Intro with some LOTR 🧙🏽♂️
If you remember Gandalf, from the Lord of the rings (LOTR) series, he is a powerful wizard. He exemplifies wisdom, skill, humility, humor and levity. These together, make it a powerful combination of a personality, with capability. His role in LOTR is to keep building bridges with different races, in humans, elves, dwarves, along with kingdoms, small to large. He entertains and humors the folks he interacts with. He brings everyone together by sharing the purpose to unite, with unified goals and visions, to ensure the evil dark lord Sauron does not take over all of Middle-Earth. His trait of building bridges becomes pivotal at climactic times. In times of need, the relationships he built over time, come to fruition, when large armies from various kingdoms amass, to help turn the tide during the key battles in LOTR.
Kings, queens and leaders build bridges!
Is this relevant to our modern world?
We don’t have evil dark lords or epic battles to win? Are we sure about that? 😉 The world has constant challenges, with geo-political tensions.
However, in our dailies of work and life, we do have constant challenges. Scoping this article to our work life, we have projects small and big that we work on. There are work tasks, small or epic, and initiatives we need to make progress on and deliver. We maybe well positioned for some of them. There are those challenges that need help beyond what we can muster, be it at an individual contributor or leader roles.
Inevitably, the individuals combined make a mighty team and a mighty team is composed of amazing individuals.
So, to build bridges and allies, keep investing time and effort in people who you really believe in and can trust. It could be folks in adjacent teams or disciplines. It could be folks in your community, if you have users of your assets in other teams. If you are building a tribe like AI or UI Engineers, it could be them.
People turn to people with a combination of 2 characters.
- Will this person hurt me?
- Is this person capable?
Many a times, people are either one or the other. Either capable, but unkind, arrogant etc. Or kind and nice, but ineffective etc. However, the person who leads with the positive channel and is friendly, as well as, possesses the professional might, capability, grit and strength to overcome challenges, with a track record for it, will be the one that everyone will turn to. Also, be or become that person for others, to boost your individual and team’s value, as well as impact!
Also, from a 2024 documentary on Netflix Inside the mind of a dog, the success for the canine survival over the thousands of years is relationship friendliness. Being friendly, will make your relationships endure, if you lead with that first. If we think about it, no one is coming to work to deliberately hurt you. Situations and lack of readiness, cause stress and strain. However, if you are the rare kind that channels friendliness, positivity, along with being capable and effective, well, you are well poised, my friend! 😄
How is this relevant in my world?
Well, we are in the process of doing epic (classified) things as a Design System. We will be graduating from minor leagues into the major leagues representing the company.
Although we have 6-7+ years of experience as a program, there has never been a time when our relationships will be needed or used, more than ever before. Our bread-n-butter is developer relations or devrel, as is commonly known. We’ve also built relationships at individual contributor and leadership levels with all the relevant disciplines across the org and company in technology, design, content, accessibility, operations, strategy, research, brand, legal etc.
With the quality and level of relationships, myself and the leadership team feel well poised, like Gandalf to blow the 📯 horn in call for support, during climactic times on our road to the major leagues.
Shift in perspective over lived experience
In my early work career and life, I used to relate more to the Aragon’s (eventual king in LOTR) or the main hero characters. As I matured through my work career and life, I realized the power of characters like Gandalf. Do note, in the other literary or pop-culture epics, we have equivalent characters like Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and Yoda in Star Wars. They are the masters of their craft aka gurus. That debrief on craft mastery is for another time! 😉
Outro with more LOTR
With a terrible cry the Balrog fell forward, and its shadow plunged down and vanished. But even as it fell it swung its whip, and the thongs lashed and curled about the wizard’s knees, dragging him to the brink. He staggered and fell, grasped vainly at the stone, and slid into the abyss. ‘Fly, you fools!’ he cried, and was gone.