“It was one of the few missions that went off on schedule.”
… It was October of 1984. I had helped lead a team to design an experiment that was flying in Space! I watched STS 41-G launch. With my parents. I flew them down to watch the launch with me. We had to get up at 3 am to get on the bus to go to the launch site – 3 miles away for the 7am launch. It was not very loud… in fact, we went back to the Kennedy Space Center visitor center… and the movie inside was MUCH louder 😉
…the job only you know how to do…
There is a job on your plate right now that has been yours so long nobody else knows how it works. The vendor relationship. The release checklist. The quarterly number you rebuild by hand every 90 days. You have been carrying it alone because handing it over feels slower than doing it. And it is, the first time.
The tech leaders I coach are the worst at this, and I was too. We got promoted because we could do the hard thing ourselves, and we keep doing it long after the team could. The cost never shows up on a dashboard. It shows up at 10 at night, in the Space where your family should be, and in the person on your team who never got the chance.
…the friend who managed the band, then had to step back…
Phil Harvey and Chris Martin were friends at school from the age of 13. Phil went to Oxford to read Greek and Latin, dropped out to manage Coldplay, and paid for their first record, the Safety EP, in 1998. He managed the band through its first records, then stepped back in the early 2000s, because managing them on his own had become too much. He came back a few years later as creative director, took over as manager again in 2022, and is so much a part of the band that he is often called its fifth member. He shares the 2004 Grammy for Record of the Year for Clocks.
Hand the job over while you still have the energy to manage the handoff.
…to manage is to let go of the controls…
To manage is to get work done through other people. Not around them, and not after hours while they sleep. It means building enough Space into your week that the work can move into someone else’s hands, and trusting them enough to let them drop it once.
The roadblock is the story you tell yourself: it is faster if I do it. It is, this week. By next quarter it is the reason you cannot take a vacation, and the reason the best person on your team starts taking calls from recruiters. A leader who never hands anything over is not protecting the work. They are capping it at their own capacity.
…a painting, a boldness, and a first No. 1…
Viva la Vida came out as a single on May 25, 2008, and gave Coldplay their first No. 1 in both the UK and the US, the first British act to top both charts at once since Rod Stewart in 1971. Chris Martin took the title from Frida Kahlo’s last painting, which he saw at her museum in Mexico. “I just loved the boldness of it,” he said.
It won the Grammy for Song of the Year. By then Phil Harvey was back with the band, in the creative director’s chair. The friend who had stepped away because he was carrying it all alone came back to a job with a different shape, and has stayed for 2 decades since. And a cautionary tale for today – It also features the lyrics of a speech that King Louis XVI of France wanted to deliver to his people – just before they cut his head off…
I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning, I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own
…the 2 machines I managed to bring home…
After the launch, we drove down to Boca Raton – where the PC was developed by IBM, and we had lived when I was in 6th – 7th grades… where I watched the first Moon landing on a 9 inch Black and White TV… I was there to pick up the unannounced PC/AT – the first PC that we had started prototyping the Space version from. I had convinced them to let us have 2 of them, and we checked them as baggage as we flew back to Texas. It was a special 386 version of the PC/AT that would be eventually announced in 1987… and is still flying the Space Station today…
By late 1984, I was leading the construction of a laboratory of elements to demonstrate our approach to computing on the Space Station. It involved a lot of things around us now – fiber optic networks, fault tolerant computing, flat panel displays… and I was leading it in a way that I would soon learn was not scalable… because I wasn’t managing… I was doing… Luckily, the punishment from the team was not as bad as King Louis…
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: Hand 1 job you have carried alone for a month to someone on your team today, and tell them, out loud, why it is theirs now.
If you are not sure which job to hand over first, or to whom, let’s work out how to manage the handoff together. Schedule time with me here.
Let someone else run the next launch, and watch them sing… Viva la Vida
