When do we have to transform and re-invent ourselves?
The answer is ALWAYS, PERMANENTLY!
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What happens when a company is transforming and the people who have been there for a while are no longer qualified to work there?
What about Mary who became CFO because she was the only person at the time who had some accounting knowledge?
What about George who was the jack-of-all-trades …but now is the master of none?
Should John still be leading the engineering team even though he has less experience than the entire team now?
As our companies transform, we are quickly faced with the harsh reality that the folks that were critical at one stage of our growth are woefully under-qualified for our current state of operations. Things get weird. We can feel the tension mounting as we try to wrestle with our own evolution and how it impacts each team member.
So, what do we do?
Companies and people need to change and adapt. Where the old version of who we were is replaced with the new version of who we are, we need to adapt by acquiring the knowledge and skills needed to survive; otherwise, although painful and undesirable, some folks will be left behind in the process.
None of this is happy-fun-times — but, it’s a very real part of the business.
Some of us are probably dealing with this right now. We have a bunch of team members who have been really amazing and helpful, but now that we have grown a bit and we have evolved or transformed, just don’t quite fit the way they used to.
We’re freaking out about what to do with them. How did we get here? What can we do about it once we’re dealing with it? Is there a way to avoid some of these problems?
Let’s walk through…!
We can see turnover as progress. But sometimes we’re so used to thinking of “losing people” as a horrible sign of our mismanagement. “Oh no! People are leaving!”.
But let’s try to think differently for a moment: People are supposed to leave. There’s almost no way of growing an organization where every role will suit every person forever.
Think about it this way: If no job or responsibility in our organization ever evolved, would that really signal a growing company? Probably not.
We need to recognize that a changing organization is a good thing. And, part of that change is going to mean that when the music stops not everyone has a seat. We can’t automatically associate “losing people” with some failure on our part. If we’re losing folks because the organization is improving, it’s the right move.
We also need to deal with people whose titles made sense when we were tiny but don’t fit the role when we’re a larger company.
Remember Mary, our CFO? Sure, it was fine to make her the CFO when there were 5 of us in a room and she was the only person with some knowledge of accounting. But now that we’re 50 people or more, we have serious finances that demand some serious experience. The idea of Mary learning “on the job” isn’t what we want for the person handling a critical aspect of our business.
This is always a tough conversation.
We can either convince Mary that she probably needs to dial down her title and role in order to accommodate someone with more experience, or we’re going to have to replace her with someone wholesale. Neither feels great to Mary, but no matter what, we must choose one of those two paths or we will be stalling the whole organization.
Within this change, we’re going to have some people that make more sense now than later (Including ourselves). There’s always going to be “George” who was a magician for years. He was the “do-it-all” person who could dig in on payroll, help-out with marketing, and even pitch in on sales. That’s awesome, and that’s exactly what the organization needed.
But now it is about having the Right People at the Right Time. As the organization grew, we have someone dedicated to payroll, someone handling marketing, and a whole team of salespeople. The benefit of George as the “one who knows a little about everything” (and master of none) means the role of “do a little of everything” isn’t a role anymore.
It might happen that George doesn’t have the skills to be a key resource in a specific role that now requires certain level of specialization or expertise, but all his miscellaneous jobs have evolved and require a higher level of knowledge and maybe a different set of skills, and that’s why they are being probably taken by someone else. We need George to evolve. He’s going to have to pick one facet of the company where he wants to excel and focus to build his capacity. Sometimes George doesn’t have the depth of experience to handle anyone role specifically, and once again, we risk losing him altogether.
Another reality we face is that sometimes it’s not a title change that we’re wrestling with, but rather seniority. A few years ago, John was still in college and working feverishly on our mobile app as our only engineer. As the business grew, we hired more engineers to help him out.
Over time John became the “leader” of the group because he had been there the longest, but now that group needs more than a leader, it needs an experienced manager.
John did all he could, and his intentions were right; but being a skilled engineer doesn’t make him automatically qualify as a manager, which is a very different skill set. We’re now having trouble finding talented engineers who will work for him, handling communications with the executive team, and understanding how a team should be managed at all.
In this case, we probably don’t need to have a talk with John about losing his job but more about how he needs to be a player on the team versus being its coach. If we can’t get John to understand that the organization needs to grow faster than his experience, we’re going to have a serious problem on our hands.
Change is the only constant.
What’s important to understand about all these changes is that they are natural. They are a result of our progress as an organization and in the world, not a knock on any one person’s lack of experience or contribution.
As leaders or as contributors, we need to embrace change, but we need to mix hard decisions with an incredible amount of respect and appreciation. We need to think not only about what the organization needs, but how that change will have both personal and professional effects on us and in our teams.
We need to evolve by transforming and re-inventing ourselves in order to grow. If we don’t recognize the importance of this change and deal with the consternation it inevitably brings; we’re doomed and condemned to be stuck in place, and that’s not precisely a place where anyone wants to be.
Don’t miss our next blog where we’ll talk about “Leadership in times of transition”.
