Growth: It's Personal

If you are selling yourself -- from a branding perspective (come on now) -- and we all should be, reflective change is an absolute necessity in how we do business today. It doesn't mean you have to constantly be changing, it means you have to constantly be thinking about whether you need to be changing. There's a great book entitled What Got You Here Won't Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith that covers this concept.

Would it surprise you that he suggests even successful people need to be examining whether they have the right tools needed for continued success in their tool kit? Resting on your laurels is never a way to win a race. We're taught that as children with the Tortoise and the Hare so why do we assume that the top level's innovation should be at a product or service level. If you head up an organization you need to think about more than just the strategy involving the business. You need to think about your skill set.

As your climbing the corporate ladder, there are plenty of reminders of the skills you need to acquire or refine. You have managers, supervisors, reviews, job descriptions and many more that are continually pointing out areas for continued growth, but when the company is looking to you for leadership, the stellar leader is looking both outwards and inwards.

I liked what Les McKeown wrote in Inc., on the 3 Silent Killers of Successful Businesses:

"When was the last time you had a massive change of mind about a fundamental way in which you do business? When was the last time a coach or a mentor so challenged you about your management and leadership skills that you lost sleep? When did you last scrap a much-loved process, or system, or meeting, or process because its time had passed? When was the last occasion when someone told you you were flat-out wrong about something important-- and they were right?"

The problem with professional growth and attaining that point on the top of the corporate ladder is that you no longer are continually reminded of growth opportunities from the outside. You have to rely on yourself to uncover and explore them and so many times the pressure of leadership keeps you from doing that. You're busy thinking about the business or the employees, and you miss the teaching opportunities for your own growth.

What if You Ran Your Office Like a Crab Boat?

picture credit: Discovery Channel

You don't have to spend much time with me to know I love Deadliest Catch, partly because I love reality shows and partly because I value what these guys do. They work hard for a lucrative payout. It's the embodiment of the American Dream (or at least what it used to be).

I also love the show as it depicts men in their original form, before they started waxing, filing and plucking (but that's a post for an entirely different kind of blog). As much as pampered metrosexuals could learn from these men, corporate America could learn a bit too.

On a crab boat there's a fair amount of nepotism. It's not unusual for boats to be family-owned and employ people the captains know be it family, distant cousins of other fishermen, childhood neighbors or friends of friends. It is difficult to get a spot on one of these boats without "knowing" someone. Life in office America is similar. We hire people we have connections to, people with backgrounds we're familiar with, before we turn to complete strangers. Of course, our pool from which to draw potential candidates is much larger than these Bering Sea explorers. It's infinitely easier to get someone to run a social media campaign on their laptop from Starbucks than it is to convince someone to pull a thousand pound crab pot out of frigid cold waters and 40 foot swells. Yet, both captains and CEOs have their share of issues with bad hires. Candidates always think they are up to the job at hand.

Crabbers, however, are quick to learn who is effective in their role and who is not. They run a very lean operation and everyone must be pulling their weight at all times. If a team member is unable to work at the levels that everyone else does, it becomes painfully obvious from both a safety and production standpoint. Corporate America misses the boat on this. (Promise that's the first and last bad pun.) We tend to keep people in roles they are not well-suited for because we like them. Worse yet we promote them because they've been here the longest or they've been successful at a given role. Sometimes we even transfer them to a different department or a different hiring manager because they are doing a lousy job where they are or having difficulties with other employees and moving them is just easier.  We work human resources like a jigsaw puzzle trying all sorts of angles and eventually making the piece/person fit.

It's just lazy management. It takes work to get employees producing to your expectations. A conversation about goals and quotas may need to occur. And sometimes it even requires a manager to admit a bad hiring decision was made.

Whether pushing papers over a faux wood desk or landing a full pot with icicles hanging from my hat, having the right team behind you is key to your success. If you don't have the right team in place you must evaluate how far off of that goal you are. Is it the process or the person and can it be fixed? Can the greenhorn learn how to be a valuable member of the team or are they ill-suited for the stress and strains of the job at hand? The sooner you are able to answer those questions, the sooner you can begin in either investing in their professional growth or cutting bait.