Last week I wrote that when a project gets hard and progress feels slow, I take on more work instead of asking for help. I put that in public on a Friday.
By Tuesday the structure of my week was handing me every reason to do it again. By Friday I was sitting in a one on one hearing about a second problem I did not know I had.
The math
Project teams here are built for four or five people. Mine has three.
When a team is short a person, that work does not evenly redistribute. It falls on whoever knows the most about the thing in front of you. On our project right now, for a few pieces, that is me.
So the path of least resistance was obvious. Absorb the extra, move faster in the short term, look productive. It is the exact behavior I had just finished admitting was a weakness, and the situation was practically arguing for it.
What I tried
Load balancing. Deliberately letting my teammates learn the work instead of handling it myself.
I told them what I needed. Not vaguely. I said what support actually looks like for me and why it would help us hit the deliverable. That is harder than it sounds when your instinct is to go do the thing quietly.
I stopped handing over answers. When we got to the core concept behind our solution, I had a head start on it. The old version of me writes it up and presents it finished. Instead I asked them to go learn the base concept so we could build on it together.
We wrote down how we work. A session on trust and team agreements turned what I had been doing informally into something structural. Last week I wrote about trust as an equation. This was the operational version. On a three person team those agreements are not bureaucracy. They are how we hold each other accountable so all three of us grow, and how we cover a role we do not have a person for.
Something did change. They are actively understanding the solution instead of receiving it. When we talk about it now, it is a conversation rather than a briefing.
My week as a flowchart
We covered flowcharts, swimlanes, and UML this week. Mapping a process, showing who owns what, making the handoffs visible.
The whole time I kept thinking that if I diagrammed my own default behavior, it would not look like a line. It would look like a loop.
flowchart TD
A["Work lands on the team"] --> B{"Am I the one<br/>who knows it best?"}
B -->|"take it"| C["I do it myself.<br/>Fastest path today."]
C --> D["Nobody else learns it"]
D --> E["Next time I am still<br/>the only one who knows"]
E --> A
B -->|"balance it"| P["Say out loud<br/>what I need"]
P --> G["Hand over the concept,<br/>not the answer"]
G --> H["They learn it with me"]
H --> I["Next time three people<br/>can carry it"]The left path loops back to where it started. That is the part I had not seen before I drew it. Taking the work myself is not a one time cost I pay to move faster today. It is a cycle that guarantees I face the same decision again next week, with the same answer waiting, because nothing about the situation changed.
The right path ends.
Then I had my one on one
I went in with my own report ready. Here is the thing I wrote about last week, here is what I have been doing about it, here is where I think I stand. On the development rubric I put myself at proficient with room to grow on emotional intelligence and self-awareness. Patience, and meeting my teammates where they are instead of jumping in with I will just do it, went on my own list as the thing I am actively working on.
I was prepared to talk about all of that.
My program director wanted to talk about something I had not put on the list.
The thing I did not bring up
The growth area she flagged was not the work. It was my voice.
Observant, thoughtful, and tends to hold back. Other people in the room would benefit from hearing more from me, and they are not, because I do not say it.
I sat with that one, because at first it sounds like the opposite of the problem I walked in ready to discuss. How can I be the guy who takes over everything and also the guy who does not speak up?
They are the same thing.
Doing the work quietly and staying quiet in the room are both ways of skipping the exposed part. If I take the task, I never have to say I think we are heading the wrong direction. If I sit on a thought in a session, I never have to find out whether anyone disagrees with it. Both look like humility from the outside. Both are me picking the version of the situation where I cannot be wrong out loud.
Taking over is not confidence. It is the quiet option that happens to produce output.
Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
I had heard that line before. It landed differently this week, and not on the half I expected.
I have been working on the first half all week. Understand first, do not arrive with the answer already formed, let people get there with you.
The second half is the one I keep skipping. Being understood requires actually saying the thing.
The tea
High Tea started this week, which means the job I described last week as something I did not understand yet is now something I have actually done.
It turned out to be less about the guest than I expected.
It is a roundtable. Everybody sits at one table, and you introduce the person next to you and pour their tea. Literally pour it, into their cup. The host opens with the guest, it moves around the table, and the last seat comes back around to introduce the host.
Which means you cannot phone in your introduction. To introduce somebody you have to have asked them something first. The format quietly requires you to go learn a little about the person sitting beside you before you ever sit down.
We sign up and work out as a team who sits where. I keep the document that holds all of it, which this week meant building in a spot for the guest of the day and a sign-up for who helps set up.
Here is the part I did not expect. A format where every single person is handed a turn to talk still does not guarantee everybody gets heard. Making sure each person gets a fair shot, or lands a real question during the session, is an open problem we are still working on.
So I got told Friday morning that I hold back my voice, and then spent Friday afternoon inside a structure purpose built to give everyone one, watching it not entirely solve the problem either.
If a format designed specifically for this still has to be worked at, my own quiet is not going to fix itself by accident.
Nobody asked for the recap one sheeter. I started making them after a session because of what I want them to be good for later. My hope is that six weeks from now somebody in my cycle hits a situation, remembers a guest who talked about exactly that, and can pull up the profile I built instead of trying to remember a conversation from a Thursday in September.
My program director read it as something that could become a running record people come back to, for reference or for motivation. That is close enough to what I was going for that I am going to keep making them.
The hard part is not the writing. It is staying present. I have to catch everything with weight to it while also actually being in the room getting something out of it myself. Those two modes fight each other.
Thursday guest was Dominic Barrett, a Cycle 5 graduate who works as a photographer and a software engineer.
Friday was Shanda McConnell, who runs corporate relations here. Twenty-one years at one firm, then fourteen months of getting to this one. She organizes what she says yes to around an acronym she has been carrying for about a decade: BEE. Build, equip, empower. If something does not fit, she has learned to decline it, even for a season.
The line I wrote down came out of a stretch when she was working sixty and seventy hour weeks and could not physically be everywhere she needed to be. She had to start asking her community for help, and she was honest that it was hard at the time.
Asking for help is a sign of wisdom, not weakness.
I have spent two weeks now writing publicly about a pattern where I take on more work instead of asking for help. On Friday morning I got told I also do not speak up enough. On Friday afternoon a guest sat down and said that.
I did not go looking for it. I just happened to be the one taking notes.
Looking ahead to week three
Two things to carry forward, and only one of them is new.
Keep load balancing, and find out whether it holds when a deadline gets close and the fastest path is to take the work back. Look at the flowchart again. The left branch is not there because I am careless. It is there because it works, right up until it does not.
And start talking. Not more words, just the ones I am currently swallowing. If I have a read on something in a session, say it in the session.
I do not know how either goes. I will report back.
If someone told you that you both take over too much and speak up too little, would you have seen those as the same problem? I did not, until this week.
Week three goes up next Friday.
