Howdy everyone! It is October and I am thriving. I’ve always loved fall – I seem to be most myself on gloomy, cooler days. I’ve always detested summertime as I find it quite uncomfortable; I feel the most at ease when bundled up in sweaters and jackets. Additionally, the start of the school year is always an exciting time for me, and happens to be when I’m most productive (despite no longer being a student). That being said, this summer was notably better than most summers before it. I remained productive at work and really grew in a number of ways (whether it be professionally or otherwise). In my last entry, I discussed how I’ve gained confidence and theorized that confidence is a byproduct of adversity (as my Dad likes to remind me, “it builds character”). The past few months have been quite adverse; as such, I think I’ve grown quite a lot. All of that being said, It was a good summer… I think. We will revisit this later.
Since the spring we’ve had a group of consultants at the mine whose goal is to help us improve our productivity. In particular, they are interested in our processes/management strategies pertaining to our battery equipment. This makes sense given that it is a novel technology with unique challenges which all require a certain level of analytical thinking in order to manage efficiently. I’d say that 95% of my job is aiding in the management of our battery equipment, so I’ve spent a lot of time with the consulting group. During this time, I’ve come to learn that the consultants are really good at analytical thinking (or they’ve convinced me of it, at least). They are also really good at implementing new whiteboards. On occasion, I’ve tried to have individual conversations with a lot of them in order to obtain a better sense of their thought processes and how they break down problems analytically (so that I can try and learn from them and think more like they do) – but they’re also really good at getting back on topic and being efficient without giving me a good peek into their heads. Quite the mysterious bunch of people. I suppose for now, all I can do is rely on my super-spy skills to siphon knowledge from them. Maybe I’d do better to start incessantly using terms like “synergy”, “deep dive”, “bandwidth”, or “drill down” in order to catch their attention and “close the loop”. Whatever that means.
Initially, a few of the consultants began helping me by implementing systems to improve the tracking of KPIs (key performance indicators) within one of my projects, the battery refurbishment project. The core goal of the project is to replenish old batteries with new cells so that we can re-use all of the associated infrastructure – but it requires a lot of work. It’s a new project that we haven’t done before, so I’ve actually spent most of my time on it doing in-fleet testing and failure analysis of both retired & refurbished batteries. I’ve always felt this project to be quite important and critical to maintaining the effectiveness/health of our battery vehicle fleet (in an economical way) – but it was difficult to quantify how much impact the project had, how necessary it was, and what level of funding would be optimal for it. Understanding the health of a battery fleet is a complex, multi-variable endeavor. The consultants helped me develop a business case which demonstrated how critical the project was and how much funding was required for it to be most effective. The first step in figuring this out was defining our project abilities & production output. In one week, what are we capable of doing? What is our bottleneck? If we wanted to scale this up, what equipment/resources would we need? I had begun to develop an intuition for the answers of these questions but it was hardly analytical. The consultants helped me answer these questions in a more analytical way. Particularly, the question that I ended up giving the most thought (and ultimately the most important one) was, “what does good look like?”
Performing a “What Good Looks Like” (WGLL) exercise is to sit down with your team (or even just yourself) at the beginning of the day/week/month (or whatever timeline best suits the project) and quite literally define what “good” means in terms of the targets for the day/week/month. For instance, If we do tasks A, B, and C today, it was a good day. University did not train me to do this – every day was a bad day. Most university deliverables were not long term, so it was natural to just be more binary about tasks; For instance, a good week was handing everything in on-time. A good day was getting as much done as possible and not feeling bad about how stupid I am. That is a very unhelpful way of managing a workload, there’s no inherent strategy but only an expectation of achieving the end result. It felt as though everything had to be done at once and priorities were only defined by what was due next – not necessarily what needed the most time & attention. Granted, trying to gauge what work needed the most time & attention was nearly impossible – how am I to know how difficult a physics problem is before solving it? It was overwhelming to manage, but I think I did a good job of it nevertheless – I got my degree. It wasn’t in the university’s mandate to make it easy for any of us.
Taking all of that into consideration, it still seems so silly to write about this now – answering “what does good look like?” should be an obvious first step when developing daily tasks & expectations with workers. How could I have been so oblivious to the usefulness of setting bite-sized expectations for such an enormous project? I’m not sure, but I don’t think dwelling on this is helpful. I had near zero experience managing projects previous to this one, so all I knew to do was to make graphs about outputs. “Hey Haley, we built x modules today and we need screwdrivers”. Okay, cool – I’ll add that data point to my chart and get you some screwdrivers for tomorrow. I wasn’t overly focused on planning day-to-day activities with the workers or looking ahead. Any plans for the future were unspecific – they’d go something like: “Hey team, I think tomorrow we should focus on building modules”, and the team would build whatever amount made sense to them. The consultants coached me to ask better questions such as: Was x number of modules a good or bad number of modules to build? Why couldn’t we build x+1? Is x our upper-limit? Are we able to build another x modules tomorrow? Why or why not? At the start of the day today, how many modules did we plan on building? Was it x-2? or was it x+10? Did we achieve our goals?
Performing the WGLL exercise with the team every day has cemented itself as a tremendously important task. An effective WGLL exercise lists specific goals – not “let’s focus on module building today” but instead “let’s aim to build 4 modules today”. Each task on the list has a unique priority level, thereby eliminating issues to do with team misalignment – we all know what’s expected and in what particular order. I’ve written about my theory of expectations before, and I state that a good leader will make their expectations clear and reasonable. WGLL is the tool I use to make my expectations clear and reasonable. It requires everyone to think about what we are reasonably capable of and to have a better understanding of what’s priority and what’s not. A good WGLL exercise is a team-effort that everyone can provide input on what they think they’re individually capable of – or what problems they think we’ll run into. This exercise has also made me a better manager on a personal level. The team now has an objective means to feel good about their work. If I do a good job of setting clear & reasonable expectations then the team will have a lot of good days. WGLL also provides clarity when it wasn’t a good day – it’s easier to track specific variances (whether the variance be in control of the workers or not), and helps hold people accountable when necessary (including myself as the managing figure). In the case where the variance is not an individual, it helps identify problems within the system that may be leading us to not have a good day and helps me be more effective at correcting it. In terms of reporting upwards, setting targets helps us have a better understanding of timelines and guiding the expectations of upper management.
Over the past few days, I’ve come to really appreciate the WGLL exercise on a broader level. I’ve come to learn that it’s a lot easier to identify a bad day than it is to identify a good one. Bad days can happen for any reason (within our control or not), good days depend only on us and require premeditated attention. it takes a lot of work to have a good day. Historically, I’ve struggled quite a lot with self-inflicted pressures and feelings of being overwhelmed. I have a million things I want to do in my life, I want to be good at all of them – I want to be somebody that is in the room where it happens and it cannot happen fast enough. Although just like university, I’m not really good at providing a way to measure my own progress and acknowledge my own development/shortfalls. It feels so overwhelming all of the time because the only objective goal I have is to be successful. I don’t even know what that means, and I certainly haven’t valued the importance of defining a path to achieve it. Every day is a bad day because I’m not yet in the room where it happens. Of course I feel shitty and anxious all of the time – because the only thing I know about myself is that I haven’t yet been successful at achieving my goal. I feel as though I work really hard but I never feel like I have a good day. Perhaps if I spent time defining what it means to have a good day at the beginning of the day, then I’d actually set myself up properly for having one.
I want to get my P.Eng. I want to get my MBA. I want to implement a proper battery maintenance program. I want there to be 10 truck batteries underground that are operable & healthy at any given time. I want to start a non-profit knitting charity this winter. I want to write and produce an album by my 25th birthday. I want to run a 5k before October 2022. I want to read Dune. Most of all, I just want to know when I’ve had a good day; or at the very least, I want to know that I’m making progress.
So, was it a good summer? Well, I didn’t begin the summer with a “what does good look like?” conversation. This summer felt overwhelming, it felt revolutionary, it felt like a whirlwind. It’s difficult to know in any certain way that I had a good summer – but it must have been close because I do not feel as though it was bad. I did everything I could within my capacity and very little guidance. Perhaps the only way I can quantify it is as follows: It suspect it is reasonable to think I had a good summer, because for the first time ever I learned how to have one.
(October 4th, 2021)
astronomine 