It's a wrap!

This is it! The final regular post on this blog and my reflection on the year just past. I am mirroring my first post by posting on a Friday rather than my normal Wednesday schedule. That first post was delayed as I procrastinated over the name of my blog. After running down the clock until the end of the first week of January, I decided to stick with the title “Above Middling Management” as I had no better alternatives. In hindsight the name didn’t really matter as I don’t think many readers noticed it. This week I have delayed until Friday to avoid the holidays, but it also seems appropriate to be posting on the final Friday of the year.

In the end I reached 186 subscribers on Substack, which is significantly beyond the top end of my modest expectations when I started. If I had got to twenty, I would have been happy. Interestingly I have picked up three new subscribers in the last week, just in time for my last post. Feeling a little sorry that they were joining just as I was winding down gave me the idea for this week’s post. No one wants to read a whole post of me gushing about the experience of blogging and my own personal growth. Instead, I thought I would pull out the posts that I consider to be the most interesting and explain why. For new readers this gives them an easy way to navigate to things they may find useful. For regular readers I will provide some additional context and hopefully draw this blog to a satisfying conclusion.

Let’s start with a truism, there are very few original ideas. Most inventions and thoughts build on what went before. I have never pretended that my blog is original. I haven’t copied or plagiarized anyone else’s work, but I have observed myself and others and tried to make sense of what I have seen and experienced. I am the human equivalent of a magpie, collecting examples of actions that are effective and actions that are counterproductive. Amusingly, a colleague suggested that my introductory post used similar devices to the Ishmael books by Daniel Quinn, which I had just finished reading and had recommended. I took this as a compliment as the books are fantastic, genuinely thought provoking and I recommend them to everyone. But I was also a little disappointed that even my writing style appeared to be low grade knock-off of someone else’s work. My disappointment and fears subsided as I found my own style. In fact, one of the biggest sources of satisfaction is that when I read and edit my work, it is an accurate expression of my personality. It’s like hearing yourself speak without having to hear the actual sound of your voice (which like most people I hate). It is also this revelation that has stopped me from using AI to generate content or edit my posts.

There was one post that I do consider to be a completely original idea, in fact the only truly original idea across the 52 weeks. It’s probably important to start with your strongest card and this was my second post and the first real topic after the introduction. I called it the “Only Tell Me Twice Rule” and it was a mechanism I developed to give me the necessary confidence in my own management skills to do my job effectively. The post expanded on this idea to try and improve communication skills in general. As I was reflecting on this post I start thinking about the question: what one thing do your colleagues need to know about you to be able to work effectively as a team? This post is my answer to that question. I will go out of my way to help colleagues, but if they need more than two attempts to explain a business issue, I will conclude that they either don’t understand the issue, they can’t communicate effectively or both. Given that you can only help solve a problem if you understand what it is, this rule helps to direct efforts to tackle issues more effectively.

Even though my second post is my most original thought and chronologically the first real post, it is not the first post I recommend to new readers. Instead, I prefer to recommend my post on Networking. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, it is not something that I consider myself to be particularly good at. Secondly, the person who I have observed doing it well, is not aware that she is good at it either. If someone is effortlessly good at something and isn’t doing it for its own sake, they make a great subject for observation because you can learn so much from what they do, why they do it and why it works. In the case of networking, it is my wife who is an unwitting expert in this field. Her love of Pilates has driven her to seek out mentors and experts and to connect with them through a joint passion for Pilates. The most important lesson, and what makes it authentic, is that she is connecting with people without any expectation of gaining something in return.

The post that seemed to have the most resonance was my post on Confidence. I think most people suffer from Imposter Syndrome at some point and so it is a subject that quickly connects people through a shared experience. It’s also something that is as important in day-to-day life as it is in the workplace, and I know in one instance this post was shared with someone who was still at school. The fact that confidence is 100% a construct of the mind gives us both a high degree of control over how confident we feel, whilst also the helpless feeling of being trapped by our own minds and the stubborn patterns of our thinking. At the end of the day, we need confidence to be our best selves and in this post I share my own levers and triggers for strengthening my confidence when needed.

There are a few posts that can easily be grouped together. I wrote three posts on meetings. The first was on tyranny of meetings and the fact that they are often not well managed, an inefficient use of time, and what could be done to make them more effective. The second was an appeal for people to speak up during meetings. Last week whilst sitting in a bar I found someone had turned “would you rather?” into a board game and my wife and I had fun asking each other questions whilst waiting for the rest of our party to arrive. My “would you rather?” question for meetings is would you rather regret not speaking up and subsequently finding that your idea was important, or regret speaking up and saying something that was incorrect? I know I would rather speak up and risk saying something totally stupid than live with the regret of not saying something that turned out to be important. The third post is a practical guide on how to speak up in meetings. This one was fun to write as there are a bunch of simple tips and tricks that often get overlooked. I got plenty of feedback from people at work who referenced this post in our next meeting and then started using my Jedi mind tricks against me. These were simultaneously proud and frustrating moments! Letting everyone know that my right eyebrow betrays my inner thoughts left me feeling very exposed.

I have written three posts on moving and working abroad (here, here and here). These are a little niche as not everyone plans to move abroad, but as an expat of 13 years I have firsthand experience and hope that it helps those who are considering the change. I like these posts as all of them focus on areas that don’t get much attention. I wasn’t told any of this information before moving to Hong Kong in November 2011. All of it was picked up through personal experience and learning through mistakes and is hopefully valuable information to some people who are just starting their journeys.

Some of the posts which cover topics that may seem mundane, may actually be the most useful from a practical perspective. In these posts I attempt to reshape how we think about specific business processes to give ourselves a competitive edge or drive us to a higher level of performance. Specifically, the posts on writing a resumé, writing a self-appraisal and setting annual objectives all fall into this category. The latter two we are usually required to complete annually; the first one is more of an as-required process. With a bit of time and effort we can shape each of these to get the maximum benefit. By writing a self-appraisal properly, we can craft a narrative around our performance for the year. This can help when we need to update our resumés as we can collate those narratives together and put our careers-to-date into context for prospective employers. Finally, if we can set objectives that really motivate us, we can use this tool to push our career in the direction of our choice and accelerate our development.

I would like to wrap this us by referring to one last post. In my post on Success, I boiled down the essence of being successful to the following idea: do what you are meant to do in a way that makes brings you satisfaction. This blog has given me everything that I wanted from the experience and has given me far more satisfaction than I expected when I started. It has opened conversations and reconnected me with people from earlier in my career and it has allowed me to reflect on my own career to date. The idea for the blog originated from a mentoring relationship and the thought that I might be able to scale this by sharing my thoughts more widely. What I have realized in the last week is that I have been self-mentoring and relearning from my own experiences and mistakes. I thought I was providing something that I wished existed at the beginning of my career, but the act of refreshing my memory and writing my thoughts down has provided me with a resource that is if anything more useful to me today. Wherever you are in your careers, I hope that something I have written over the last year has been useful and repaid the investment in time.

I won’t be regularly posting going into 2025, but I will update as I grapple with my new resolution to publish a book from this blog. This blog is not going anywhere, so please feel free to share with anyone who may find it useful. More importantly, I hate goodbyes. If you are dealing with an issue at work and want to bounce ideas with me, you can reach me via LinkedIn or message me through Substack.

Thank you to everyone who subscribed, read, commented, shared or corrected my typos. You made this experience worthwhile, and I am very grateful for your time. I wish everyone a very happy, successful and prosperous New Year for 2025. Let’s make it count!