Give people the chance to live into their potential
When I moved to the Cayman Islands in 1989 there were only 32,000 people, with more than half the workforce imported from other countries. I moved there the day after my 24th birthday, having just qualified as a Chartered Accountant.
Within less than two years, I was recruited to be the Financial Controller of the national airline, Cayman Airways, at that time with 450 staff flying five B737 jets to 8 destinations in 4 countries. Within three days of starting tha role at “CAL”, a radical internal announcement was made. Due to massive cashflow issues, every member of staff would be taking a 19% pay cut. This was the only way management could see to cut costs, to slash their largest cost area. Naturally, this caused real distress, so the Board and Managing Director gave the management team sixty days to find equivalent savings from other areas, something they had, to that point, failed to do.
As the new person on the team, I was put in charge of this key project, working countless hours and talking to every area of the business in person. Soon enough, I found myself at an all-staff meeting presenting our findings and recommendations to the Board of Directors, letting them know that we had, indeed, found the savings needed.
I was still only 25 years old. If I had been working at a large corporate, I would never have been given such opportunity and responsibility at that young age, not a chance.
Let’s talk, then, about the difference between Entrepreneurial and Corporate environments when it comes to hiring and also succession.
Whilst my ego would love to think I was given that opportunity and level of responsibility because I was some genius prodigy, the reality was different. I was given the chance to be Financial Controller because I was a) professionally qualified, and b) they could see I could “live into” the role. I was then given the lead role in finding those cost savings because “well, you were there and we felt you could do it”, as I was later told.
Cayman is, historically, a fast-growing and entrepreneurial society and economy, very similar to a fast-growth “scale-up “business, In entrepreneurial businesses, they recognise that people may not have all of the experience and formal skillsets on their resumé to tick all the boxes, but they allow people to stretch and grow with and into the opportunity. They give people the chance to “live into” their potential.
In contrast, the larger and more corporate a business becomes, the harder it is for them (institutionally) to be entrepreneurial, their structures, processes, and disciplines prevent them from doing so. Put another way, people have to have proven they have realised their potential before they get given the opportunity to move into a role that requires those skills and abilities.
This difference is not right or wrong, there are many benefits to the corporate environment. For one thing, the levels of skills and abilities at any stage in the career of people in corporates tend to be higher, and for exactly the reasons that also hold them back from giving people the chance to “live into” their potential!
A few thoughts and observations from this then.
Career Jungle Gyms
Increasing people seeking to develop their career in the corporate world have to think of their career not as a “career ladder” where they take each step up in an orderly fashion, but as a “career jungle gym”, where they may have to leap out of the corporate they work in and jump diagonally upwards to a different company. They may even come back to that company later, having taken one or two diagonal leaps. Really? Yes. A mid-20s person I know left the major global bank they worked for after college as their system would not allow them to be promoted (“We can look at it in 11 months on the annual reviews”) despite them working two grades above where they were being paid. That corporate was just too “stiff”. They left for a job two levels higher paying more than 25% more. At their outplacement interview, their (40-year-old) manager said “You’ll be welcome back when you are ready, I myself am on my third stint here”.
There is a large part of me that feels that when the corporate world tells you to leave because their systems can’t accommodate you in living into your potential at your own speed (whether that be fast or slow), then that corporate environment has gone too far in creating systems and structure!
Hiring
In hiring, we place far too much emphasis on structured and systemised filters, far too little on difference and diversity.
The author Matthew Syed looked into how the CIA hires “only the best”, but their resultant hiring meant they had massive blind spots in their thinking, as the 1 in 20,000 they hired all seemed to think similarly, too western, too white, too male. He argues that they could have caught Bin Laden much, much earlier otherwise. The CIA hires “the best” based only on those who pass tough exams.
Now drop down to the end of high school. In the UK, “A” Levels are the key method by which Universities select who they accept into Bachelor’s courses. This week the annual “A” level results came out and many were disappointed, as they had adjusted grades down from the inflation which had crept in during the pandemic period. the Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan, said this:
“They won’t ask you anything about your A-level grades in 10 years’ time. “They will ask you about other things you have done since then: what you have done in the workplace, what you did at university? And then, after a period of time, they don’t even ask you what you did at university.”
She herself is a rare politician in her party. She did not go to a private school or a fancy university. She didn’t initially go to university at all, later being sponsored by her employer to do so. A very rare combination at all, and one which no doubt informed her statement. There is one major logical flaw with her statements though. You can’t get into University in the UK in the first place unless you get high enough A-level grades.
When it comes to hiring then, I do always love the adage “hire for attitude, train for performance”, so my encouragement when hiring is a) to look closely at your minimum educational and experience requirements and challenge if they are too high, too much, and b) put in some other criteria which encourage other areas to assess potential.
As one example of the latter, the Big 4 accounting firm that I qualified with in Edinburgh 1986-1989 had a reputation for developing first-rate people who were much in demand to be hired elsewhere. I feel that part of that was that they wanted to hire people who were successful at sports. This was actually so they could compete in corporate leagues as some of the Partners in the business prioritised that. I sense, though, that such athletes also brought non-academic attributes that allowed them to live into potential in different and powerful ways in the workplace too.
Succession
Corporations tend to have quite structured succession processes and plans. Designed with positive intent, they also all too often limit people from being promoted as early as they could be. Over and over again I hear of people being graded as “ready for succession in 2-3 years” or “3 years plus”. In many cases those people are already highly capable, they simply don’t tick enough boxes for relevant experience, skills etc.
In such situations, there is then a real risk, as in the case of the young person noted above, that your best people will leave as you don’t give them a chance early enough.
One way to reconsider this is around crisis succession. If you look around, as Cayman Airways did at a time of crisis, at who you have there that you feel can do it ( in the event of their boss being hit by a bus, so to speak), then would you promote them at a time of need? If so, what would you then give them and surround them with in order to support them in that role? To be sure I didn’t do my crisis role on my own at 25, I was supported and mentored along the way.
It is a fine balance to strike, to be sure, but knowing there is value in finding the balance between structure and rigidity versus being entrepreneurial and dynamic is a key awareness to have.
As for me, my purpose is #MakingPotentialPossible, so you can tell what end of that spectrum my bias is towards!