The Truth About Where You Are Now. (Don’t Shoot The Messenger.)
After conversations with leaders over a couple of decades, I’ve come to realize an important truth... but it’s something not obvious if you’ve come up through the ranks.
As you make your way up in an organization, or as you scale an organization you started, there are certain skills you need in order to do your job well... or avoid having people shout at you for doing it badly.
Some of them may be specific skills, such as managing the company finances or peddling back from appallingly bad financial decisions made by someone else.
Some of them may involve working and dealing with other people.
At that scale and those levels, your role is about tasks, logistics, operations, spreadsheets... all the things that make life truly worth living.
Once you reach executive levels or scaled your business beyond 10 people, an important truth comes into play... one that isn’t obvious until someone like me points it out:
The skills that got you to the level or size you’re at, aren’t the ones that will make you successful here or take you beyond it.
At these higher levels, it becomes less about operations and more about managing, motivating and aligning complex human systems.
Translation: Your work becomes mostly about people and their “issues.”
Part of the problem is: people don’t work the same as spreadsheets. (At some deep, intuitive level… you might already know this?)
Spreadsheets don’t need motivating. They don’t fall out with other spreadsheets. They don’t call in sick for 2 weeks to go on a secret Caribbean cruise.
I’m not trying to make a case here for the wholesale replacement of your team with spreadsheets. As tempting as this might sound, it probably won’t work.
Your people are actually your greatest assets… but only if you know how to help them lift and pull together at the same time.
This requires a different set of skills... a different toolkit from the one you’ve perhaps been using up until now.
After all, humans are quite complex... with different needs and motivations. Fortunately, there are also patterns in how people respond to things.
This is where I come in. And the crystals, of course. The crystals help me to understand those patterns. The crystals give me the answers.
OK... I’m just checking you’re awake and still paying attention.
I’m not talking about literal crystals. Crystals don’t talk to me about leadership issues. They just give me trivial stuff like the winning lottery numbers.
I’m talking about crystallized thinking... the “different way of thinking” I mentioned, like... two blog posts ago... remember?
I have a very different way of thinking and seeing things, which means I can often detect the underlying causes of tension and conflict.
I’ll talk about the most surprising one I’ve discovered, in the next blog post. It comes as a shock to many leaders, but it probably has the single biggest impact.
Anyway... the key takeaway for now, which state law mandates me to remind you in each blog post, is that:
The skills that got you to where you are now, aren’t the ones to help you do your job well at this level, or to progress any further. You need a different toolkit.
I intend to unlock this toolkit for you over the coming weeks... so for now, hold off on firing your people and replacing them with spreadsheets.
