Week 22
Short weeknotes this week really.
We had an end of engagement workshop with a client team and a large group of their colleague-collaborators. I suggested I hand the client team the baton ahead of this final session - I felt it would be powerful for their colleagues to hear them tell the story of what had been done, to have them walk them through the roadmap and dive into the detail. I’m proud that the client team stepped up - confident and feeling equipped to deliver a great session. They did a grand job. And they’re able to describe not just the approach or the principles, but how it will working, and is already working, in practice. This , though, represents a further widening of the gap between the people who show up and those who don’t - a gap that still needs addressing. Reflection: busy people have lots of competing demands for their attention - so it’s not uncommon for folks to dip in and out of workshops, show-and-tells, town halls and the like. Their days might be back-to-back meetings, or they’ve fires needing to be put out, or perhaps they’re just very busy and trust that their team is on it and doesn’t need them. Here and there it might not matter, but the absences add up and as a leader you can quickly find yourself in a very different place to your team - and with sufficiently different mental models and expectations that you’re unable to give them the support they need. As someone running transformation projects, I know the fix for this is often more bespoke communication and engagement for these leaders - to meet them where they are (within reason). But my honest advice for leaders this overwhelmed? Either genuinely delegate leadership decision-making so that decisions can be made at the pace of delivery - or else don’t pursue that transformation project until you can give it the attention it needs.
Most of my week was spent working on the big new engagement that started the week before my holiday. There was a huge amount of progress in my absence - I’ve been frantically trying to catch up with the rest of the team. This week for me involved: data schema, document requests, data protection, trauma-informed research training, trauma-informed operating model design, engagement strategy, participant recruitment strategy, screener survey, exploring options for prototypes with connected front and back-end, operating model design, comms planning - for service, and for service design. It’s…a lot. And I hate feeling like I’m a bottleneck on things. But we’re making good progress. And it’s a lot of fun. My team mates are amazing and my contributions are valued. It’s lovely. Reflection: When you’re part of an immensely talented team, the learning that comes from the “all hands on deck” nature of intense, ambitious, ambiguous, complex projects like this is truly invaluable, and the camaraderie is swoon-worthy. It’s all about the people. The same project could be a dream or a dumpster fire, depending on the team.
We had “Ladies Lunch”. This is a regular hour scheduled for PD women to catch-up. It’s a mix of in-person and hybrid as we’re really all together in the same place at once. Sometimes we talk about meaningful things, sometimes someone presents something or facilitates a structured discussion about something important. But just as often we’re shooting the sh*t about favourite coffees, teenage celebrity crushes, and when we’re having the next karaoke night. Reflection: These lunches, with this group, they really hit me in the feels : they’re utterly innocuous in the diary, and might look like a bit of a waste of time, but that time spent is astonishingly valuable because of the connection it creates, renews and strengthens. We’re sharing ourselves as women, not just as professionals. And I love it.
Post-holiday chaos. The day after our arrival home, our youngest had 24hr playdate with a friend and our eldest needed emergency dental appointment. We had to stock our completely empty fridge and cupboards and clean a mountain of washing. The girls had to revise for school tests (they’re streaming/setting the classes for 2024/25). I held onto holiday mode for as long as possible - and didn’t turn Slack notifications back on until the very last moment (Monday 9am - go me!).