All has been quiet on the blogging front, since life has been busy: on top of my wife and I moving houses in August, as part of the COO Leadership Development Program (LDP) at Autodesk I had the opportunity to travel to to Tokyo in May, met with my business challenge team in London in July, and experienced the culmination of our program with a presentation in beautiful San Diego before AU, the Design and Make conference.
At the beginning of our LDP program, one of our senior leaders Haresh Khoobchandani told us a parable of a zen master who instructed his student to “empty his cup” (metaphorically speaking) so that he could be open to learning new ideas — I found this to be a very apt way to put it, and was something I found to be very true of my personal leadership journey during this program.
I’d go as far as to say that I had to “unlearn” some things I had learned in the past, in order to learn anew.
Since the early days of my career, I’ve been largely a self-learner and have picked up many a book on software engineering and technology, and in recent years, many a book on technical leadership. I had little mentorship early on in my career, and like most people thrust into a “staff engineer” type of role, I had very little guidance to lean on — in recent years, I found solace in the writings of technical leadership books by the likes of Camille Fournier, Will Larson and others.
To suddenly find myself in a scenario where I wasn’t trying to teach myself leadership on my own, but had mentors in the form of our amazing leadership coach Geoff Scales, and our amazing internal leadership and coaches who supported the program, was not something I was used to, and as I went through the program, I realized it was an unprecedented opportunity.
To that end, one of the pieces of coaching that really resonated with me was: you’ll get out of the LDP program what you put into it. I was fortunate to have an organizational leadership chain that truly allowed me the space and time to put in a lot of energy into the LDP program, and the benefits will carry with me for a long time to come.
With that, I have a few personal takeaways I want touch on (even though it’s hard to whittle it down to just a few), both for my own reflection, and in the hopes that someone else out there reading this has one or more of these resonate with them.
I’m a perfectionist by nature, and it was abundantly clear in my 360 assessment I took for the LDP program that perfection was the strongest “Reactive” behavior I had.
Close on the heels of being a perfectionist is a struggle with balance (a “Creative” behavior, which you want to maximize) — when you do have perfectionist tendencies, it is also natural tendency to pour yourself into projects with undue amounts of time and energy that would otherwise be better spent.
Throughout the LDP program I learned that by leaning on the strengths of others, I could bring my own strengths to bear on the challenges that we were solving for, and that allowed me to let go of some of the perfectionist tendencies that I would normally have, which there in turn led to better balance; this was especially helpful given the nature of our business challenge for the program, which had no “perfect” answers to seek.
To wrap up my thoughts around LDP, I would quote the title of Michael Lopp’s book: “The Art of Leadership: Small Things, Done Well.” I am used to software engineering where there is a discrete set of activities that one can do to successfully build a given piece of software and deliver it to the world. Leadership is not always as clear-cut as that, but though it is not as “binary” and straight-forward as the 1’s and 0’s of the software world, there are a lot of small things we can do well in our leadership journey to have a big impact, and help build a positive culture in our organizations that we serve, in order to better realize both our own potential and the potential of the individuals around us.