My changing workplace – part 9: An “Individual Contributor” in the second half of 00s and early 10s

Time for another change of role and a change of working practice.

Having spent much of the early 00s on the road building a visiting a team across several sites in the UK a change of role brought a change of working location.

The change came after I realised that I wasn’t really cut out to be a full-time people manager. The team wanted a team leader; I was constantly being distracted by the interesting technical stuff. It was a mindset thing. Given a burgeoning list of things to do I would avoid, at all costs, those administrative ones that were really important to people. The thought of fighting with the organisation to get some training approved filled me with dread. This was especially so when the choice was between expenses and a customer with a high-priority red-hot complex incident that needed someone to dive in deep. The team deserved better than I was shaped to give them.

It was about this time that the term “individual contributor” was going through a resurgence. Here was a definition that I could identify with. There was a realisation that I didn’t need to be a manager to gain salary, achieve recognition, or any of those other reasons why people stay at their level of incompetence. As an individual contributor I could feed my family and do a job that I enjoyed.

I became aware of an opportunity to join the team that was helping one of our biggest customers define their strategy and to govern the technical side of a large portfolio of projects. Brilliant, an individual contributor role, bringing high value to an important customer, but what did I know about strategy and governance? As it turns out, I knew about as much as everyone else and while that wasn’t a lot, it was a massive opportunity to learn.

The other huge advantage to this role was the location. It was based in an office just a couple of miles from my house. Physical meetings were still dominant, but the teleconference was starting to become mainstream. These were the days when special people were issued with a conference number and a pin. If you weren’t special-enough you would have to borrow someone else’s number or schedule time using the team number. When the time for the meeting came you would reach for your desk phone, if you were fortunate, you’d put on your headset, and you’d dial, dial and dial. First was the number for the external conferencing service, then the number for the meeting, then your pin. The conference service would likely ask you several questions about the meeting and then you’d be in. If you were fortunate no-one else was using your number, if they were you’d have to politely point out that you had need for your number and that they should go elsewhere. You’d then wait for others to join which was indicated by a beep, or if you’d set it up that way, they would announce themselves with a recording of their name.

You’d have to do a rollcall to work out who you had, if it was a sensitive meeting you’d check the number of people on the meeting with the rollcall. The two never rarely first time around, so you’d try again. Eventually you’d convince yourself that you’d got the people you were expecting.

If there was a group of people in a room they would join from a spider phone from which the sound would be terrible. The meeting would be peppered with people saying “John/Mary please get closed to the microphone” or “Can whoever is eating crisps next to the spider phone please stop it or move the phone” or “Whoever is having a separate meeting in the meeting room please go elsewhere to have it.”

In the situations where most of the people were in a meeting room and you were the one who was on the phone you had no chance of being an active participant. The best you could hope for was that people would forget you were there.

The desk-phone headphones were all uncomfortable. They were made of materials that made your ears bake. They had heavy cables that pulled down on one side of your neck. The sound quality was, at best, poor. There was no volume normalisation, and you’d go from listening intently to catch a word to having your eardrums blown out by that colleague who was related to Brian Blessed.

We’ve still not fixed some of these issues.

Yet, despite all the drawbacks this was now the standard way to work in an organisation with multiple locations.

I would spend several hours of every day dialling into calls with different teams, contributing to the project or problem that they were working on.

This was also the era of the mobile phone car kit. While Bluetooth existed, it wasn’t mainstream enough to be standard in most cars. If you wanted to use your mobile in the car you needed to get a kit fitted for your specific make and model of mobile phone. Using a phone without a handsfree capability, while driving, became illegal in the UK in 2003.

As I look back on it, I see how deadly the combination of these two things was. Mobile phone access in your car, conference calls on your mobile. How any of us survived that distracted era is a miracle, several did not.

There was also a couple of changes in the major mobile phone manufacturers during this time, the emergence of the laptop as the standard device for most workers, the explosion of home internet and the growth of Instant Messaging.

However, I’m already over 1,000 words so I think I’ll leave those thoughts for another day. Oh, also, what I did and how I went about it changed significantly.

My changing workplace:

• part 1: The 1980′s
• part 2: Into the 90′s
• part 3: The mid-to-late 90′s
• part 4: Connecting across the 90′s
• part 5: Client-server 90′s
• part 6: Outsourcing 90′s
• part 7: The late 90′s
• part 8: 00’s on the road
• 13 year gap…
• part 9: An “Individual Contributor” in the second half of 00s and early 10s

Header Image: Out and about in the local farmland this hansome fella wanted to say hello. Thankfully there is a wall betwen the two of us.