It’s time to consider what success looks like in this professional age.
April 3, 2022
In the last 30 years of professional working, there have been, as with many of us, highs and lows both personally and professionally. With recent surveys suggesting a change in career desires from simply remuneration and promotion to work-life balance and giving back to society perhaps it’s time to consider what success looks like in this professional age.
Recently Covenant has been working alongside businesses and professional charity leaders with the aim of cementing strategic and cultural change in the habit of progress. I was struck though, in all honesty at the predication to measure what had gone before to plan for the future. It is as though no one is looking at it now.
Over that period we became aware of the need to look again at what professional achievement or success looks like. In doing this, with all integrity, I am also speaking to myself.
Reinforcement
It may be easy for some to empower themselves and speak out loud about who they think they are and what they stand for. My issue and challenge though with the leaders we were engaged with was to recognise and reinforce the ‘narrative of now’. What do I mean by this? Let me give you a brief example.
In supporting a housing charity with works to maintain their buildings we discussed the need to “get this done” to “not let this wear out” and “if only it was all done I could……….”. I suggested that to look ahead we should see what was currently happening.
I stopped for a moment and reminded the extremely talented leader of the following.
- You ARE managing buildings over a 15-mile radius with different needs and challenges.
- You ARE helping and empowering tenants, all with individual needs and support considerations
- You ARE managing staff, sickness absence, annual leave, professional development and performance.
- You ARE managing an office, the rent, insurance, and logistics (yes the damn printer).
- You ARE empowering churches, they have signed a committal agreement and are engaging with tenants.
- You ARE maintaining the buildings, tenants are safe, warm and able to dwell to a good standard.
- You ARE building vital relationships, meeting local agencies and authorities, churches and fellow Christian networks
- You ARE making difficult decisions, deciding to offer a home to someone or to move them on where their needs require more dedication and specialised interventions. That is really tough to see by the way.
- You ARE putting yourself between people and homelessness. Look at numbers 1 to 8 if in doubt.
10 You ARE burdened to make tenants’ lives better. Your passion, care and devotion are still firmly in place.
Ultimately that professional leader is doing all of that right now. NOW
Less Noise
If your pursued by targets or battered by what you didn’t do right in the past in your career. Where you wished you had done better and are striving to put right many of the aspects of perceived failure, take a moment to reflect on the above. Write down what you ARE doing now. It won’t be complete, it won’t be everything you should be doing, it will be stressful. You are a human being, not a human doing.
In the above example, I also need to mention the quiet success. I was told once by the CEO of an NHS hospital that what he needed was less noise. He put it like this.
“if I don’t hear about the plant and machinery failing, or the IT systems ‘going down’ then I can focus on the things where the noise is. The lack of noise in the things that have little tangible benefit to us until they aren’t there are the pillars of my strategy. Mostly, I have to manage the noise. I am grateful and reassured where there is no noise. I can work with that”
So here again we see that what is or what are the things in place, is as much a measure of success as all things past and the desire for future success.
In my experience leadership and management are about making decisions and prioritising. Not necessarily doing everything. Let’s not be busy fools.
As I was once told, when I was feeling particularly doubtful about my abilities; failure is an event, not a person. I had to have a proper chat with myself.
On that note, it’s worth mentioning the idea of failure and its purpose. I was once at the pinnacle of my career, or so I thought. I was a little arrogant and chasing the ultimate CEO prize. I took my eye off the basics. One day the very clever multi-million poundWorlds first technology I had put in place slowed down. It slowed so much that the client couldn’t use it. All heck broke loose. Within a matter of weeks, I was toast. I had forgotten, in my zealous desire for success to remember the basics of what was in place NOW. Taking care of that. I was striving and looking ahead too much.
I hope this article helps those driven to chase more success to look at what they are doing now. Your success is probably right where you ARE.
