The Seasons Of Our Lives
And leading through them effectively
It was a Friday afternoon in the summer of 2017. I was sitting across the table from my skip-level manager and we were catching up over a coffee. I was exhausted. It had been a long week, a long month, and yet the first half of the year had gone by in the blink of an eye. I was relatively new in my role as an Engineering Manager at work, and at home I was still adjusting to life with our 1-year old daughter. In short, I was realizing and getting used to the Volatile-Uncertain-Complex-Ambiguous (VUCA) nature of the management role, while my energy levels felt like they were at an all time low.
“I don’t even know what I did this week, or this month! I feel so unproductive.” I lamented. Vijay looked at me and said - “We all go through seasons in our professional lives. There are ebbs and flows, and the tough times pass. What’re you looking forward to?”.
That conversation has stuck with me ever since. Seasons. I had been given a powerful metaphor, a new perspective, that allowed me to recognize the cycles in my professional life, and the lives of the people on the teams I’ve served since.
Winter - Plan and Prepare
I’ve lived in Canada since 2018. Nobody is planting anything in the winter, at least not on open farmland. You can’t take action, but you can plan. You can set expectations. You can dream about the harvest you’d like to produce, and make plans for what it will take to achieve it.
Questions to ask yourself and those you support
What are you excited to achieve? To learn?
What resources will you need?
What relationships will you need to lean on?
Do you have a plan? Do you need another set of eyes on it? Do you need help building a plan together?
Spring - Put Plans into Action
If I’m planting anything in my garden, Spring is the time for it. We set things in motion by tilling the soil, picking the plan(t)s, preparing the seeds. Planning is comfortable and it’s easy to get stuck in planning forever, or make half-hearted attempts. A well executed Spring season means committing and moving decisively.
Questions to ask yourself and those you support
Which plans will you start executing now? Which ones next?
Is the environment conducive for the plans to take root? If not, what do you need to do or adjust?
What can you do to support someone on your team who is starting to set their plans into motion? They might have executed on dozens of other plans before, but maybe they are doing something new this time. What will you do to guide them?
Summer - Execute Enthusiastically and Monitor Continuously
What you’ve planted, you now need to cultivate and care for. Plants are watered, weeds and pests are kept away. If you plan to sell your produce at a market, relationships need to built and arrangements need to be made. In short, things are busy. Have a pile of podcasts and books sitting in a corner? Those are plans made in the spring for which the summer never arrived.
This can feel like a grind with nothing much to show for it. This is the season for persistence and grit, necessary to reach the finish line.
Questions to ask yourself and those you support
What’s working well? Where should we invest more?
What’s not flourishing? Is it time to adjust our approach or should we cut our losses and put an end to those plans?
Do we have what we need to finish strong?
Fall - Harvest the Results
If you’ve gone through the dream - plan - execute cycle, iterating and adjusting relentlessly, Fall is the season to reap the harvest from those efforts. If the cycle fell apart, particularly for reasons that were under your control, it can feel like “another year just flew by”, and all we can do is to watch the trees fade and find hope for the next year. Sounds depressing, but very relatable, because I’ve been here a few times myself.
Questions to ask yourself and those you support
What did we learn?
What will we do differently next time?
How did our efforts this season set us up for success for next season?
Parting thoughts
Does any of this resonate with you? You’re almost certainly in different seasons for different parts of your life. Do you recognize them well? As The Byrds would say:
To everything turn, turn, turn
There is a season turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under Heaven
A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones
A time to gather stones together