New Opportunities Required More Growth

After nearly two decades with the same company, and most of that in one facility, I knew just about everyone I worked with daily on a first name basis. I also knew many of their family members and a fair amount about what the majority of them enjoyed doing during the little bit of time they had off. While much of the work I did in the full time roles I held after leaving that company was very similar, I had to buckle down from day one in each new role to begin building rapport with my new teammates. Like each job I had prior to that point, I needed their support to achieve results but had no direct authority over any of them. Doing that put all I had worked to develop personally to the test. It also pushed me to grow even more as I realized that I could have an even bigger positive impact in a smaller company than I could have ever made in a global corporation.

Although much of my responsibility in each new position was similar to what I had done in manufacturing, I also got to put on a few additional hats. The first job away from manufacturing included doing payroll for the entire company. I handled time and attendance for around forty percent of the manufacturing facility so learning the payroll system wasn’t a big deal. In the next position, I had complete responsibility for all aspects of human resources and safety. While neither were a huge stretch, that was significantly more tied to compliance than I had ever dealt with on an everyday basis.

Earlier, I referenced believing that making the change from behavior-based safety to human resources would provide me with opportunities to work more in what I had started seeing as a clear and definite purpose - by developing the human resources I was working with. In each role after moving away from that behavior-based safety process though, I seemed to move farther away from what I had been doing to pursue meaning and more toward complying with rules and regulations. And that provided even more incentive to dig into the Maxwell licensing process Cindy had been nudging me on. At least during the time I was focused on that, I felt somewhat connected to what I had come to see as a purpose that energized me.

Please don’t misunderstand me here, I’m not complaining about any of the jobs I held after leaving the behavior-based safety role. Each of them provided adequate wages and benefits. And in complete transparency, none were all that difficult - including the one that required such long hours. Even though very little of time in those roles was dedicated to the purpose I wanted to chase, each provided me with more and more clarity around how I need to work to achieve that purpose. With that clarity, I realized that I’d need to become more focused on growth than I had ever been and that would require more investment than we had even made (at least at any one time). Even with that clarity, some of the steps along the way sucked so we’ll work through that next…