The Fork in the Road

One of the most important things I’ve learned in my 57 years is that life is all about choices. On every journey you take, you face choices. At every fork in the road, you make a choice. And its those decisions that shape our lives – Mike DeWine, Ohio Attorney General

You've just landed a promotion and now have the added responsibility of caring for other human beings for the first time; or more human beings in the way of a larger team.

The momentary feeling of achievement and that you've "made it" suddenly is overtaken by a series of other feelings of apprehension, fear and self doubt. "Am I actually going to be able to make a success of this?" is one question you ask yourself. You have arrived at a key decision point in your career where your next choice of direction will be vital to your success.

At each of these moments we effectively stand at the fork in the road; looking down one path or the other; not knowing which one will lead to the best outcome for us. Taking into account why we have come to this fork in the road, how we feel about being here and what we know about how we got to this point.

You may have been there before and taken the wrong path that was on offer only to find it was full of obstacles that made it nearly impossible to progress with real conviction. Every time you thought you had a clear line of sight, another roadblock appeared.

For the purpose of this Post you have come to the fork in the road at the precise moment that you have been given the responsibility of managing another group of human beings.

It may be the first time you have taken on the responsibility; it may be a merger of teams and you now have an increased span of control or it may even be that it’s a group of humans already under your care and there are some tell tale signs that things aren’t going all that well.

In these three scenarios you have already taken your first choice or path to take when getting to the fork in the road. That choice may be that you are going to progress from being technically competent at a task or a group of tasks (which is usually what gets you the opportunity or promotion as its commonly known) or to managing a group of humans as humans and not outputs or resources. There is a big difference in these two approaches and one of them can provide you with the spark to ignite both the individual members of your group and the whole team to achieve incredible outcomes.

Make no mistake – this is one of the most important choices that you will make in your working life and one that is usually made without a lot of thought. The reason there is not a lot of thought put into the decision is that the system that most of us work in has it’s own way of selecting those who will be in charge of people.

It’s just not as effective as it could be.

The organizational system that we work in has a way of identifying the next manager to be promoted. It’s largely based upon the displayed technical competence over a prolonged period by an individual, which results in positive outcomes for a business unit. It may also be supported by a person extending their development and level of competence by undertaken additional curricular activity which in a lot of traditional organisations is a bit like the “keys to the car of promotion and rising up the ladder.

Some people who are promoted simply don’t want to manage other human beings. They are quite happy to keep ploughing out very good technical work; which isn’t a bad thing; and the system then takes over sometimes with catastrophic consequences.

One of the main reasons for the apprehension is that the new people manager has other human beings are now dependent on that manager; and to make it really clear their livelihoods are now in the hands to some extent of their manager. This is why you will hear many people managers say “I’d enjoy this job a lot more if I didn’t have to worry about the people stuff……..” and “just let me do what I’m good at and the results will come my way”.

This is also why so many managers shy away from building a human relationship with people under their care; preferring to keep it to a purely transactional one based upon knowing more about their outputs than about them as a human. This is precisely where the problems begin for people managers as they work against their natural instincts in favor of the technical skills and organisational rulebook to manage people.

So choose carefully when you arrive at the fork in the road.

Be Human..............Be You.