Being Before Roles
Article of the month
Before You Leave The Room
Every year, millions of people enter the workforce, beginning a journey that millions before them have already travelled.
They come with a backpack of education, personal aspirations and ambition to achieve something in life.
Someone joining an organization at the age of twenty will see the workplace from the beginning of their career, while a leader at fifty may understand the same organization through thirty years of experience involving deadlines, promotions, difficult and excellent colleagues, successes and failures, departures, friendships, and changes in personal priorities. They may be sitting in the same meeting while seeing very different realities.
It is this difference in perspective that is important for our understanding of leadership.
Beyond delivering results through people while navigating policies, budgets, laws, procedures, and organizational objectives, an experienced leader understands the business and the consequences of decisions that may not be visible in a spreadsheet. They will also have developed perspectives on ambition, authority, relationships, conflict, uncertainty, and judgment, and with experience comes a deeper responsibility to pass on the lessons learned so that the next generation can begin its journey with the wisdom of those who have travelled the path before them.
If a leader required twenty years to understand something that can be responsibly communicated in twenty minutes, your team member should not need to spend twenty years discovering it alone.
If experience has taught you the importance of being visible in an organization, you can help your colleagues understand why doing excellent work alone may not be enough.
If your experience has shown you that a particular career path offers limited opportunities for progression, you can help a younger colleague understand those limits and explore areas where their strengths may be better used. This does not mean that you need to tell your team members which ambitions to pursue, but you can certainly provide them with better information on which to base their decisions.
Moving the starting line
The lessons of working life, however, are not passed so easily. Our understanding of authority, ambition, organizational behaviour, relationships, failure, and success develops through years of working with people, making decisions, facing disappointments, and discovering that some of our most firmly held beliefs needed to be reconsidered in light of experience.
Still, there is something valuable in sharing the perspective that comes from having travelled that road, particularly when it helps those beginning their own journey approach unfamiliar situations with fewer unnecessary struggles.
The value of a career
Across its full arc, a career gains value through experience, growth and contribution as well as the responsibilities held along the way, developing capabilities and judgement that you did not possess when you first entered an organization.
When someone uses years of experience to teach, mentor, offer guidance, and share knowledge, you may come to recognize that contributing to the development of others is an important dimension of becoming a capable professional.
The knowledge, values and understanding developed through professional life also extend into families and communities, helping build a better society and adding value to the progress of humanity.
What remains after we leave
There is nothing in professional life that is necessarily permanent. Employees leave, managers retire, founders eventually depart, and organizations themselves can cease to exist.
Nevertheless, a career does not need to last forever to have value. Its value can lie in the work created, the lessons learned, the capabilities developed, the knowledge passed forward and the opportunities created for those who come after.
Knowing that a leader will eventually leave the office places greater importance on making good use of the time, authority and opportunities the position provides than on holding the position itself.
The leader has travelled farther along a road that others are beginning to travel.
They may not be able to remove uncertainty from that road, but they can make some parts of the journey easier to understand.
It is worth considering, before leaving the room, whether those who remain are better prepared for the journey ahead because you were there.
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