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Ten Things I Wish I Would Have Known In My Thirties

This article is more than 8 years old.

In my thirties I was a hard-charging business person. At that time I thought that by applying logical methods and hard work, I could solve any business problem. I did not get a lot of sleep, because I was working all the time and had small children at home.

I was just beginning to notice that there were certain aspects of the business world that didn't seem too healthy, from an obsession with measurement and individual performance metrics to a general fear of messing up or looking bad in front of other people.

I thought these were small issues. I didn't realize they were baked into the framework of hierarchical business. As a fish swimming in a dirty fishbowl, I couldn't see how filthy the water around me was!

Back in my thirties, I wish I would have known that some people spend all their time and energy moving up in the corporate world so that they never have to stop and look at who they are.

Like many people my age and even older, I thought that business success meant getting a job at the top of the organizational chart. I didn't realize that many of the people in senior-level management roles have no idea why they are alive or what their mission on this planet might be.

They don't have time to look at issues like those. They are too busy bossing other people around or polishing  their trophies!

I wish I would have known that the culture in an organization is the energy field that drives every good thing (and every bad thing) that happens there. I wish I would have known that  if the culture is broken, no yardsticks, rules, policies, plans, strategies or vision statements will help.

I wish I would have known that the most perfect business strategy in the world won't work unless employees are excited about it and see their own place in it. I wish I would have known that you can't force people to change their viewpoints.

You can only force them to grudgingly comply with your wishes as a leader, but grudging compliance never helped a team win anything worth winning.

You can show people another way to look at things, but that takes time, and in the business world people don't want to  invest time in other people. They say "Time is money!" and they believe that money is more important than people are.

If you want to teach someone, you also have to listen to him or her, and lots of people in the business world don't like to listen. They prefer to talk.

I wish I would have known that business is no more complicated than a lemonade stand on your front sidewalk, although battalions of consultants, B-school professors and other weenie types would have you believe differently.

I wish I would have known that business is a human activity first and foremost and that human topics are always more important in business than anything found in a spreadsheet or a policy handbook.

I wish I would have known that everybody in a business feels fearful at times, including the CEO, but that nobody talks about their fear. Even when adrenaline is rushing through a business person's veins, you won't hear him or her say it.

You'll hear fearful things like "I'll have you know I have sixteen years of experience in this area!", instead. That's how you'll know when a business person feels fear. They get defensive and lash out at other people - and nobody talks about that, either.

I wish I would have known that I never needed to feel guilty about having personal commitments outside of work.

I wish I would have known that respecting a person means telling that person the truth. It means telling a boss when he or she says something crazy, even if (or maybe especially if) it's hard to choke those words out.

I wish I would have known that the people who strive to please the boss are not people to emulate.

I wish I would have known that the old adage "Pick your battles" is very bad advice. People who tell the truth all the time don't pick their battles. In fact, battles have nothing to do with telling the truth when it matters.

Anybody can react to your truth however they choose to, but there's no reason for you to withhold your valuable observations just because somebody else might not like them.

I wish I would have known that management and measurement have nothing to do with one another. Most of the important stuff on a team isn't measurable. We know that  in regular life, but in the business world we pretend it's not true.

By the time I hit my thirties, I had been part of exciting and hugely successful projects for twenty years - performing in musical theater and operatic productions and playing in orchestras.

Playing in the pit or dancing onstage, I was part of something  bigger than me, but there was nothing to measure in my performance and no yardsticks to hit. My fellow performers and I knew our individual pieces of the puzzle and we were all focused on the same goal.

Why can't business work the same way? It can, of course, and in smart organizations it does. In my thirties, I often missed the obvious parallels between business and the rest of life, but in the meantime I've stopped to notice those parallels and now I write about them.

Real  life is colorful and human -- why should the business world be black and white?

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