Raising the Floor
July 14th, 2020
It’s been a strange week: turbulent, disruptive and exciting all mixed into one. (Honestly, the best word to characterize this week would be whiplash.) To meet the challenge, I have had to get something out of the way first. I needed to square away who I am as a professional.
My personal self image has been reasonably consistent, but I have never managed to nail down a narrative to explain myself in my career; perhaps, it’s because I have jumped between continents, then between fields (and back... and back again), all factors which obfuscate my sense of professional self. Not being certain about who I am, has made it difficult to adapt. Imagine the difficulty in planning a journey, when you’re not sure where you’re starting from...
For whatever reason, the challenge of this week have given me the clearest glimpse of what I want to be in some time. So, I‘m taking this as an opportunity to work hard and nail that identity down. Introspection can be scary stuff--you are likely going to face some uncomfortable truths before you get through the process--yet making the leap has clarified what was uncomfortably fuzzy about my direction.
(Drum roll please...)
In short: I am/will be known as a person who strives to, “Raise the floor.”
It’s a phrase I heard often in the inner-city school I taught at in London, England. The idea is pretty simple: the community around the school was vibrant and beautiful, they wanted nothing more than for their children to experience success, but those wishes were wrapped in reality: most experienced poverty, transiency and other significant challenges that got in the way of any meaningful success in school and out.
As an educator serving this community, my duty was to raise the floor of attainment and success for all. (I simultaneously was tasked to push the attainment “ceiling” for that same group, for those wondering.) That meant digging deep, working with my entire team, parents, community partners and the students themselves, to push (uncomfortably at times) to change their pessimistic mindset, one that shied away from difficulty because success wasn’t part of their lived-experience, and into a hunger for the next opportunity to realize success. Everyone had to lift themselves up. If the goal was to have each student reach for bigger risks on more difficult problems, they couldn’t be worried about how far they might fall. My job was to provide the supports to get that momentum going and the skills and habits necessary to sustain their momentum independently.
In the last couple of years, the world twisted a bit beneath my feet, so I no longer find myself in the classroom. What then does “raising the floor” mean for a team leader and developer? I am fully committed to raising expectations and to refine and improve the quality on work that everyone else has already moved on from. That might be through attention to the product itself, refactoring, realigning, etc., or engaging with the culture that empowers those decisions to build a better product. I will push the bounds on what the team considers “shippable” in the time budget we have, always striving for more accessible, performant, collaborative and ultimately better products.
When I join a project, I’m at peace with the fact that I do not shine brightest when working on the “latest and greatest.” I am not motivated by prestige, money or even building things that are unique. No, I get up in the morning looking towards a chance to lean-in to hard problems. Typically those problems are cultural, or people-based, and not sitting inside my text editor (Neovim in case you care 😘). Tackling those problems bring me the greatest contentment, because the first step to creating great work is fostering an environment where the team is empowered to reach after greatness and not worried about the potential fall.
I’ve met countless other styles of people in my professional career, but never anyone with the same priorities and values as me. Perhaps, that is why I haven’t been confident in coming to this conclusion earlier, or maybe there is some kernel of wisdom that I hadn’t realized until recently. Whatever the reason, I’m ready to face what the world has in store for me: ready to adapt or hold steadfast, starting from my current understanding of who I am.
Are you on a similar journey? Tell me about where you landed, about who you are or who you‘re becoming.