Growth is forever

Stop stagnating. No matter how long you’ve been working you can always progress to the next phase of your career. This is important at any career juncture but is even more vital towards the typical ‘retirement’ age.

I was brought up short at one of my big decade birthdays when someone asked me how I planned to develop myself, having reached an important milestone.

My reaction wasn’t good. I was just digesting the bare fact of my age, feeling old, not someone up for growth. So I fended off the question. I’d just lost someone close to me and frankly, what was coming next seemed just a few short steps from my own mortality.

But that’s the point. If we don’t grasp this nettle in our maturity, there’s plenty of pain coming from other directions. I see it in my clients whose thoughts are turning to the horrible ‘R’ word - retirement.

Failure to grow

One example of this problem is Merrick, a very successful partner who had done most of the senior roles in his firm. He casually mentioned that he was making sure he was up to date by spending as much time as possible ‘on the tools’, sitting in the project room with his team working with the latest technology.

My alarm bells went off, as I also knew his partners were wondering where he kept disappearing to. And his group was suffering the highest turnover in the firm.

Merrick was seeking to reconnect to the excitement of his youth, doing the detailed work and getting the hit of immediate success.

As a senior partner in the firm, this was damaging in two ways. Firstly, he was not taking part in any of the firm’s discussions about strategy and the real threats of new technology for the whole firm. Or rather, he would drop his opinions into partner discussions like a brick, without furthering the discussion in any way.

 Secondly, he was wrong. Wrong in providing old answers to new problems and coercing, rather than leading, his team to act in ways that made him feel vindicated. Good people don't tolerate this kind of thing for long.

The firm was forming the view his failure to grow meant that it was time for Merrick to retire. He dragged any discussion on the issue back to his historical contribution to the firm and the hours he was putting in on the ground. In any case, since he had no succession plan in place, he felt the firm needed to keep him as practice head. He was wrong.

Progress is always possible

Merrick’s behaviour is a pattern I’ve seen in many professionals where they think they are near the end of their career. Perhaps the firm has a mandatory retirement age, or they had a plan to retire at a certain age but no longer like the idea. Perhaps they have unexpected financial pressures.

Most often, they have nothing. No plan. No projects to pursue. Or, as I discovered in myself, no clear conception of what kind of person I could become - mixed in with the smell of my own mortality.

It doesn’t matter. To do nothing means you lose control of your life. The firm will exit Merrick as he is impeding the firm’s growth. Others I’ve seen grind out a year or two until the situation became intolerable and a nasty break was the only way out. Contempt, bitterness and a tired irrelevance became the tone of their career. Going out with a bang was not an option; just a whimper.

Embrace your wisdom and accept the invitation

What’s the way out?

Wisdom.

The call towards the end of your career (and at many junctures earlier, in fact) is to grow up, even if you’re a ‘grown up’. Take the next growth stage of life and seek out its particular form of progress. Progression towards something worthwhile is the best antidote to the fears of retirement and other endings. With ability and experience, the step up to the next level looks less like repeating past glories and more about bringing wisdom.

This might sound presumptuous. Who can say they’re wise? Yet when I listen to what people expect of their most senior leaders, wisdom fits the description.

Progressing to wisdom displaces retirement from a career (or life). It’s very full. Once the idea clicks with you, you’ll find many instances where wisdom is needed and you are the one who can provide it. It generates worthwhile action.

One example is when the team is wrestling with a problem in one of your projects. You know the solution. You may be a bit concerned and disappointed that your team don’t know the solution. But rather than jumping in with the answer, the wisdom approach is the opposite. Sit in silence.

The reason? Because wisdom works when it is invited in. Wisdom does not solve the problem but leads others to their solution. It is not focussed on the details but on the context. It brings about relevance rather than more activity. And it enables learning, which is very different from providing answers.

One way to generate your understanding of your wisdom and how others perceive it is to hold a ‘master class’ for your top performers. Take an issue to which you do not yourself know the answer. (Yes, allow that anxiety to arise!). Your goal is neither to solve the problem, nor to assess the team’s competence. It is to find new patterns that suggest new solutions, enable everyone to learn from everyone else and feel your way into a light-touch, high impact way to work.

It’s likely the team will come away grateful for your wisdom, and also wiser themselves.

Accept the paradoxes

Bringing wisdom for most of my high-performing experts feels paradoxical but delightful. It is easy, when difficulty was usually the measure of worth. It is quiet when life had been frantic. And it creates growth in others.

But it’s hard, because you can’t insert it or throw it at people. You need the invitation. You need the conversation to provide the right opening to make the useful comment. You need to be humble but confident in your knowledge. Willing to be wrong, but able to add your truth.

The reward is that you gradually make a contribution at the more systemic level rather than in polishing the details. Clients gravitate to you, because they develop trust that you will genuinely listen to the complexity of their issues without rushing to a pet solution. Similarly your colleagues will trust that whatever you say is likely to be relevant rather than self-serving. They like what happens when you come into the room.

Merrick felt these paradoxes keenly. The first barrier was to absorb the tough feedback without dismissing it. The second, to acknowledge and work through his fears, which were provoking his actions. Then he had to experience the value of silence and endure a meeting where he spoke only when asked. He was shocked by the wonderful jolt of pleasure he felt when his more humble suggestion was taken up and integrated into the team's work. And he began to hear and pay attention to his peers' positive encouragement that he had previously blocked out. 

Forget old battles. Face the fear.

Jaded, stagnant and embittered old professionals give us all a bad name. The one who sits at the back keen to lean on their seniority but without respecting their brighter juniors. The one who hijacks board meetings to drag things back to their opinion rather than generating creative consensus. The one who wins a string of battles that have nothing to do with the firm’s war to survive.

If this is you, there’s hope. Bringing wisdom is tough emotionally because the feedback is not as crisp as a transactional victory. But it underpins your progress to a more fulfilling life beyond the firm and even beyond the profession. Look around and notice the vibrant mentors in their 70s and 80s who are developing the experts of the future. And those who are starting their arts degrees, writing their books and starting new endeavours when everyone thought they were about to sign out!

It's up to you to become the wise version of yourself.

‘Bring Your Wisdom’ is one of the antidotes to burnout that you’ll find in The Burnout Test. You can take the test online here:  The Burnout Test Online

Find your burnout toxin and use the workbook to understand what drives you and what your progression pathway can be. Or contact me directly and let me help you progress into a fulfilling future.