Let's start by talking about some of my presuppositions. Although, if I explicitly talk about them, are they presuppositions anymore? 🤔 Regardless, I think it's important to call them out.
First of all, I recognize that you are an individual. This carries a lot of meaning. It means that you will have a different definition of success and a different path to get there than others. Personally, I prefer the lazy river path to career growth, but that's for me not for you. But being an individual also means you're going to have different likes and dislikes than others. For example, I was able to be an engineer for 20+ years without being a fan of Star (Wars|Trek).
In addition to being an individual, I also want to recognize that we are both real people with lives beyond work. That means we will be impacted by our friends, our family, our pets, our community and the world around us. I don't expect you to stop being a person just because you're "on the clock."
Next, I'm assuming that you want to be here and that you want to be doing a good job. You might not always want to be here, and you might not always be doing a good job. But I'll assume that in general both of those things are true.
Moving beyond you, and looking at our industry I want you to know that I have a high view of engineering. I've seen first hand how technology can change lives. Not to get too deep too quick, but at the end of my mom's life the only way she was able to communicate was with a computer that tracked her eye movement. The work we do can literally change the world.
My final presupposition isn't so much a presupposition as it is a fact: I will make mistakes. (So will you.) That said, it's never fun, and rarely easy, but I will own my mistakes.
Availability is an important topic, even more so as the industry shifts to various working situations (remote, hybrid, in office, etc).
I typically work from ~8:30am to ~5pm Central time. I'm getting much better at leaving work when I leave work.
I have notifications on my phone turned off, except for texting. This means if you need to get ahold of me & I'm not working, you'll have to text or call.
If it's while I'm working I'm pretty responsive on Teams. I can be responsive to email, but after years of working at places where email was deprioritized, Teams is your better bet.
I keep my calendar up-to-date, including non-work related things. So if you ever want to set up a meeting with me, you don't have to ask just throw it on the calendar.
If my calendar is full and you need to chat, let me know and I'll move something around for you.
What about your availability? I recognize that we might work different hours. I will try very hard to not bother you during non-working hours. If I send a message to you during that time and do not explicitly state I need a response, then I'm not expecting a response until you're working again.
I might also (lovingly) call you on it if you do respond outside of hours. You really do have my permission to ignore me if you're not working.
I'm a firm believer in 1-on-1s. I think it's a great chance for us to connect regularly and discuss things that are on your mind, or things that might be happening around you. That said, I leave the definition of "regular" largely up to you. I'll own scheduling the meeting (see Misc & Quirks below for why), but I'll set up the frequency and duration based on what you want.
It's important to note that these are not status meetings. I'm not looking for specific tasks you did, unless you want to talk about that.
I do want to know how you're doing, and I want to know if there's anything I can do to help you.
What you want to talk about is more important than anything I have, so we'll cover your agenda items first, if there's time left over, we can cover anything I have on the list.
I want to give you a bit of glimpse into who I am so you have a bit of an understanding. I do not expect this to be a replacement to conversations we'll have going forward, but instead just a little background information or character development.
I'm motivated to do my job well because I believe work is an act of worship, and I want to glorify Christ in how I work.
I'm also motivated by my past experiences in my career, both good and bad. I want to take the positive things, the way people have impacted me and use them for good. I want to take the things that haven't been good and either eliminate them or avoid them. For example, I've seen "open door policies" weaponized, and I don't want to pass that on to you.
Finally, I'm motivated by the fact that engineering can change lives and I think where I can have the most impact is by helping others make real change. That is, I want to see you be as successful as you want to be. And that's a thought we can unpack over time.
As I said earlier, we're both real people with real lives. That means I've got some strengths, and also some things I'm working on. To start, I like how the Gallup Strength Finder defined my strengths. I don't know my Meyers Briggs acronym. I do know I'm an enneagram 9, although if I'm honest I'm not entirely sure what that means.
My number one strength, according to Gallup is Harmony. This means I look for consensus. I don't like conflict (and sometimes that's a weakness.) I'm going to look for ways that we can come to a consensus.
I'm also Restorative. This means that I like to figure out what's wrong and fix it, or restore it back to how it "should" be. This can be a major source of frustration for me if I either can't identify the source of the error, or am unable to fix it.
Another strength is that I'm a Learner. I enjoy learning...a lot. I'm more of a broad learner than a deep learner. By that, I mean I have books on my shelves for theology, psychology, economics, physics, history, etc. But I don't think I'm an expert on any of them.
The next strength they identified is Input. I like to collect information. In fact, Gallup says I "have a need to collect and archive. They may accumulate information, ideas, artifacts or even relationships." I don't collect relationships, but information and ideas for sure.
The final one of my top 5 is, perhaps, my favorite, and that is Connectedness. I see links between topics, maybe unusual links, but I think this plays in to my broad based learning. I like to learn about various topics and I will likely find a connection to something else.
While Gallup didn't test for this, I'd say sarcasm and dry humor might be a strength as well. Although my wife would disagree with both 🤷
Ok so those are my strengths, what am I working on right now? One thing I'm working on is getting the right balance of trust but verify. I tend to err on the side of blindly trusting, and that's had a couple blow-backs, particularly when it comes to work that did (or did not) get done.
Along those lines I'm also working on the balance between giving individuals freedom to make their own mistakes and making sure that I can help the team avoid big pitfalls.
With both of these, the key is balance (which I guess makes sense with that harmony strength up above).
We're almost over, I promise. I wanted to share a couple of my quirks or things I want you to know about me.
First, I believe in the power of narrative and will likely illustrate my point via story, as you can probably tell from the rest of this readme 🤣.
Next, my humor is dry. So dry it's been described by a former coworker as "Sahara dry". This has caused problems for me in the past, particularly in Slack and other text based formats, because I've said something to be funny and it might not have been taken that way. I'm trying to not make that same mistake.
Speaking of humor, my wife describes me as "Not funny". And I'm ok if you think my wife is right.
I love animated gifs (hard g btw).
This one is important, I really don't like when people place the burden where it shouldn't be. This could be an entire manifesto soap box for me. But perhaps nothing demonstrates this better than open door policies. I believe they're well intentioned, allowing anyone to come talk to you whenever. In reality, though, I've seen them abused way too often, and not by the employee, but by the boss. Too often they believe that because they have an open door policy, they don't need to reach out to anyone, and that if there was anything important, people would bring it to them. I didn't like that for me and I don't like that for you. I firmly believe it's more of my responsibility to make sure we're communicating. It's why I said I'll own the invite to the 1:1s, because I don't want you feeling like there's one more thing you have to do.
So that I don't end on that note, one final quirk is that when I eat candy like M&Ms or Skittles (green should be lime not apple, btw) I used to have to eat in even numbers. That is I had to have 2 M&Ms or 4 Skittles, and yes, I've bitten one in half before to make it even. I don't do that as much anymore.