Ideal Jobs and Superpowers

As I've been looking for my next role, I've had to think about what my "ideal job" might look like. I've also had to think about what my "superpower" is: what I uniquely bring to a hiring organization. I don't know that I have a complete answer, but I reached a few conclusions recently.

My ideal job is to take on a broken-but-fixable organization and bring it to where it doesn't need heroism to survive day-to-day. My superpower is to create the organizational bandwidth to make that happen.

Hard task becomes routine: 7000 checks/hour and no writer's cramp!

My superpower

I have a better feel for my superpower and my ideal job is to use that superpower for good, so I'll talk about the power first. Throughout my career, I have delivered analysis, reports, and results at a quality at least as strong as my peers', but with significantly fewer hours on those tasks. For the "normal" tasks that take up the bulk of my day, I made them quick and routine to free up my time and mental energy for the hard problems that needed them...and then I made the solutions for those hard problems quick and routine too.

It took me a while to realize I was doing this. I knew that the work was hard and could demand long hours, but I'd see people struggling with their PowerPoint presentations or frantically updating their "integrated master schedules" before meeting with the customer, and I wasn't. I managed my projects using my master schedule, and my presentations were often screenshots or pasted excerpts from those schedules. I used this organization when expediting, managing change, following up with my team, identifying source-of-supply risks, and in many other circumstances. I had more time and better tools to highlight where my projects or teams were struggling and could focus on those issues.

Once I had my routine time-sucks under control and the real issues identified, I then spent more time on those with the intent of making their solutions routine and automated too. A motto at my old company which quickly disappeared was "uneventful days": people would need to put in the hours and effort at their jobs, but there shouldn't be the frantic firefighting and heroism that was required when processes were out of control. The motto disappeared because senior management wasn't able to make it happen, but the idea still resonates with me. It's how I ended up with a way to capture quoting data that was previously lost (leading to more work, higher costs, and late deliveries), and characterize our late-order-placement issues so we could zero in on solutions. I wrote dozens of job instructions on the various risk-reduction actions we would take when I was running the Supply Chain Work Transfer team because I wanted to make the days less eventful.

My ideal job

This is where I still struggle. I don't think I'm at the pinnacle of my career yet. I have a target organizational level in mind (director / vice-president) and some features of the job (working with direct reports, ideally in manufacturing and/or aerospace), but the specifics are harder. I have a broad base of functional experience across supply chain, operations, and customer-facing roles, and have enjoyed aspects of them all.

But when I think of what I've enjoyed most, it's been those initial runs at the problems before I've gotten everything down to a routine. When I was a Program Manager and had to work with the team to turn napkin-drawings into machined pieces of steel, that inherently cool but also gave me an excuse to build and use a "bill of material tracker" that tracked our status towards releasing engineering drawings, requests for quote, purchase orders, and many other details towards the customer's final delivery date. We could know with precision how on-time or late we were multiple years out, and pinpoint it to specific part numbers. We could also compare recurring and non-recurring costs with the original proposal and as-negotiated contract. I rebuilt the Change Board process to make it actually effective and take less of everyone's time. And when our suppliers were falling behind, I would go out to work with them directly to understand the problems and push whatever changes I could through the engineering and supply chain processes.

When I entered the work Transfer team in Supply Chain, no one knew which parts were being transferred. Given a few days, I could poll the various project managers, who would pull all of the project documents and then give me a list, but nothing was maintained in real time. And if I wanted to know any additional detail, I'd have to go around again. Every time an internal customer asked for a report, it was another difficult task for the team. I created a centralized database for every part number we were transferring and helped the team maintain it. This started as a pretty "dumb" tracker, but features kept adding up. I trained the customers to come to me for status requests and I could turn most of them around in minutes without bothering the project managers. I had data on schedules and costs that we could use to drive our metrics and focus our activities. And as long as the data in the tracker was maintained, the team's weekly bullet-point updates and every-other-week management presentation could be generated automatically. More data for me and the organization and fewer interruptions for the project managers (as well as less time making reports!).

So that's what I want to do again: an organization or team in a hard spot that needs help turning that hard spot into routine. I'll coach and develop the team, drive tool development, and see the team able to focus on the next hard problem.

So, who has a team of sharp people in an impossible spot?