2020 - Release
I am a planner. Some time in December or January, depending on workload, I reflect back on the last year and then I look forward to the next year. I pick a word for the year and then I use a version of Chris Guillebeau’s Annual Review spreadsheet to identify goals in each area of my life.
I knew that 2020 would be a year of major transition. I made the decision in June 2016 that I would renew one more time in 2017, but would not seek a third term as ESIP’s Executive Director in October 2020. This gave me a year to personally get comfortable with such a big decision and then two years to lay the foundation for leaving and finally, a controlled succession in 2020. At times, this felt like the longest goodbye ever.
My word for 2020 was release. I liked the double meaning of letting go and putting something out into the world. However, when I picked release in January 2020, I had no idea how appropriate it would be. In March, the COVID pandemic forced me to release every expectation for how I thought my time with ESIP would end. ESIP supports two semi-annual meetings a year, one in January and one in July, and we have met for the last twenty years in this cycle. This July was our first virtual meeting, which turned out to be one of my favorite ESIP projects. Reimagining our in-person meetings valued for connection into virtual meetings allowed for us to invest in our session conveners with more training and better sessions and for us to visualize for the first time where all of the attendees are coming from and what are they bringing to the meeting.
Following the Summer Meeting, I worked on releasing ESIP to the newly hired incoming, Executive Director, Susan Shingledecker. Susan and I had 10 weeks of overlap, where in August I led and in September I shadowed. This time proved invaluable as it gave us an unhurried time for many issues of ESIP operations to surface and be discussed. It wasn’t just Susan and me, the ESIP staff and ESIP volunteer leadership worked tirelessly to ensure that the core operations of ESIP would be handled as I let go. On September 30, 2020, my last day, I felt calm and peaceful and like we had all done the best job working together to make this transition as smooth as possible.
The last quarter of 2020 was a new release for me. Who am I when I’m not ESIP’s Executive Director? I had the great honor of being named the 2020 Gregory Leptoukh Lecturer and with that honor came a lecture at the 2020 American Geophysical Union. Because AGU was virtual, this talk was prerecorded. I dedicated significant time to developing and producing the talk and I am so proud of it. I realized that I had a coherent thread through my career - building connections to move open science forward. That thread is what I will continue to build on here as the Open science leadership coach and through my consultancy, Metadata Game Changers.
Release wasn’t easy. Letting go and change always have uncomfortable parts and a lot of 2020 was being ok being uncomfortable. Leading ESIP through this transition at times was lonely and stressful. I was able to do all of this work in part because I had the support of coaches from 2017 through this year. In 2017, with Joan Garry, I envisioned the organization I wanted to leave and the details that were important to me. It is easy to get lost in the business and busyness of the day to day and lose the big picture. In 2020, I completed the Martha Beck Institute Coach Training program and had the support of peer coaches.
My biggest release of 2020 was to become a leadership coach. I see a void in the Open science community leadership space and I am hoping to provide support to other leaders the way that my coaches supported me. If you are doing big work and feeling alone, checkout the ‘Work Together’ page for details on 1-1 coaching.