There’s something very meta about creating and writing down the rules and metrics that will be used to evaluate myself and my teammates. I never had a chance to do that before. In my previous roles I either had a set of requirements set by my boss and their boss, or only a vague unspoken sense of what I’m supposed to do. This is different from anything I’ve experienced.
The rubric I’m creating is the ideal, something that even the best performers on our team aren’t meeting yet. I don’t think anyone is ever going to meet all these goals at 100%, and if they do, we’ll likely need to come up with better ones. Nothing makes work more enjoyable than the desire and capacity to grow.
At the same time, knowing that someone will use this rubric to evaluate my performance, it takes a lot of courage to add things that I’m not currently good at. I know I’m going to have uncomfortable conversations about these. I’m gonna keep these questions anyway, cause the only way this can succeed is if we’re all absolutely honest.
This experience is stretching my comfort zone in many ways, and there will be much more to come. I’ll need to incorporate feedback from both my leads and my teammates, and then iterate on it as we go. There might be obstacles on the way that I can’t even yet predict.
But it also makes me incredibly grateful that I am given this chance to clarify what our work is and should actually be about. Of course we all knew who’s doing a great job, but we had no idea what exactly it is of the things they’re doing that makes them great.
This makes both training and onboarding new team members quite challenging. In a traditional office knowledge transfer can perhaps be osmosis, but in a fully remote company like ours we need to be super clear about where we want to get and where each of us is standing.
I can’t wait to see how this evolves.