Something I've been thinking about for a while, and never quite written down, is how much of who I've been at work has been determined not by what I'm capable of but by what the organizations around me decided IT was.
I want to say this honestly, partly because it's been sitting in me for years and partly because some of the people who've worked for me might read it, and the version I'd want them to read isn't a polished argument about organizational behavior. It's closer to a confession.
For most of my career I've been pulled into whatever shape the place I was working at expected of an IT person. When I was somewhere that treated IT as a service function, I became service-shaped. The questions I got asked were operational. The fires I put out were operational. The praise I got, on the rare occasions it came, was for restoring service quickly. The version of me that wanted to think about architecture, security posture, organizational risk, or where the institution was headed in five years had no real place to put that thinking, so over time it got quieter. It didn't disappear. It receded.
When I've been somewhere that treated IT as something more than that, the same effect ran the other way. I was invited into conversations I wouldn't otherwise have been part of. The questions got bigger. The thinking I'd kept to myself for years suddenly had a place to land, and I found that the version of me that had been waiting wasn't quite as ready as I'd assumed it was, because it had been underused for so long. The reps come from being treated as someone who does the work, not from privately believing you could.
I want to be careful not to make this sound like a story about being held back, or about places that didn't appreciate what I could do. That framing flatters the person telling it, and I don't trust it. The truer version is that I went along with the shapes I was put into more than I'd have liked, that I noticed it less in the moment than I do in retrospect, and that some of the years I spent inside a particular kind of expectation are years that produced a particular kind of me. Some of that me is good. Some of it is narrower than I'd have chosen if I'd been more deliberate about my own development.
I think this happens to most IT people, and I think it happens worst to the ones who are good at the job they were initially hired into. The reward for being a strong service-function IT person is more service work. The reward for being a strong infrastructure engineer is more infrastructure work. The organization is, in a sense, optimizing for keeping you where you're effective, and your effectiveness in the current shape is the very thing that makes the organization reluctant to put you into a different one. The career consequence is that the people who are most capable of growing in a particular environment are often the ones most likely to stay narrow in it, because the environment likes them too much in the shape they're already in.
I've watched this happen to people I've managed. I've watched it happen to myself.
The thing I most want to say to the people who've reported to me, if any of them end up reading this, is that I've thought about this question more than I usually let on. The version of leadership I tried to practice, when I was at my best, was an attempt to make the function around you wider than it strictly needed to be. I wanted there to be room. I wanted you to be asked questions you weren't strictly required to answer, given assignments that were stretches, brought into conversations that were above your formal level, because I knew from my own career that the shape you're given is the shape you eventually become, and I didn't want the shape I was offering you to be too small.
I don't know how well I did at this. The feedback loop on whether the environment a manager builds is good for the long-term development of their people is years long, and most of the data lives in the heads of the people who left and went on to do other things. Some of you stayed and grew in the place. Some of you left and grew elsewhere. Some of you may have grown in spite of me rather than because of me, and I've thought about that too. The work of managing people honestly includes the possibility that you didn't get it right, and most of the times you didn't, nobody will tell you.
What I can say with more confidence is that I tried. The structural choices I made about how the function was organized, the kinds of work I directed your way, the assignments I tried to get you invited into, those were, at their best, attempts to give you a wider shape to grow into than the bare requirements of the role suggested. Whether they landed depends on the person, the timing, and how much room there was in your life for stretch at the moment I was offering it. I didn't always read those things correctly. I'm sure there were times I pushed when I should have held back, and times I held back when I should have pushed, and I won't know the full balance of those errors for a long time, if ever.
The version of me that has been showing up to work most days is a version that grew out of a particular set of expectations over a particular set of years. It's not the whole of me. It's also not separate from me. The thing about shape-following is that the shapes you take don't sit on top of who you are like clothing. They become part of you. I'll carry parts of this shape into whatever comes next, and parts of the next shape will start replacing parts of this one, and some of that exchange will be conscious and most of it won't.
What I'd want anyone who's worked for me to know, reading this, is that the dynamic I'm describing was always something I tried to push against on your behalf, even when I wasn't pushing against it hard enough on my own. The function I tried to build was meant to give you room to grow into something larger than the role required. Whether that's how it landed is a question only you can answer. I hope it landed at least partly right.
If there's any advice in this, it's this. The shapes you take on at work are real, they last longer than you think, and they don't come off easily. The version of you that exists three jobs from now is being assembled, in part, by the environment you're in today. Choose the environment carefully. Resist the pull toward narrowing when you feel it. Notice when an organization is asking less of you than you're capable of giving, and notice when one is asking more, and treat the second condition as a gift even when it's exhausting.
And if you have a manager who's trying, in some clumsy way, to leave more room than the role requires, give them the benefit of the doubt. They probably can't tell you directly what they're doing, because the language for it is awkward and the gesture loses something when it's made explicit. They're trying to keep you wide. Whether they succeed depends as much on what you do with the space as on what they offer.
I tried. I'm still trying. I'm grateful for the people who let me try on them.
— Chris