Riding the Career Train
I took a deep breath at Kings Cross and settled back in to the comfortable seat of the Virgin East Coast train. I was looking forward to arriving in Edinburgh but more importantly I was looking forward to experiencing the rolling hills of the countryside outside my window and of course the Virgin travel experience but on the ground this time, not in the air.
This was the holiday part of my trip so I wasn’t expecting my head and eyes to be seeing and processing leadership lessons but I guess I was practising what I preach – that life is always integrated and the best leadership lessons come in a holistic form.
Virgin trains presented as an exemplar in modern career and leadership practices as you would expect. I could see how the staff felt that they were at the very heart of things, not on the periphery. I witnessed how Virgin balanced everything beautifully. The trip was a living and moving example of how the values of quality, innovation, competitive advantage, fun, customer care and value for money blended together. I could see how modern leadership practices around community impact and cultural cohesion were in play, that it wasn’t just about financial performance. (They proudly gave us rich information about each city we stopped at along the way and I learned they were often a supporter of local events within each city).
This wasn’t the lesson though. The lesson came unexpectedly when an international exchange student with barely any English boarded the train at Newcastle, bound for Edinburgh. (Or so we thought).
About 10 minutes into the journey he asked me for help. He wanted to check that the train was going to London and wanted to know how long the journey would be. I let him know he was going in the wrong direction and got help from a local person who could guide him on how to get off, when to get off and how to locate the train going down to London.
The gem of a lesson highlights that one of the most essential modern career and leadership practices is:
Have clarity of direction – start at the end. Take time up front to get crystal clear on where your end point is and then align everything to this.
Our fellow passenger, failed to get crystal clear clarity around his end point (language barriers) and consequently he was on the right train but going in the wrong direction.
How often have we witnessed talented colleagues and exceptional professionals do the same thing? Their career goal (or the business strategy deliverable they have responsibility for executing) is blurry and somewhere along the line they start delivering on someone else’s career goal/dream (or the business strategy gets harder to deliver on because they allow themselves to get pulled in different directions).
It’s paramount for modern professionals not to be on the right train but going in the wrong direction. How many do we know who are in the right industry, with the right employer but in the wrong role? Or how many modern professionals do we know who are doing great things to grow a business or achieve a certain strategy but the destination is blurry so often they are doing things that are taking them off in a different direction or they are putting in phenomenal hours but not getting results.
‘If you don’t know where you’re going, you probably won’t get there’. – Yogi Berra.
Modern and talented professionals, whether employees, consultants or business owners, must have a clear vision of where they want to go. Then and only then, can they create a plan to follow to get them there. The key is to ‘start at the end’. They figure out where they want to go and they reverse engineer the path to get there.
Right train – Right Direction = Alignment, Efficiency, Right Results, Happy Career, Happy Life.
So, there you have it. In the end the lesson wasn’t actually from Virgin but from the experience of a fellow passenger. I’m so glad I had the opportunity to help him course correct. Trusting too that his end point when he eventually got there was well worth it and that it was exactly where he wanted and needed to be.