October 2021

#MonthNotes

Published in

Web of Weeknotes

6 min readNov 2, 2021

This year I’ve been writing reflective notes at the end of each month, loosely based on a set of prompts/questions. I’ve found writing these notes helps me to think about, articulate and record things that otherwise I wouldn’t. I also believe that this reflective practice helps me to learn and develop too.

1. Who did you work with/talk to other functions in your organisastion?

I discussed communities of practice with our Talent team — terrible team name, good bunch of people
I discussed how we get better at OKRs with colleagues in our Strategy, Operations and Technology functions
I discussed how to get value from agile ways of working with one of our HR leaders

2. What made you proud?

Seeing people I trained 17 months ago to facilitate workshops with teams on psychological safety — as part of our approach to building psychological safety across our organisation — beginnning to recruit and train the next set of facilitators

https://twitter.com/mcleanonline/status/1258444668108447744

3. What did you achieve?

We had the first meet up of a new community of practice that I’ve recently set up at work — it was good to get it going and to feel the interest & energy of the participants
I launched a(nother) new community of practice — for people leaders in my part of the organisation where I work — and got some lovely feedback, saying it was fantastic news. Together with the other core members, we’re now planning five experiments between now and Christmas to learn what activities members of the community find valuable.
We got final exec approval for a new element of our operating model for developing new products. Connected to that, we closed the project (great advice on closing agile projects in that article from Mark Dalgarno) that had developed the model and are now making it part of how we do things, just business as usual
We kicked off a new project focused at improving the customer experience of one our large products. Following a failure I had in April that helped me to realise that I would be better shifting from an approach where I push an initiative on to teams to one where they pull on it, this was the first success and the enthusiasm of all the participants at kick off validated that new approach for me.

4. What went well?

I’m looking to get back into coaching, and I’ve had five exploratory conversations with people interested in coaching
In a month of participating in panel discussions, I was part of a panel on new product development
I was also part of two panels at the RELX global inclusion and diversity conference on strengthening teams through psychological safety. (RELX is the parent company of Elsevier, where I work.)

5. Who were you inspired by?

Four of my colleagues, talking about responding to life’s curveballs

I was on a panel as part of a global week-long virtual wellbeing event at work, aligned with World Mental Health Day on 10th October. The event (dubbed ‘Health’sevier’ week) was created by our ‘MindLife team’ — an amazing group of passionate colleagues who, throughout the whole year, help to make Elsevier a mindful place to work by offering a range of activities, events, tools and resources focused on a healthier all-round lifestyle.

‘Health’sevier’ week is a global week-long virtual wellbeing event aligned with World Mental Health Day

The topic for our panel was ‘evolving careers through change’. If we’re going to thrive in our career, we need a foundation of wellness and an ability to balance and manage personal, familial, social, and organizational/ professional change so we can respond to life’s curveballs. I knew I’d been invited to take part because I’d previously shared my story about surviving and recovering from a stroke. But I wasn’t looking forward to the panel at all. I was talking to Rebecca, my wife, the night before the event and was very cautious about it and uncertain about what I would say. And immediately before the event, I wasn’t sure whether I was going to mention my stroke. (I’ve had plenty of other career changes that I was ready to talk about.) But when the first speaker spoke very openly about an illness she’d had and about her recovery, she set the tone, and I knew I wanted to do the same.

I got lots out of listening to the other panelists — I heard stories about learning to walk again after illness, supporting a dying parent, coping with divorce, managing depression, dealing with anxiety and much more— and I left feeling inspired.

I was reminded that each of us comes to work with a long shadow of our life outside work behind us, and you might never know what’s in someone else’s shadow.

‘Sitting here casting my shadow’ — sculpture by Rook Floro

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” Wendy Mass

6. What else were you inspired by?

The map that Alec Danco drew of his career journey:

https://alexdanco.com/2021/05/09/building-the-world-of-alex-dancos-newsletter/

It made me think I’d like to draw a map of my own career, and I’ve thought about different ways I could do that, but I can’t say I’ve started…

7. What did you learn?

I never regret going outside
In September I started a coaching program. This month, we focused on two topics:

Mindset: replacing judging with a belief in potential, avoiding the desire to ‘be helpful’ by jumping in to fix things, and questions/approaches to avoid giving solutions and advice: