When making the family spaghetti sauce recipe it’s important to stick with the ingredients that have stood the test of time and create an experience that connects the present day with your past. Having made the mistake “ONCE” of substituting jarred spaghetti sauce in the recipe nearly broke my marriage! We survived the day, but I learned my lesson to NEVER recreate the experience without the essential ingredients.
Now let’s think about job skills of our future leaders in the context of a recipe:
- 4 year degree
- 5-7 years of business experience
- 2-3 certifications in your field of expertise
- 1 hour of good communication
- 20 minutes of giving feedback
- 5 seconds of navigating challenging conversations
- 1 millisecond of understanding the culture of the people they need to work with
When you stir this up over 2-3 years, do you think the organization benefits from the investment? If it’s obvious to you this will not be a recipe for success for the organization or the individual, then why do you continue with the wrong ingredients? What makes matters worse is the deep culture of the organization gets lost as we mix in individuals who lack the essential skills that create sustainability in your organization. People lose their trust in the organization because either brute force working long hours or having the right network is the only way to get ahead. In “The CEO’s Compass”, the “Past” compass point along with the “People” point are where you need to navigate to, to get you to “Peace of Mind”; your true north.
If this is you, then I want you to pause and reflect while I take a short detour…
My guest interview this week on The Drop in CEO Podcast with Tra Williams, we discussed Entrepreneurship and how critical it is to building our competitive advantage as individuals, communities and entire nations. His book, “Boss Brain” speaks on this at length. The essential skills are even more critical as the foundation for business and building relationships. Without cultivating those skills, the “American Dream” and for that matter, “Everybody’s Dream” for a better life is lost. Believing in entrepreneurship is believing in people and their talents to create a better future. Given this thought, why would you not cultivate this within business?
When I think about you and the need to ensure you have the 3 Essential Ingredients for Leadership Recipe, I draw your attention to this picture.
You see my daughter and son making the recipe, but hidden in this image is your answer:
- Preserve the past of this recipe – where did it come from, why was it important to write it down, who created the recipe and what is the importance of each ingredient. When people understand the past culture, they are more likely to understand how it connects to today. They will remember the story and build on it.
- Mentor the essential skills – now in the context of spaghetti, cooking the meat in the sauce, adding spices to taste and dipping the bread in it to make sure it has the right flavor are what we teach my children in making the recipe. The same goes for business when we give them the job description – we need to spend hours / weeks / years nurturing their ability to fulfill a role that provides value. When we skip this step, they may take short cuts like I did in buying jarred sauce, burning it if the stovetop temperature is too high, or one time I used sugar instead of salt. We save our employees some of this heartache if we invest some time in showing them the way.
- Show people you care about them; it goes a long way in building a trusting (and loving) relationship that ensures a sustainable business. While these are two of my three children making the sauce and we indeed enjoyed the results, it was more about learning the process and the experience of eating together. When we translate that same sense of family and caring to business, we not only create a sustainable business, but one that is creating a culture for tomorrow.
With these key ingredients, for building your leaders of tomorrow and the culture you wish to see in a sustainable business, do you have everything you need to get started? Do you have the time to build your leadership team leveraging the culture, their technical skills while building their essential skills? If there are barriers in the way of starting, let’s book a call. We can talk about the spaghetti sauce recipe, or we can talk about getting you back on track!