About
Throughout my career I find I keep returning to a central theme – teaching others. In my first job - many, many years ago - I led a team in what could only be described as a specialized assembly line (fast truck washing). As each member of the team would improved his or her skills on the line the time would come when they had passed their peers and could out-pace the newer team members with their eyes shut. At this point the inevitable declaration would occur, “I am the [best, fastest, cleanest] washer on this crew!”. A declaration like that seems to indicate that you have arrived and could now relax and go through the motions. To keep them motivated to continue growing their skills I would always reply, “I’ll admit you are good but you don’t ‘own’ it until you can teach it to someone else.”
That core value is one I have carried with me ever since. I firmly believe that the only way to fully commit a skill to memory is to practice passing it on to others. The act of teaching alone helps you look beyond the basic task and understand why a particular method or approach works and what approaches may seem to work at first but ultimately result in problems (“here there be dragons”). Every where I work I try to leave behind improvements to the organizational memory in whatever way I can. I may mentor the team on new concepts, update the systems documentation to ensure it is usable by a larger audience of readers, or maybe create a service catalog or CMDB.
This blog is just one more tool in my kit and will allow me to record what just doesn’t fit anywhere else. I hope you find my observations useful as I take one more step toward “owning” my abilities.
