This is inspired by a post from my good friend, Tobia La Marca. He wrote The Mastery Trap, it’s outstanding, please read it.
As I reflected on his article, I started thinking, “This is about how we define success.” I moved on to the idea:
“We confuse being successful with being as good as we can become.”
We hit our numbers, we achieve our goals, we outperform our peers, we are the top performers awarded a trophy at the President’s Club.
We see the same thing organizationally. Our products are the top-ranked products. The market research companies rank our products at the top, always in the very corner of that top-right quadrant. We outperform our competitors, gaining share against them.
By most measures, individually and organizationally, we are successful.
But the question that’s never posed is, “Can we be better?”
Success becomes our greatest obstacle to learning. Success becomes our greatest obstacle to change. It can be the greatest obstacle to achieving what’s possible.
When we are startups. When things aren’t working. When we are figuring things out, we have compelling reasons to change. We experiment; we shift directions. We recognize we make mistakes and learn from these.
As our success grows, wee develop our competencies, we develop expertise, we become comfortable with what we know. This builds our confidence.
And as we continue to grow and succeed, unconsciously, we start locking in. We’ve figured out what works, we just need to do more of it. We develop playbooks and processes. We develop the metrics that support these. We reward compliance, because those are the things that led to our success. We design organizations to preserve what we have done.
The more successful we are, the more we’ve locked in. It becomes our identity. We are a top performer because of the things we do. We believe our industry leadership is because of the things that got us to that position.
We keep doing things because it’s the way we’ve always done things. It has become who we are.
But as we get challenged, we struggle to change. It goes against everything that has defined us.
As we struggle with this, another factor creeps in, sunk cost. We’ve invested so much in who we are and how we do things, that change becomes unaffordable. We can’t abandon those things that got us here, we have to double down on what we have always done.
The cost of changing is immediately visible. The cost of not changing is delayed and, often, invisible.
The greatest obstacle to our growth becomes our commitment to what made us successful.
The reality is success is temporary.
Markets and customers change, new competitors appear, new technologies, tools, methods or processes appear.
Continuing to grow requires change.
I don’t want to diminish any of the things that we do to achieve success. They are critical as a foundation. But we can’t let them limit us in achieving our potential.
We have to continue seeking to learn and develop.
How do we do this?
“Can we get better?” That’s a question some pose. The only answer is “Yes,” but where does that leave us? Instead of asking whether we can get better, perhaps ask, “What does better look like?” Answering this requires us to imagine new possibilities. Some might be discarded, but a few might produce ideas to explore and what they mean.
“What we should be doing more of,” is the typical way successful organizations look at things. It’s a natural question; we want to do more of the things that made us successful. A tougher question is, “What should we be stopping?” In our quest to do more, we never take the time to look at what no longer serves us. As a result, we carry baggage of past success, that really no longer serves us.
Another twist might be to pose the question, “If we were starting all over, what would we do if we weren’t allowed to continue our current methods?” Sometimes, we see people phrasing it, “Start with a blank sheet of paper.” This can be very powerful in freeing people’s thinking, but it requires caution, people will tend to look at what they have always done. Don’t let them fall into this trap.
“What might we do differently?” That’s a tough question, particularly when what you are currently doing drives your success. It works in a loss review, or when a program has failed. The question might be reframed not by looking inside but looking outside. “What are others doing differently from us?” That is followed by “What can we learn from them?”
But be careful in posing the question, “What are others doing differently from us?” Typically, we look at our competitors, taking things they are doing and adapting them for our use. They are doing the same thing, so what you are doing will never be differentiated. Instead look in vastly different places.
If you are in technology, look at what successful organizations in basic materials are doing. If you are in professional services, look at industrial products. Or consider looking outside the business world.
We’ve run workshops where we get jazz musicians, improv artists, leaders in high performing not for profits together with our commercial clients. Seeing things these people and organizations do to drive their success, considering, “How can we adapt some of those things to our business,” creates great possibilities.
“We are the leaders,” is possibly a great marketing pitch, but as an identity it can limit us. What if you changed your identity? What if your identity became less focused on market position and more on something like innovation?
“Innovation” has become a marketing buzzword. It seems every new company or product is introduced as innovators/innovations. We tend to focus on disruptive innovation. But we innovate when we rigorously pursue continuous learning, experimentation, and improvement. It’s the recognition that change is constant, and to drive that change, we have to develop new ideas and approaches.
What if you became recognized, both internally and externally, as the people/organization constantly changing the playing field? This creates a culture of improvement and innovation within the organization.
As I work with innovating organizations, something I notice is they are the envy of their competitors. But these companies don’t pay a lot of attention to these competitors, they want to be recognized as the organization that drives new ideas and changes.
How do we change our behaviors? It starts with leadership constantly challenging themselves. It’s leaders that reward others in the organization for coming up with new ideas. It’s allowing “wild ducks” in the organization because they are often the source of learning and improvement. One client I am currently working with is trying to embed this in their culture. They are creating awards experimenting with new ideas.
Consider bringing back the “idea box.” Open it every week, recognize the contributions people have suggested, encourage them to experiment with those ideas.
Much of what I’ve focused on is organizational change. What does this mean to each of you? Whether you are a leader, manager, or individual contributor? How do you constantly grow and develop? In his post, Tobia shares some of what he does.
He talks to and learns from people in very different roles and experiences. He learns from doctors, entrepreneurs, and fighters. He reads broadly, outside of sales books, looking at geo-politics, military history, medical research, and essays. He constantly finds ways to experiment and try new things when he executes a deal strategy or develops account plans.
You may be wondering, “Dave, shouldn’t we seek success?”
We absolutely want to be successful!
We should view success as an outcome. We’ve accomplished something. We should be driven by continuing to learn, change, and achieve greater success.
The danger is when success becomes our identity. When it becomes who we are not what we can achieve.
Pursuing success moves from “These are the things that made us successful,” to “These are the things successful people do.”
Pursuing success causes us to shift to continuing to focus on constantly learning, growing, and changing, success will follow but never be the limiter.
We need to stop confusing success with being as good as we can possibly be.
Success is about what we have accomplished. It doesn’t tell us what we are capable of accomplishing.
Afterword: A truly stunning AI based discussion of this post. It is better than this article, primarily because of the examples they use to explain the concepts in the post. At the end they come up with an interesting idea: Can you create a safe failure? It is worth your time to listen to.
