What Got You Here, Won't Get You There

Find yourself in. I am Nola Simon, and this is the Hope and Possibilities podcast. One concept that I'd like to talk about is the whole theory of what got you here won't get you there. It actually comes from Marshall Goldsmith and he may have been inspired by somebody else, but that's where I know it from.

And so basically the concept is whatever got you to whatever level of success you have currently isn't the thing that's going to get you where you want to be. So often this comes up when people get to a certain level in their career and then they move into leadership or management, whatever got them to the peak level of success that got them. That promotion to leadership or management is not the thing that's actually going to be make them successful in that new role. A lot of times individual contributors have to actually let go of.

The things that made them very successful in that individual contributor role and step away from those skills and abilities and prioritize other things. The attention to detail, the, maximization of effort all of that isn't as needed in a leadership role because. You are paying attention to different types of details. You're looking at things from a different perspective.

A lot of times you have to let people figure things out themselves and you are not the person in control. But you have to. Strategically support. A lot of times parenting is the best metaphor for leadership and management, right?

Particularly management, you are responsible for the overall. Success of the project, but you are not the person doing the work. You're just accountable for what's going on, right? So as a parent, you wanna make sure that your kids are, healthy, they're fed, they're doing their homework, they're safe, they're developing themselves.

They're fed, they're clean, and. They're developing all kinds of skills at different levels. They're making friends. They're supporting their emotional health, their mental health, as well as their physical health at the end of the day.

I remember saying this to my husband, once your kids are alive, that's about all we can ask for today. They're fed, they're healthy, nobody's dead. Yay me. My kids just turned 18 and 20, and I perceive that to be my success.

Everybody made it to adulthood. That's something my mother used to say to me is the goal of a parent is to raise adults. So if you've raised adults as a parent, you've achieved your goal. It's a long term project.

So that's the sort of metaphor that I applied to leadership and management is you are not the person in control. You're not living their lives, but you are. Supporting them in their journey to become independent adults. And a lot of times that's the same as work, right?

You are working on a project, but you are not the person doing the work. You're just enabling, you're facilitating the work to be done. You are moving. Obstacles out of the way.

You're negotiating better circumstances and resources for the team that will enable them to have success, right? So if you think about it it's a really good metaphor for what's going on in the world of work right now, right? Nobody exactly knows how AI is going to actually. Come in and change things, whether it's going to be bad, whether it's gonna be good.

We all have opinions on what that's going to look like, but at the end of the day, if you are thinking about it simply from a perspective of what got me here won't necessarily got, get me there, that kind of narrows it down because AI didn't exist before. So it wasn't what got you to this level of success. Success, so you have to consider. What's going to get me to where I want to be in the future?

It's not that your past success isn't valuable, but legitimately it's not going to be the only thing that's going to carry your career through to the next stage that you want to move towards. And I, I saw this actually even when I was doing the deep research into Liam Payne in one direction. So Liam was always a strong singer. That was his main skill and ability.

He was naturally gifted. He, even when they started, when they were young teenagers, he was an incredible singer, but he also brought this ability to. Melt and to fit in and cover when other people weren't necessarily having the best vocals. So it made him actually ideal within a group because he could sing almost anything.

He had an extremely wide range. He could sing falsetto, he could sing high notes. He could, but he could also do really deep notes. And he had that mellow ability to harmonize with anyone.

And it really, in lots of ways, he was the glue in the harmonies. The thing about Liam, he was also very vocal and he was in lots of ways, especially early on, the spokesperson for the group. If you watched lots and lots of interviews, especially early on, Liam was often the person who spoke first, who's often the person who's sang first. He took that level of responsibility and initiative.

And that carried him through an awful lot of the group dynamic, but it actually became problematic later on because the others grew in their skills and abilities and, the dynamics of the group changed. So they didn't necessarily need Liam to be the leader in all aspects of how the group was performing. Both, in interviews and professionally on the stage. So that ability of, adjusting what got you here won't get you there.

That's something I think that Liam struggled with. If I was analyzing his career, which I did, he very much, although he was very creative and inventive and changed a lot of things because he could sing almost anything. He was very much into changing sound and genre and experimenting in different ways. His playbook of how he conducted himself stayed pretty similar all along the way.

He, showed up. He was responsible. He, again, was very vocal. He voiced his opinions an awful lot.

He did lots of interviews. He was very active on social media. I'm going to counter that, that actually, especially when he carried that through into his solo career, that did not work well for him because it made him a target in lots of ways, and there was nobody else to actually balance. And I think that he might say so he was incredibly available and I think that in retrospect, looking at how his life and his career worked out, he would've been.

Better May speaking less and letting the music stand for itself because it did stand for itself. His solo work was actually incredible. Where he actually got into some problems I think is. Because he said so much.

There was so much to analyze. And the more you say, the more you make yourself a target to certain people who have nothing better to do, but except analyze everything that you say. So strategically, I think if he had been able to adjust his playbook and how he interacted and how he presented himself he would've had. A better experience now would've, could've shoulda up.

There's no way to know for sure. But that metaphor of, what got you there won't necessarily get you there, I think really played out through it Liam's life. And there were other factors as well, like tall Poppy syndrome. One Direction was incredibly successful and Liam was a big part of that.

But the way the world works in terms of tall poppy syndrome is when people have that level of incredible success, there's certain personalities in the world that want to take you down a peg. And the way that they do that is to undermine your credibility and your success. And so Liam's often engaged in defending what he had managed to do with One Direction and. That again is totally understandable, but it was detrimental to him, right?

So what I'd ask you to do is really consider how this plays out in your life. You're not a pop star, you're not, selling at the top 1% of the music industry, but it plays out in everybody's lives. How do you adjust and adapt from what made you comfortable? What made you happy?

What made you successful? However you define success, how do you adapt and change that? So for example, I'm looking at that with my work right now. I founded my consulting business because I saw an opportunity.

To talk about the way that I had developed hybrid remote within my own career and adapted it so that I could be a more present parent for my girls. My girls were what? Six and three when I first started advocating for work from home because I really didn't have a whole lot of family support or daycare reliable daycare. And so that's why I started advocating for that flexibility because I had a four hour commute and I was seeing my kids one hour a day.

Now my kids are now 18 and 20. I don't need daycare. I haven't needed daycare for a good 10 years. But they're also not living at home, right?

So I have to consider that, although I may believe. And everything that I read and research indicates to me that flexibility will be the future. It's better for caregivers. It's better for anybody who's disabled.

It's better for integration of work and life. It benefits. Everybody, even people who don't need any type of accommodation in their lives because you just have more freedom and autonomy to do the things that are more important in your life. And the businesses do matter as well too, right?

You don't have that fixed capital cost associated with real estate if you can get that away. So automatically you have the ability to redirect resources. To different areas of your business that can help leverage your success. In terms of how I work, I've always been the type of leader.

Who teaches by role modeling? I have this thing about actual teaching. I never wanted to be a teacher. I took training courses and I realized that I didn't actually want to teach or be involved in learning and development.

It's not that those things aren't good to do. I'm very glad that there are people who can do them, but that's not the way that I. Communicate best. It's not the way that I inspire best.

I am not very good at repetitive teaching. I'm not good at reinforcing messages. What I am good at is role modeling, right? So I see something that I think that is valuable to do and I.

Take my own advice, leverage it, and then share what worked, what didn't work, what has a possibility of being tweaked. And then I go from there, right? And so that is really the way that I. Developed my whole work from home when I was working corporate.

But it's also how I developed my business as well too. And so that's really how I got media attention. That's really how I've developed my podcast. It's that role modeling.

So now that I don't actually need to be present for my children, how does that change my work and what do I want to role model? And how do I best share my skills and abilities so that I am useful and sharing something that's going to be inspiring both to myself and to the people that I work with. And I don't know that hybrid remote is really where I need to be right at the moment. So I am thinking that I'm going to be customizing how I do my consulting work.

It's not that I'm going to abandon that. Right at the moment I've always found that hybrid, like flexibility, hybrid, remote work from anywhere, work from home, whatever you wanna call it goes in peaks and valleys. And when you've got a valley where the economy is not doing well, where employers feel that they're in control at its employer's market and they can operate from. A perspective of it's my way or the highway, and they're using that fear to inspire and control their workforces and flexibility is that.

A minimum where they're trying to go that route where they're actually impeding people from having that flexibility and they're requesting and demanding and mandating that people come back to the office. It's happening throughout Canada, the big banks, insurance companies federal government, provincial governments. All of that is really based on the fact that. A lot of these companies have too many, too much staff.

A lot of this, these companies, especially government, have a lot of people with a lot of tenure. So that means severance would be really expensive. And I'm not saying it's going for everybody, but there's an instinct to try to mandate to bring people back to the office to force a decision. Even if that's really early retirement.

Maybe that's, I'm going to start my own business so that I have the flexibility that I need because I create it. Or maybe that's I'm going to accommodate this mandate because I have no choice, and see how that goes. So personally, I've been there. I a mandate in 2013 meant that I had to go back to the office.

I actually had to go back to the office with a day's notice because they canceled the program and. I was on medical I had broken my foot and so I really had to go back to the office because my medical leave got canceled, and they basically said either I show up or I get fired. So with a day's notice, I had to go back. Which was awesome.

So I've been there. You have no choice except to comply with a mandate unless you actually want to lose your job. And without that mandate, I wouldn't have actually started this work. So mandates, I don't respect them, I don't believe in them.

But if you are forced to comply with one, what you have to look at is what are you gonna learn from the experience and where can it lead you. So that's again, what got you there to where you are right now won't necessarily be what gets you to where you wanna be, but that path may not be what you expect it to be with everything that's changing in the world of work. So the world is scary right now. There's lots of things going on that nobody ever really planned for, expected.

Even from a demographics perspective, people are living longer, people are having fewer babies, lots of things are changing. How do you plan for it? How do you adapt to it? What do you want your life to be and what do you want your work to be to support that life?

And that's really where you have to get that clarity and that clarity may come as you work through this process. And that's what I'm doing at the moment as well too. So I'd love to hear your perceptions about what playbooks hold you back and what you think that you might have to drop in order to be more successful in the future. And for me, I'm thinking I have to move on from hybrid remote.

So that opportunity may still be something that I come back to because once the cycle changes and it becomes more flexible again, which, honestly it did after my mandate. It was about a year where we started to go back to it. But you have to repair broken trust. You have to assess, how policy works, how those interactions work what the engagement level is, how you demonstrate respect for people who made different choices throughout the whole mandate.

There's a lot of repair work that might have to do, and that can be interesting. So it may be that what I do is, I still have it on the books, but it's more. Assess where you are, assess what's working, what's not working, assess the impact on trust, leadership, management and how that all combines with the changes that are being brought also by AI and the different interactions of different generations within the workforce. Because we've got five different generations who are working and often people are working longer and later.

Than they ever have before. So all of that, it's like a tsunami of change that's not gonna go away. That's maybe where, that's something that I explore when people are in the mindset to walk away from that control and really look at how you move forward with flexibility and. The same things that would've made you a really good leader and manager during the pandemic, that knowledge management, that trust all of that is gonna help you adapt to AI in the future of work as well too, right?

So it's seizing the opportunity that you see to actually make an impact. And that's really what I'm asking you to look at anyways. I'd love to hear from you. Thanks for joining.

Bye. Find yourself in.