Power of Resilience - Seth Morth

Arsineh

Meet @Seth Morth of Clair Global. Seth is a problem solver who loves puzzles and helping others. We shared with us how his Power of Resilience and Smartsheet positively impact the work he does everyday. Learn more below.

I use Smartsheet at work in two predominant ways. First is to provide a digital vessel to carry a process through a team or subset of the company. The second is to provide timely reporting presented in a clear and intuitive manner that has been aggregated from third party systems (multiple ERPs/MRPs) to establish sources of truth within a single platform.

An example of building up Smartsheet as a conveyor for a process was how I built up a method for the system integration engineering team to work with the drafting department efficiently. This was barely launched pre-pandemic, but boy did it ever save our bacon in 2020 and 2021 when the group at large was all evacuated to WFH! Engineers and Project Managers ingest their work requests to the drafting department, drafting sorts them out by complexity/duration/urgency and self-assigns them using the Kanban card view, and then there are some complicated in the background but simple on the surface automations happening for approvals, tracking, and archiving. Since this was stood up about 2,000 requests have been processed with it. The best part is I am hands off and the team handles the work of the team. At one point when I was the manager of that group I was delegating the work. I was doing it well, but I stepped back to analyze and realized this was totally self-governable by the team, and that if I shed the work I would have a lot more time to get more important things done (being a leader instead of a manager of work).

More recently we cultivated Smartsheet as a presentational reporting tool by sourcing data from several SQL databases with multiple tables each and populating multiple Smartsheet grids overnight with automation. I have made effective use of the Sheet Summary feature and some very fun formulas to present fresh data consistently to our executive leadership where before they had to wade through a sea of .csv exports and manually manipulated the data with filters and pivot tables each week. That this is now an automated daily delivery of information they can see has been widely celebrated and enjoyed extensively. Transparent and accurate data presented in a timely fashion is part of making any company a success, and we have found many instances where Smartsheet helps us harvest wide-ranging fields of data and present a feast of meaningful summaries with no heavy lifting at all. Leadership has been liberated from manually manipulating data, and now they look at results and make decisions – exactly what they should be doing!

I describe a large part of what I do as taking useful information and helping others to use it effectively with a minimum of effort. I have always been interested in being efficient, though at times my motivator for that is a view of laziness towards repetitive work what it manifests as is a craving to minimize work time and maximize free time. I learned that having good templates to copy/paste and build off of as well as automating anything that is repetitive or hard to execute gets me a lot more time to drink tea and read for pleasure at home. Those drivers are coupled with an intrinsic desire to know how things work and an insatiable curiosity have served me well in my career when merged with my deductive reasoning skills. I see enough of a problem to identify it, get enough information to find a path forward, and off I go! At times I feel like I am building an airplane while it is in flight, and occasionally have to rebuild some of my work, but I have found it is far better to deliver 80% of a solution and then get feedback and adjust than to agonize to reach 99% of what I ‘think something needs to be’ only to find out that it is not what anyone wants. I act decisively, and quickly, but constantly recalibrate and adjust. I am stubborn in my desire to move forward but not enslaved by my own ideas and quite enjoy interpreting the asks of others. What I enjoy the most is when I get conflict asks from two entities and deliver a singular product that makes both ecstatic!

I flex my power of determination internally within myself to achieve goals. I am 100% aware that this can be self-destructive and cause me to burn out, so I have learned to take breaks, force myself to think about other things, and take advantage of the epiphanies that often happen once my mind has been freed from thinking about whatever project I am working on. I will still perform sprints when needed working at night and on weekends, but I really do try and minimize that and make them a rarity instead of the norm. Externally I have found that I am content to play a long game, and rather than make a fracas about a something I feel adds value or creates efficiency I will patiently educate, and educate more, until ultimately what is the best outcome is reached even if that is not what I or another party predestined. I am determined to deliver the best result in everything I do, but am happy to let go of little things and forgive myself in the interest of achieving goals. All that leads me to say I am constantly leveraging my focused determination, though there have been some key milestones in getting hired and advancing through the company where it has benefited me, and others that lack it have not been advancing as quickly, or at all.

I feel like I am myself the most when I have a big new problem to solve, a lot of information (these days it is data tables), and the encouragement of our leadership to build up something new from scratch that is intuitive and efficient to use. This means the world to me, as I am wired to solve problems and be a helper. Having puzzles and problems to solve feeds my soul, and Smartsheet is my go-to tool for solving work data issues.