User manual for me — 2021 refresh

2021 is (again) a time of big change for me, so here’s a refresh of my ‘manual for me’, inspired by https://medium.com/@cassierobinson/a-user-manual-for-me-d3a851fbc694

I’ve been working at Kettering General Hospital since March 2020, we’re an Acute Trust, and we’ve experienced Covid like every other Acute. It’s been a steep learning curve, and I continue at Kettering as Digital Director in 2021. You can see some of my early thoughts at Kettering in this blogpost.

Conditions I like to work in

• I like to be flexible and work in the best way to meet a need. Sometimes that’s sitting in a coffee shop with headphones on, sometimes that’s standing in front of a whiteboard, sometimes it’s joining a videoconference with the video on so I feel (and am felt to be) present.
• I’m a fan of (remote) distributed working and have done it since 2005. Covid has changed people’s ideas of office based or remote working forever. It will be interesting to see how as an Executive team we balance the ‘being present’ with also showing leadership that ‘being remote is ok, indeed it may be very positive for all kinds of reasons’ (it means space on site can be maximised for patient care, it reduces our carbon footprint, it promotes a work life balance, it reduces congestion etc).
• Wherever you’re working I think it’s incredibly important to be ‘present’ and that people know where you are and in what state. That’s why I try to keep my status updated in Slack/Skype/Teams as to where I am.
• My work calendar is open so you can see what I’m doing at any time (and if you see a slot in my calendar please feel free to send an invite — not an email asking for my availability…).
• I spent many years sat at ‘my desk’ with my curios around me, my discarded food wrappers and photos of my nearest and dearest. It was ‘my space’ and I treated it as such. I don’t want to do that again.
• Increasingly wherever I have my bag, my laptop, phone, sharpies, post-its and highlighters that’s my office.

The times/hours I like to work

• I’ve had to train myself to switch off. Too often in the past I have been ‘on’ from 7am to midnight.
• I now work 27 miles from home so the days I’m in the office I enjoy a car commute across country roads. It gives me time to think. I also have a 2 year old son and a 7 year old stepdaughter — being there for meal times, bedtimes and before school is important to me. So don’t be surprised if I ‘time shift’ and am working early or late to protect that family time.
• I often catch up on work over the weekend, and if I do send anything out at evenings and weekends I don’t expect a response until the next working day.

The best ways to communicate with me

• I don’t think I have a preference. Increasingly I’m using mobile technologies and ‘push’ alerts via tools like Slack/Teams.
• I don’t disrespect email but see it more at the formal end of the scale, and useful when you want an ‘audit trail’ — whether that’s for staffing matters, or resource/budget issues etc.
• I’m comfortable in Slack, Teams, Trello and Google docs but also Office 365/Sharepoint, Jira, Confluence. And if I’m not comfortable, I soon learn.
• In this digital age I am still a big fan of face to face (or failing that telephone) and often like walking meetings.
• I use Twitter mostly for work reasons and it’s a great way to keep up to date in the broader Digital and Health market, (and my DMs are open).

The ways I like to receive feedback

• Face-to-face please.
• And please do it, so many people don’t give feedback. I recently did an informal feedback form, and was pleased to have more than 30 people reply — many who I haven’t yet met in Covid times. I wrote a blog post about how I did it , and some of what I learnt from the feedback.
• I’d rather broach any disagreements, than let them fester. I have learnt how to have difficult discussions in the workplace and am not afraid of them.

Things I need

• I try and treat people with respect and take any staff management or mentoring duties very seriously. I need the people around me to do the same with me. I’d much rather you say <stuff> to me than keep it in your head and share with others so I hear it third-hand, or get a <vibe>.
• I also need people to be efficient, to focus on the task at hand and to be conscious of how much time you could be wasting by doing <that>.

Things I struggle with

• Arbitrary commitments; I much prefer to work towards genuine outcomes, with dates and tasks and people identified
• Disrespect, of people’s time, and being (it’s easy to be civil).
• Siloes, and internal only thinking.

Things I love

• Solving problems at a whiteboard is my norm.
• I enjoy working across different roles and teams and have a <big perspective>.
• Delivering stuff, making stuff happen and enabling change.
• Being wildly ambitious and naively optimistic, when I’m neither of those things (I’m a planner, and a deliverer by nature).
• Learning new things — a couple of year’s ago I learnt to not use ‘guys’ — see articles like this as to why — I also did a couple of Roman Pichler training sessions, and he’s my go to person for Product thinking… I’ve also learnt not to ‘trash talk’ (thanks Mohammed).
• And I love working in the open — see some YouTube show & tells I’ve done at https://youtu.be/Bzs_qJtuxE4 and https://youtu.be/C8dfgJQ8JEo and of course I blog when I feel I have something to say.

Other things to know about me

• I once messaged a colleague “Product until I die”, which (whilst being melodramatic) means by nature and training I self-identify as a Product Manager, whereby being Agile, having a roadmap and a vision, a backlog, a focus on outcomes and metrics, managing a delivery product life cycle and above all else focusing on user needs are my core. There’s also a bunch of stuff around intentful listening, right speech, achieving consensus and referent power that I’m a big fan of — you can read more here). If you want to know about Product Management visit the Gov DDAT framework or consume everything by Roman Pichler.
• I’ve learnt to bring more of me into work, but I’m still quite private. On the Myers Briggs Scale I consistently come out as INTP — and INTPs ‘pride themselves on their inventiveness and creativity, their unique perspective and vigorous intellect. Usually known as the philosopher, the architect, or the dreamy professor’. But I guess I’m being more open — heck — I published to the world some thoughts when my mum died in Covid times (not of Covid).
• But I sometimes struggle with the INTP definition (and I know Myers Brigg is viewed sceptically now) as I am highly delivery focused, and increasingly care about the common good of the people around me.
• Back to that “wildly ambitious and naively optimistic” thing — I believe anything is possible, and let’s start every conversation in that way.