Ladders of management, part 2...
I know the previous entry was all about knowing the WHY and then consistently applying a HOW and WHAT. Leaders of motivational stuff regularly repeat the mantra “start with the WHY”. Know your WHY and then everything else should fall into place.
However, you may find yourself in situations where the WHY is not easy to grasp. You may be seen as too “junior” to understand the WHY. You are asked to simply do and leave the worry of WHY to loftier beings. Fret not, all is not lost.
Sidenote; I am strongly think that all team members would benefit from knowing the WHY. However, we operate in a world that is not always rational and sometimes people want to preserve knowledge to themselves and not help juniors for fear of power loss.
There is still a potential value to be salvaged. By focusing on the WHAT or the HOW you can still be learning skills that may be of future use. Or, as you will read later, you show the right attitude and impress others when picking future teams. The key point is that yes, it is very useful to know the WHY, but sometimes you can come out stronger without really knowing the WHY.
In the context of ladders and walls it is like not knowing why you are going up a particular wall. But, in scaling up and down, you get better at using the ladders and heights and building the muscle memory that enables you to use the ladders better, regardless of the wall. Such that when the right wall (right WHY) comes up you can easily attack it and will get to the top easier. A bit like when the karate kid (from the Karate Kid movie) unknowingly learned how to become a karate champion whilst washing cars! I learned this the hard way in my first job upon leaving Uni.
Queue nostalgia music
I was feeling proud of myself, I had managed to get a first class degree and a coveted graduate position. Boy was I going to come down to earth…Fast! After orientation, my manager went through what I was to do. My first project as a grown up, I was excited – all those years of studying and I was now going to finally do some sexy work, like in the movies!
The reality was different; I sat there whilst he explained that I was expected to copy figures from a print out into a spreadsheet. That was all – no fancy maths, no complex algebra, I was simply to put numbers into a spreadsheet. Oh, and there were 15 pages of these numbers. Yes, that is correct, having attained top of class in Financial Mathematics I was expected to data entry. Was this guy for real?! You could say that I was less than enthused about the work. There was little else that was given to me as an explanation – other than not to make mistakes.
Sidenote; the same manager, at a later date, reached into his pocket offering to double my annual bonus when he found out my staff bonus amounted to 25pence. Now, I am not saying there was something wrong with him, but what kind of SICK SICK man offers to root around his pocket for loose change! Not that it adds anything to this story but I just wanted to get it off my chest - it still grates!
Luckily I recalled something that my parents had always told us. No one works as hard (‘hustle’ in modern parlance) as someone who has their own business. The theory being that everyone should work as if it is their business and do whatever they can do to the best of their ability and grind it out. With this in mind, I was able to plough through the menial task.
Anyway, in hindsight, I now know that the rates were needed in a spreadsheet to check whether the we were being ripped off, to the tune of £15m. This would have been a very very useful and motivating WHY. But my manager had decided that it was not important for me to know. Oh, and the icing on the cake; once I had finished the task the manager sat there with me checking each and every single entry - for 1 hour and 25 LONG minutes! Oh the indignity!
Can you imagine the level of “what the heck is going on here” – first, I had been asked to data entry and then was being made to watch my manager check each and every single entry. I cannot begin to tell you how crap my career choice felt. Everyone was asking me how great the job was - family were holding me up as examples for their kids – if only they knew; I was a data entry zombie!
The manager, it turns out, was testing my ability to focus and attention to detail. Fortunately, I passed and was able to leverage into more meaningful projects. But that first week was a test of will!
A further silver lining was that I got fast, very fast, at entering and sorting numbers in spreadsheets – grudgingly I will concede that this skill has saved my bacon on more than one occasion throughout my career! (A bit like an unsexy version of the Karate Kid where he is painting fences one minute and blocking punches using the same movement!)
I could linger a bit more on the crapness of that first week went, but the takeaways:
a) Sometimes you will not be given the WHY. This should not necessarily stop you from action and pressing forward
b) There is still value in learning skills even without a WHY, even though you don’t feel it sometimes you may well be learning skills that will then be of use when you are given the right wall to climb!
More to follow…