White Knight… Shining

Are you the team’s seemingly white knight in shining armor?

I feel like it happens to all of us when we’re first learning to lead our own teams. As new leaders, we often find ourselves trying to compensate for our team’s gaps. And as we stumble in our quest to learn how to properly empower and delegate, we end up taking all the work. Ironically, I feel like the best way to learn how to avoid this pain is to just suffer through it until it clicks.

In case you’re interested, the best book I’ve read about how to avoid this issue is weirdly The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. It’s actually a book about how to establish a small business which up front doesn’t seem like a helpful leadership book. But the author discusses how business owners need to stop working in the business and start working on the business. This key thought can actually be extrapolated a bit further and applied to how we run our own teams. Consulting teams are technically a type of business unit after all - as hodgepodge as they are.

Making this comic gave me a huge boost in confidence. After comparing the first one, “Notice Me Senpai” and this one, I realized how much more confident my line work was. I also was able to start speeding up my workflow by standardizing how I mocked up the ideas, how I finalized the panels, the brush sizes I used, colors, text type, etc. I also learned how to condense the wording a bit more so I can convey the same idea with less words.

The title “White Knight… Shining” is of course an homage to Gary Oldman’s several last lines of The Dark Knight. Not the hero we deserved, but the hero we needed.

Oh, and I started revisiting a very old friend of mine, Bill Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. It’s been really fun to relive and get inspired by such a treasure.

Ramen