goals
I had a really weird week, capped off by a two day meeting where I spent every waking moment that I wasn't in the bathroom with the people I work with - 10 of us total New boss arranged it. We were all under orders to cancel all meetings, the team members who live in CO and OH flew in for it, and everybody stayed at a small hotel in Half Moon Bay (small town about an hour south of San Francisco, right on the beach. We had dinner together Wednesday, after our division all-hands meeting and holiday party, and then met up at 8am Thursday and worked and ate every meal together until I got home from dinner at 10pm. 8 to 5 again on Friday.
I will be eternally grateful that nobody made us do any stupid team-building exercises. We worked. We talked. We set a goal for the team to meet in the next year - identify and promote 150 new Aces. Recognizing that nobody reading this (except Todd, who is one, and Tonya, who's going to help get us there) has any clue what that means, it doesn't really matter.
What matters is that I felt really good about it when I got in my car to drive home Friday night, and then it hit me - other than the directive to get our site moved off of CollabNet a couple years ago (which was a worthy goal and one I'm proud to have accomplished) - since I started at Sun in 2005 no one has ever set a goal for me, or worked with me to set goals for myself. Nobody. In seven years. No goals. I've set plenty for myself, and achieved a lot of them. But for the last few years I've been feeling this nagging sense of drift. In the last couple of years it has really beaten me down. I didn't realize how much until the last couple of days. With no over-arching goal, there's no point to the site. I've had a lot of "why are we here" type conversations with people who have a presence on the site, and I've fumbled through answers that don't make a lot of sense. I've never been able to make a case for why we need more money because I can't tie it to anything more concrete than "to make the site better" - better for who? Better how? I've also not been able to say no to dumb ideas in some cases because there was no goal that dumb thing x would distract from.
The result of all that is a site that I still think has a lot of potential, but that I'm not particularly proud of at the moment. I am very proud of the relationships and community we've built. That's the vague reason for me to exist, and I think I've done that part well. But I've been a terrible leader. I don't think in any particular offensive way - more in a bland boring, yeahhhhhh whatever kind of way. That's been a huge frustration for me and this epiphany is really that I can't lead people when I don't know where I'm going myself. I've had a lot of fits and starts with trying to stay on top of things and then it all falls apart a few months later because....why? It's really hard to stay motivated when it's 10am and there's a new piece up on that website I wouldn't be reading if I had something better to do, and I have nothing better to do except try to not get fired. Even working with awesome people, earning an excellent salary, and all the travel really don't obscure that fact. I'm asshole if I complain about my job. I recognize that, and I don't think I'm complaining. I just haven't been engaged with it in a long long time.
So this is good. We have a goal. I can now ask for money to do things that directly contribute toward that goal, and I can start saying no to stuff that doesn't help us get there. We can start tracking some numbers that we weren't before and measure our progress. Goals. Who knew?