7. On 5 years and 30 years

It's been a busy day/week/month/year. But this week, a good friend reminded me to pause and appreciate my progress. How often do we do that? Not the big round of applause, award-winning, recognition moments but the quiet reflection of how far we've come ... especially when it seems like we still have so far to go.

The truth is, even after 28 years in this career, I still have far to go. I want to improve my leadership skills, see my people rise in their careers, and achieve things for my community and my company, and I'm not slowing down, yet. I.T. continues to evolve, like it always has, and I am here for it.

So where does 5 years and 30 years come in?

This month I celebrated the first service milestone of 5 years at Microsoft. I ordered the infamous service crystal - a representation of my commitment to this company and a nice, earned addition to my MVP awards prior.

Along the way, I've learned a few things, which I thought I'd share. Imagine future me looking back on this in another 5 years time - I don't think much will have changed ....

Things are more complicated than they appear

Have you ever had someone give you advice about a situation, whether it's family stuff, finances or technology, and your response has been "yeah but it's not that simple?" When you get to work for a technology vendor, you get to look behind the curtain and see all the layers of complexity. This is especially true at cloud scale. What may seem like an obvious improvement can be extremely complex to execute, especially if it crosses more than one capability (and that happens more often than you would think, as we look at the technology stack layers of a cloud platform).

This isn't a Microsoft secret. This applies to ANY organisation. Even your own.

In the olden days when you needed to go into a bank branch, you could wonder why they only had 2 staff and 3 empty counters with a long lunchtime queue of customers. What you didn't see was the complexity - the teller who had called in sick, the headcount that the branch doesn't have to hire more people because of financial decisions wrapped in their own layers of complexity. You know the complications that impact your own situation. You rarely see everybody elses.

Large organisations are a collection of moving parts

Again, not really a secret here. You could draw a generic org chart of any large organisation and it would have similar departments and functions, maybe industry specific ones too. How those parts work together can feel like the opposite of a car engine - all in time, all at the same pace, all with the same access to fuel. So take the complexities of two different departments and get them to work together. Now you have a new challenge to solve - how the sum of the two fulfill their own goals and the goals of the org, when the probably have different constraints.

Microsoft has come a long way from how siloed the products used to be, and I say that as an end user and systems administrator. Internally, the culture has changed for the better too, and the cross-org relationships are vitally important, but this fundamental business construct is still at play. Departments have different functions, goals and constraints and somehow they also need to function together. You can put into a pile all of your management degrees, leadership training and business systems but ultimately, the grease is people.

He aha te mea nui o te ao? What is the most important thing in the world?

He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata. It is people. It is people. It is people.

In those life-resetting moments when we lose a loved one or a good friend is sick, we remember the essence of this Māori proverb.

When you have good people who are committed to doing the right things for the company and for the customer, they grease the wheels of industry. They influence decisions, change process, achieve outcomes, work together across boundaries, take common sense and turn it into how we work around here. Listen to your people.

In the workplace, we dedicate departments, values, support resources and training sessions to acknowledge and support our people. "Culture eats strategy for breakfast" said management consultant Peter Drucker. But do you know what eats culture for breakfast?

Actions.

Your culture is not an objective, a webinar or a poster - it's your actions.        

Your culture is not an objective, a webinar or a poster - it's your actions.

The challenge is that sometimes actions (including decisions) are layered in complexity that your people don't see. They need to either understand why things are the way they are, or they need to have faith that someone else in the company has more information than they do, and they've made the best decision they can. That doesn't mean it will be the right decision. We're dealing with imperfect humans here, often in circumstances that change. But unless every decision you've ever made has been the right one, cut people some slack and assume good intention. Conversely, with every organisational decision, make sure your actions accurately reflect the culture and values you so loudly espouse - or take a little longer to explain why they don't. The disconnect will kill your culture.

As I read back through those last paragraphs, I wonder if you'll think that's a pretty big subtweet. It's not a reflection or gripe about regarding my employer - it's an insight into how people work and think, again, in any organisation. Tell me I'm wrong.

Nobody has it all figured out.

It's easy to point at large organisations and think they have it all figured out. Much like experts or celebrities, we see the outside production and none of the internal messiness. Granted, organisations like Microsoft have solved issues at scale and because of longevity, that smaller, younger businesses haven't - it's no mean feat to grow to be a 48 year old $2T company.

But the same things that got you to be a 48 year old $2T company don't guarantee you'll be a 96 year old $4T company (just to double the numbers). And there's no rule book to follow for years 49, 50 and beyond - especially in the ever-changing industry of technology.

With any company, I'm less interested in whether they have it all figured out - perfectly productive meetings, processes and tools - and more interested in how they're changing and what they're trying next. Building on your foundation and growing into the experiments of the future are crucial to a company's lifespan, not to mention staying relevant in a changing world. So I can't give you the Microsoft Manual of how to operate a business. But I can tell you we have some amazing people who keep trying, keep innovating and keep me excited about being a technology platform that helps the world solve it's problems.

... and the 30 years?

This month also marked the release of Windows NT on the 27th of July, 1993. Many of my peers "grew up" with Windows Server during their careers, and we wanted to wish our favourite operating system a happy birthday!

To learn more about the groundbreaking capabilities of Windows NT then, and the 30 years of innovation since, check out Jeff Woolsey's trip down memory lane at https://aka.ms/WS30YearAnniversary

It's late on a Friday afternoon for me now, so I'm logging off for the weekend - Inbox at 16 and a performance with my community choir to look forward to on Sunday. Whatever you're doing, I hope you have good coffee and you feel the sunshine on your skin. And you stop and pause for a minute.

-SCuffy