Chad SturtzA Journey Through Software

There is a line that separates the people around you.  Depending on how you look at it, it may be blurry or clear, but you still know it’s there.  On the left side you have people that you want to invest in, do everything possible to keep at your organization, watch and learn from, and let drive the direction of your team or business.  While those on the right side may be intelligent and hard working, you know they’re not the type of people to grow an organization around.

What separates these groups?  It’s the presence of four traits: vision, desire to learn, passion, and value of teamwork.

Vision is what keeps these people focused on the big picture in addition to their immediate tasks and surroundings.  They consider long term effects, understand how individual roles fit together, and are able to look at a single issue from many perspectives.  Passion keeps them motivated and always performing at their best.  It’s the excitement and reward they feel every day and is visible in their actions.  The desire to learn makes them ask “why?”.  They want to be taught to fish rather than given a meal.  They work to consume new information every day and grow from it.  Their value of teamwork encourages them to assist others and share information and responsibility.  They wear whatever hat is necessary, and often wear several hats at the same time.  They know that the most ambitious goals are possible with the right group of people.

Focus on creating teams with a majority of people from the left side.  Provide an environment and culture that encourages innovation and risk taking, does not treat change negatively, and invests in its people.  From this you will get processes that work well for your organization, an army of intelligent, productive, and efficient people, and an organization considered successful by any measure.

9 months ago my daughter was born and since then I’ve had trouble finding much time for career development outside of the office.  One of my solutions to the problem was to form a sort of user group in my office that would meet over brown-bag lunch presentations.  I had already given a few brown-bag lunch presentations myself, trying to set an example, but only one other person ever did a presentation.  I thought that if I wrote out what it was I wanted to do and how I expected to to be valuable to our team, maybe there’d be more buy-in.  Plus, if I could get everyone to do just 1 or 2 presentations a year, we could have a meeting every other week.

I approached the entire office with this proposal and was very thrilled to get buy-in from a large percentage of my coworkers.  I volunteered to do the first presentation and asked 2 of my more active coworkers to take care of presentations 2 & 3 just to get things rolling.  Presentation number 3 is next week and after several emails, no one else in the office has volunteered for presentation #4 (or any other future slot).

I found out that for 2 people, the problem was coming up with something to talk about.  I have provided topic ideas as well as offered to brainstorm with anyone that was willing to present but unsure of a topic.  Still… no one has offered to present.

At this point I’m assuming it won’t pan out.  I felt it was acceptable to send a few emails stating that we needed people for upcoming presentations seeing as how I got a large amount of buy-in before this whole thing started, but I’m not going to push it.  If no one comes forward, I’ll just continue giving presentations when I can hoping that maybe someone else will jump in every once in a while.

I have to admit, I’m a little confused as to why so many people thought it was a good idea but then won’t participate.  I even found out that for presentation #2 (I was out sick), no one set up a virtual meeting or conference call for the few remote people assigned to our office.  Furthermore, those remote people never IM’d, emailed, or called anyone asking what number to call in on or for an invitation to the virtual meeting.  Maybe I’m the only one that feels there’s value here…