Learning to celebrate success deliberately

It is the start of a new year, and January has been a bit of an introspective month. I've been pondering my strengths and weaknesses as a leader. Something I find difficult (or at least doesn't come naturally) is celebrating success, especially collective success, and that matters as part of encouraging and building a team or community.

I think this stems from my own approach to celebration. I'm a planner, and I'm usually quite good at predicting how things are going to turn out. If something goes as planned, it feels adequate but not remarkable. If it doesn't, then it isn't something to celebrate at all. As I get more experienced (nearly wrote "older" there) fewer things surprise me, so the world separates into "adequate" and "disappointing".

However, I have worked with managers who take the "if I don't complain, you're doing it right" approach and I find it very unsettling at best. I don't want to be that person to others. Over the years I have trained myself to be more liberal with praise - making sure I call people out when they are doing decent work, not just exceptional work. These days, I think I'm ok at individual praise and being supportive. I'm much worse at wider, structured praise such as celebrating the success of a release or a project.

This is not because I don't value either the delivery or the individuals involved. I am fiercely proud of the people who work for and around me, and have often gone to bat to defend them if I hear anything different. And I certainly don't have a problem giving credit appropriately - I have an almost visceral hatred of even half-appearing to take credit for the work of others, even when I actually led it. My problem is that when one big thing completes, I'm already thinking about the next problem or considering what went wrong.

So in summary, I can praise a person (although like many I do find it uncomfortable) but find broader praise for a delivery more unnatural and difficult to remember.

This is clearly not a good thing for team morale!

I'm going to link this to being autistic - or at least how autism shows up for me. As I said above, I have this internal flatness and while I try very hard to keep it inside where it can't hurt anyone, unfortunately my real self does come out from time to time. It is important I recognise this, and think of ways to put it right. Plus, I get a blog post out of it.

I've got a variety of tricks for remembering to do praise and celebrations ... which does make me feel like an android remembering they need to blink and smile to stop the humans feeling uncomfortable. Notes in the diary / todo list work really well ("say well done here"). It sounds crude, but if you're used to organising yourself by a checklist why not add expected emotional reactions?

For individuals, I joked above about training myself but this is genuinely what I did. I made praising people a deliberate and considered act, which means for me I track praise / criticism in a conversation and try to balance the scales properly. I've also had to overcome my natural uncomfortable feelings about doing this - again with deliberate practice. However, by dispassionately thinking about conversations in this way, I think I'm doing ok at the 1-1 level and also have managed to gain some useful skills in keeping the tone of the conversation where I want it (eg not being too nice if I'm correcting someone, or vice versa). All of this takes deliberate effort. Tracking conversations, balancing praise and correction, and consciously managing how I show up for others is work.

Being neurodiverse is exhausting at times.

Groups I do find harder. I can say the words, but if it needs to go further into an actual celebration I am lost. I have had a lot of success with the classic (and genuinely good) leadership approach of surrounding myself with people more skilled than myself. In this context, that means people who are more naturally effusive than me. These fine folk either directly remind me, or (more often) just twitch at the right time which makes me react quickly and speak up. Like I say, it's not that I don't want to celebrate and praise, it just doesn't occur to me.

This post has been about my own thought process, but at the end of this ramble there are some solid tips. Make lists, take deliberate action and if all else fails outsource it. Good leadership isn't about feeling the right things, rather it is about doing the right things consistently. Even when they don't come naturally.

Celebrating a success

I am not very good at celebrating my own success. I have usually already moved on to the next thing, so if I hear something positive I might give a smile or a nod then go back to the new thing. I am not comfortable talking about my own achievements either, so I've decided to write a short post about something nice which will both make me look at an achievement and also live with feeling uncomfortable.

A few days ago I was accepted as a Fellow in the British Computer Society. This is the professional body for tech folk and is a very important part of shaping the future of the tech industry. In their words... BCS Fellowship is home to the most influential professionals in the digital industry - and a Fellowship is their highest membership recognition. It means I have been assessed by my peers and judged as a leader in my profession.

Yes, writing that felt awkward.

Anyway, this is a great thing for me. It is a very clear signal to people in and outside tech that I am worth listening to, which is helpful if I'm applying for a charity trustee position or board membership. It is also reassuring if you end up being mentored by me.

For me, it also opens doors into parts of the tech industry where I want to play an active role. I've long been worried that we have next to no professional consistency across tech (eg a "senior developer" could mean more or less anything) and that means organisations looking to build technical capability can struggle to engage with what is a fairly esoteric industry. Without common standards and understanding, it is easy for organisations to waste money and repeat mistakes. This does us no favours - it fuels perception that ours is a young, chaotic industry which doesn't have its house in order.

As our professional body, the British Computer Society has a key role in influencing our future albeit a difficult one as, unlike the medical bodies, it does not directly regulate who can practice.

So what is next? I'm going to look at the different ways I can engage with the organisation. My local branch is looking for volunteers, and there is a leadership forum which I will join. Over time, I would like to work with the groups that form the structure of the organisation so I will likely become an assessor and possibly look to join a committee like the Registration and Standards Committee, which governs various definitions of membership and professional accreditations.

I also plan on looking at getting Chartered, which complements Fellowship nicely. Fellowship speaks to career impact and leadership, whereas Chartership speaks to professional competence. Fellowship is a peer-reviewed, honorary status, and Chartership is a legally protected position. I am increasingly operating outside of pure technical environments, and these positions open doors and smooth conversations without requiring a detailed CV review.

All this is for the future. For the moment, I am pleased that I have been accepted into the organisation. I have been enjoying a career break over the last few months, and I was starting to worry whether tech was the right place for me. This is a timely reminder that I have done good, impactful work - and a nudge to keep going.

Moving office

I don't often directly talk about events at work, but for once I'm going to celebrate something rather cool that's happened. We've moved offices!

Despite the valiant efforts of our estates people, the Macmillan offices in Vauxhall were ... well, terrible. Vauxhall itself is a roundabout with delusions of grandeur and the building was slowly falling about around us. I do not frequent the office too often, so I was rather surprised during a trustee meeting when the whole building started to shake like the apocalypse had come. Nobody else blinked - this was "normal" to the point of it happening several times a day. The rest of the day gave a glorious demonstration and I have no idea how anyone copes, frankly.

So for this and various other reasons it was time to Be Elsewhere. However for us in Tech this meant we had to face the (kinda literal) elephant in the closet - the server room on the premises. This was not a comms cupboard, but a proper server room, with ageing steam-powered servers bolted the floor, powering the organisation. But this was not a time for panic and fear - instead, we had a fantastic opportunity to take a big step modernising our systems. A golden opportunity to spend a chunk of time significantly moving the dial on our legacy tech debt in the service of a hard deadline which the org needed hitting. We grasped this opportunity, with months of work spent virtualising, reconfiguring, and rebuilding to bring things into a much better state in preparation for the move.

To actually move, we initially had to plan for disabling everything. However, with every week of work where we cleaned up dependencies and updated our overall configuration we decoupled systems and by the time we came to do the move, the only services that we actually disabled were the ones hosted on the machines we had to turn off. This in itself was a huge win, but the move weekend itself was exceptional. I've been involved in lots of tech projects over the years, and many releases, and something always goes wrong and needs correcting at the last minute. We had our share of challenges, but for the week before the move we were having daily meetings in which we were looking at each other wondering what we had missed - things were calm. Then the weekend was so well executed it was almost unsettling. The team didn't exactly stick to published timings, but only because they were so far ahead.

Overall, it was incredibly smooth and not only did this enable our office move, we have finished with our systems in a much better place, either in the cloud or in a proper data centre and better understood, and run by a team with a great deal of (very much earned) confidence. An exceptional result on the back of a lot of hard work - really knocked it out the park.

The second, and far more visible, part is the new office itself. This was clearly much wider than the Technology group, but we had a crucial role in making sure the new premises had an internet connection (which it didn't until quite literally the 11th hour ... worrying times!) and working AV, door controls, room bookings, etc etc. The wider team did an excellent job bringing everything together on time and it is lovely being in a modern office which doesn't shake when the trains go by. In particular (for my post!) I'm going to say the technology is working rather well. The new meeting equipment is very easy to use, with great sound quality and scary cameras which track motion to zoom in on speakers. I wonder if I can mount a nerf gun on one of them...

So yes. Some excellent work here and well worth recording. A great result for Macmillan. For the Technology group, not only did we play our part we've also managed to modernise, increase knowledge, improve resilience and other great things across our server infrastructure we ALSO managed to remove a load of problems with the office AV. As I said at the top, I don't often write about specifics here but I thought I'd make an exception.

And to close, here are some pictures of the new place including the most important part of the new office building - a button which gives hot chocolate milk...

Congratulations everyone!

Next CIO 2023

Well, this month I won an award.

Honestly I'm not sure how to write this post. I do not usually deal with praise well, and that is unlikely to change. However an industry award is something to celebrate so I'm going write something about being recognised, and I'm going to keep self-deprecating jokes to a minimum.

Next CIO is an industry award where a group of expect-to-be-CIOs-soon are recognised as the future of the industry and celebrated. They are brought together over the year for workshops and group learning, and hooked up with a mentor - someone who is already a successful CIO.

And I am one of these people. Which means I'm part of the future of our industry. Good grief.

What does this mean? Well, over the next year I'm looking forward to talking with and being mentored by the very generous Wayne Clements, and I'm going to be attending a series of workshops with my Next CIO cohort. I've also got access to a group of excellent people from across the world of Technology - there has to be something useful I can do with that set of contacts.

For the award event, we were asked for volunteers to talk for a couple of minutes about ourselves. I volunteered mostly because while I didn't want to do it, I wanted to make sure I was making the most of the opportunities. That is what this year is going to be about for me - taking opportunities and seeing what happens. In this case, what happened was a talk which got a few laughs (in the right places!) and some excellent conversations in the bar afterwards with people who were interested in what I had said. Only good things.

Looking forward, I'm going to do a few things. I'm going to start posting my blog posts on LinkedIn. Long-term readers will know I write this mostly as a tool for self-reflection. Putting them up on Twitter and Facebook was a big step and LinkedIn will be another (slightly terrifying) moment of development. So ... hello if you're reading from LinkedIn. There are lots of other posts here - you might be interested in the essay subset.

Coming back to the topic of my "about me" talk - I need to think again about how I give back. My particular interests are around how people get into the Tech industry and how they move around and up. Over the years I've coached and mentored, and I want to lean back into this. However, this doesn't scale terribly well - there are only so many hours in the day so there is only so much time I can give - so I want to look at other options. There are a lot of stories out there to be told, and while some people have inspirational tales of mega-success, I think there is a lot of value in the more attainable stories of people who do well without being the next Jeff Bezos or whoever. Can we get better access to those tales?

Anyway, these are thoughts for the future. For the immediate now, I'll end with some pictures from the event and me talking about how I should have been a forester.