by Gary Markle
I almost derailed my career simply by doing what I thought I was supposed to do. One man helped me get back on track, but he had to go around our employer’s career management system to do that.
George was 25 years my senior. A specialist in the Training and Development Department of a large oil refinery. Part of a multi-billion-dollar Fortune 50 corporation. He was also my first boss and mentor.
George began my first formal performance review by faithfully slogging through our twenty-five-page performance evaluation describing my first year’s work using tic marks to dutifully compare my displayed skills vs. the ideal competencies. All those little marks, of course, then added up to an overall rating. As protocol dictated, he then finished with a formal pronouncement about my higher-than-average base salary increase. That should have been the exciting part, but it wasn’t what ended up being most important for me.
The greatest impact came from between the lines, in the cracks of the formal process. George saw me careening toward disappointment and dead ends. He made the opportunity to pass on two pearls of wisdom that proved invaluable in my career navigation. Two gifts for which I will be forever grateful.
“You don’t get to move into the houses you build.” That was the first pearl that George gifted to me. He knew that I had my ambitions set on being an HR generalist and rising to the level of a Vice President within that corporation. “Solve a problem, demonstrate your competence, and then move on. You’ve got to change jobs every eighteen months to two years if you want to stay on the high potential track.”
Starling as it was, this advice was particularly well timed. Solving complex problems with simple systems is a passion of mine. It always felt like I was just getting started on the first iteration before being moved on to another project or focus. I was actively trying to convince management that it would be wise to leave me in place for a while. Let me truly master each new challenge they gave me. Given time, I could really fix it good.
George knew better. As a specialist himself, he recognized both the tendency and satisfaction associated with polishing a process over time. He also knew from personal experience that it was a bad way to climb the ladder. You couldn’t climb higher when you were perfecting the rung you paused on and perfection takes time. George strongly suggested I change either my ultimate career objective or my polishing tendency to better control my destiny.
“Illigitimi non carborundum.” That was the second gift from George. Roughly translated, it meant “Don’t let the bastards get you down!.”
By age 60 he’d supervised and mentored a lot of people. In fact, he had created and delivered a course in Effective Supervision that had graduated more than 10,000 managers over his tenure. During the graduation ceremony, George gave each student a card with some very special words emblazoned on it. Although I was not yet ready to attend his formal training, he took the occasion of my first formal evaluation to give me one of those cards containing this advice.
George told me that the performance review ritual at that Fortune 50 corporation was tough. The forced ranking process literally necessitates that half our entire population be rated below average each year. It also meant that even though I was starting extremely well, with each promotion and advancement, the competition got stiffer. Given time, even ambitious and dedicated ladder climbers often find they can’t quite get to the next level. Or even close. Some literally don’t make it. They’re compelled to leave the company and start over elsewhere. Others just lose confidence and quit.
That second gift was harder to process. I loved my company and I’d signed on for the long haul and the big climb. Thankfully, George once again went around the given review system to give me the coaching he knew I needed. He told me that our company hired nothing but the best and highest achieving students from the very top schools in the country. Do the math. The vast majority would never realize their dreams of climbing to the very top.
That didn’t mean they necessarily failed. It didn’t mean I would ultimately fail. His message, ironically, was one of hope and perspective. “Those who fail here ultimately do just fine elsewhere.” He said he could cite dozens of instances where people had fizzled in our competitive system only to rise to the top of other corporations and enjoy highly successful careers.
That second gift from George was equally as valuable and instructive as the first. I raced up the ladder rapidly for nine years and the minute it began to slow down, I jumped to another where I could finish my generalist journey.
It strikes me how often those earliest and most beneficial insights came from outside a highly structured process development process. How different my own path might have gone if my boss had just stuck to those glorified file fillers.
Later on, my career thrived under more formalized coaching. I climbed the ladders I wanted to climb. I’ve built successful companies, coached others on strengthening their own careers and organizations, and with Catalytic Coaching, I created a framework that encourages managers to give their employees the gifts they need to be successful.
I guess it shows that great natural coaches like George can work around a bad system to do good things. It does make me wonder how much better he could have done with a good system. How many normally equipped coaches could have upped their developmental impact with better tools and training?
Thank you, George, for going off the script. It was truly a blessing to have a boss like you who found a way to tell me what I needed to hear, even when the forms he was forced to utilize made it hard to say.
And to all the committed coaches working around bad systems and through good ones, many thanks to you as well for the work you do to grow both an employee’s career and their contribution to the organization.
Garold (Gary) Markle is the creator of Catalytic Coaching and author of Catalytic Coaching: The End of the Performance Review. He brings real world experience from 17 years in HR leadership in major corporations coupled with over 20 years of teaching small and mid-sized organizations how to cultivate their leadership, retain employees, develop their talent, and increase profitability by ditching their detrimental performance reviews for a proven Coaching process.
If you’re interested in Catalytic Coaching, Transformational Teambuilding, or booking Gary for a speaking engagement, please contact us.
