A look back in time... a few reflections... and an easy to remember roadmap for development

This year I’m celebrating 25 years of professional career and I’m fortunate to be in a position to deeply reflect on the journey so far and share in this concise article a few insights that helped me navigate reasonably well so far, and that keep me centered on my personal purpose to “Inspire people to believe it can be done and equip’em for the ride”.

?When I started my career, coming out of a Chemical Engineering school, my long-term aspiration was to be working as an engineer and be excellent at what I was doing. ?I had a few examples of very competent engineers I could look up to in the manufacturing site I started my career in Guaruja, Brazil. At that time, I didn’t even think of becoming a people leader. Quite the contrary, I actually felt that people leadership roles would be boring and not as meaningful as implementing process improvements and projects.

?It was probably 3 to 4 years into my improvement engineer job that I started to realize that some of my projects that were very solid, technically speaking, were not as successful as some others that were not as technically robust. I was intrigued by this fact and the gap between my beliefs and reality drove me to start investigating these cases. ?

It took me sometime?to realize the cause of these findings, but in retrospective, with more than a dozen projects from the previous year, I was able to clearly see that the projects where I had higher engagement from a diverse team were often much more successful than the ones where the engagement was not at similar levels. And that by having higher engagement these projects generated higher buy-in and commitment from the team with the project success, and this team commitment more than offset the technical robustness of the other group of projects.?

With this realization in mind, I started to pay a lot more attention to how I could influence and engage the needed teams in the projects I was leading. A few great leaders in my past saw something in me, that I even had not recognized. Some traits of leadership, however when I was asked about my aspirations for people leadership, my paradigm had not completely shifted from my early years despite my increased interest in understanding engagement, empowerment and influence.?

A few years later I eventually accepted my first people leadership role in Texas, where me and my wife, Ana, relocated and where our beloved son, Lucas was born. At this time, a few years after I started to work to increase influence and engagement, I was reading a book from John C. Maxwell, “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership”. John is a very experienced leader, wonderful storyteller and leadership writer, and he connected the dots for me on his definition of leadership: “Leadership is Influence, nothing more, nothing less”. When I reflected back, at that point in time, I realized that the technical problems, despite some of them being extremely complex, were actually the easiest to resolve, and the main challenges were presented on how to inspire, influence and motivate people.?After working for several years in capital and Six Sigma projects, I ‘d finally realized the need and the power of leadership and of a motivated team.

For most of my 25-year career I’ve been a super optimist employee, extremely engaged, except for a short 6-month period, where I got myself waking up in the morning and having to find upbeat songs, and other motivational ways to get me to work and to not produce to my full potential. I was probably delivering 80% of what I could while throughout my career I’ve been always striving to deliver 120%. An insight from this period was that one could instantly increase the output of an individual or a team by 50% (from 80% to 120%) by driving engagement and motivation, and this was more than any capital or Six Sigma project I’ve had a chance to see delivering.?

As I developed as a people leader and started to share some of my insights with my teams, coachees and mentees as part of development plan discussions, I’ve tried to boil them down to some simple terms, so it would be easy for me, and for them to remember. I was still in Texas when I was first exposed to how our brain works, with a high focus on driving safety results, however some of these learnings stayed with me and helped to frame my initial development roadmap guidance which I called 3Hs, as the key points to be consider start with the letter H. As time went by, with more experience and maturity, I incorporated a couple of more Hs to the roadmap, which is currently at 5Hs which I’ll describe in the next paragraphs. I use them as my compass at work and in my personal life and have shared them with a lot of folks throughout the years at different versions.

?

5H Roadmap:

?I’ve been using this “H” model for more than a decade. It’s an easy way to remember a compilation of several lessons I’ve got throughout my career from different leaders, books, articles and discussion with friends and colleagues. It started with 3Hs, which I currently call them the execution “H”s and eventually went to a 4H model and recently I incorporated a 5th “H”, probably as a result of more experience and the realization that time passes each day and year faster than the one before.?

I’ll start to describe the 5H model from the most Aspirational "H"s going towards the execution ones. They depict pretty reasonably my way of seeing things in life, which encompass work among other areas.?

The 1st “H” comes from Happiness. I’m Brazilian and normally my country, and Latin America as a whole, is perceived as an optimistic region, one which even in hardship times, people seem to look at the bright side of things. By their uniqueness each individual has a different way to achieve Happiness and I believe it should be a key priority for every individual, to pursue this basic right, according to the United States Constitution, it certainly is for me. My basic belief is that we are here in this life to be Happy and if one is not happy with his or her personal life, job, partner, situation, one ought to do something to change as we just have one life and we deserve to enjoy it.?

With experience, and the feeling that each year, month, day, hour are passing faster than the previous ones, I incorporated the 2nd “H”, which is somewhat related to the 1st in the sense that we just have one life and time passes fast (or even flies). The 2nd “H” comes from Hour, re-enforcing the importance of time and the prioritization we all should have to make the best use of our time to work and do the things that matter the most for us.?

These are more aspirational “H” concepts and very important for me to gauge if I’m in the right direction, doing the right things and attempting to find congruency between the rational part of my brain and the emotional part of it. Talking about brain, this is a good segway towards the Execution “H”s. I've been using this execution model for years when working on coaching, mentoring and supporting development plans for colleagues and team members.?

The 3rd one, and the one I actually started as the 1st more than one decade ago, is the “H” from Heart, which I refer to in order to try to identify what are the passions one individual has in life. The key questions here are: “What are the things you love to do in life?” “What are the things you’d do for free?”. And the answers to these questions will highlight words, aspects, things, situations, circumstances that you love to do. I encourage folks to jot them down.?

The 4th “H” is the first letter of the word Head, which I’m referring to the brain or the intellectual abilities of any one individual. I normally refer to the Head as what an individual is good at, or what are their areas of strength. What are your natural abilities that differentiate you from the rest of the pack. Another insight I normally share with folks is that when it relates to development, most people focus on improving their weaknesses, whereas my guidance is to not neglect their areas of weaknesses and work to get them better so they don't become a liability, but pour most of their energy towards their areas of strength, the ones that differentiate them from all other individuals and I normally draw a picture of a small circle symbolizing one's weaknesses within a larger circle being their strengths. And by putting a similar effort on mitigating your weakness you'll be able to close a small part of the small circle as it would take a lot of energy to improve something you're not good at as these areas are normally ones that are not natural abilities or that one has more difficulty to acquire. On the other hand, the same effort in the areas of strength can expand that large circle by that increased radius which the expanded area is orders of magnitude higher than the little pizza slice from the weakness improvement.?

Well, with the answers to what you love to do and the things you are good at, one can find the intersection, similar or partially what you see in an "Ikigai" diagram. You want to know the things that you love to do, and you are good at. As there are always things that you are good at and doesn’t like to do and things that you love to do and is not good at. In my case an example of the latter is singing, I love to sing but I’m horrible at.?

My advice to folks is that you should be looking for roles, hobbies, activities in this intersection, so you can potentialize your strengths and something you love to do, so you wouldn’t even feel it’s work. I’ve been very fortunate that with the exception of a few quarters stint's I’ve had a chance to work the vast majority of my career in this intersection, having jobs that the majority of the time I was doing things I’m good at and that I love to do. In my example, I love challenges and challenging assignments, as an engineer I’m reasonably good with math and logic and coming from a large family in a small city in Brazil I learned very early how to relate with a lot of different individuals, so teamwork, team sports, are areas that appeals to me.?

Well to wrap things up, the last but not least: the 5th “H” from Hands. This one closes the execution part that highlights the importance to doing the work, hands on. I’ve been in the industry for about 25 years and working most of the time on things I like and have skills for, and, I’ve always worked pretty hard and this is in my mind a key for success. I love sports and normally share examples of athletes, basketball players, runners, boxers, and the fact that people only see them in the court, track, ring at show time but don’t see how much work they’ve been putting in the gym every day for long hours. There’s a say that "success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration", and I truly believe in it.

My key message to the folks I share these concepts is that you need to know where you are going, understand the goals you have and what are you doing Today so you are better tomorrow and closer to your next step. Don’t wait for perfection but take the 1st step, this is always the hardest to be taken and you'll be amazed by the growth you can achieve in the long run by taking minor consistent steps on a routine basis.?

So here you have, the 5H Roadmap, an easy to remember guidance I’ve been successfully using and sharing with several others to help drive a more fulfilling life and successful career. The recipe will be different for each person, but I believe the framework is widely applicable.

Happiness ??

Hour (Time) ?

Heart ???

Head ???

Hands ??

?At this point in my career, I had been a people leader for over 15 years, I had small teams and very large teams with global responsibilities, remote and local teams and I can say that I more than surpassed any initial career aspirations I had from when I joined the workforce.

With that said, the one thing that never changed, was my focus on working with people and helping wherever I could. With time it my personal purpose crystallized more and more, and this is what drives me to wake up excited everyday: to “inspire people to believe it can be done and equip’em for the ride”.