I'm taking a long weekend, because I just need the time to decompress and readjust my mental bandwidth distribution. In just over three months, my new team delivered something consequential and important, and I'm so proud of them. I really like the job so far.
But what's weird is how I have a hard time keeping my focus narrow and not in every lane. I've been having the somewhat surprising realization lately that my experience encompasses a lot. I've seen a lot. I've helped make a lot of things better. Sometimes I may have made them worse. So when you work in a growing company, it's not unusual to see something and think, "Oh, I can help with that!" That's a good thing. If you can't find things about your work that excite you, where you think you can have impact, ugh, that wouldn't be great.
With that experience comes some amount of maturity to recognize that I can't do all the things, and that is something that I still have to navigate every single day. Over the past decade, I've made the choice to specifically be close to the makers, which is to say, be a line manager. I really like it. It's kind of counter to various autism stereotypes, but it's remarkably like being an athletic coach, minus the intense emotions and pep talks. When you set up all of the right things, you see a group of people ascend to great outcomes. You rarely get credit for it, but you know. When those things pop up in the peripheral, you start to realize that you could make those better, but it might come at the expense of the thing you were hired for.
The complication is that a lot of folks in my position find purpose in the wrong things. It relates to my previous post, where sometimes they find purpose in telling people what to do instead of enabling them. But even if you're someone working "on the line," you can see ways to improve things, and may want to help. There's meaning and purpose in that, too. It comes with the same question though that a manager has to consider. Does my help, help?
At my highest level of management, I admit, I wasn't able to even look for this. Granted, I was in a somewhat broken situation where I wasn't entirely enabled in the first place. There were people around me though who could have made things better, outside of their lane, but I didn't see it at the time.
It's a little strange to be having these thought exercises when I feel like I should be close to the end of my second act career. It would be first act for most other people, but I never dreamed of being in this line of work. Heck, this line of work didn't exist when I was choosing a career.
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