The work is (often) people

Being a manager or leader or whatever – being a person who works across multiple teams and attempts to help them all do something good together – I occasionally get asked to participate in forums outside of my own team. This is quite fun. It is also entirely logical: if this place is going to function, information needs to flow across a vast set of semi-independent fiefdoms. The bridges necessary to make that happen aren’t going to build themselves. Accomplishing this sometimes means going to Leeds.

This past week I travelled up north to take part in an away day run by the Digital Prevention Services team. Most of the day was run as an unconference in which I hosted a little session about the NHS App. I was hoping to start getting non-App teams comfortable with the idea that we are exploring changes that could have consequences for them and solicit feedback on what we should be careful about. It was very fun and I think I achieved enough of both goals. Massive thanks to everyone who participated and asked great questions.

Toward the end of the day everyone in attendance had a conversation about leadership and what it means to them. This was the best part of the day for me (expertly prompted and facilitated by Emily). During the session, I tried to describe what I love about being a quote-unquote leader. The story went something like:

• I love getting to see people flourish
• Establishing the conditions for that to happen is central to how I see my job
• To enable growth you first need to get to know people as people: you need to understand their personalities and what drives them
• Getting to that point means that you need to get them to open up emotionally and so far as I can tell this is best done by doing the same yourself
• That is to say: you need to develop a real, trusting relationship
• When that happens, there is a tendency to become their therapist
• I’m not really sure what to do about that

Taking on everyone else’s emotional complications and difficulties can be draining (duh). While I find this mode of activity more tiring than doing detailed design work it can be just as fulfilling. Once upon a time, when I was a young designer who just wanted to make things all day with no end, I didn’t expect that I would ever feel this way. I am an inveterate perfecter-of-things and craft-based design work fits me like a glove. Work that is about people and their emotions and dreams and fears doesn’t come as naturally in part because you can’t perfect people. The element of this work that my younger self didn’t know about – and didn’t know I could take energy from – was what it would feel like to be trusted enough to engage, and be engaged, in this way.

It is easy to reduce our work to the obvious material outputs – the reports, prototypes, business cases, etc. – but the ultimate endeavour is first and foremost a means through which people try to understand and shape the world. It just so happens to be done for money with a bunch of people you probably don’t know particularly well. That situation often results in conflict and misunderstanding and frustration, all ingredients that tend to lead to a therapist’s couch. Or me.

We don’t talk about this very much. HR says stuff like “take care of yourself first”, and yes, of course we should. They do mean it, but they also don’t tell you how to be there for people, how to help them grow, how to advocate for them with all of the force that is necessary if any of this is going to pay off without also burning out. Most organisations I’ve worked for are set up to produce outputs. The machine expects it, craves it even. That same machine does not truly expect serious emotional labour in pursuit of human betterment. Attempting to achieve that is, shall we say, rather difficult if you maintain an active interest in not becoming a drained husk who just wants to stare at a wall for five hours after getting home because your limbic system is absolutely fried.

There might be other ways to approach the work, but I haven’t found them yet. I’m not actively trying though and right now I don’t think I need to. Getting to do this work is a privilege and thus (to me) worth the cost. I get to be a facilitator of the massive project of making the health service better via the people it is composed by. To semi-misquote Kyla Scanlon,

I think we often forget that [work] is really a bunch of people peopling around and trying to make sense of this world.