Autonomy is a strange place

It's really strange moving out from a space where I had very directed work, to a place that is results driven with barely any guidelines.

I'm constantly asking of myself should I be doing something? And I find myself looking for permission to others in things that I see need doing ... and yet there is no one really owning the overall situation. Or rather there is but they are so high up that they would look strangely at you if you asked.

It puts me out on a limb. I own or do not own. I do or do not do. I make it happen or it does not happen (by me anyway I guess). Before I could lean back into some comfortable process or way of working or clear direction given. Now I have to work out the best solution and make it happen. I love the creative freedom... and yet it's another way to fail.

I guess I am not as scared at failing here now though - it's taken a long time to separate that which was imbued in my spirit with what is required here.

I like my new team leader (new as of February). They are good at both setting a vision, and then giving a kind of permission to get to that vision. Two separate things.

Still a bit of an issue on feedback from them. A bit better than the last one. That's always been an issue all my working life I've realised. Best article I've seen  written by a CEO makes it my responsibility to get feedback - and I'm ok with that. Or rather I've decided that hey if I want to be a good BA well then der, that's kind of my job so just extend that out personally. Also, I no longer have any belief that leadership programs seriously teach the importance of feedback, it's just such lacklustre token effort. My friend seeing the article I shared as the best I had seen to date was appalled that the article took such an approach - but then also conceded it was necessary.

Why though? It's so odd. Surely one of the key functions of leading is that coaching/directing/teaching part - and feedback should be so fundamental.

I wonder if our current society's dislike of failure is caught up in that? We don't like being seen to fail so we don't ask for feedback. A leader doesn't like seeing/dealing with their staff that fail so they don't give feedback. I suspect they are connected.

Recently took on being president of our local Toastmasters club. We are going to be a club that excels at feedback I've decided. I asked the question, who here wishes that they had had better feedback in their jobs either past or present - and no surprise everyone did. This means I also need to work on giving feedback - what is is, what it's for, why and how.

IWD2018 personal progress

I'd elected not to go or do anything about IWD this year. Shadows of cynicism, hopelessness, pointlessness, and pragmatically choosing that there were other things I would rather do, but, best of luck to them.

So it was strange that near the end of a crazy, busy day I found myself thankful that I had stayed in engineering.

I laugh at myself. This is me. Internally I barely refer to myself as an engineer. It is not in my list of statements about  my identity. I might say 'I did an engineering degree' (and that I am still amazed I actually did) but I don't say 'I am an engineer'.

Today at around 2.30 a newly minted Director, one of the good guys who has brought in the healing wind of change of good people leadership wandered past with purple UN ribbons saying our corporate had bought them for us. So my colleague and I put them on and continued racing through what we were doing respectively.

It was one of those days when I had been meaning to get sunshine and sandwich for the last hour and it was now 3.15 and I had another meeting in 15 mins. And even further subconscious prompting reminded me I had been meaning to go to the bathroom for the last hour.

So because it's a yearly marker I ended up thinking again through now, verses then.

My day had been filled until that point with work of such breadth and depth.

A meeting for collection of requirements for a business/legal/regulatory solution where an architecture solution needed to be chosen and even the existing solution optimised with an end architecture goal in mind and incoming products attempting to interpret incoming legislation in awkward ways. No architect available but conveniently located two desks over and easy reach coffee breaks is the architect who worked on this last year. Good thing as I stare bemused at a precipice of learning about general ledgers and revenue tracking.

In the late afternoon this colleague comments on a solution brief she has architect-ed for zero rating of Paypal portals for those with no credit - this is a customer solution I have been chasing for over four years now. Fascinated and delighted the end is in sight I check it's ok then forward this to the person managing the customer relationship of a high visibility customer who we both have been tracking for two years.

An urgent request had come in for a kind of mobile VPN for which I had recently inherited a hideous email driven process and am trying to sanitise and optimise this immediately with a JIRA instance while 6 and counting different project groups attempt to automate in the same space. And later in the day I find out that one of the implementation teams are setting up their own JIRA such that with their efforts and several other groups most likely it will not just be a notification tool but will at least be able to set states. Oh and I need to teach myself JIRA development ASAP.

A project for a product worked on last year I set a time frame. This time I'm the analyst and not architect and have confidence that I can produce the needed artefacts. And this time I've worked out I need a senior analyst to mentor me and have set this up for tomorrow. And by the end of the day I will meet with them and chunk out time for workshops and have directions and goals and clarity on what I'm actually meant to do in this role.

And I started the day completing an authentication file for a series of SIMs using an Air Gap laptop and PGP encryption while working in this space between machines. And ended the day justifying the ordering of services for creation of SIM candidate cards.

It's been a huge day of interesting and fun tech.

I can do this. It's fun. And I'm glad I stayed.

Re-focus to escape

Discussing with a friend, a DV survivor, this morning what would I say if I met someone else in that situation, and she asked what happened that I made a move to get out of there.

I think what helped me move out is when I focused on something else - somewhere to get to.

So going through the logic:

Slowly over time the situation has become more and more toxic - in fact it's really bad so that all those who care about me are telling me to get out.

As it's happened so slowly I can't see its so bad. I don't believe them as they are outside and they can't see the things I hope in, that the people are mostly ok and have good and bad sides, that there are chunks of hope.

My view of myself has eroded over time. I no longer believe I have any value. I believe I am useless and unemployable. The pieces of hope I have are that I might be lucky to get a break in this place but that is the only hope that is realistic for me. I believe what they say of me and how they view me and how they treat me.

Management don't know any better. It's been like this for a long time, everyone here the same. So they can't see how bad it is or what could be better. I am getting my reference point from them and this feeds into my perception of myself and my work.

 I know I'm unhappy. And I pick at it. And really that doesn't get me anywhere.
Even as I read up and analyse it and here is where I am grateful for feminism concepts to untangle events for which I do not have words or concepts or a framework to process what is going on. I had kept away from all that stuff years ago, equating anything about gender a cause of problems. Determined that if I ignored gender, that anyone else who dealt with me would ignore it also. If it had no value to me, then I should be perceived as person first gender next by others. And that is sort of true. Excepting that my differences by whatever means, gender being part of those, seemed to be the problem. The emphasis on inclusiveness makes so much sense to me.

So what to do with this happiness? This round and around in my head of I am useless so I can't do anything so I'm stuck here and lucky to have a job.  So helpless. Just stuck. Around and around.

So I was frustrated with myself as much as those people around me who I heard saying the same things. Complaining to one another does not improve matters.

So I started with the question "What do I want?" I can't whinge about something and just stay there - I need to take action or else quit complaining. It was clear that despite much effort things were not going to change there as I had tried. And I can't just want something impossible, like 'that it's not like this' - it needs to be something tangible. So I started looking outwards. What could I do, what could I aim for.

So the focus stopped being on myself, and this internal I'm useless short-circuit, to looking outside to what I would like to do, I could see there were opportunities out there, and work out the steps to take and have the courage to take them.

As I chatted with my other friend who had been in a situation like this, you just don't know that you're in that situation and how bad it is. You won't believe people who tell you to get out.

Perhaps the trick to help those people is to show them what else is out there, what other workplaces are like, and encourage them to look inside, not at what they are, but what they would like. What you would like is independent of how good or bad you are at it. Capture people's imaginations, help them get in touch with the interests and likes inside of them, show them opportunities.

How to not believe people. And the power of knowing what you want.

If you trust people, and trust is a good thing, you can get things done more quickly.

In a toxic environment, if you are someone who offers trust, then you believe it when management says that they will do this, or will do that. You believe the best of people and that things will change in such and such a circumstance. Particularly when they themselves might believe what they are telling you.

Maybe I need to do regular reality checks of the situation around me. That toxic situation went on way too long. It's not like I'm not capable of assessing if someone is actually going to do something - regardless or not if they are capable of doing something. My EQ is not that bad even if you have to wonder if I put up with that for so long

And reality checks of myself. If I can not change into what they want me to be in order for the overall circumstances to change, well then I only have myself to blame if I stay there.

I guess I am wondering what could I say to young women coming into the STEM industry how to recognise and remove themselves from a toxic place - how to see that no matter how interesting the work is, how cool a lot of the people are, how great the overall company may be, how to recognise and just leave.

I think part of it is the question I ended up regularly asking myself "what do I want?". It got tiring with this nebulous whinge of I'm unhappy. I am about solutions so solve it. Sometimes the definition of a solution requires a direction first to identify the problem. And it's just so negative dwelling on problems all the time. Particularly when problems are just so obvious - and not soluble anyway. Having a specific direction, knowing what I wanted, is a lot more tangible. It just makes more sense, is a better use of energies, to navigate around rather than through.

Knowing what I wanted, and part of that is obviously not to work in a toxic place, really helped me navigate out of there. I took steps towards what I wanted to do, and now am on my way to how I want to work with the tech I love.

BWS

A few months back I caught up with someone who had been working in the construction industry. Who at the time, me included, we had all been urging to leave her toxic workplace as they were constantly stuffing her around and treating her badly. So odd that people at the same time were also urging me to leave. For both of us for many years. And neither of us could see it for ourselves.We stayed because we believed we could make it better, that it would get better, that there was better there, that the people were better (sometimes) and the work was...ok? Anyway she had left a couple of years back, been promoted 6 times and now is managing 30 people. She now saw me after 6 months out of that toxic place, and seeing how much more relaxed I am, she says we are the ones who understand why we stayed there, despite everyone telling us to leave. And I do. I get it.

Why did we stay in those toxic places?

We looked for hope? We saw solutions if we could just get them implemented. We could do things. We could fix things. All our training, knowledge, skill, we knew how. And the people, at least individually are all ok. Mostly. Maybe one or two exceptions. And the work is interesting and worthy.

But the culture is toxic.

Maybe it was us. I know for me it was a case of there is no way I could get a better job elsewhere. I was lucky to have this one and the pay is reasonable.

So anyway, we're both out. By our own choices and actions.

And we do understand why we stayed.

In fact her partner said as we were discussing it, "battered wife syndrome". I looked at him in some surprise, and went home and looked it up. It's no longer a syndrome, but I see what he means in the rough descriptions.

Makes me look twice now at the domestic violence stories.

And other stories of bullying and marginalisation. Most recently of assistant ministers in the Anglican church. Someone asked the question, "well why do they stay?" as if it was obvious that anyone who was above this all, pure of motive or whatever would have the common sense to leave.

But I get it now. I don't think there is any way I could have understood until I was out of it. I had years and years and years of friends and family telling me to leave. And considering I still haven't left the company as a whole just the toxic section, I still anticipate a certain level of cheers when I finally say I'm gone.

Someone posted an article on the 'work finding social media platform' re my company re leadership approach to culture. Wow. It was messaged to me and I privately asked someone who I know in HR about it. She also was surprised and told me to keep my digital signature clean as they would be scouring everywhere. Both the article and her response to tell me to protect myself from fallout make me feel just sick again. That, and what I've seen towards the end of the year of ... other things.

I've taken a large amount of leave at the end of this year to think about things. I was in that toxic section for a long, long time. It is not unreasonable to need a little more time to work through things to let them go and build to where and who I want to be.

When you can't even produce a sigh

So the new director visited today.

He was late. Like 30 mins. And due to recent costing exercises where I have all the OPEX costs in my head I could actually cost this. And then he spoke for 40 mins. And then we had morning tea over which we were permitted to continue to listen to him. I watched a person who I admire greatly contribute to one of his points and watched his slight impatience.

He started with what seemed to be establishing his credentials of things he had achieved. But very little talk about team work or building others up.

He gave two specific examples of staff. A GM who left when he became director. And a woman who he had been recently talking to who had formally been one of his staff. As there are not that many women out there it wouldn't be hard to work out who.

The thing that has got me just so disheartened is his repeated statement about if anyone was unhappy they could leave. Saying that if staff are unhappy they could leave is a statement about culture. It's saying I don't want to know any problems, don't tell me just solve them and I'm not interested in helping. Here are my KPIs and get behind them or go away.

There is no group effort here.

I've never been so glad to be 4 levels down and beneath notice before.

Authenticity, engagement and standard setting

The CEO has made a post which is being read by a lot of people as permission to vent.

Lower level people that is.

Upper level people are all 'rah rah yes yes'.

And I suspect middle level people are going to be very silent as they need to do both.  (Although I have noticed a lot of likes...)

To me, it's made me look at the question of enablement again. We have system after system that gets put in place collecting staff ideas and getting very enthusiastic and then nothing happens. And every single system I've seen has this same breaking point : you begin to submit... and you get to this point in the submission process where basically they expect you to do everything, you the submitter.

They expect you to understand the scope of the problem and your solution

They expect you to be able to cost it (get real???)

They expect you to have all the details of the solution.

They even expect you to proof of concept it.

It's this constant push back on the submitter. It's like they don't really want to hear. It's like they really don't want to do anything.

It's like a wall.

Seriously the last time I submitted something if I hadn't had my secondment experience over the previous 3 months I would have had no ability to participate. The process itself has demonstrated this massive disconnect between senior leadership's understanding of staff enablement. We have all these staff who really want to do something but can't do it. And then the upper levels go 'yes we care, tell us your woes' and the cycle starts again. Again and again and again.

Anyway, I posted. I can back up everything I posted.

And it's an interesting problem to think through how, if I were upper levels, would I break this amazingly stupid cycle.