A personal note on engineering, autonomy and knowing when to get out of the way.
Not a CV. Not a performance review. Certainly not a management handbook.
I find problems. I question constraints. I learn the machinery. I improve what I can. I sometimes get ahead of the people and processes around me, and that can be both useful and difficult.
Good leadership doesn't have to change my nature. It has to help make the consequences constructive.
And I have to do my part.
Charlotte Brontë's Shirley drew its Yorke family from my own Taylor family of Gomersal. I've visited Red House and know the family connection firsthand.
Hiram Yorke was described as “difficult to lead, and impossible to drive.”
I prefer it without the conjunction:
Difficult to lead. Impossible to drive.
It's an uncomfortably accurate description of how I've moved through work for decades.
I've repeatedly been hired for a defined role and ended up doing something adjacent, broader, or altogether different.
Not because I have a grand career plan. Usually because I've found a problem nobody is properly addressing, or a possibility that the current operating model can't quite see.
I follow the work that needs doing.
That can make me difficult to manage. At one previous company, one founder hired me to shake things up; his brother, who managed me, concluded I couldn't be managed. They weren't necessarily disagreeing about the facts. They had different expectations of the job.
I've had good managers, too. They understand that autonomy is not an exemption from accountability. It's often the condition under which I do my best work.