Consider the postage stamp. It has one singular goal. It remains focused. This focus was a habit it developed in the face of fear. The fear of leaving its home and its other family of stamps, but it knows that in order to get what you want out of life, you must push through in order to create the life you want, and not just settle for the life that is given to you.
There are a lot of reasons performance appraisals can get wonky. Managers who don’t take the time to get the input they need or are just not paying attention; Forced stack ranks that have glowing words, and a “meets requirements” rating because there were too many other “exceptional” exceptional players in the mix; Or a boss who says, “You write it, I’ll sign it.”
A paradigm shift is happening today about the meaning of work, what a job is, what it means to be an employee, and the changing nature of a working life. We are working and living longer, so it’s crazy to think of education as a single decade at the beginning of our lives when we might have seven or eight more!
Many years ago, I enjoyed an all-too-brief read of Max De Pree’s, Leadership is an Art. In that book, De Pree encourages readers to ‘make the book your own’ by interacting with it, including the active writing along the pages’ edge with responses to key and significant concepts an author proposes or illustrates.
I was speaking with a client, which led to an interesting discussion about illegal hiring questions and topics. As a Career Coach, I think about this from candidate’s perspective but as an HR Consultant, I also consider it from an organizational viewpoint as well. So, what are some of the illegal topics?
Consider the postage stamp. It travels to far and distant lands. It leaves its family (the rest of the book of stamps it was plucked from) and it never sees them again. I’m sure that is fearful for the stamp, but it knows that it has a job to do. It stares fear in the face and forges on. If the postage stamp can do it, you can too.
She smiled for the first time that day. It was the start to a beautiful mentoring relationship. She
always had my back after that day. I learned a valuable lesson on leadership in that awful,
horrible day. The VP who initially had her back firmly against the wall in a defensive posture
took the time to think things through and took a risk on a naïve, but passionate kid. It made all
the difference for me.
One of the factors for job and career success is the value you add. Sometimes you can quantify it, like exceeding targets or the increase in dollars from implementing a creative idea. Other times it’s more intangible, like how you make people feel and the support you give as a valued colleague.
A key question to ask related to succession planning is, why are you doing it? Another question might be, what do you want the successors to be prepared to do? These two questions fit well together and if they are both not answered with the best thinking you can muster, your succession planning effort could be just checking another box in your organizational life.