Challenges come in a lot of different formats. Here's mine: I found myself putting in my notice to resign at a company where I worked. A little bit of backstory: I worked at a startup that was lean and excellent. Salespeople were great, and the engineers were all hand-picked by the CTO, and we all did so well that we got acquired. A year or so passed, and one-by-one the engineering team of 6 shrank down to 2 remaining members, with gaps filled by offshore people that couldn't fully contribute due to legal compliance requirements around data safety. I was at my wits end, and had decided to put in my notice to resign. There was a bout of conversations that happened after that. First, the then-director of engineering called me to ask me to reconsider. I told him that if we were going to have that conversation, it needed to happen in front of HR because of how many times leadership failed to follow through on their word. Next was the CTO, and I certainly let him know how I felt about our culture. Later, we had that meeting involving the engineering director and the VP of HR, and I laid out everything: the history and erosion of the original team, the micromanaging, the silos, and broken communication, policy and process that was designed by people who had never written code, engineers who were never consulted about projects they were expected to complete in unrealistic timelines, being constantly set up for failure by managers that didn't understand requirements, and so forth. Anyway, the result of the conversation ended up with me reconsidering my resignation. A lot of commitments were made during that meeting, but the really important part was that those commitments were made in front of a member of HR, who also happened to be part of the culture committee that I also participated in, who was very aware of how bad the culture was due to the anonymous survey results received and reviewed during committee meetings. The result was more than I expected. In the months to come, I started seeing improvements in leadership. I'm not sure if it was the fear of losing me, or the realization that they were underperforming, but people started getting more promotions and recognition, process coordinators (i.e. non-technical managers) started listening a lot more to engineers, and silos started to quietly break down the process barrier is moving more toward open/direct communication instead of "appropriate channels", which makes it far easier to produce results.

@Cory Berg As much as I want to call this an anomaly, I have a strong feeling there's varying degrees of this sort of thing happening in a lot of other companies. Also, there were a lot of micro decisions that lead up to the aborted resignation. In this case, I actually found that HR was very willing to come to the table. I think the mindset here is what mattered the most. I didn't see HR as a friend or a champion of ground-level employees. I sought a partnership with them to solve a problem that was effecting the whole company. Our engineering departments were crumbling, and without a functional engineering backbone, our company was heading toward disaster. I think under those circumstances, any upper-level HR person would cooperate. I don't think the leaders were very introspective in this case, either. They weren't the ones issuing the surveys, organizing the feedback, and formulating corrective action. Most of the corrective credit goes to HR, and the rest of the culture committee (which also included the CEO and Chief Compliance Officer [compliance, as in legal]). The current VP of HR seems to be driving most of the changes. I can't imagine that it's easy. I didn't make my decision to leave lightly. I had been considering it for at least a year. I know as much because I had a draft of my resignation letter sitting in my outlook, and the creation date was a year prior. I was more inclined to leave, but at some point I realized the opportunity to change things was there, and with the amount of data collected by the culture committee, and the degree of proof that our culture was in shambles, IT leadership didn't really have enough space to disagree with me. It left them with two options: commit to doing better, or give me lip service and start looking for my replacement. The most useful tool may have been the tone of my intent to resign. Below are some of the things I communicated in my discussions with leadership and HR:

Okay, so I totally blew by this post and didn't add mine - so here it is: Hi, my name is Destry. I live in Arizona. I like writing clean code, and my latest project is trying to help turn an IT culture nightmare into a team of enthusiastic people that love to learn and help each other. The company that I work with were crazy enough to start calling me a lead software engineer, so I figured I'd try to lead something somewhere for a change. 🤣

@Cory Berg Lol, I just wrote that on a different thread. You can find it here: https://www.skool.com/lead-better-live-better/what-was-your-most-challenging-job-experience?p=4b9152de

Right on! I think that part of his vision was being able to translate the need for "faster horses" into "faster transportation". That takes empathy to achieve.