What if it's not you?
If the ship is sinking, it's not about improving your rowing skills
Our culture is enamored with self-help. We love stories of the self-made. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Manifest your dreams. Rarely do these narratives acknowledge that, as individuals, we exist within systems that can support us or hold us back in ways that have become almost invisible.
Most of us have, at some point in our careers, gotten bad feedback. We’ve been told about areas where we should improve, skills we need to develop, unskillful behaviors we need to curb. Advised, in short, to help ourselves be better, different, more effective.
The corporate narrative is that if we improve our individual behaviors, skills, tactics, and attitudes, it will improve our work, and the work of our team/group/division, so that we can be more effective and the company more profitable.
Which makes sense. Except for the fact that it is often not true.
No amount of individual excellence and effort can entirely compensate for systemic problems. The faulty product, the terrible marketing, the dysfunctional leadership – any of these systemic holes in the bottom of the metaphorical ship of commerce will sink the ship eventually, no matter how hard everyone is bailing the water out of the boat. You can hire the Olympic level rower, and the ship is still going down.
Is this a solvable problem? Is it solvable by you? I use these questions often, and they are useful here. Is the problem your management is trying to solve by addressing your supposed flaws actually a problem that is a result of your flaws? Or is it a systemic problem that may or may not be addressed by your building skills in a specific area?
When I was doing new business for advertising agencies, the job where I get new clients, everyone expected me to have a magic wand that could conjure up new revenue and win pitches. If money was tight and lay-offs loomed on the horizon, people would show up at the door to my office, faces pinched, asking me to save their jobs. They never came in and sat down, they just perched at the threshold, fingers wrapped around the doorjamb, eyes narrowed.
In reality, new business is a team sport. But for agency management, it’s only portrayed as a team sport when they win, while losses are often laid at the foot of the new business lead.
In some cases, yes, I could have been doing more cold calls or working on the PR or awards strategy.
But often the agency revenue was down because existing clients, who I didn’t interact with at all, were leaving. Lackluster creative, indifferent strategy, mediocre account management – I didn’t always know why they were leaving, and neither did the executives. If there was no conversation about the actual problem we were trying to solve – clients fleeing like rats from the sinking ship – then we weren’t going to solve it. I could bring in all the new business in the world and we’d still end up in the red if the rest of the agency couldn’t keep the business, or grow it organically.
I’ve worked for dysfunctional leaders who wasted time and energy, refused to listen to the experts and decided that their ego-based fact free strategy for winning a pitch would work. I’ve gone into pitches with executives who were so hungover they could barely present.
These are not problems a new business person can solve. But they are likely to scupper a pitch. My skills could be flawless and we’d still lose a pitch if the executives blew the presentation.
Another systemic issue that is often ignored is lack of investment. If a company has vast expectations for results when they aren’t investing, that’s a kind of delusion. A decent PR firm is going to cost over ten thousand dollars a month. Effective marketing, social media, product development, R&D – these all cost money, and require the skills of a professional, not an intern. Yet many orgs will chastise the leader in charge of an area for not getting results with inadequate staff and budget.
Good ideas and attitude are not enough. Too often leaders will talk about grit, stamina, creativity, and cool ideas as if those were magical superpowers that could do away with the need for capital, processes, oversight, investment. Throwing some planks on a river and telling the team to row harder isn’t going to get you anywhere. Something needs to lash those planks together, there needs to be a rudder to steer, a destination.
We can pull this out even farther. Our culture is really big on individual responsibility. If you are fill-in-the-blank, it’s your fault. When, often, it is not. Recently, I’ve had a few conversations with friends my age who are worried about retirement. According to our culture, they should just work harder, save more, invest more effectively.
These are women who have worked their whole adult lives, live modestly, invest conservatively. But life happened to them. A divorce, an illness, a sick kid, gender discrimination in the workplace. If we lived in a country that had single payer healthcare, a basic income guarantee, affordable housing, long term care options and a social security system robust enough to survive long enough to pay us back the money we’ve put into it then we wouldn’t be worried about retirement. Our savings would be adequate if we lived in another country. Just not this one. But financial advisers tell us the problem is ours and the solution is for us to save two million dollars before we retire.
Who else might be impacted by systemic issues but being told it is their individual responsibility? Anyone over fifty in marketing who is looking for a job. Any person of color who is looking for a job or promotion. Anyone who is marginalized in any way and has trouble in their career.
The point of this is not to make you discouraged, although it is discouraging. The point is to help you understand what problem you are trying to solve. If you have a boss who blames you for not bailing out a sinking ship quickly enough, you might want to get another job, not work on a new way to pack more productivity into your ten-hour workdays. Many of us are culturally programmed to take on responsibility, to fix people and situations, to shame and blame ourselves. Let’s not. I invite you to look past any critique of your skills and understand how the overall system is working – or not working, as the case may be – before you let anyone tell you that something is your fault.