Risky Business

Sharing Lessons I Learned the Hard Way

For about a year, I’ve been “teaching” English to a whip smart Ukrainian woman who lives alone in Kyiv.

In truth, she knows English as well as I do, and she speaks at least 3 other languages to boot. At age 26, she has already assembled an impressive career in fintech as a lawyer, reviewing contracts and other documents.

She’s smart, and very aware of the world beyond Ukraine. She’s also tough. She’s living her life in middle of a war, and at any time might have to flee her apartment and go into an interior corridor or down to a shelter. We’ve had calls with her sitting in the hallway outside her door.

I admire her greatly.

When we first met through ENGin, she told me she was more interested in cultural exchange than English lessons. I’ve done my best, introducing everything from Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to funny word play memes to slice-of-life photos from my volunteer activities.

She asked me recently about lessons in business. I suggested we share lessons we have learned as part of our careers. In my case, I would highlight a few things I wish I knew when I was her age.

Keep in mind that during most of my career, we didn’t have social media and its never-ending stream of hacks. You figured out stuff mostly by experiencing it. If you were lucky, you had a good mentor who provided watchouts and tips.

Here are four lessons I shared with her:

At some point in your career, it is no longer about how good you are at your job. That will become a given.

Instead, you will reach a turning point when senior leaders will start paying attention not to how well you execute, or how much work you churn out, but instead to how well you lead. How often do you develop and delegate to others, how well do you work together across the organization and how skilled are you in leading teams to success when you don’t have any formal authority?

That turning point might seem obvious to some. It wasn’t obvious to me in the 1990s.

I came from a journalism background, where the onus was on me to determine which stories to pursue, to gather info to understand all sides and then to write the finished product. For many years at various employers, I worked whatever hours it took to get things done at a high level.

Doing it myself was faster than taking time to get others up to speed, or to “fix” their work when it wasn’t quite what I needed. Besides, peers had other things to do. I could help them by piling shared projects onto my plate.

And that seemed to propel my success … until it didn’t.

I had plowed ahead, head down, paddling furiously and cranking out whatever Ball needed. Meanwhile, those above me suddenly had different expectations. And I didn’t recognize it for years.

By then, I had been slotted into the “he keeps the trains running on time” role by senior leaders. I was an “individual contributor expert,” not a “high potential leader.” I still loved what I did, but my growth became lateral, not vertical.

Never say no to a request from senior leaders, even if you know it is the correct answer. Some people have a problem with “no,” even if you’re right.

At a critical juncture in my career at Ball, I was part of the company’s cross-functional “marketing committee.” As a B2B company, Ball didn’t yet have an actual marketing function, only sales.

During one of our marketing committee meetings, a new team member leading innovation asked me to “get Ball on the cover” of a major trade magazine.

Unbeknownst to me (or anyone beyond a small group of senior execs), the new team member was on the fast track to becoming our CEO. He had recently joined Ball from a Wall Street company, quietly hand-picked to eventually succeed our current CEO. He just had to avoid screwing up.

But to me, he was simply a peer. So when he told me to get Ball on the magazine cover, I said I can’t get the cover without something to pitch. Did we have any innovations I could leverage to get the media’s attention?

We didn’t, not at the time, and that was his area. He didn’t seem happy, and the conversation moved on to new agenda items. I assumed he would figure out what we might pitch and then reach out when he had examples.

Not this guy. He knew his future path. After that meeting he went to *my* boss at the time (who had been in the meeting as well), and asked, annoyed, “Does Scott get what we are trying to do? Is he onboard?”

I know this because my boss told me about it afterward. “I told him not only do you ‘get it,’ but that your answer was the correct one,” my boss told me later that day.

I assumed things were fine. But the new guy never forgot that I told him “no.”

When my boss retired a few years later, the new guy had progressed through several roles and was now president.

I wasn’t considered to succeed my old boss.

Instead, he chose a jovial, “we’ll get it done” VP out of sales who he had hit it off with not long after I had said no. The sales guy became my boss.

I didn’t realize the newbie in that marketing committee meeting was the CEO in waiting. Nevertheless, the lesson here is that no matter what a senior leader asks you, find a way to say “yes, and” and never say “no” – even if you are correct.

Make connections across the organization, regardless of whether they are part of your role. You can do it the hard way, through forced networking and requests for informational meetings (“I want to understand what your team does so I can be ready to help if you ever need it”). Or you can choose a route I found more natural - volunteer for cross-functional special projects, community engagement activities or company special events.

The more people who see the quality of your effort and your work for themselves, the more advocates you will have and the more opportunities will find you. People remember competence.

Now, will that mean you will be doing even more work? Yes, yes it will. You might have to stretch. But it almost always will be worth it for your longer-term success.

Finally, you can’t just be you (who is that masked man below?). That is, you need to pay attention to what you say or write and how you express yourself with others.

Because no matter how often your organization tells you it’s OK to “bring your authentic self to work,” there will be consequences. And I’m not talking about telling everyone you are into cosplay, or that you have 10 cats.

I’m talking about simple word choice. Perfectly normally phrases you say every day to friends and others close to you might be land mines at work.

You can’t say at work, for instance, “I don’t know,” even if you don’t, or “I tried,” or “That won’t work,” or “I’m not sure.”

There is nothing wrong with those phrases. But they cause some people to view you as “less than.”

Instead, you want to say, “I’ll find out,” or “We’ll take a look” or “Let me give it a shot” or “I’ll confirm.” Because even if you actually don’t plan to do whatever is asked because you know it won’t work, you can’t actually say that.

It’s silly, and yet it matters more than you think. Watch your words, because other people are forming conclusions based on them.

I could have done many things better during my career. Even so, it was a damn good 35 years, and at the end I even made it back to the exec team. Maybe the lessons above will help you do it better.