No Good Deed…

Near the end of a recent lesson in our Leading At The Next Level program, I shared something I had found in a Bloomberg.com article that ties right in with what the point we closed with last time; career advancement is not a one-size-fits-all proposition!

Certain jobs attract people with predictable personalities. Office managers tend to be outgoing, detail-oriented, and respectful of authority, as do fitness instructors, flight attendants, and beauticians. Industrial designers, creative directors, and executive producers tend to be excellent listeners, with an ability to understand the needs and feelings of others.

In fact, personality correlates so tightly with jobs that it may affect job choices more than skills, experience, or ability, according to a group of researchers based in Australia. The team who published those findings in 2019 is now back with another revelation: aligning occupation with personality leads to happiness and engagement.

We’ve been able to provide some great tools for leaders to use within their teams to really dive into understanding this for each individual they’re working to develop, and we’ll work through the specifics of those tools next time… For now though, let’s get straight to the point that’s missed far too often by organizations, both for-profit and not-for-profit, when they have someone showing up consistently and doing outstanding work. Let’s face it, we all get excited when someone new joins our team and begins to excel. A fairly natural response is to give them more responsibility…

 I know you’re tracking with me here! You’ve seen this happen in your church or civic organization, and I’m quite certain you’ve experienced this in your work! It’s so refreshing to have someone else join the team who’s willing to accept responsibility that we can't help offering them more… Sometimes that’s just fine, but there are times where this can do as much to squash their enthusiasm or even push them away as it does to get them even more engaged. Yes, they’ve been willing to help the organization leading up that point but are we really helping them by giving them more? Sometimes this comes across as no good deed goes unpunished…

In short, maybe not! This is where it’s so important for us, as leaders, to learn as much about our team members as we can - as quickly as possible. When we know their dreams and goals, the things they genuinely get excited about, we can begin developing some direction for how we can help them move toward those things. When we understand which tasks give them energy and which can suck the life right out of them, we can be proactive in utilizing their strengths. And when we understand just how they process information, we can adapt our communication so that we’re speaking their language and earning their engagement in each part of the process.

Some folks are driven to climb the ladder as quickly as they possibly can while others get fulfillment from providing great support to the team around them. If we try to use the same approach with both, we’re very likely to push one of them away! When we can offer examples of career pathways that line up with each team members’ goals and desires, we have a much better chance of creating a succession plan that actually comes to fruition - rather than one that looks good on paper but needs to be changed every few months because someone leaves…