Slowly Then All At Once

Stepping Back Into a New Role

It’s transition time. After 5 and a half years, my time with salary.com came to a close last week. Up to the point that I took the job, I’d been independent and self employed for most of 30 years.

There are two ways that I think about the experience. First, during my independent days, I was an industry analyst. I was an industry analyst before I even knew what that meant. I spent my time and focus learning about companies and their products in the HR arena.

Working in marketing and as a part of the product team at salary.com, I learned about what it was like on the other side of the fence. I often told people that ‘after 30 years as a food critic, I took a job in the kitchen.

The other way that I think about the experience is that I spent 30 years without a boss and five and a half years remembering why.

Anyhow, the kitchen is a busy, dangerous place. Fire, hot stuff, knives, repetitive chores, long hours, a focus on cost effectiveness and efficiency, and more mistakes than you could ever imagine. The mistakes are how learning happens. Kitchens are organized by their mistakes. Processes evolve to make sure ‘that doesn’t happen again.’

What happens inside a company is like that.

The analyst/food critic rarely sees the inside of the kitchen. Instead, they are served particularly well curated meals and experiences. There is almost nothing that is more different than these two complementary views: marginally orchestrated chaos and perfectly curated deliverables.

In the kitchen, it’s hard to grasp the changing narrative. The pieces move quickly and priorities change at least seasonally (and often more frequently). Getting things done has a high priority in the kitchen.

Understanding and delivering the story is an inherently different thing.

At salary.com, I built products, did research, and was the VP of Marketing at different times of my tenure. Most of the time, I did pieces of each. (Recently, I spent a good deal of time working as a part of the core AI team.) It was refreshing to return to the engineering roots of my first adult career. It was eye opening to gain a view of marketing in today’s B2B environment.

The transition is more complicated that I’d imagined. Five years of well developed habits (like 6am meetings to be on East Coast time, relentlessly using outlook and teams, relationships with a goal driven cadence, and regular trips to the mothership) don’t come undone over night.

Leaving feels like being the tooth after it’s extracted. Roots attached to almost nothing. There’s a profound shift in relationships when you no longer share the work.

It’s surprisingly murky. The uncertainty levels are way higher. The contradicting combinations of sad and liberated, grumpy and delighted, empty and full, and stressed and relaxed make for a richly complex emotional stew.

I’m already missing the people. I’m only modestly missing the comfort of having well established ‘swim lanes’. Familiarity inhibits learning. I prefer lots of uncertainty

I learned more about compensation and its importance in the world of work than I imagined possible. Compensation, its organization and structure is the very foundation of the Employer-Employee relationship. It has the interesting attribute of being necessary but not sufficient for motivation.

In the coming years, we are going to have a tremendous opportunity to reimagine value and the meaning of work. Our silos will crumble. They are an artifact of industrial era thinking. The emerging technology does not respect workflow precedents.

We are going to watch smart companies automate away their chances to learn and grow. We will see smaller operations who don’t know better reimagine the ways that things go together. Like most change, it will happen slowly then all at once.

In the near term, I’m going to be looking for the things that will mature into the next thing. I doubt that it will happen where it is expected to happen.

The HRExaminer is going to slowly take shape as we (Heather and I) explore. Like all change, it will happen slowly then all at once

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