You cannot hire your way out of a capacity problem

Thank you so much for having me, I appreciate it.

Yeah, so I'm an engineering and project management leader with fifteen plus years of experience across electrical utility engineering, capital infrastructure delivery, and operational management. And I developed Evernorth to use those skills to give back to the industry that gave me so much.

Absolutely. What I found in my experience was that through the years, projects are becoming more and more complex. Things used to be much easier to accomplish, to get through the finish line. And as these projects become more complex, We find ourselves losing sight or losing the ability to keep these projects on track. So I've found tried and true ways to ensure that projects stay on the go, that we cut back on the bottlenecks, manage risk, and continue to put out quality work.

Yeah, so right now what I think I think the biggest thing we need to address is that we have a capacity problem. And I find that a lot of organizations try and compete or battle that capacity problem by adding more people. And I don't think that's necessarily The first step we should be taking. It's certainly the easiest step, but as the industry is finding the people at the right level to get the right work done are simply low a number. We don't have the right people to do the right work, or we don't have enough people to do the right work. or we need somebody with a certain specific skill. And I want to combat the idea that adding more people is going to fix our capacity problems. Because quite frankly, we can't pull these people out of thin air if they just don't exist.

Yeah, so I think when executives think they have a capacity problem, I think they're usually missing that there are growing backlogs, missed deadlines, declining utilization, and overwork employees. sorry, can I restart that? Okay, cool. Thank you. let me just you can cut all that out. I think when in when executives think they have a kappa capacity problem I don't think it's necessarily a lack of people, like I said. Capacity can also be consumed by the way work moves through an organization. We see that in delayed decisions, unclear ownership, repeated rework, and unnecessary meetings and inefficient handoffs. Adding people without understanding those conditions can actually increase coordination complexity. Without really solving the underlying problem.

Yeah, the first thing that we want to see is where those bottlenecks are forming. We want to see what's causing that repeated rework. We want to understand where the information's missing or where the handoffs are breaking down. A lot of times we find that high performers are the ones that tend to kind of carry the organization through. And so you'll find that certain people are really the friction absorbers. And if you remove those people, things tend to kind of tend to fall apart around them. So how do we reorganize that work? How do we re-evaluate how the work is being done? That's the first question we try to answer.

Of course we do. Of course we do. And sharing those is a really hard thing because that's where we shine. That's our proprietary knowledge. That's my 15 to 20 years of experience that I've put into developed frameworks.

Yeah, that is one of the secrets we're trying to kind of wrap our heads around as an industry in an industry in the industry as a whole. Of course, being highly regulated means that we're very protective of our security and protective of what our plans are, how we're going to achieve that, all the way down to what our grids actually look like. And AI can give us very practical and very easy ways to make workflows more streamlined, but we have to be careful as to that security side. And so, kind of like anything in the utility industry, it's very slow to adopt. We like new technology, but we have to test it. We have to make sure that we are staying secure. So there's a balance there that we're still trying to kind of figure out.

Yeah, I think that's a really good question. And let's take it from a leadership aspect or a career growth aspect. I think that looking back at my younger self, I did a lot of really great things for my teams, but what I wasn't so good at is documenting how that impacted my teams and taking away the information. As to I like I implement this tool or I implement this theory and taking away from it the positive impact it actually had, that way now 15 years later, I can go back and say by implementing XYZ, I was able to take ABC to X number or improve by something percentage. A lot I fell into the trap of, let me just document all the things I did. Tell my younger self what business impact did it have? Because now that I'm having those conversations about business impact, it's hard to dig up in numbers you never really tracked.

Yeah, I think the the thing that I feel the most, and this is perhaps a personal perspective, but what I feel the most is I think leaders tend to blame or tend to put a lot of pressure on the people to perform better, to perform more. You can't grow a flower and expect it to bloom. Just by setting higher performance metrics for it. But we do that with people. And my way of looking at it is that we need to see what the organization is doing that's making it harder for our people to succeed. So we need to dig in there as leaders and remove roadblocks and remove the The things that make it harder for people to do their job. And so when I think I think when it comes down to performance, our first reflection as leaders should be: did I give this person every opportunity to be successful? Did I remove all the things that made their job hard? Did I give them the opportunities to grow and develop their skills? Am I Putting the responsibility of their growth solely on them, or am I owning some of that responsibility? And that's the biggest thing that I see as leadership missing is the first response tends to be, well, that's not a good PM, or they just don't know their stuff yet, or they're too junior, or A, B, C, D mistake, and it's their fault. And I want to remove that. as the the first reaction. I want the first reaction to be, what is my organization doing that is making it harder for that person to be successful?

Yeah, I think the hardest stretch for me is finding people in the industry that think like I do, that see or share the same vision that I have. And that story is is difficult to get across because it makes us kind of self-reflect and say, you know what? Maybe I don't know. Everything, or maybe, maybe sh maybe there is a different way. And in engineering or technically heavy industries, we tend to think that we we are problem solvers, and we tend to think that, well, I understand, I know the problem, I I know how to fix it. If anybody's gonna fix it, I'm gonna fix it. And we talk about fixing these problems. But it never happens or it rarely happens. What ends up happening is, I have a deadline. I need to jump on this. And we firefight. And the the looking at where we could improve and getting around to finding solutions to fixing that just kind of tends to fall to the wayside.

I love that. My vision for Evernote Solutions is that we build stronger organizations that are self-aware and kind of self-healing. The organization itself, we don't do a very good job of tracking the why behind the what. And let me explain. We look at performance metrics. Performance metrics may be utilization. They may be where projects, you know, budget, scope, schedule, budget, turnover. But those don't tell a whole story. Performance tell us, performance metrics tell us what we accomplished, but not necessarily what the organization had to overcome to accomplish it. So my vision is that we build organizations that are a little more self-aware. We don't just depend on traditional performance metrics, but we understand where the organization's moving and how we're actually coming to those conclusions.

absolutely LinkedIn. We have a great website, but LinkedIn is the best place to find me. I'm on there a lot. I put out a lot of content and I try to say the things that are hard to say. I try to just put it out there and ask the hard questions and Get people's responses on them.

gosh. Well I think I think what I would like for listeners to take away from this is that we have a responsibility as leaders to be stewards. And if we have a vision, we need to help others share and learn that vision and grow our vision with us. I think that's probably what I want people to take away.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.