Is it an age thing?

Despite denying in my last post that my quest for a more meaningful professional existence is a mid life crisis (which I still hold fast on), I do think it's an age thing. As I've got older, my progression has become more difficult to map. Success used to be quite clear cut - promotion every 2 years. Then I hit partner and had kids it's been a challenge ever since.  As is clear from these pages, my challenge is less about whether I'm successful - I know I'm successful - I only need to look at what I do on a day by day basis and who I come into contact with... the question is whether that's meaningful.


Part of the challenge is to put in place metrics that mean enough to me personally when I think about success. More and more though I'm realising that my problem isn't the firm, the people, the clients I work with - they are all ok. My problem is one of focus - I don't have a clear enough focus (be it meaningful or not), and so I'm meandering around doing stuff (not bad stuff, just not as useful as I could be) without a clear idea of what it's in service of. I basically need something to get my teeth into. That's my problem not someone else's. I can't talk about being accountable without taking accountability for my own focus. The question is who do I trust to help me find that focus?


The other thing I see myself doing is self framing - I feel I'm guilty of putting boxes around what I can and can't do which are self imposed. The reality is that I can (within the bounds of what we do as a firm and what I have the competency for) do pretty much anything if I put my mind to it. I've just got to make a decision what that would be in a perfect world and make it happen. Today I was lucky enough to hear Mathew Syed give a presentation on the value of marginal gains in high performing teams. Part of what he was evangelising about was the need for teams to have a growth mind-set - you've got to want to make seeing the room for improvement part of your everyday priorities. You've got to have a culture where finding those marginal gains is to be celebrated - where not succeeding is an opportunity to learn rather than to blame. Good stuff, particularly about the growth mind-set - you've got to want to win and win together. We have a way to go in the team I'm part of. Trust is a fundamental enabler of a growth mind-set and I feel it needs to be across the entire team to give us a fighting chance of high performance.


So I'll finish with some words from Shakespeare who died 400 years ago this week - "We know what we are but not what we may be" - maybe he was seeking purpose as well...