Changing Countries Weakened My Mojo but I Just Got It Back

Changing jobs always involves adjusting to the new environment and finding your feet again.

Changing countries as well is a career culture shock of epic proportions.

I've been doing this work thing I do for a while and feel pretty comfortable with my method and my madness in achieving any goals I am set. The thing is that being in a new work culture combined with a new country has shaken my confidence in what I do and how well I do it.

A lot of this comes from working with people who have their own very successful ways of doing things that simply aren't my ways. The reality is that there are many ways to achieve the same requirement with each being completely valid.

My skill set involves becoming adept at functioning inside a new environment very quickly. This is why I'm surprised at how long it has taken me to become comfortable with who I am and what I'm doing in my current job.

The environment I work in has many rules and is constantly in a highly productive state of cognitive dissonance. It works but it does involve being brutally decisive and being right a lot.

To me, the only way to be highly decisive and be right a lot is to trust the almost two decades of skills and experience that I have under my belt.  Yes, listen to others but do what you know is right for you in that context.

The two times that I have done something I felt ill at ease with but persisted with anyway, I have come out in a situation that I do not feel went brilliantly.

It is finally starting to dawn on me that I know how to do this job with my eyes closed and as long as I second guess myself, I will not rock it like I normally do.

Although changing jobs and countries weakened my mojo, I've finally found a way to get it back.

She who hesitates is lost. Just go with your gut. 

Forget Being Lean Until You Get Some Rigour

Over and over again, people talk about Lean like it is a giant waterproof, super-fast healing Band-Aid that will fix every delivery team. They say "Toyota this" and "Motorola that" and "you're not lean enough."

The problem I have with this is when the Band-Aid is being applied to a delivery team that has no structure at all. You can't make a cowboy team leaner or even more agile without putting structure in place and then improving it.

I don't mean picking Scrum or Kanban and saying do this and then become leaner. Instead, I mean that teams must become aware of their as-is way of functioning. Identify practices and articulate them. There always are practices in place but people are not always conscious of them. Without consciousness, there is no method. Once you have method, you can use it rigourously.

Become aware of what you do now. Decide on where you want to be. Map a course of action from one to the other and most importantly, give yourself time and give yourself permission to fail and correct.

Telling a team with no self-awareness to become leaner is pointless. First find the point.