A Lesson in Career Regeneration

How many of us have gone through a phase where we feel as if our career has reached a dead end? When you feel that your career has either gone through a slump, or you have experienced a career-threatening setback. In these moments, you would not be alone in thinking that the best thing to do is to find another job, and forget everything you have done. Like many, I always wonder if ever there is a career after the fall. Time and time again we hear of entrepreneurs who set up business, see them fail, and they lift themselves again. How often do we hear of those who regenerate their careers this way?

This week I was jolted to remember someone who experienced a spectacular fall, and in fact is seen as having the worst record on the most important job he had reached. This was triggered by conversations with a friend who is experiencing career uplift after a big disappointment, and he is going through one of the best professional experiences of his life. We compared his current experiences to what happened to former US President Jimmy Carter. I thought to tell his story will encourage many who think a disappointment, even a big one, is a permanent blemish.

Jimmy Carter became President of the United States in 1977. The US was still reeling from the oil shock of 1973, and had just been through the tumultuous events that led to the disgraceful exit of Richard Nixon from the White House. Whilst Jimmy Carter was not a well-known name, he ran a good campaign and many were hopeful that he would lift a demoralised nation after his election. As he came to power, the US was battling inflation, low growth and high unemployment. He achieved some success with the Camp David Accords that led to a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. With an act that in hindsight many now appreciate, he established two Cabinet level departments, Energy and Education, which have proved to be strategic for the US in the current period, more than 30 years after he left office. However, he is remembered as the one who was President when, after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, US citizens were held hostage at the American Embassy in Tehran for 444 days. He suffered one of the heaviest defeats of a sitting President in the 1980 elections, and when he left office, nothing was expected of him in public life. Literally and figuratively, he was regarded as a spent force.

Jimmy Carter, however, felt that his mission for humanity was not done. He refused to see the disappointments, or even failures, of his term of office as being the most defining of his character. He realised that the job of US President gave him a particular experience and world-view, and through it he had established networks that went beyond the key issues that defined his Presidency. His work on Middle East peace whilst he was US President had given him a certain level of recognition globally. Paradoxically, he had to become a non-President to realise the value of having been a President, and thus become one of the most successful ex-Presidents in history. And this is how he regenerated his career.

In 1982, together with his wife Rosalynn, he set up the Carter Centre. The Carter Centre is a non-profit organisation which seeks to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health. Some of its notable achievements include having been an observer of 81 elections in 33 countries since 1989, and mediating various conflicts globally based on it being a trusted broker for peace, in countries as diverse as North Korea, Colombia, Ecuador and Sudan. This conflict mediation role was building on the experience President Carter had gained in negotiating the Camp David Accords. In 2002, he became the first US President, in or out of office, to visit Cuba since the 1959 revolution. President Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his contribution to global peace, and is unique in being the only US President or ex-President to receive the award for actions after he left office. During this time, he also has found time to write 21 books. It is testimony to someone who built on his personality and experience to create a new career that has made him more appreciated than when he occupied high office. The four years as US President pale into insignificance to the more than 30 years of success since he left office.

I have used Jimmy Carter’s example as a way to illustrate that we need to look at life and careers through a different time and contextual prism than we tend to. Any experience we gain, combined with our character, creates a platform for the next generation of work that we will do. Whilst we may experience failure and disappointment, and also some may seek to derail our progress, we have this foundation to use to build for the next career experience (click here on the previous article I wrote about how to deal with those who can seek to derail your progress).

How many of us, when faced with these difficult career moments in the organisations we work for, we think they are the final arbiters of what happens to our lives? I hope many of us can learn from people such as Jimmy Carter than one’s current office or job can provide an experience and value network that can be a springboard for future success. He never let the failures and disappointments of office to prevent him from pursuing his life’s passion, and has thus achieved success, and regained the respect he might have lost when he left office. It is a very easy example to follow.

Perspective on Talent and Leadership Responsibility – Part 1

In the previous articles I have spent a lot of time talking about what they can do for their own growth and success. The limitation with this focus, whilst good enabling the individual to develop self, is that it may ignore the role of the leadership. The reason I focus on that aspect here is to share what I think is one of the most critical leadership, not management, responsibilities: developing talent. It will also enable us to think questions to ask in order to see if an organisation has the culture and leaders with an affinity for this aspect.

One of the major flaws with the creation of layers of management in organisations is that a lot of managers start to believe that they “own” the people who are in the units or divisions. Through this thinking, they see themselves as having the ultimate responsibility for these people’s careers and growth. Negatively, they also think, when they may not work well with someone, they have the right to stunt their growth. In an era where organisations rely so much on the talent of individuals, I see these behaviours as some that have such a negative impact on the life of an organisation and its ability to compete. In many organisations’ architecture, this problem gets super-reinforced by the general reliance of HR Talent-management specialists on the feedback of the line manager. This thinking is so flawed also because an organisation thinks it promotes people into being managers on the basis of their ability to do so.  Although many organisations profess to use  360⁰ feedback, often it is infused with such levels of subjectivity as to be no worth the paper it is written on. What most organisations tend to suffers from is no different from what they tend to with their own customers, which is not being able to analyse and connect the multiplicity of data that they may have about their customer. This often results in a customer being framed in such a way that the organisations’ solutions never address the core issues the customer faces.

To illustrate the challenge and responsibility, I use football, which is a matter very close to my heart. Most successful football clubs will have a coach or manager with the ultimate responsibility of selecting the team, and designing tactical and strategic approaches for games and tournaments as relevant. This manager will have assistants, who, because of their specific skills and experience, will play a particular role to enable the manager to arrive at the best strategic and tactical decisions. This manager will also rely on a system of talent scouts that the club will have, to identify talent that may be coming from the club’s development structures, or to analyse potential players from other teams that could add value to the club’s objectives. It never is the case that they will rely on only one person to be able to that, and they also put in place the infrastructure that will enable them to have this continuous flow of talent. Whilst the manager would have been appointed by such a club for his / her competence and ability, the said club would not simply place reliance on this one person to deliver talent in such a competitive environment. If they get this wrong, it may years later come back to bite them with such talent being used by competing clubs against them.

To illustrate this, I will use a recent case that involves a manager, who is renowned for his talent identification and nurturing skills, Arsene Wenger of Arsenal Football Club.  In 2003, he had the opportunity to sign the midfielder Yaya Toure together with his brother Kolo, who was already at the club. Due to administrative delays with his work permit, Arsenal was not able to convince him to wait and he went on to play for other clubs before joining Manchester City. Ten years from the time Wenger nearly signed him, Yaya participated in a game that led to one of Arsenal’s heaviest defeats ever. Wenger has admitted that missing out on signing Yaya was one of his biggest regrets in football. And the competition has now used Yaya against Arsenal, denying them the opportunity of being title contenders ten years after a fateful administrative delay.

The example used is unfortunate, as Wenger is one manager whose heart is generally in the right place on this issue, and he was not entirely responsible for it. But I think it illustrates more than anything that organisations have to think beyond the narrow view of the manager, and become very jealous about their people. It is not unusual that managers will participate in a deliberate process of destroying someone’s career if they feel that person is a threat or potentially may overtake them in the organisation that they work for. It is funny how people can frame their thinking and decision on the basis of the narrow world they see, and never have a broader view which enables them to give up talent that they do not have a use for.

It is here that the responsibility of leaders becomes more critical. And they will only be effective by being able to do a combination of the following things: 1) Being in touch with the most junior person in their areas of responsibility; 2) Having a cynical view when they receive feedback that one of their employees’ ‘wants too much”, “is ambitious”, “does not behave like others”; 3) Related to the above, seek to understand whether these employees may not need to be placed in different environments and given a different set of challenges. They must ask themselves what is wrong with an employee that wants to do more for his / her employer, if that leads to better returns for the shareholders; 4) Think about how they would feel with a particular employee being on the opposite side. How would it affect their competitive position and would they have an Wenger-type regret years later; 5) Reflect on the managers’ own ability to deal with talent, and maybe focus solutions on the manager being better at this, as many other employees will work with this manager in future; 6) Focus on the organisational culture, and whether it enables these hungry employees to have a voice without being judged; 7) Continuously assert the organisation’s “ownership’ of every employee, and that the manager only has a “custodial” responsibility whilst those employees are working for them.

After all, if people are some of the best assets for organisations, they cannot afford to leave focus on them only to managers who may be unable to enhance talent. The leadership responsibility is to go beyond the management layer and continuously find the diamonds that will make the organisation shine in future. Those organisations who do this well are set for a successful and sustainable future.