entirety of my career have been on this theme. Be more timid, give people more time to catch up, stop holding people to account, etc. I have tended to disagree with this feedback, I still do for the most part.
Anger can be a positive force, it is responsible for me being where I am today. It drives action, generates alignment, can shock people out of lethargy, etc. I tend to look on angry folk quite favorably, it means that they care, and that makes them more useful to me than most by default.
However, public anger, specifically when people look to you for leadership, is something I am learning can be less than helpful. Would you look to a leader who seems not to have it fully together, who seems to be panicking? This is the person who is stewarding The Plan, it doesn’t inspire, it mostly just gives folk the ick.
I have no intention to quell my private anger, directed towards friends and colleagues I trust can handle it, but I need to put a lid on it in public spaces.
#2 – Lack of executive function
Yep, I struggle to do things I don’t want to do. Boo-hoo, cry me a river. Look, I’m not looking for sympathy, I have figured out how to deal with this. I try very hard to make sure I’m working on inherently motivating stuff, because I am trying to deliver value and that is where it best comes from. However, that can’t always be the case, especially when you are trying to develop other people. You can’t hog all the self-actualizing work for yourself, it’s selfish.
My coping strategies tend to be deadline based, artificial or otherwise. When this manifests, it manifests as me working very little during office hours, and then doing the ol’ 10x engineer fugue state for 48 straight hours, interrupted briefly by a couple of power naps, over weekends.
This, to no ones surprise, does not scale, either practically or emotionally. The implementer side of my work is no longer the most impactful part of it. As much as I would like to lock all my colleagues in a room for three days and blast through 6 months of technical strategy alignment in a caffeine fueled productivity frenzy … well I tried and they gave me a very stern talking to, so I need to figure something else out.
#3 – Not keeping confidences
I want to be extremely specific here, because despite the clickbait section title, I do keep confidences, in the vast majority of cases.
I don’t know if everyone is like this, but when speaking, I do not pre-conceptualize the words that are leaving my mouth. The entity that is speaking, heck, the entity that is typing, is a different thing to the entity that causes the inner monologue when I am thinking.
For this reason, I have to catch myself. I realize, normally before my mouth moves, that the thing I am pre-vocalising should not be said, and I stop myself.
I do this for colleagues and folks more junior to me by instinct. They are protected. I am not concerned that I am accidentally breaking their confidences. I would have assumed I was doing it for those above me also, but I have realized that I am not.
Specifically, I am holding confidences for anything that I feel is important. I have not spilled the beans on any important or impactful secrets or implicit confidences. However, you see the problem, things that I feel are important. Not that they feel, that I feel.
This is a breach of trust, and I only recently realized I was doing it when I casually dropped a, in my opinion benign, tidbit a technical director had shared with me in a 1 to 1 as a way to lend authority to an argument I was making to a peer. The technical director had told me at the head of the conversation, explicitly, that they were talking to me in confidence, and I realized after the fact that I had breached it.
I can only assume I have done this on other occasions. My instinctual safeguards were not sensitive enough to trigger if the secret was from someone “above” me, whom I do not feel the need to protect, and I do not instinctively feel the thing is important. In my estimation however, this is an irrelevant heuristic. Confidences are a promise, my opinion on the importance of their contents do not matter.
I may link this article to the technical director in question. If you are reading this, I am sorry. Rest assured that I am reasonably certain you would have agreed with me that whatever it was (seriously, it was so minor I don’t even remember) wasn’t a big deal, but you know, I’m not proud.
Boy, being honest on the internet, and under my own name too. Will I ever get hired again? Will I even keep my current job? You’ll have to tune in next time to find out.