Balancing what you have to do with what you want to do
The first year in a new position is challenging. There’s always so much to learn – new places, people, processes and especially, culture. Most leaders come in with a plan. They know why they took the role, had ideas about where to go with it that came out during the interview process. They show up the first day and do some form of a “listening tour” in order to expand out those initial ideas further and lay out a strategy. Within that strategy, among the “have to dos,” is usually a “want to do” component, tied back to why they pursued the job in the first place.
I’m no exception.
Things progressed largely along the general plan I had laid out when I arrived at UCI in October 2019. I liked the listening tour phase. I combined that with an intense walking tour across all corners of the campus and medical center to get a feel for things and meet people where they are. After the holiday period, I scheduled the proverbial “here’s what I’ve learned so far and here’s where I think we need to go” session with our leadership, and generally everyone was in alignment. That was February 2020, and we all now know what that means – no one remembers anything that was said there, and for anything said, all bets are off the table. No one to blame, just a classic “Man plans, God laughs” scenario.
Enter March 16, 2020 and the Time-of-the-Pandemic. We were all faced with a new challenge, as individuals, families, team, and institutions – heck, even as a society. We started focusing on the basics of what was most important today and figuring things out as best as we could with the information we had.
What is interesting thinking about it now, and reflecting at how it impacted my first year in a new role, is that this is a classic example of an enduring leadership reality: the juggle between what you want to do and what your organization needs you to do, with the situation at hand. I learned this lesson from the great Jack Welsh, renowned CEO of General Electric, when he shared about his experience taking over one of the great American corporations. At the time he described that what he wanted to do was focus on international expansion, but what he needed to do was to fix the GE portfolio and shed the businesses that were underperforming. That need took him the better part of six years to accomplish, and only then did he get to focus the corporation on the global market opportunity that led to significant growth. I heard that story in the year 2000. Here we are in 2020, and it couldn’t be more appropriate.
So while the “want to dos” I had envisioned when I first started have taken baby steps of progress, they pale in comparison to what has been the focus of our whole organization for the past seven months – responding to the pandemic.
I subscribe to the belief that in all life’s situations, there is both challenge and opportunity. COVID, as it turns out, is no different. While many of my early strategies have been pushed to the background, the opportunity afforded our IT community during this time is reinforcing how important the technology backbone is to the operation of a campus, a health system, and a research enterprise. We are taking the opportunity to organize ourselves horizontally and share information across our functions, at a time when people are seeking to better understand what is going on. We took the opportunity to place IT leaders in every major planning work stream happening on campus & the medical center in response to the pandemic. Some call them “fusion teams.” By doing this we accomplished a major goal for my role – both why it was created, and how I hoped to benefit UCI – to bring more understanding and leveraging of the increasing strategic nature of technology to the success of the institution. The visibility of IT today across all aspects of UCI is higher than it has ever been, and that is beneficial for the whole institution long term.
I have also been challenged by this situation in new ways as a leader. I don’t think the leadership challenge has been different, as much as the stakes have been raised significantly around the things we all expect from leadership – transparency, accountability, reliability, consistency. In these challenging times, leaders need to show up, be visible and project hope in the face of uncertainty. I don’t think I’ve always done a great job of this, because like all of you I struggle with time management between the time I have to do and the time I have to be there for others. It’s a challenge no matter what the level you are in the organization. I feel the gravitational pull of COVID, and it seems crushing at times. Some weekends, like everyone, I need to step away to regain my sanity and passion to come back and reengage in the challenge.
This brings me to my last point in this post. How does one as a leader be attentive to the moment of crisis, and while not losing sight of your longer-term strategies? In normal times, this is a challenge; COVID-19 has just made it more acute and intense. Every leader needs to develop the ability to balance opposing forces pulling the brain at the same time – the urgent and the important. There is not one approach to manage this tension. For me, some of it is time management – knowing how to protect my time and knowing what time of day I do my best creative thinking. Another part is not dwelling on the past. You can only help the organization by focusing your energies forward, seeing the field for what it is, being honest about the realities – with yourself and your team – and recognizing the opportunity within the challenge. At a time like this, how we have done things in the past matters very little.
The pandemic has turned our world upside down. For those of us in the technology space, it has reinforced how critical and enabling these technologies can be to perform our work and deliver what we do as an organization. It has provided us an opportunity to make a strong argument that things will never go back to the way they were and the need to define a “new normal” for our organizations.
It may not be what I wanted to do, but it’s what UCI needed me to do…and if I think about it, it is what I wanted to do. Funny how that worked out.
-T
Worthy reads along the way
