What, How and Why
What, How and Why
If you are only evaluating your talent pipeline for the what and the how for the most senior leadership positions, your succession plan is likely to fail. Leaders need to be aligned to the vision and bring others with them. They need to be laser focused on the why. If you haven’t read (or reread) Simon Sinek’s work recently, do yourself a favor and dust off that “Start With Why” paperback or pull up the audiobook to remember what really matters for exponential success. Where Sinek focuses on the organization, PassionFruit focuses on the individual leveraging similar concepts. Passion comes from our personal why and that is what makes each of us unique even if the what and how are the same.
PIVOT!
I cannot utter or hear the word “pivot” without picturing the Friends episode where they are trying to get Ross’s new couch up the stairs, and he keeps screaming Pivot! in a most irritating voice. As if stating the obvious is helping anyone with their literal heavy burden. The visual reminds me that often we can know that we need to change direction, to pivot at least away from something even if we aren’t entirely sure what we need to pivot towards. What to do at these critical moments? How to get past the feeling of being stuck?
Often, we turn to friends who either listen and say nothing or state the obvious like Ross and tell us what we know we need to do but aren’t able to help us figure out how to do it.
Sometimes pivot points are forced upon us with layoffs or role changes. But even with proactive pivots, we focus on what we are turning away from – drop that donut if we want to lose weight, stay away from bars if we want to stop drinking or smoking. But most of us know that change is not as simple as denying ourselves something that we used to enjoy.
We need to find out what we want more than that which we are turning away from.
We need to find our Why otherwise known as our passion.
When I think about making healthy choices with food and exercise, I don’t picture a dress I want to fit into. I picture my young daughter for whom I want to be around a very long time. She is a compelling why for me to go to the gym or to order the salad at lunch.
When it comes to my professional life, my Why is helping others achieve their goals. That is my passion, that is why I do what I do. Early in my career, I focused more on how enabling technologies helping companies achieve their goals. Over time, I dug deeper to understand what underpinned the joy I found in that work. For me, it was all about the people. So now I focus on helping individuals navigate the pivot points of their career- responding to feedback, determining the next career move, navigating changes in the work environment, demonstrating challenging progress… any number of unique situations.
When you know your Why, the choices at these pivot points becomes clearer. When you know your Why, work really doesn’t feel like work. It feels more like a calling.
What’s your calling?
