Perspective is essential to choosing well. As we put the wraps on 2020, I wanted to offer some insights into some essential truths we’ve rediscovered.
My friend and colleague Neely Taminga challenged the TedX community in Minneapolis to think differently about economics this fall. Her challenge was to move our mindset from an “economy of consumption to an economy of connection.”
In that simple yet profound remark lies a rich connection we rediscovered this year.
Pointing out that our earliest drives as children were to create something – a valentine for a parent or a play dough animal for grandma – humans have an innate need to create.
If you put us on a desert island, we begin to create and order our environment.
Clicking up a level, Peter Drucker famously said that the purpose of business is to create a customer. And just what does that customer create, but an economic demand for a group of people. And it’s in working together to clarify, understand, and fulfill that demand that provides engagement for us as a people to tap into that need to create.
It plays a big role in my business as well, as I come alongside leaders with tough challenges to accelerate their time to solution. Recently, a team was struggling to keep pace with the rapid expansion of their business through acquisitions and I was able to co-create a path to scale the talent and capacity of their team. So, intentional growth investment created a new project and an economically sustainable business case that I could help fulfill.
All from that pair of scissors and some crayons.
Take that away and the wheels fall off.
For the first time in modern memory, we took large swaths of that economy offline. When that economic demand wavered, it triggered all kinds of challenges and reminded us that we need to work together as individuals, teams, and enterprises.
By tracing that spark of the need to be seen and contribute by each of us, we can get a better handle on what will happen when we try to “go back to normal.”
Individuals
It all starts with an individual and their “spark.”
This is the intersection of the current moment with the sum of all their previous education, experiences, and environmental influences. The best firms understand that their team members are essentially volunteering to take part in their mission (with the talent challenge good individuals can take their choice of great work), and by providing clear direction, clarity and alignment, high performance individuals are drawn to work there.
How do we go deep to get the right people on board? By doing our homework by looking into each person’s education, experience and environment.
The educational imprint of a personal journey stays with us for life. By reading a person’s journey, you can get a sense of how they will show up. Did they power through a bachelor’s and master’s back to back? Go to a 2 year and then a 4 year? Grind out an executive MBA while traveling the world? Go back for a late in life grad degree? Keep up with executive training?
What experiences they have (and interestingly choose to share) tells you a great deal, as well. I highlight my experiences in more than 20 countries and a dozen business models to help people know me. Others talk about a particular role they had at a critical time in a business’s life. For others, it’s the influence of not-for-profit experience or early travel adventures.
Finally, what was the environment that this all played out on? Did they establish a new product in the teeth of a recession? Guide an established team through the great dot com bubble burst of the early ’00s? Each of these experiences leaves tracks – and generates empathy and connection with others who have had similar experiences.
Working with an insightful coach who can help you unpack each of these elements using insights, frameworks, and honest feedback is transformational. Getting to the root of positive and challenging patterns, potential blind spots, and triggers release that deep need to create and contribute.
When is the last time you had really on point feedback? Do you have someone who knows you well enough to help you see the distance between how you think you show up and how you actually show up?
Teams
When you’ve been a member of a great team, you’d crawl across glass to have that experience again. Great teams are made up of humans that:
- Know themselves and one another
- Have done the work to know that unless the larger agenda carries, individual contributions and wins are hollow
- Have an on-target mission that allows them to join their contributions to a larger and truly shared goal
I’ve spent a career building, leading, and coaching cross-functional teams. Great teams are born of addressing great challenges. Great challenges have high stakes, uncertain outcomes, and consequences if they are not addressed. Great teams transform their team members in the process of meeting the challenge.
It seems to every leader of these teams that they are doing it for the first time. The truth is that there are patterns, processes, and tools that can improve their odds of success immensely. Serving these leaders at the intersection of the journey consists of helping them get exactly the right team make up and addressing the right problem with the right approach. If one of these three elements is missing, the journey is much tougher.
How healthy are your teams? Do they welcome opinions that cross experience, gender, and educational lines? Do people go the extra mile to not let down their teammates?
Enterprises
Enterprises are groups of teams and organizations that are pulled together to serve a larger mission. This mission can be financial, technical, geographic, product, or market-centric. The best enterprises have a line of sight to the mission and clarity of their strategic arc. When healthy, they create a vibrant, cooperative spirit that allows them to make tough decisions that allow differential investments in opportunities.
The emotion of sharing the profits of core business with the needs of a growing uncertain business is no small decision. In 2020 the strength of the “we are in this together” bond was severely tested, and talent flowed from those with less clarity to those with more and roles that they could empathize with. Investment flowed as well, favoring those firms that had an identifiable, aligned mission.
Ironically, it’s the long-tenured businesses that lose their enterprise identity most easily. They have the margins and momentum to shore updated strategies and legacy business models that can squeeze the life out of passionate leaders.
What is your enterprise all about? Is the mission bigger than the firm? When you talk about your job with a colleague, do you talk about the opportunity to contribute or the pay and commute?
A Year of Insight and Challenge
The gift of 2020 was to push us all out of patterns. We were challenged to keep our firms vibrant with entirely new perspectives, patterns and ways of thinking.
Many of us had become wedded to parking in the same space, putting our pencil on the same spot on the desk, and attending the same meetings week after week.
This year blew that all up. Many remain at home, working through ambiguity and uncertainty.
My sincerest wish for you the reader is to find that silver thread from your creative child to your best-fit role.
How’s it going and how can I help? Please hit me up on Twitter at @scottpropp.
PS – It’s how we reassemble it that is going to chart our path for 2021. If you’d like to have a conversation about how to measurably improve your individual, team, or enterprise performance in the new year, reach out to me at scott@scottpropp.com or use this link to set up a short call.
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