My thoughts are mixed and maybe a little unique. In November 2016 I launched this blog thing to help “release” my creative side. A year earlier I realized I had a passion that I had not made much of an effort to chase during the 32 prior years of my professional life. I call this “the time my right brain exploded”. I then came upon a great opportunity with a job role at my current place of employment, “Director of Transformation”, which let my right brain do what it wanted to do. It gave me one of the most intriguing years of my life.
The blog is a component of all this right brain creative “fluffy stuff” as some call it, that I was releasing – preaching in fact (I’ll share my thoughts on the fluffy stuff in detail in a future blog). I got all wrapped up into the blogging. I was rockin’ and rolling, running hard and fast, burning up the keyboard. I posted 7 blogs in 5 days. It was great. The holidays came, life got hectic, the New Year came and the excitement of what 2017 was going to bring was overwhelming. I had a bunch of ideas. I started a list of topics to write about. But I didn’t blog after November 10th. I kept up the writing, but I just didn’t take time to upload to the site, I kept thinking about the site’s format (I’m not overly keen on it), and trying to come up with another way to improve the visible appeal, the aesthetics of the site itself.
So I didn’t post any blogs in December or in January until today, the last day of the month…and this month brought some unexpected changes and complexity in my professional life that came about unexpectedly.
That new role I referenced above, the Director of Transformation? Well I didn’t make up the title, it was assigned to me as my company reorganized job roles and descriptions, job stages (levels, pay grades, etc.), and the 
associated competencies required for the entire company (~100,000 employees). I liked the title. However, there were a number of my peers and co-workers that felt the word “transformation” made them and others nervous…alluding to layoffs. I didn’t feel this way and it honestly surprised me.
I attended some training in early December and there was another colleague of mine in the training with me that I had not worked with in a few years. When we caught up on what we were doing and I told him my current job title, he said something on the order of, “oh, you’re the hatchet guy now? You’re working on who stays and who gets cut?”
Wow.
I sure didn’t think that way and it couldn’t have been farther from reality. In my role, I was part of a team that was responsible for the creation and integration of a new internal organization. We were “transforming” the org from what it was before to something new that supported the company’s overall strategy. We weren’t looking at who needed to be laid off as part of a cost saving reduction. As a matter of fact, we continuously went through gyrations of strategery to understand the requirements of the strategy, and realizing that we did not have enough resources to accomplish what was needed to integrate the changes needed to align to the company’s strategy.
Funny thing (not) happened a couple weeks back. The company did in fact transform a bit. It was done with layoffs. I’m no longer a Director of Transformation. Boy did I miss the memo, huh?
My last post was about
the elevator pitch. I thought it was a little clever, not a whole lot of meat, but hopefully interesting to some. I stated some 2 months ago that CEP 1.0 (Cary’s Elevator Pitch, first
edition) was not quite ready for publishing. Well, it’s ready and will be launched in a couple of days. Opportunities are out there and the transformation starts now. I’m looking out the windshield and not in the mirror. I believe I’ll be looking back on this with a big ass smile. Stay tuned.
(Oh, please note that I did not miss out on posting something in January, and I don’t plan on missing out on the opportunity to let my right brain loose going forward – ever again.)
Cary
LinkedIn: CaryNoel_LinkedIn
Twitter: CaryNoel_Twitter