This week I’ve been doing a lot of organising. A lot of cajoling. A lot of: thank you for this, now this. I’m trying to keep my patience, keep the pressure, keep the momentum of multiple things. But I’ve also had people respond to my requests for help, and others who’ve just said nice things.

Saying nice things is underrated. Let’s do more of it.

So this week I set up a working group for a piece of work that I’m going to have almost no say in. I expect this to be incredibly hard for me. Nonetheless I’ve told people that’s what I’m going to do, so I’d better do it. The group I’ve pulled together has a great range of skills, many of which I don’t actually have. This is the essence of generalist leadership in my organisation: can I manage and lead people who have technical skills I can’t even approximate?

I think I can. I think I’m doing a good job so far. Time will tell.

I’ve got some nice comments from folks on the work I’m doing around this, and that’s been more encouraging than I expected. Some of the groups of people I’m working with are tired, and beaten up, and are lashing out. That’s not my fault, but it grinds you down, and having someone just give me a drive-by thumbs-up is genuinely doing me a world of good.

I’ve been gifted quite an incredible opportunity in this gig, and it feels so churlish to demand reassurance as well. Isn’t it enough that I get authority? But I think it’s more that I’m seeking feedback, and for a while all the feedback I got was negative. Anyway. That was a good experience.

In other work, I’m trying to hire people. This is going about as well as it can, but it’s a slog, and what’s more it’s a boring slog. I’m trying to craft good job descriptions, but I find my attention ice-skating away every time I sit down to think about it. I want to find a way to bring myself fully into it, and at the moment I’m mostly doing it with this.

I’m finding more energy than I expected in this, and it’s such a rare pleasure that it’s actually helping me to crack through the paperwork. Strong recommend.

I’ve also this week had a conversation with my skip-level. It mostly centred around the fact that I’m currently covering someone at a more senior grade, but I’m not being paid for that grade. It was a valuable conversation, even if I didn’t get an outcome I wanted. Sometimes the value of the conversation is the conversation, although sometimes it would be better if the value was also, y’know. Monetary.

Still, this is only for another four months – and at that point I can decide if I want to keep doing it. Additionally, I’ve got an interview tomorrow, so it’s possible another decision will come my way before long.

We live in hope.