Right to Effective

On January 1st I take over the Vehicles group at my company. It’s a higher-level management job, unlike my current role as Rail Vehicle Engineering Director which still involves running projects and technical review.

So far, my whole career has rewarded accuracy: finding errors in specs or nonconformances to them, improving designs that don’t meet the intent, and root-causing issues that have already stumped others. I think I’m good at all that and it’s how I’ve been advanced so far. But I don’t think it’s what my new role needs.

I spent the last few weeks noticing some engineer-based personality tics, finding related books to read and working through what I should change.

Right vs. effective

The goal I landed on is going from being right to being effective.

My instinct to ‘but actually’ got calibrated for an engineering job. It should still fire on things that matter (safety, contracts, decisions, deliverables)… but needs to go quiet on things that are only suboptimal. My test for errors: does this error change the decision or the result? If not, let it go.

That overactive instinct only worked because my prior roles tolerated it. I’m not in the new role yet, but as I get eased into new kinds of discussions, I’ve already noticed this instinct being counterproductive. The really annoying thing is that I also noticed that I do this constantly… which is probably not a surprise to anybody I know other than me. I did this multiple times today, which impeled me to sit down to plan to fix it.

Trying to find some discussion of this, and related topics, led me to two books.

The Books

Note: I’ve been listening to these audiobooks, but also discussing these with Claude while driving. I’m only a few hours into the actual books… the Claude discussion jumps around.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

Marshall Goldsmith’s book is a list of 20 habits that hold back people who are already successful. The ones that hit closest for me:

  • Winning too much - Needing to be right on points that don’t change anything. The main thing I noticed…
  • Starting with ‘No,’ ‘But,’ or ‘However’ - This is my ‘but actually’ instinct almost exactly.
  • Negativity - ‘Let me explain why that won’t work.’ This is basically correcting dressed up as realism, and I’m guilty of it.
  • Adding too much value - I can make a suggestion that might improve someone’s chance of success by 5%, but I cut their ownership of it by 50%. It feels like helping, but it’s undercutting. An adjacent point I’m not sure is in the book, it also incentivizes the individual to be less independent going forward.

He also talks about the superstition trap, roughly: I’m successful and I do X, so X is why I’m successful. I’ve probably succeeded in spite of some of my habits, not because of them.

The First 90 Days

Michael Watkins’ book is about transitions. His argument is that new leaders mostly fail because of mistakes in the first few months, while people are still forming their impression of them, not because they can’t do the job.

What I’m taking from it:

  • Listen before acting. He recommends a ’listening tour’, asking several people’s input so it can help guide my new role. Someone internally also suggested this one in a prior discussion.
  • Watkins splits transitions into start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success. Each needs a different approach.
  • Have five different conversations with my new boss: situation, expectations, resources, working style, and personal development. The tendency is to merge these, which leaves gaps on some.
  • Pick a few early wins. Avoid technical fixes; I shouldn’t still be in the weeds. (I’ll save technical things for my own after work entertainment… which might coincidentally be useful.)
  • Protect my capacity better. Overload is likely to increase misjudgments, and cause regression on Goldsmith’s 20 habits.

Plan

Recognizing these habits is the easy part. I plan to rate myself on these items… the scores themselves don’t matter, but knowing I’m scoring should make me catch old habits until new habits becomes habit.

The other thing is that I’ll recruit a few people to flag how I’m doing (on these and other topics). This is a lagging indicator, but at least it’s feedback that isn’t completely dependent on me.