RAP (Role Advice Process) - 13 Oct 2020

Documenting this experience here.

Over the past couple of weeks I've gone through a Role Advice Process (RAP), for various reasons which I hope to explore and write about at a later date.

For now I wanted to document the process somewhere (other than email) for reference purposes. The text below is taken directly from the two emails I sent out to the team about this.

Email 1 - Kicking it Off (2 Oct 2020)

Good afternoon all, I’m kicking off a Role Advisory Process, using this post as my guide... (it comes from a book that we have somewhere around the office.)

My intention is to consult with a few of you in detail (45 mins or so) and I invite all of you to send me notes or ask to meet if you have thoughts or feedback you would like to offer.

I intend to present a decision/results in a few weeks.

Why am I doing this?

As you probably know, the past 6 months or so have been a struggle for me personally and, consequently, here at Brave. In particular, over a period of a couple of months I had very little motivation for work, which is not something I’m accustomed to feeling and was very disorienting and kind of scary.

Which led to the following two things (amongst others):

- A focus on my own health, mental, spiritual and physical – and the recognition that looking after myself properly will take time (meaning both that it will take time away from other things on a daily basis, and that it will take a long time.)

- By not being as productive as I was used to, I realized that I had not done any re-prioritisation of my roles and tasks in a very long time; and I feel now is the right time to do so.

So What Next?

My hypothesis is that Brave can be better served if I am more ruthless in how I allocate my time; and also that our team size, now, is a good moment for me to reevaluate my role.

I have ideas about what that means and what it might look like, but I’d like to hear from you. To that end I’ll present more detail on my thinking to folks in individual conversations next week, as I invite feedback, and then collate the results and present to you all in a few weeks.

If I don’t reach out to you to set up a meeting in the next day or so, and you have something specific you want to share with me, please let me know and we’ll set a time to talk. I intend to individually reach out to only 4 people to try and keep the burden on you and the org relatively low.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Gordon.

Email 2 - the Conclusion (13 October 2020)

Good afternoon everyone, Thanks to everyone who participated in this process last week. Below I share where I'm landing and, effectively, a proposal for a path forward. I'm not intending to have a meeting to present this to you in person, but will mention it at a team time soon. Therefore, I invite you to respond to this email, or reach out to me directly, if there's anything you would like to respond/react to or comment on. In particular if you have clarifying questions or anything you feel others might benefit from hearing the answer to - please reply to all. :) Note that below my conclusions, is a list of my self-reflections - all of these were shared with the people who I spoke with last week (Oona, Richard, Mario, Kenzie, Theresa & Sampath) ahead of our conversations. This is going to be a long email…

Headlines:

• Am significantly shifting my role to the extent it will now have some definition and limits around it

• I will be seeking support from all of you and will ensure any work I am no longer doing is transitioned effectively

• My timeline for this is immediate, transition process will begin immediately and be ongoing

• The process has brought up other questions/issues I will be tackling shortly as well (details below)

Details:

Here are the key takeaways and the associated action I intend to take (you may need to read the self-reflection section below to fully understand the context):

• Everyone thinks/agrees I need to get out of admin, legal/governance, finance & operations as much as possible and as quickly as possible

  • Action: I will be seeking assistance on admin and finance on a case-by-case basis, with a view to sharing responsibility in an oversight or supporting capacity (e.g. Sampath has taken over the IRAP relationship).

  • Action: I will be seeking support on legal/governance – more in the sense that I would like others to be involved in management and administration of documentation etc (this is what governance means).

  • Action: I will be withdrawing from operational responsibilities such as button/ODetect installations and supporter onboarding for BeSafe – this is immediate and I will be seeking to identify if/where actual transition work is required for this.

  • Action: look into internships and/or administrative assistant type roles/cost.

• I raised a concern about being perceived as hierarchical (or something) if I no longer participate in operationalization of projects/installations etc – people shared this as a red herring: any misunderstanding around my motivations/reasons on this can be solved through communication, but to the extent I’m in the field listening to people and establishing new, core relationships, that shouldn’t stop – it’s who I am, and who Brave is and is important. Also – this is probably more a reflection of my need to be liked than it is a real concern.

  • Action: document this process somewhere so it’s readily available to any future team member.

  • Action: don’t let go of all the relationships etc, there’s magic to some of these connections that will be jeopardized if I’m immediately handing people off to other team members.

• One of my concerns was about something I think of as ‘course corrections’ or nudges in perspective I might offer during meetings or digital conversations. This was deemed a real concern and shared by nearly everyone I spoke to (nobody disagreed, it just didn’t come up in one of the conversations). My conclusion is it amounts to a failure (on my part) to ensure that each member of the team understands and shares not just our vision but also our strategy – because it’s necessary, when you’re at the 3 inch or 3,000 foot level, to remember what the 30,000 foot view and heading is – and while a CEO-type person holds responsibility for communicating and disseminating strategy, it’s a shared responsibility to apply a strategic barometer to tasks and actions on an ongoing basis.

  • Action: hold a strategic team-wide meeting to explore what strategy is, what our strategy has been to date, and ask whether we need to adjust or update it.

  • Action: invite everyone to raise this question within meetings (without having the answer).

• Everyone is pretty excited (relieved?) that I’m doing this process, that I’m taking steps to both look after myself and, in so doing, look after Brave.

  • Action: continue to look after my personal health, re-adjust parameters on how I set tasks and timelines for myself based on this.

• There were concerns around this as a change, generally speaking – what it means for my working relationships with a specific person or team or what impact it has on their role.

  • Action: do check-ins with everyone in ~4 weeks to gather reflections, feedback, concerns and identify issues specifically related to this process.

  • Action: set up regular check-ins with some team members.

• One of my concerns was around a lack of visibility or documentation on all the things – not just my work or thoughts etc (to the extent I am a repository of Brave knowledge and history – which might be why I’m invited to more meetings than I need to be at) but the mid-level updates on progress across teams, products etc (which might be why I go to some meetings where I don’t contribute much of value).

  • Action: open a dialogue with team around how we can ensure our progress is documented and shared in a way that is visible and accessible to all without placing too much burden on anyone.

  • Action: start writing down and sharing more stuff about our progress to date, how we got here, what we’re doing and what we’re focusing on (to a certain extent this will be the same blog stuff I’ve been talking about for a while but which, to date, has often been made redundant by my ubiquitous presence in all the meetings; I also expect it to include working with you on writing case studies of various projects, for example)

• Another concern I raised was handing over relationships when we don’t necessarily have aligned expectations around responsiveness in communication etc (internally). This concern was shared by everyone and it was suggested we have a conversation about this to agree norms for replying to both internal and external communication.

  • Action: open a dialogue with team around expectations (and tools) for responsiveness in communication both within and outside of Brave. This includes follow-up and follow-through, not just immediate responses, “a company-wide SLA”.

• I’ve come to recognize a macro-trend for myself in that I go through periods of consumption and periods of production – I would call the last two years a period of production and I’m going to enter a period of consumption.

  • Action: this means I expect to be reading, learning, listening, writing and speaking/sharing – largely solo activities of exploration and personal experimentation.

• In addition to the above, here’s how I’m going to be shifting my day-to-day focus:

  • Spend dedicated time each week on strategic alignment (ensuring all our activities are aligned with our strategic objectives – which will start with the team strategy exercise I mentioned above)

  • Focus on marketing, sales & fundraising – in that order: marketing to be focused on both Brave and BeSafe ahead of the launch of BeSafe 2.0; sales to be an ongoing process but to start with a strategy-defining conversation; fundraising to start in earnest in Q1 2021, so a bit of research and preparation now.

  • Preparation for all of those things will / may include more startup competition type activities, to help hone our story/messaging/pitch etc.

  • I expect to spend time doing outreach, relationship-building work, this is time-consuming and largely invisible work (as 75% of it won’t result in anything tangible).

  • I expect to have a BeSafe meeting soon – as I anticipate we actually need to do a ‘launch’ of 2.0 in December

  • I view all of this as helping Brave become more resilient – the less reliant it is on me, or any single person for that matter, the greater chance it has at longevity; so this is both a re-write of my role, and the beginning of a succession plan.

RAP Reflections:

• 6 people participated in RAP conversations with me, and they were amazing and I’m really grateful.

• I shared the self-reflections below plus (verbally) the concern that I might now appear hierarchical or snobby by not doing work in the trenches I’ve been doing up until now, and mostly what happened was people had thoughts and feedback based on those documents, and if necessary I prompted them for concerns they might have as it relates to Brave and/or their work/role personally.

• I won’t share all of the feedback I received but it certainly helped me feel loved and relevant and other good things which I didn’t know I needed quite so much...

My self-reflections (shared ahead of conversations last week):

• What are my strengths, talents and interests? Where are they best put to use?

  • I am good at listening to people – collaborators, team members, partners, clients; and reasonably good at learning from that and incorporating it into ‘everything’

  • I am good at execution of stuff, especially the first part of things

  • I am interested in new things: new relationships, new designs, ideas, products, strategies

  • I am good at big picture thinking, which could be called strategic thinking but is not quite the same thing, I have some work to do in order to translate the one into the other

  • I am good at connecting – getting us connected with people, org’s, unlikely allies etc

  • I am insanely productive – driven by a combination of uber-organisation (ClickUp and 12WY these days but all the tools I use) + just working long hours. It’s become super clear this is not sustainable.

  • These could be put to use for sales, PR, investment, new product, partnerships and collaborations (researchers, big companies etc)

• What contribution am I currently making to the team? What’s working well? What could be better?

  • Current Contribution:

    • I’m currently helping with a lot of things, available to many people and teams and areas. Things that used to fall mainly on me (at least in terms of vision if not execution).

    • I do a lot of the grunt work for various things, connecting dots and following up to see if stuff has been done

    • I’m in charge of the admin, finance and governance sides of things – everything ‘coop’ is on my plate

    • I still hold the ‘vision’ to a certain extent – but thankfully that is being distributed to the team (as in, it will be owned collectively) through both our past and present work with Junxion

  • Working Well:

    • Being available, holding and distributing vision

  • Could be Better:

    • Am involved in too many things

    • Expected to plow through all the grunt work but don’t have capacity to do that (it is also largely invisible work)

    • I’m in operations but am not really adding operational value (I add context)

    • I shouldn’t need to be following up on (other people’s) stuff

    • I’m not good at admin, it would be better if someone else owned this and I supported them

    • I’m not made for financials either, someone else doing this or helping with this would get better results

    • I don’t have time to focus on sales (and marketing) and fundraising

• Could I increase my impact by shifting or changing my role? In what ways, specifically? What could be gained? What could be lost? Who would assume current duties I’d like to hand off?

  • I would like to shift my focus to be exclusively on a few things, essentially sales & marketing, and fundraising (investment, not grants); and strategic partnerships & relationships (which could often look like me making a connection and then handing the relationship off to someone else)

  • I would still be available for support and input and so on, but I would not be involved in operations (rather: operationalization of things – implementation etc)

  • I would not be doing that ‘helping’ (adding context, nudges, course corrections) thing anymore; but I would still (like to) be engaged in product (or design) conversations (because I would effectively be product manager of Brave, and Brave’s primary product is its products)

  • I would like assistance with admin & financials specifically

• How do I feel about this potential change? What am I worried about? Excited about? What are the pros and cons?

  • I am very excited about this change

  • I think it would give space and breathing room to other team members who might feel I have been crowding them or just taking up room

  • I feel it would make me much more productive and, by definition more focused

  • I am worried about handing over relationships as I’ve seen this fail here in the past (perhaps we need a CRM)

  • The context I add to some conversations has occasionally shifted the whole nature/flavour of a project or part of it, I’m worried if I have no idea what is going on I can’t contribute at all until it’s “too late” – so objectives and communication and cadence and transparency will be even more important

  • I feel like I have been acting like a caretaker on external relationships (with my email reminders etc) and some internal activity - I don’t think we all share the same expectations around responsiveness in communication and I worry we’ll lose important relationships and drop balls internally but...

Thank you! Gordon.