Add San Diego blog post

_posts/2024-11-08-san-diego.md

@@ -0,0 +1,59 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: San Diego
+date: 2024-11-08 00:00:00
+description: >
+  Reflections on the COO Leadership Development Program at Autodesk
+
+tags:
+ - leadership
+---
+
+All has been quiet on the blogging front, since life has been busy: on top of my wife and I moving houses in August, as
+part of the COO Leadership Development Program (LDP) at Autodesk I had the opportunity to travel to to
+[Tokyo](/2024/06/tokyo) in May, met with my business challenge team in London in July, and experienced the culmination
+of our program with a presentation of in beautiful San Diego before AU, _the_ Design and Make conference.
+
+At the beginning of our LDP program, one of our senior leaders Haresh Khoobchandani told us a
+[parable](https://www.learnreligions.com/empty-your-cup-3976934) of a zen master who instructed his student to "empty
+his cup" (metaphorically speaking) so that he could be open to learning new ideas — I found this to be a very apt way
+to put it, and was something I found to be very true of my personal leadership journey during this program.
+
+I'd go as far as to say that I had to "unlearn" some things I had learned in the past, in order to learn anew.
+
+Since the early days of my career, I've been largely a self-learner and have picked up many a book on software
+engineering and technology, and in recent years, many a book on technical leadership. I had little mentorship early
+on, but like most people thrust into a "staff engineer" type of role, I had very little guidance to lean on — I found
+solace in the writings of technical leadership books by the likes of Camille Fournier, Will Larson and others.
+
+To suddenly find myself in a scenario where I wasn't trying to teach myself leadership on my own, but had mentors in the
+form of our amazing leadership coach [Geoff Scales](https://www.dialogik.ca/), and our amazing internal leadership and
+coaches who supported the program, was not something I was used to, and as I went through the program, I realized it was
+an unprecedented opportunity.
+
+To that end, one of the pieces of coaching that really resonated with me was: you'll get out of the LDP program what you
+put into it. I was fortunate to have an organizational leadership chain that truly allowed me the space and time to put
+in a lot of energy into the LDP program, and the benefits will carry with me for a long time to come.
+
+With that, I have a few personal takeaways I want touch on (even though it’' hard to whittle it down to just a few),
+both for my own reflection, and in the hopes that someone else out there reading this has one or more of these resonate
+with them.
+
+I'm a perfectionist by nature, and it was abundantly clear in my 360 assessment I took for the LDP program that
+perfection was the strongest "Reactive" behavior I had.
+
+Close on the heels of being a perfectionist is a struggle with balance (a creative behavior, which you want to
+maximize) — when you do have perfectionist tendencies, it is also natural tendency to pour yourself into projects with
+undue amounts of time and energy that would otherwise be better spent.
+
+Throughout the LDP program I learned that by leaning on the strengths of others, I could bring my own strengths to bear
+on the challenges that we were solving for, and that allowed me to let go of some of the perfectionist tendencies that
+I would normally have, which there in turn led to better balance; this was especially helpful given the nature of our
+business challenge for the program, which had no "perfect" answers to seek.
+
+To wrap up my thoughts around LDP, I would quote the title of Michael Lopp's book: "The Art of Leadership: Small Things,
+Done Well" — I am used to software engineering where there is a discrete set of activities that one can do to
+successfully build a given piece of software and deliver it to the world, and to that end, though it is not as "binary"
+and straight-forward as the 1's and 0's of the software world, there are a lot of small things we can do well in our
+leadership journey to successfully build a culture and deliver it to our organizations that we serve, in order to better
+realize both our own potential, and the potential of the individuals we are leading.