Helping Organisations Focus on their People First

Near the start of my career in the workplace, I worked assembling and calibrating Air Data Computers at Penny and Giles in Dorset.

I was in Aerospace, as I loved to tell people!

While the team was a few older veterans, it also now included me and 2 other guys, Kepa and Steve, both slightly older than me (both post-grads at the time), while I was waiting to start uni (I had taken a year to figure things out after doing well at school, then flunking college).

Under a newly minted manager, the assembly line was a fresh Lean system with shadow boards, calibration, bonding and insulation stations etc, in a J configuration with personal work stations in the middle.

We didn't realise it at the time, but we were young, passionate and wanted to make things better, to make a mark.

Between the three of us, we would scribble notes all over the procedures to make things more efficient, easier, and to help the next person. Changes were reviewed and written up into the next version of the procedures. We were making a difference and implementing our own version of Continuous Improvement (CI).

We enjoyed it. We were a tight team, everyone got along, and our leadership team gave us recognition for the work we did.

It didn't last long; Kepa went back to Spain after probably 6 months, Steve was promoted to Engineering, and after a year or so, I moved into Production Engineering.

Looking back, I realise how lucky I was to have started with that support and freedom to contribute. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than most, and even better than a lot of teams within the same company.

I'm a bit older now, and realised a while ago I had lost my passion for what I did, and I didn't know why.

I thought I loved creating new innovative solutions to problems, but while I enjoyed doing this, it no longer lit me up like it did - I didn't know why I was doing what I was doing. I was blowing in the wind.

It took handing in my notice and time to reflect that I realised what it was - I needed to help people live more. My own health had suffered in recent years due to modern working practices and lifestyle, and after a battle to reclaim it, I wanted to help the next person, like I did at Penny and Giles.

So I drew from everything I've learnt (working with Software Engineering teams, guidance and support I provided to Engineers as a Technical Architect, my Shop Floor experience, and experience supporting Assembly Line workers while in Production Engineer, my MBA and my BSc) into helping organisations focus on their people, because not only do the people live more when we lead with them first, but organisations do better and are more resilient (Sinek, 2020, B Chapman, 2016).