Trust in the LORD with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek His will in all you do, and He will show you which path to take. - Proverbs 3:5-6 NLT
I feel I live this out daily in my personal life, but where I struggle is when I have to go interact with the rest of the world. Work in particular has its own challenges.
I’m a believer, and I know God directs my life, but with work, subconsciously, I become “detached” from that understanding when I’m having to interact with non-believers or in a secular environment.
I know He goes before me, in everything that I do and that He ultimately has control. I’ve surrendered to that with gratitude, but it’s a growth opportunity for me in my faith when it comes to my day to day job.
This is especially challenging for me for what I do for a living. I am attempting to position myself in a strategic operations leadership position in a software technology company that is scaling from a startup to an enterprise.
I am in a situation where senior leaders are inquiring what exactly I do for the company. To his credit, my leader tells his peers, when they ask what I do, that I am behind the scenes keeping things moving forward. My spiritual gifts are rooted in Administration and Leadership and I am blessed to be in a position where I get to exercise those by putting my direct reports and peers into positions to be the best version of themselves they can be, at benefit of the organization. My goal is to maximize the potential for my team, organization and company. This requires working from a position of thought leadership and strategy and delegating the tactical, while facilitating efforts across the greater technology org.
However, I am now finding I need to be more tactical in doing work that will elevate my visibility within the organization. It’s not that I am expected to deliver more code or documentation or such. It’s that I need to start attaching true corporate value to my personal efforts. This is beyond just leading individual contributors and program related projects.
This is an uncomfortable spot because most companies who are rooted in startup culture base the value of the individual on the tangible output of said individual. When you provide thought leadership that has to be turned into action, when one leads with ideas, those have to manifest outcomes that have to deliver value. You have to be able to ground it in facts, numbers, metrics, etc.
But when a company wants to do the work that is required to scale, that’s where this kind of work and my experience come into play. However, does the senior leadership team outside of my immediate organization see that same value in the efforts? Most of their experience is rooted in start up culture or SaaS sales strategy.
Yesterday, I proposed a way to look at how our production environments are managed.
Like every company I have worked for, we don’t have anyone who owns production. Our current view is that “everyone” owns production, claiming we follow the SRE model. But when everyone owns production then no one actually owns production.
It’s kind of like how priorities are set. If everything’s a priority, nothing is.
So, the hardening of production takes a backseat to other things that are more important to those individuals who are supposed to jointly own production.
To remedy, I proposed in a brief, a plan to shape production excellence following elements of the Netflix CORE pattern to manage our production environments while we transition to a more optimal SRE footing. I grounded the reasoning in facts, numbers, and metrics. I took into account the current state of our business and the loosely managed mechanisms we already have in place. I couple that with some expectations on monitoring and visibility the CTO has set and I was able to roll this into a strategy that can align the technology organization and give my CTO a plan to show his peers and the board of directors that the technology team has a plan. I am excited and proud of this brief.
However, my anxiety has been raging since I did that because I am doing something out of my comfort zone; something that if I actually look back on, is kind of surreal. I took an action that doesn’t seem like the normal operating procedure for this company and my relationship with my leader: Managing upward into my leader.
My main motivation for this action is to improve the company and protect my CTO. The other part of this is motivated because when the CEO is asking my boss, the CTO, ‘what does Aarron do?’ I feel a little exposed and I need to own the optics.
So I’ve wrestled with this all evening and through the night. And I didn’t add a minute to my day stressing about this. But I took minutes from my rest.
Then this morning, Proverbs 3:5-6 came in my email. There are no coincidences.
Trust in the LORD with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek His will in all you do, and He will show you which path to take.
Last summer, I had a life changing perspective shift. I realized I was not surrendering everything to the Lord when it came to my work. Once I did this, positive changes began to happen and I have been building momentum. My work really became focused on elevating and enabling my direct reports and my peers and not self serving. And it has thus far culminated in positioning the technology organization in a better place than it has been since it’s inception.
But there has been a gap. The uncomfortable part is now managing up and trying to work with a leader who may not agree with my decisions, one who may be at odds with my ideas. I need to do the work to build a working relationship with my leader.
I don’t know what he knows or what he wants. I am very comfortable with the authority I currently have and what I am doing to make my team and thus, the company better. But I don’t know if my boss is an advocate and ally. He hasn’t stopped me but also he hasn’t validated my efforts in ways that I appreciate either. So my paranoia rages.
I am fairly certain my idea yesterday was in the Spirit, as I credit Him as being the one who gave me an aha moment. And I know that me putting together the brief felt like the right action to take in the moment. I feel the Spirt took my experiences, memories and understanding of the current state of work and coalesced all of those variables into the aha moment and I just ran with it.
But in retrospect, with some distance from the days work and reflecting on my efforts, I look back at what I did and how I acted, and my worldly self is like: “What the heck?!? What were you thinking?!?” And now I have a host of fears, uncertainties and doubts that I’ve planted into my head that causing anxiety that are making me second-guess my actions, even though I felt they were spirit lead.
So then we come back to the crux of this post, inspired by Proverbs 3:5-6.
I feel as a Christian I unconsciously compartmentalize where God can be part of my life and that’s my mistake. More often, I tend to box him in thinking he SHOULD only have access to specific parts of my day to day. Whether because I think He doesn’t want to be part of trivial things like work planning, or worse, I think I can handle all of this on my own, I am excluding Him from my efforts and trusting him to lead the way.
He wants to work good things for me, through me, in my day-to-day job even when I am dealing with non-believers in a secular environment.
I know He is not expecting me to do anything super insane and claim “God made me do it!” He knows there is still the nuance of the human condition at work and the unspoken business rules in the organization that you have to know. I need to continue to follow the directions laid out in the Bible: meet them where they are at.
Work rules are rules of the world and if I can improve my ability in just simply trusting God, the Spirit will help me navigate this new challenge. He already has helped me this year and this is just my next evolution of me, trusting in the Spirit. We are to respect and be in surrender to the authorities in our lives, including our workplaces. God is always working for us. I just need to let Him do his thing.
So my take away on this is simply to TRULY trust in the Lord with all your heart and He will go in front of you.
Including when it comes to interacting with your leaders who may not immediately see the value you bring, even in the complexity of technology organizations.