Quirky Thoughts About Career

I had a talk today with a really smart talent professional and he had two interesting questions that led me to think about "career" and about personal development and what I think we might get wrong because we haven't thought it all the way through. I don't know if this post will be useful. It might be. It's about work, jobs, careers, such as they were.

Let it Go, Let it Gooooooo

I remember vividly when I realized I was doing it wrong. (Sidebar: a common occurrence in my life.) I was the subject matter expert on a project at work, and without me, no one would be able to succeed, and I was thinking to myself, "Yeah, I'm a big deal. I'm important." And THEN I realized what was also true: and I'll never get another role in this whole company so long as I'm the ONLY guy who knows how to do this (what ended up being not at all important) task. Uh oh.

Immediately, I set about to training the team around me how to do EVERYTHING I knew how to do. And I started choosing to forget my expertise. Instead, I poured all my energy into developing the team around me.

Oh, and then I got promoted. And promoted again. (Unlock #1: Don't hold onto anything. Teach others everything.)

Special Delivery

When I got the new miniboss role, I immediately set about doing the least impactful things. I screwed up royally. I made the mistake of thinking "team morale" was a very very important end state and that if I had everyone feeling happy, I was surely doing a good job.

What I wasn't doing was delivering. My track record with landing successful projects was pretty iffy. It'd have been fair to say "a crap shoot." Worse, I didn't have any particular strategy to which projects I'd deliver. Instead, I did the things I liked and slacked off on the things I didn't. Which helps exactly one person: me. Great, if I'm paying myself. Not great, if I have bosses, and boss's bosses, etc.

If you don't deliver, no one cares. If you're not producing something of value to the organization, no one cares. Your ability to get along with others is great. Your ability to do that AND deliver is what makes you worth something.

My CEO has a great way of saying this: "I pay people for two things and in this order: to be kind to other fireflies, and to be really good at what they do."

I now use this as my compass for evaluating talent. Can they deliver? And are they kind when they do so?

Train Your Replacement

This is almost what I talked about earlier when I said I taught my team how to do all the important work. But slightly different. Time and time again at work, I find that people who advance are people who build lines of succession deep into the team where they operate. You can be the front line and this concept works: train the new junior person to do what you know how to do. Then, as you move further into the organization, train the replacement who'll take your job when you come up.

This is how we develop our leadership and it makes a lot of sense. It works rather well and it means that when we have a deep bench, we can go even further in developing a durable multi-generational business.

Specialize and Diffuse - in That Order

My colleague asked an interesting question, and I don't have a solid answer, but I was able to offer some insights: "How does one get invited onto the Board of Directors of a company?" I have some thoughts. They're not concrete.

One easy way is to invest enough money that you get a Board seat as part of your investment. (I'm not knocking this - our investor seats are SO smart and give us mountains of insights we can't see at a one-corporation level.)

Beyond that, we sought specialists to be our Independent Board seats, and each specialist had very specific skills and knowledge we sought to share with various parts of the executive leadership team, so one guy was great at product and could help our product person. Another had strong people/HR skills and could transfer that to our people person, and so on.

Each of them knew MORE than that, though. They had diffuse skills beyond their specialty, partly from direct experience, and also from being on other boards. That's some value.

So if you aspire one day to sit on Boards, my observations at this time make me think that's what earns you a seat at the table: real deep specialization in a skill, as well as a spread-out overall knowledge base from experience and observation.

Career Isn't About What You Think

I told my colleague that career isn't about being on all the right projects and knowing how to professionally brag about it. In fact, at least at Appfire, we're not all that into people who brag. It's almost the exact opposite, though: the people we end up talking about a lot are the ones who are delivering, developing the people around them, and who somehow transform whatever team they're on into being a team of great operators.

We never say "She did this thing and everyone was so impressed." Instead, it'll be like, "She got the team all organized and they delivered right on time with very little fuss. It was a mess before, but wow, that team really landed the plane."

At least here, the way people seem to advance comes from making the rest of their team amazing and then delivering on mission-valuable projects and tasks.

What I like about that is that you or I can do that at any level and in any role. Making the team around you better is something nearly every single role can approach.

Career-View Mirror

Looking back, I'll say what everyone who's had a great ride through work and life will say: none of this lines up. None of it was point A, then point B. Most of the people you admire the most have crazy careers that were more like four dogs in a trench coat than an actual path. I'm the same.

Looking over my shoulder, I wasted so much time on the wrong things. That's the worst part. I have many regrets for where I spent my time and energy. I could've done even more. But whatever. I checked and this game has only one playthrough.

I'll say this: raise up the other people around you. Except in corny movies, there's never a situation where there can be only one.

All the best stories are team stories.

Chris...