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Are you hitting the weights?

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Thoughts on building stronger professionals

Paul Currey

“Hey Boobie, you didn’t lift.”

“C’mon man. This is god given. The only thing I gotta do is show up.”

If you’ve seen Friday Night Lights (spoiler alert for those who haven’t), you know that Boobie Miles – Permian High’s star running back – suffers a career ending injury a few scenes later. Boobie was the Panther’s most talented, dynamic, and exciting player…and it all came naturally. But what happens when natural talent isn’t enough? What happens when you’re up against equivalent talent with a substantially stronger work ethic, grit, and determination to win. You lose.

Athletics provide an easy and tangible arena for the “hard work pays off” adage. If you’ve ever trained for a marathon, you know that more miles yield more base fitness, more base fitness yields more speed, and more speed yields a faster race result. All sports have an equivalent payoff; with success coming to those who put in the work. Conversely, we’ve all been on a team with talented superstars who lack drive and work ethic. These superstars are objectively good (at times infuriatingly so); but everyone around them knows they’re leaving potential on the table.

I think you know where this is going (after all, this is a business blog, not Sports Illustrated). Reflect with me on your career and professional life, ask yourself the question “are you hitting the weights”? For what it’s worth, I find this question convicting and need to explicitly clarify that I fall short here often. Most of us would love to emphatically answer, “absolutely, I’m essentially a corporate powerlifter.” But, if we’re really honest with ourselves, it’s easy to slide towards the Boobie Miles camp of, “the only thing I gotta do is show up” to my job. Hitting the weights in your career is difficult. For starters, your season is 40+ years long with no recurring offseason (unless you’re French, I think they take an annual off-season). Additionally, the game evolves incessantly (several folks reading this didn’t start their career with a computer in-hand, now you can use Excel in your Meta Quest VR headset). Your career is a long game that requires a lot of stamina and endurance…so how do you build it?

That answer is long, varies by profession, and in the proverbial words of a consultant “it depends” on a lot of factors. That said, here’s a few practical ways I think we can all “hit the weights” together. You might ask, why does it matter if we’re “hitting the weights”? My assertion is that the world doesn’t need more corporate “Boobie Miles superstars” – it needs folks who work hard, care about their contributions to the greater good, and serve their teams well. That’s a much more enjoyable huddle to be in on a daily basis. That said, here’s some “workouts” to consider:

  • Read, a lot: Some of the most impressive professionals I’ve encountered have an avaricious appetite for reading. Novels and news are a free gym membership for the brain…turn off The Office re-runs and pick up a book (I started rewatching Succession last night, I’m a hypocrite).
  • Keep up with your industry: It’s imperative to stay apprised of key updates and the long-term direction of the industries we work in. This dovetails nicely into the reading piece…stay current on industry trends and implications for your company through trusted sources. It’s not enough to be a “finance, supply chain, or [insert functional expertise] area person,” you need to know the landscape of the industry you’re playing in.
  • Learn and develop hard skills: Do you remember trying a clean and jerk for the first time? I do, I was an overweight rising Freshman with less muscle mass than a wet rag and aspirations of playing in the NFL – it went really well. Like trying a new lift, there’s a ton of hard skills we can go learn, grow in, and develop into real professional assets (e.g., data analytics, accounting, project management, etc.). Learning hard skills is a great way to evolve professionally and be a “5 tool player” on any team.

The three points above are far from exhaustive (and thousands of books, lectures, and TikToks exist on similar themes), but I hope it spurs some thought and action towards ways we can get stronger in our day-to-day professional lives. If nothing else, I hope we’re all reflecting on the work ethic we bring to the office every day; and, I hope we’re all hitting the weights.

What are other practical ways you “hit the weights” in your professional life?

Wish you were here

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Humans are wired to be at the same campfire.

Geoff Wilson

We are seeing a lot of consternation in companies these days around the topic of remote work and so-called “back to the office” movements.  Remote work among knowledge workers has been a viable topic for decades, but really came into its own when “everybody” in a knowledge-work role suddenly had to be remote during the COVID pandemic.

Such a mass adjustment to norms came with a lot of warm, fuzzy feelings about how effective people can be while working remotely with today’s tools.  Indeed, for the first months of the pandemic, the effectiveness of remote work was one of the few areas of general consensus in an otherwise uncertain environment.

But what has followed has been mixed, at best.  It slowly began to surface that “cheating” was happening if not common. Some people took advantage of remote work to work multiple “full-time” jobs.

On the other side, many business functions actually became more productive in a remote environment.  When we consider certain business functions as essentially piecework, we can see a great advantage to sending piecework back into the cottages. A worker charged with auditing accounts isn’t likely to be any more or less effective at such an individual activity while doing it with the same tools remotely. And, they don’t have to commute.

But this post isn’t about cheating, or managing, or outright fraud (which you are if you aren’t telling your multiple employers that you are overcommitted…but I digress).

This post is about culture.

Humans are strange animals.  We are tribal by nature.  We operate in a cognitive fog of trust, and love, and social proof, and mutual support.  We work for the common good in small groups. We become self-involved and selfish in large groups. We care less as social distance increases.

Such is the reality of the human condition.

And, we depend on actual…interpersonal assessments of these social aspects to form culture.  So-called “social cues” are tremendously important to establishing social consistency.

No matter how much we adjust to the amazing tools and technologies intermediating our remote lives–and I for one am fond of telling people I am remotely kicking them under the table, for instance–we can’t replace the whole-bodied experience of being there IRL (that’s “in real life” for you Gen X’ers like me).

Remote culture-building removes almost all of this. It’s reductive to a face on a screen or–worse–a disembodied voice.  It’s fully intermediated by technology.  And, it largely eliminates serendipity.  All of these things, disembodiment (“is he actually listening?”), intermediation (“you’re on mute” and “sorry you’re breaking up”), and lack of serendipity (“this meeting ends in 5 minutes”) can combine to completely distort culture.

All of this is to say two things:  No matter how much you try to engineer culture in a remote environment, you will fail if you are trying to engineer the same culture you would have had in an in-person environment. And, human cultures are fundamentally in-person.

Yes, that’s right, you’d better change your expectations if you are going to “stay remote.”

We are wired to be around a campfire.  We are wired to hunt and gather and dine together and engage in small talk while working in the fields or while stalking dinner.  We are wired to hear and feel and see and…smell each other as humans without some “greater power” interceding or masking our own often already-masked and insecure presences.

Your culture CAN survive being remote. But, the deeper human aspects will erode with a sort of half-life.  I have no idea how truly fast-paced cultures like the large consulting firm I was a member of for years could even survive for a few months in a virtual work environment.  So much of that type of culture is conveyed “in the team room” and the workforce turns over so quickly that culture can be shattered in a matter of months if extreme care isn’t taken.

If your company is slower moving and has less turnover, people will still remember. But remembrances fade.

As somebody who struggles mightily to ensure enough alone time in a life that rarely affords it, I can tell you that being “in-person” is not an all-the-time thing.  But it is a critical aspect of building warm, supportive, team-based cultures. And, warm, supportive, team-based cultures will be very important in a future where most any truly remote-piecework style jobs are likely to be automated.

Human factors–culture–will be the deciding factors for the future of competition. This is true whether managing a workforce or selling the next big deal.

So, what’s a leader to do?

Well, if you are leading a remote workforce, be sure to create more campfires and gatherings to build culture.  These so-called wastes of time can be foundational to building mutual support and acceleration.

If you are leading a hybrid workforce, the mandate is similar:  Be sure your pieceworkers who are off in their cottages get called back to the mothership frequently.

And, if you are leading a team that’s together, be sure you reinforce the benefits and expectations that together should bring.

What do you think? How do you see culture impacted by presence?

Legacy lessons from NASCAR’s worst wreck ever

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We all leave a legacy of some sort. Ryan Newman’s survival of NASCAR’s worst wreck ever highlights the contrasts of passive and active legacies.

Geoff Wilson

Do you know the legacy you are leaving with your business, team, or organization?

It’s surprising how little this topic actually gets highlighted when managers and executive teams focus on their strategic aims.  Sure there are legacies that are left via who you are–for example the ethical legacies like that of Marvin Bower at McKinsey or innovation legacies like that of Gordon Moore of Intel and Moore’s Law fame.  Those were probably not forged in a boardroom strategy session but rather through strength of personality.

But, there are also legacies left in a couple of other ways.  There are passive legacies that result accidentally, and there are active legacies that result from thoughtful focus and intervention.  This weekend offered a stark contrast of the two.

Monday’s Daytona 500 ended with a vicious wreck where driver Ryan Newman–leading the race at the time–was bumped from behind and spun violently into the wall of the final turn in the race.  His car, pictured above, went airborne, was struck broadside by another car at 190 miles per hour, landed on its roof, and then slid for a quarter mile or more in a conflagration of sparks and flames.  Here’s a post with that wreck:

Most are saying the wreck is the worst in NASCAR history.  Rescue crews took a long time to extract Newman from the car, shielded by black screens that usually signify tragic carnage on race scenes.  Speculation was rife that Newman was killed in the wreck, and prayers and concerns swept social media.

But, Tuesday morning brought news that Newman had survived.  As of this writing, details remain sketchy, but reports are that Newman is not only alive, but also is awake and conversing with doctors and family.  Doctors have said his injuries are “non-life threatening.” And, while such announcements can no doubt hide life-changing and awful injuries, they offer hope.  Furthermore, Newman’s survival illustrates an amazing pair of legacies.

The first, is the unfortunate legacy of the last race driver fatality in NASCAR’s elite division.  That would be the 2001 death of Dale Earnhardt, Sr.  Earnhardt Sr.’s death–on the same track at almost the same spot as the Newman wreck–happened one day shy of 19 years before Newman’s wreck.  For those who are not NASCAR-literate, that wreck killed the biggest legend in a sport that is rife with legends.  It was, put simply, the equivalent of Michael Jordan, Lebron James, Tom Brady, or Lionel Messi dying on the court or field.

And, it changed the sport.  NASCAR changed mandates for safety equipment and changed car and track characteristics significantly.   Many fans are acknowledging this:

At the same time, Ryan Newman is being acknowledged as having a safety legacy of his own. Newman has been an outspoken safety advocate who is responsible for the addition of the “Newman Bar” to the roll cage of the current NASCAR car design.  That addition may have saved his own life on Monday.

Which brings me to the punchline of this post.

The sad reality is that a lot of passive legacies are written in blood.  The Earnhardt legacy can certainly be characterized as such.  Without going too far in trouncing a legend, I’ll put it this way:  Earnhardt came from a tradition of selective usage and even modification of readily available safety equipment that was allowed within NASCAR at the time. But, that selective usage arguably cost him his life in a wreck that “looked” far less violent than the Newman wreck.  I quote “looked” because I know firsthand that television cannot convey the real physics of collision like this.

Active legacies, like Newman’s with the “Newman Bar,” are quite different.  They are active modifications in hopes of protecting the future. They are also often implemented without fanfare or–thankfully–tragedy.

Not seeing the connection to your legacy yet?  Consider such passive legacies as innovation funding or safety investment cuts to meet current quarter profit targets.  What do they leave for the future?  Consider such active legacies as protection of training and development programs for your team. What do they leave?

The list could be long on both sides of the ledger.  I only pose the question:  What kind of legacy are you leaving, and are you trying to leave it?

What do you think?

When one more is too many, what do you do?

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Focus need not be only about doing less.

Geoff Wilson

Focus is a frequent theme in our work.  Often, action-oriented teams do what they do, which is to take on more and more “things” until the collection of things is basically overwhelming. When organizations place one management layer of achievers on top of another management layer of achievers, the result can often be a cacophony of initiatives…each with a purpose and all generating tension against one another.

In the most mature organizations, the tendency of achievers to stretch toward more and more things is bounded first by a few good leaders who decide what not to do and second by processes that force choices early and often.

In less mature organizations…cacophony.

So what is that organization to do?  As with almost anything, the first step is to admit it.  If you can list a dozen initiatives that you are working on, you likely have a problem. I often tell executive teams that 3 – 5 active initiatives are plenty (a lot, even) for any management team.  That’s in the context of teams that can list a dozen or more active initiatives.  And, of course, all the initiatives are important.  All of them need to progress.  We must make progress on cost structure and product development and accounting systems and talent sourcing. So, admit it when you have a problem.

The second step is to actually define what focus is.  Is it truly doing fewer things, or is it about ensuring that the things that are done in the organization are done in the right place in the organization? All the example initiatives I listed in the paragraph above are likely important at the same time.  Of course they are…all of those elements are about running the business.  The problem is, many of them should belong to a person or team, not to the entire organization.  There may be a natural owner of the work that is not the executive team.

You don’t often really need to have the entire management team engaged in the accounting system rebuild, but often they are. And, thus, I see it frequently:  Senior managers scurry from one steering committee meeting to another, without having real context on any one initiative to be a clear contributor.  They have their hands in many pots, but have no idea what is for dinner.  Why not try to leave some things to the organization? Too many people get worried about focus because they think it leads to accomplishing less.  Once you factor in your ability to delegate, it’s just not true.

After you have the first and second steps completed, it’s time to actually focus.  This involves at least four decisions.  First is what to delegate.  Second is what to do now.  Third is what to do next. And fourth is what not to do at all (explicitly).   If anything is still standing alone after those four filters, then the answer is likely to get help. Why? Because it usually means you have other root issues–like not being able to delegate because you don’t trust your people or because they haven’t earned your trust.

If your management team or organization lacks focus, try to organize a bit to get through these few steps and decisions.  Your company will thank you for it.

What do you think?  

You are what you eat, whether you like it or not.

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Your sources of revenue (and income) say plenty…mind them closely.

Geoff Wilson

 The New York Times released an article this week on McKinsey’s work with authoritarian and otherwise dangerous regimes across the world.  The article raises some questions on McKinsey’s choices on whom to serve and how such choices align with McKinsey’s Firm values.  There have been further revelations even today that McKinsey has a partner under arrest in the Saudi kingdom (a partner who was “acquired” by the firm through a company transaction, and so not one who was “vetted” up through the ranks, but a partner nonetheless).

While the Times article is less than flattering to McKinsey–a firm that has faced an unusual number of embarrassing press items recently– it deals in very gray areas around client service.  How does a global firm make choices on which governments to serve (or serve under) and not serve?  How does a firm decide on engagement or disengagement as a statement of its values?

In short, the article raises the most basic of questions: How do our values relate to our income?

This question goes far beyond McKinsey (a firm that I admittedly still have a very strong positive feeling for)…it goes right to the very soul of all of our work.  In the business world, your professional profile is highly correlated with how you earn your income.

You are what you eat.

Do you earn your income by creating new ways for authoritarian governments to impose their will on their populations?  That makes you an accessory to oppression.

Do you earn your income by depending on a steady stream of working poor people to borrow/buy/rent from you?  That makes you dependent on the existence of the working poor.

Do you earn your income by creating technological addiction in order to sell more ad space?  That makes you dependent on addicts.

Do you earn your income by serving tyrannical or amoral leaders who use people as objects?  That makes you his or her enabler in their career.

These aren’t hard concepts to chew on as we get ready to dive into the new year:  Do the things you get paid to do–in the main–produce more good in the world, or not? Do your sources of revenue contribute to a better society or not?

McKinsey’s case is not cut and dried–few are in the business world–and the New York Times was sensational bordering on unprofessional in its insinuations.  Still, it isn’t a large leap to assume that serving authoritarians is enabling them. It is also not okay to blame such client service choices on “growth” or “influence.” This is especially true when you consider that McKinsey is a firm whose iconic leader examined this very vein of thinking many years ago.  As I have written before, Marvin Bower wrote to the McKinsey partnership on how income and growth could lead to poor client choices.  He said:

“If an individual consultant has
to make a professional decision
on the spot and he has too many
obligations, I worry that he is
likely to make a decision to attract
a client who shouldn’t be
attracted.”

So…What is a client who shouldn’t be attracted to you?  What is a source of income that isn’t worth the hit to your integrity?

To me, and in my firm, it’s basic: Does the client or source of income depend on or produce states of the world that I would not sleep well at night knowing that I have proliferated? Admittedly, it’s a personal test…but I have given hints as to my own limits above.

As we ponder the new year, let’s ponder the fruits of our labors, and know that we are what we eat.

Now it’s your turn, share a bit about how you match purpose, values, and income.  What do you think?  

 

 

The bare essence of professionalism

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The bare essence of professionalism is reliably doing real work on the right things, and doing it well.

Geoff Wilson

One of the benefits of my position as a management adviser is that I get to see a lot of different management and leadership styles. And I get to see them from all perspectives: executive, buyer, seller, consultant, adviser, subordinate, and superior to name a few.

As I think about the most effective people I know–that is to say the most effective professionals I know–I have realized over time that the key to enduring professional success tends to be a simple word: reliability.  The funny thing about reliability is that it is timeless.  It doesn’t depend on your experience level, it doesn’t depend on your topical expertise, it doesn’t depend on your role. It simply depends on your dependability.

Why do I write this?  Because I get to see the outfall of unreliable professionals all the time. These are the consultants who talk a big game but who don’t do real work to back it up (the “one-hit wonders” of the consulting profession).  These are the managers who set aggressive, unreachable deadlines for themselves and therefore can’t be counted on to deliver.  These are the employees who never met a deadline they couldn’t silently stretch or break–while their leaders silently watch them fail because why bother?

These are the professionals who look and feel like they have something better to do than work on your problem or the task at hand.

The essence of professionalism can be encapsulated in a timeless quotation from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  This particular quotation was the favorite of a beloved football coach of mine, and it’s one that has informed my ideals for a very long time.  It goes like this:

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”

That means if you are called on to deliver the next M&A deal for your company, you think Michelangelo. It means if you are a mid-career manager who suddenly has to step in and own the financial model, you think Beethoven. And it means that if you are a seasoned professional who suddenly has to create that pitch deck when nobody else is available, you don’t think about how you no longer have those skills or how you are better than this work–you think Shakespeare.

In short, the professional mindset is one that doesn’t get bogged down in what work is “beneath” him or her.  It’s the one that finds the work and figures out a way to do it for real.  It’s comfort in doing the little things that build to a big thing. And it’s being known for reliably applying that comfort. It’s reliably doing real work on the right things and doing it well.

That, my friends, is the bare essence of professionalism.

It’s an ideal that I always aspire to.

What do you think?  What would you add as the essence of professionalism?

 

Don’t tell me what you believe…show me where you invest.

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In a world of punditry, knowing where people invest will show what they believe.

Geoff Wilson

Where is the most compelling evidence of what you really believe (as opposed to what you say you do)?

It’s in what you own.

More specifically, it’s in where you invest.

Even back to biblical times, it was understood that “where your treasure is, your heart will be also.”  That’s Matthew 6:21 (NIV).  Where you put your resources reflects what you believe.  This is not a new or original concept, but it’s a very important one.

In this age, I’d suggest a couple of alterations to the concept.  First, treasure today is as much about time as it is money or assets.  Second, because we have so many ways of telling people what we believe (the POTUS likes Twitter), and because we can often conceal where we invest time and money, knowing where others actually place their values can be a challenge.

And that’s the point of this post: Where you invest shows more about what you believe than what you say does.  The inconsistency is apparent in “easy” cases like the CEO who says innovation is important but who cuts the R&D budget incessantly; I call this easy because everybody can see it.  Where things really get interesting is when you see normally concealed things like the leaders of tech companies not letting their kids use the tech they have helped to develop (cases of this have come out with respect to Apple, Facebook, and others).

That shows what they really believe.

So the next time you are confronted with a leader who says they believe in something, do a little bit of poking around to see where the budget is allocated and where time is allocated.  You will often find that what they say doesn’t match what they invest in–like they say they believe in putting the customer first but haven’t talked to a customer in a year.

Talk is cheap.

Oh, and like anything else, this can apply to you. Maybe get your own house in order as well.

Don’t tell me what you believe, show me where you invest.  That will tell me what you believe.

What do you think? 

What the fear of missing out does to your business strategy

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You don’t want to miss an opportunity, and that means you might miss them all.

Geoff Wilson

What does a smart strategist do with resources?

Most would say that “strategy” in and of itself depends on focusing the investment of resources against valuable ends. But what happens when you have too many possible directions to go with your resources?  Or, worse yet, what happens if you are afraid to focus on a critical few ends?

What if you suffer from an all too human factor:  the Fear Of Missing Out, or FOMO for short?

Here’s what happens:  Your fear of missing out exacts a price on your focus because every opportunity you pursue comes with a little bit of distraction.  Call it the fixed cost of opportunity pursuit: The need to organize, plan, and simply think about any given opportunity just to start it up.

To illustrate, assume that you have 100% of your mind to allocate.  Now imagine that any given opportunity you pursue comes with a 5% fixed “mind cost” of addressing it.  If that’s the case, then addressing three opportunities leaves 85% of your time after the fixed cost (or nearly 30% of your attention per opportunity) to truly develop them. But pursuing five leaves 75% (or about 15% per opportunity) and pursuing ten?  That leaves half your time to dedicate and only 5% to pursue each opportunity.  And so it goes: The fixed cost of opportunity pursuit, even if it’s small, devours valuable development time.  But while the cost of pursuit may be linear, the price you pay per pursuit in terms of dilution is essentially exponential.

And, no, you can’t escape the fixed cost, because it’s more than organizational.  Even left fully alone, you have to contend with your own brain, which incurs a cost when shifting gears.  That’s why multi-tasking is a dangerous thing.  Your brain simply can’t filter out all the noise between the many focus areas.

The impact to your organization is easily as bad. You see this all the time: the organizational costs imposed on opportunity pursuit.  They might look like project reviews, justifications, planning meetings, and deployment program reviews, and in some organizations, these exceedingly hungry mandates devour more of the managers’ time than actually pursuing opportunities.

Admit it…you’ve seen this happen.  And, all too often, it’s because of the fear of missing out: ol’ FOMO.

But what drives the fear of missing out?  In almost all instances it’s confidence. You don’t know enough about a critical few things, so you spread your bets around…only in doing so, you don’t simply allocate resources, you simultaneously dilute them.  In gambling terms, you play with scared money; you impose a fear tax. In the process, you often create a lot of really small initiatives that don’t go very far or make much difference. Refer to this article from a few years ago about killing these “gerbils” in your plans.  In simple terms, the fear of missing out leads you to this: You don’t want to miss an opportunity, and that means you might miss them all.

So what is the point of all this?  It’s pretty basic, actually. Challenge yourself to focus on the critical few things that matter. If you don’t have the confidence to do so, invest the time to build it.  Challenge your organization to do the same.  That’s what a smart strategist does with resources.

What do you think?  Are you diluting your focus out of fear?  

 

Why ghosting may be the most unforgivable professional sin

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There are professional ways to end a relationship, and silent indifference is not one of them.

Geoff Wilson

I was amused (appalled?) yesterday by a trend on LinkedIn that noted how the supply/demand balance had shifted so much in talent markets that people are resorting to “ghosting” at work.

Ghosting, a dating term that means ending a relationship by suddenly and without notice ending all communications, manifests itself in the workplace by people quitting without giving notice, or not showing up on their scheduled first day of work, or no-showing for interviews.  And it’s certainly a direct reflection on any candidate’s professionalism when they stop communicating or simply don’t show up.

Which brings to mind a thought for those of us in the professional realm: Ghosting is never the right way to end things.  No matter how busy you are, how important you are, or how indifferent you are to the other person or company, it’s always professional to invest a moment of your time in achieving closure.

I spend a portion of my time, as does anyone with a firm like mine, developing relationships and ideas for service; I usually do this alongside a very busy executive who has a need for help. The process of developing ideas and investing in new relationships is a significant investment of time and mind share, but it’s part of the trade.  In the years I have been doing this, four instances of ghosting stand out; these are the executives who go through the motions of scoping and idea generation, solicit a proposal, and then drop off the face of the earth. They are the cultivators of free information and free options for service. It bears saying that I am not referring to lost proposals: You win some and you lose some.  I am referring to proposals that have gone into a black hole, never to be acknowledged as residing in this universe.

Invariably, the ghosting executives wonder why people don’t enjoy working with them.  And, when there is some future outreach, there is always the “I was so busy” trope.  This usually comes from a busy executive who doesn’t stop to think that perhaps those around him who are responding to his requests are equally busy.  That excuse is chuckle-worthy.

Now, I must say that I write this as someone who values closure.  I especially value it when there has been mutual investment around a topic–no matter the context.  I once sat through a lunch discussion with the most dishonest person I ever met after a being a part of a series of negotiations with her; and I did it just to close things out–I can still taste the bile from that one.  Yeah, I’d say I enjoy closing the book…ending the discussion…getting to “yes” or “no” as the case may be.

So, why the moment on ghosting? Because life is longer than we like to admit.  You’re too busy to say “no” to that proposal, or to politely decline that next phone call, or to ensure that you have cancelled your attendance at that next interview?  Just remember that lapses in professionalism have a nasty habit of coming home to roost, and lapses that result in wasted time and lost value are among the worst. Ghosting may, in fact, be the most unforgivable professional sin.

What do you think?  Have you been ghosted in a professional setting?  

 

Really smart people try to do too much, and that makes them look stupid

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Why the proliferation of initiatives does not make you look smart, motivated, or aggressive.

Geoff Wilson

“I have too much on my plate.”

You probably hear that from people occasionally, but you rarely if ever actually hear it from the highest performing people.  And that’s the problem this post is about: When smart people try to do too much, it makes them look stupid.

If anything, one old management adage is “if you want something done, give it to the busiest person in your organization.”  Why?  Because, well, the busy people are the ones who are always finding a way to get things done.  And there’s a ton to like about that platitude.

But, as with all platitudes, there’s a ton of insight left on the cutting room floor. If you want something done, find someone who is smart, focused, and motivated.  Sure.

But if you really want something done well, find someone who is smart, focused, and motivated and then help them manage their workload appropriately. Smart, motivated people have a really hard time saying no to things.  And smart, motivated people often have a view of others that leads them to think others should be as smart and motivated as they are (and therefore have all the capacity they have).  This leads the smart, motivated, and overcommitted leader to proliferate initiatives ad nauseam.  

And that reality leads to big problems as you promote your smart, motivated people up the chain.  The problems look like executives who take on too much, and consequently ask their organizations to take on too much.  It looks like endless lists of initiatives, all running concurrently.   It looks like a mess of execution because everybody is scrambling to do too much.

And finally, it looks like really smart, motivated people experiencing failure as leaders because of the very virtues that got them to their leadership role in the first place.  Being smart and motivated leads some managers to take on too much, which leads to point failures in execution or in organizational leadership, which leads to the manager looking stupid.

The solution if this is your peccadillo?  Find that sounding board who will help you focus on the critical few things that matter and drive the organization to them.  Unfortunately, in an age where “more is better,” all too often those sounding boards have the same incentives as you do as a manager: To recommend more and bigger, not less and better.  If you can find an adviser or mentor who helps you know when to slow down and focus on fewer things, you’re already ahead of the game.

What do you think?  How do you find a way to ensure you don’t take on too much?