How to Make Success Inevitable
We Start Our Careers Knowing Absolutely Nothing. That Can Be A Really Good Thing.
We humans are really good at learning. We’re built for it. Our capacity to think, to figure things out when confronted with novel situations, and to learn through direct explanation, through observation, through tinkering, and especially through reflection – those are the traits that have made us successful as a species.
The flip side is that, unlike gazelles, say, we are born knowing absolutely nothing. Watch a nature documentary about the savanna and you’ll see gazelles get born and get running all in the same day. Nobody has to tell a newborn gazelle to stand up, walk around to test those new leg muscles, grab a drink of her mother’s milk, and then start running along with the rest of the herd lickety-split, so the lions don’t catch her. These are all the things smooth little gazelle brains are pre-wired to do.
Humans, on the other hand, have to learn everything. Ever met a kid? Once they start talking, their favorite two words are “Why?” and “No.” To help them along, a parent picks up one very important word to reply with: “Because.”
Kid: “Why do you want me to eat my vegetables before you’ll give me desert?”
Short-term-focused Parent: “Because eat your vegetables!”
This is a missed opportunity. The part that goes unsaid in this parent’s reply, but that is understood nonetheless, is that the world is ruled by tyrants whose unpredictable whims make for conflict on the one hand or miserable compliance on the other.
A parent who wants to avoid this same challenge in the future, and who also wants to introduce in his child an internal drive for self-care, will instead take a different tack:
Long-term-focused Parent: “Because vegetables make you smart, big, healthy, and strong. Desert without vegetables first can make you sick and weak. You want to be strong and smart, don’t you?”
Of course this challenge will come up the next time, and the next, for a few years before (with good fortune) the kid moves on from this struggle. But when this reasoning approach is applied consistently over the span of years, sooner or later most children will come to seek out vegetables even when the parent isn’t there to watch – and that’s the real point of the parent-child vegetable battle, isn’t it? To make the kid a self-starter? Not just with vegetables, not just at the dinner table, but in every way imaginable throughout their life.
What does all this have to do with the world of work?
The first and most important point I hope you take away is that, if you’re a boss, lead with your well-thought-out Because. Provide it even before your worker has to ask you why. For instance,
Wise Boss: “We’re assigning you this new project because we’ve identified you as one of our high-potential new hires. This is going to be hard; harder than your current responsibilities, and much harder than what your peers who have not been chosen for this assignment are going to be working on. You’re going to run into all sorts of problems we in management haven’t even anticipated yet. Along with your small, hand-picked team of project-partners, we’ll help you think through those unexpected problems, of course. That’s why we’re here. But meantime, it’s important you realize that this will give you the professional growth and the chance to prove yourself that will put you on the short list for promotion, as long as you’re learning the way we hope you will. That’s why we chose you. Are you up for it?”
The wise boss in this scenario is working with the best part of her worker’s human mind – the very thing that makes us humans such a successful species in the first place – to do so much more than just get the worker to comply with a harder new assignment.
After all, if our goal is compliance, we’re going to drive away our most talented workers. That’s another topic entirely for another day.
This wise boss, though, doesn’t want a worker who will meekly accept a hard assignment. That would be short-term thinking at best. Like the short-term-focused parent, the foolish boss is setting themselves up for future conflict, for poor worker performance… a whole litany of poor outcomes.
The wise boss, on the other hand, has used her “because” to set a chain of positive results in action. Among them,
· Buy-in. The worker has an internal drive to do well on this project, because he sees it as an opportunity to learn, to advance in his career, and to show gratitude to a boss who clearly favors him.
· Self-motivation is the result of this buy-in. The boss just made her job a thousand times easier and more enjoyable. Rather than being the boss of a chain gang, she can now enjoy being leader of team that probably doesn’t need much oversight.
· Preparation for difficulty. The boss informed her worker that problems not only might arise, but that they are bound to. Guess what happens the first time her project team runs into an obstacle? Rather than fret or resent it, they’ll buckle down and get to work. After all, solving novel problems was introduced as a benefit of this project, rather than a chore.
· Well-trained future managers on her team. By showing through her example how to manage, the boss has provided implicit coaching on how the worker should manage his own reports when it is his turn to run a team.
· Much higher chance of success. By gaining buy-in and properly framing inevitable challenges as learning opportunities, the boss has a whole crew of superstars who will prove their ability to succeed at hard tasks or die trying. If this project can get done, the workers brought onto the team in this way are definitely the ones to do it.
Do you own a “Main Street” business in South West Florida that is thriving, but you could use some help scaling to something larger and thus more impactful?
Do you know an owner who fits that description?
We should talk: