Back on May 17, 2021 I wrote about the best/worst things. I kind of skimmed through that to make sure that I wasn’t repeating myself so recently and I don’t think that I will. My point of that post was that that events that were really great experiences were also incredibly difficult at the same time. While I was in the moment, it was exactly what I wanted but in retrospect the situation was not the best for me to continue. Or maybe looking at a different perspective that all things will come to an end.

Why am I revisiting this then again? I was part of a reunion of sorts this weekend. I got together with my former team last Saturday. What was amazing was that every single person that worked with me on my core team (on this continent) was there. I never got that kind of participation on any non-work function when we were together.

The reunion was the doings of my former right hand man. He contacted me in May and asked me if I wanted to get together with some former support team members. I said sure but I would have to shoehorn it into my packed schedule which ended up being Saturday. What was also amazing was that the majority of the people have moved on to other employment. Half of the people now live in a different states. It wasn’t as if this was my hand selected team, only one of them did I even interview and approve hiring. It was a collection of people that were assigned to my team.

One of the things that I think I did right was letting the team buy into decisions that were made. When I had latitude to do so, I was able to lay out the spectrum of decisions and consequences and let them choose how to proceed. Sometimes, we would evaluate our decisions after the fact and potentially make another choice.

For instance, we spent some time developing the Standard Operating Procedure. We worked on group consequences for not meeting our Service Level Agreement. We developed operating policies and procedures. Not everyone agreed with my methodology, particularly my last boss. But, my theory was that in order to get compliance, I needed to make sure that people understood and more importantly agreed on what they were doing.

I built an incentive program around Service Level Agreement compliance. That definitely influenced behavior as no one wanted to break a thirty day string of team compliance. But, occasionally there was a questionable action by a team member. When that was the case, I would make the team vote on the facts and end the end the results always ended up where I thought it should have been. It was sometimes difficult but the team had buy in for why something happened.

When I first started out with this team, we had almost no oversight. This was when the best progress was made. After about a year, we were really beginning to perform and people began to notice. That was when we began to get pushed to do things that were straying from what I wanted to do. Despite that, we had built enough foundation to continue to be wildly successful. The company leadership continued to tinker with the team and change the direction and in essence, I lost control. That was when I decided to leave.

Talking with the guys I came to learn that they stayed and enjoyed their work because the group was supportive and people cared. When that stopped happening, they decided to make a career change. I suppose I could add that description to myself because as my team incrementally stopped becoming mine I stopped caring.

End Your Programming Routine: I am not going to promise that I am not going to talk about this subject again because I am still trying learn the lessons from it. Call it therapy. I guess what was so amazing was that everyone made an effort to get together because I think they felt that it was something special as well. That really feels good.