What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
Construction leaders are deservedly known for putting in grueling hours at work. When asked, many leaders say “hard work” is the key ingredient for success in the construction game. At what point in a leader’s career, one may rightly ask, does that conventional wisdom come into question? Is it true that “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There?”
Tune in this week as Wayne explores this question and points out the key inflection point that separates great contractors from the not so great.
Please give us the benefit of your thinking in the comments area below.
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Hello everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at The Family Business Institute. Thanks for tuning in.
This week, I want to talk about ‘What Got You Here Won't Get You There.’ It's actually a blog from my friend, Donald
Cooper, also a book written by Marshall Goldsmith back in the 2000s, I think. Great title captivating title. It was a good
book, but really, I want to talk about Don Cooper's blog here. Now, why is this important to you? Because, I think as we
talked about in our previous blog, Dan Sullivan said, "What really holds us back as leaders is our mindsets." I think, if you
think back about your own career, and I think of my career, some of the things that have held me back have been clinging
to the old ways. What do I mean by that? When you started your career, it was all about hard work and production.
You had to get noticed by your boss and your boss's boss, et cetera. I mean, it was really about just focusing on those tasks
that you had to do to make yourself and your company more successful. There's that old saying, I forget who it is, but,
"The harder I work, the luckier I get." So, we end up training ourselves and being trained by watching our senior leaders,
that to be successful, you have to work 60 or 80 or a hundred hours a week. It's all about just driving, driving, driving, and
working, working, working, and getting things done. That actually causes us in part measure to be more successful. When
you're a 25-year old or a 30-year old, if you can afford to work 60, 70, 80 hours a week and be productive, then that's
going to cause you to be successful and success builds on success.
What happens in our minds? We say, Golly, what's gotten me to this level of success, it's gotten me those raises, those
promotions, those accolades from the boss. What's gotten me there is this really hard work and productivity." Now, if you
think about it, even the most talented entrepreneur, at some point, hits what Dan Sullivan calls the ceiling of complexity.
You can't work, if you work 80 hours a week, you step it up to 90 and okay, maybe you're surviving at 90, but can you
really go to 100 or 110 or 120? At some point, even the most energetic leader can't work any harder and they have to
focus on working smarter. That's what this blog and that's what Marshall Goldsmith's book was all about, those habits
that got us to where we are in the senior leadership of our organizations actually began to hold us back.
The way that Goldsmith says it, is that successful people have very few reasons to change their behavior and plenty of
reasons to stick with the status quo. That's how we got where we are, insanely hard work. Okay? But at some point, and
the way Donald Cooper says it, is at some point, one of the business's biggest challenges as any business grows is for the
founder to make that important transition from being a player, to being a coach. Players take initiative, coaches give
initiative. That's how it works. I agree 100%. At some point, leaders have to stop doing the things that made them
successful, the hard work, the constant driving. They've got to stop doing those things. They've got to quit doing tasks and
start managing and leading people, and that's a very different skillset. It comes quite naturally to some people. Some
people have to work really hard at it and learn it.
So, to be a real success in business and in your personal life, because again, those 100 and 110-hour work weeks are not
sustainable over long periods of time, if you want to have a healthy, happy marriage, healthy, happy children, healthy,
happy self, it's just not sustainable. To be a success, both in business and personally, give people tasks, duties, projects,
responsibilities with crystal-clear expectations. Check in with them periodically and hold them accountable. That's
ultimately how you build on your own and other people's success. Achievers think they have to be driven. They think they
have to work incredibly hard every day, but why not just make that mental switch and choose to be a happy achiever that
leads people, instead of doing tasks all the time. I'd like to hear your comments.
This is Wayne Rivers at The Family Business Institute.
