In any process, whether it’s code, leadership, team development, building, whichever, there is a part where it gets awkward. Perhaps it’s a hypothesis that failed. Maybe your design fell on its face. Maybe the presentation on team growth fell flat. Whatever it is, there is that awkward moment of silence where you can either look it in the eye and figure out how to fix or you can let it sit there, stare at it,…
Of course, it’s going to be a doozy. What first step wasn’t a doozy? What thing did you ever start for the first time that the first step wasn’t the hardest? The first time you walked. The first code you ever wrote. The first bug you ever worked on. If it wasn’t a doozy, it wouldn’t be worth doing. And if it wasn’t a doozy, it wasn’t something new.
Your team will have new ideas. They will tweak processes. They will come up with new designs, patterns, and practices. They will have a thought and want to run with it. And through it all, they will look to you to trust them. They will start with you, their manager, looking for that trust. And if they can get that trust from you, whatever they will implement will be that much better than if they…
If you can’t explain where you are, no matter your role, in your current release in less than a minute. Then you don’t know where you are. And that should make you wonder what you don’t know.
It’s been done, there are no more wheels to invent. You can make them faster, you can use different materials, you can control them remotely and I’m sure there are a hundred other things you can do to tweak them and make them better. But you can’t reinvent them. The same might be for your product, your code, your team – you can’t reinvent it, it’s there, it works, it might need some tweaks, but…