YOU PIVOT™: Which Life -Career Version Are you In?

by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

Careers, like software, require updates to keep them fresh. 

Just as with software, Version 1.0, while it works, is just the beginning. For some, Version 1.0, is well thought out. These are the lucky ones. My husband, for example, knew when he was a child that he wanted to be an engineer. And, he did just that, even in high school he was preparing to become an engineer. For him, later versions consisted of different types of engineering roles, mechanical, quality, and ultimately design. He is always learning, always updating to a new version. 

Me, on the other hand, I graduated high school at 16 because I was anxious to be on my own, except I had no idea what I wanted to do. I walked down the street and applied for a job at a local Savings & Loan Association1. Thus began my career in financial services, career Version 1.0. I eventually completed my undergraduate education, moved to Chicago, began Version 1.5 as an executive at Northern Trust, and completed my MBA at Kellogg.

After 18 years of Version 1.5, I looked in the mirror and said to myself, “you don’t have kids to send to college, you don’t have to make this much money, it’s time to go and find something new.” While I wasn’t able to name it at the time, this was the beginning of Version 2.0 and my consulting career. A few years later, came Version 2.5 as a Leadership Coach and Peer Advisory Board Chair.  

Today I am moving into 3.0 as I migrate from leading a fantastic CEO Peer Advisory Board in affiliation with Vistage International, toward exclusively leading the You Pivot™ Program.

What prompted me to tell this story?  

I mentioned to a friend recently that I am working with leaders in transition, and he asked me, “how does this work, doesn’t “in transition” mean unemployed? I was astonished by this comment, having never thought about transition as an ending; instead, for me, transition is a beginning. And of course, transition is both. To have a beginning, we must also have an ending. And it’s the ending that is often the hardest part.  

Sometimes when people are ready for an ending and a change to a new version, they tell themselves a story of failure. “If I were more successful,” they say, I wouldn’t need a change.” How then do we explain the professional singer I met recently, who is now a first-year medical resident?

We need language to talk about transitions, and this language needs to normalize the experience. We are living a long time. With these longer lives, we are likely to have many transitions both in our lives and our careers. Isn’t it time we embraced transition as a normal part of life? And, more importantly, a positive force in our lives.

For me, the people who become intentional about version changes are the successful ones. I enjoy working with people who are ready to explore a new version of themselves and their careers. My clients typically fall into two groups: CEOs, Presidents and Owners who have recently begun a move toward 2.5; or those who may already be in Version 2.5 and are looking toward 3.0.  

As you think about your life and career, 

  • What is your today story?
  • What matters to you? How does what matters compare to what you are doing today?
  • What is your tomorrow story? Have you begun to write the next chapter or version of yourself?

Let’s work together. If you are feeling stuck, considering a transition and you want to cut your time to action to six months or less, there is no better time than now to contact me. 

1 For those of you who may not be familiar with Savings & Loan Association, S&Ls were a simple financial services concept designed to foster homeownership. They took deposits at flexible rates based on market conditions and then lent these deposits at fixed-rates to people buying homes. The model worked until inflation and interest rates skyrocketed in the ’70s. Borrowing and lending terms were mismatched, and while it took a while, that was the end of Savings and Loan Associations.  

Leadership Quote: This is not the end…

by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Winston Churchill

As we come to the end of this challenging year, Winston Churchill reminds us, there is light at the end of this seemingly endless dark tunnel. This pandemic has occasionally been compared to war, which makes this quote resonate today. So, as we go about our lives as we end this year, let us remember that there is still much to be grateful for, and with the upcoming vaccines, certainly we are entering the end of the beginning.

Happy Holidays. Thank you for honoring me by reading my Sunday Stories. See you in the new year.

YOU PIVOT™: Flunking Retirement

by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

When I began this interview with Marsh, now 80, the first thing he said is “I flunked retirement twice.” We both agreed the word retirement doesn’t work anymore. Version 3.0 of ourselves, even version 4.0, is not about endings, it’s about beginnings. Discovering the content of the new beginning is both the hard part and the reward of the journey.

Marsh began his career in the military, following his father into West Point and ultimately into the Marines. When the Vietnam War ended, he realized two things, 1) without a war, his military leadership options were limited. 2) if he wanted to change his career, he needed to control it. In the military, you went where you got assigned. With a wife and two children, this idea no longer appealed to Marsh. 

So at the age of 35, Marsh decided to enter the corporate world. He sent letters to 85 companies and got zero interviews. When I asked him why, he said, “In those days if you were a Vietnam vet, you were viewed as some crazy person. At 35, no one wanted to touch me; no one was willing to give me a second chance.” 

Fortunately, he had a friend at Chase Manhattan Bank who got him an interview for a job for which his military experience was a plus. Soon thereafter, he was offered a job that no-one wanted, corporate budget director. While his colleagues viewed this job as too hard and too much work, it was ideal for a military trained guy. It had the side benefit of regular briefings with the bank’s chairman, which provided him with broad strategic exposure and, ultimately, opportunities.

In retrospect, Marsh describes the transition from the military to corporate life as his most challenging transition. Learning the lingo was hard enough, e.g., the executive dining room was just that, not the mess hall. The hardest part was learning how to create and inspire teams. Teamwork is essential to getting the job done in the military and therefore happens naturally. There is a common enemy to fight, and without a team to deploy it, an 85-pound machine gun is worthless. On the other hand, while teamwork certainly maximizes the result in a company, people are more likely to compete within the company and work in silos.  

Once he got the hang of building teams in the corporate world, he enjoyed it and wanted to lead people as he had done in the military. He navigated his way to a regional management job, his first P/L responsibility, and ultimately to head a growing business called global custody. It was in this role that he was tapped to take over as CEO of State Street Bank and Trust. From SVP of a money center bank, several levels below any C-Suite role, to CEO of a regional bank. He transformed this bank into the worldwide leader of global custody, and then after ten years, he retired at the age of 61. 

When I asked how he and they decided he should retire, he replied, “This was planned from day one. The board had been caught short by his predecessor deciding six months before he retired that the person he was grooming to replace him was not the guy. The board had to scramble to find a replacement (Marsh). They were determined not to have this happen again. So, before I started, they asked me, “what are your plans?” I said 8-10 years is about right in the CEO role (today, I think it more like 4-5, he added), and my wife and I want time in our early 60’s to enjoy life. From there, we agreed on how we would proceed. We began a management resource review for candidates four years before I left.”

After Marsh “retired” from State Street, he followed his father once again, this time into teaching, a seemingly ideal retirement job. For two years, he taught full-time at the Kennedy School at Harvard, only to discover he was bored teaching the same subject a second time.  

As luck would have it, about this time, the New York Stock Exchange imploded in scandal. The CEO was fired, a new board was created, and the chairman asked Marsh to take the helm.  

So much for retirement. Marsh led the New York Stock Exchange for ten years, and then at 74, he retired for real. He still gives lectures at MIT Sloan and consults a bit with business leaders. 

What advice does Marsh have for other CEOs who want to pivot?

  • Be strategic about your current role AND the next versions of yourself.
  • Find a coach – being a CEO is a lonely job; you can’t share your musings and life questions with your team. While you can seek your own counsel, an outside perspective is better. 
  • Have another passion. If your whole life is around being a CEO and your family, any transition will be hard. Roosevelt had his stamp collection; I learned to fly. 
  • Forget about retirement. Think more in terms of redirecting. 
  • Experience space before you fill it and discover what is calling your attention.
  • And one more…it’s a big transition when your inbox isn’t full every day!!!

Thanks-Giving

by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

For me, the Thanksgiving holiday is a time to pause and consider the gifts that life has given me and ask myself how and where I can pay those gifts forward.   

More than any other year, 2020 is the year to pay it forward. More than any other disaster, the impact of COVID-19 has been unequal. And it is unequal in ways that will have a lasting effect. People are hurting like never before, and sadly the agencies that support them are devasted as well. People who had jobs, and were barely able to support their families up til now, are without a safety net and are hungry. 

As Thanks-Giving approaches, its time for all of us who have the gift of privilege to pause and ask ourselves these questions:

  • What can I do to support the businesses in my community so they too can pay it forward and continue to employ people?
  • What can I do to support my neighbors who may be struggling with housing, food insecurity, and other unmet basic needs? 
  • What can I do to support the agencies, including the arts, that fill the gaps in these unmet needs and bring hope and beauty to our community? 

The Unreliable Narrator: Part II – The Flip Side

by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

Last week I featured the familiar unreliable narrator story, the one where we judge ourselves harshly and thus tell an unreliable story of our accomplishments.

As I reflected on this story in conversations with readers, I was reminded of an unreliable narrator of a different sort that can be equally misleading. In this version, the narrator tells a story of accomplishments that may also be lies, i.e., the flip side.

As a reminder, the unreliable narrator is a storyteller who withholds information, lies to, or misleads the reader, casting doubt on the narrative. Authors use this device to engage readers on a deeper level, forcing them to come to their own conclusions when the narrator’s point of view can’t be trusted.

In the flip side story, the narrator has convinced himself (or herself) that s/he is bulletproof.

A while back, I watched two documentaries, both of which chronicled storytellers who were later indicted for fraud, Billy McFarland, founder of Fyre Media, and the Fyre Festival creator and Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos. Perhaps because I watched them back to back, I was struck by the common themes.

Both founders passionately believed in their stories and told them well, so well, that investors and buyers flocked to them. Except their stories were lies. These two founders were unreliable narrators that were so good at their craft that the observer didn’t see that the narrator’s view could not be trusted.

One can easily dismiss these dramatic stories as intentional fraud. I wonder, though, whether these storytellers and others like them set out to commit fraud or believed so passionately in their stories that they were blind to the facts.

Less dramatically, there are the people we know who confidently share their successes, which seem real, until we look behind the curtain.

Regardless of the type of lies, the unreliable narrator holds us back and keeps us from telling our real story.

Are You An Unreliable Narrator?

by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

Last week I wrote about the importance of telling your today story before answering the question, What is Your Tomorrow Story?

One of the challenges I observe in my work as an executive life coach is we are often an unreliable narrator of our own story. Successful people tend to focus on what is next. They become accustomed to asking themselves, “what could I do better?” “What could my company do better?”  

While this approach is perceived to drive results, it also leads to negative feelings and perceptions, judging ourselves, others, and our circumstances. This judgment then shows up when we tell our story.

I recently began work with a CEO who had spent the last seven years transforming a founder-led, founder-dependent company into a steady, stable, independent profitable growth company—the result: a company that couldn’t find a buyer, sold for multiples of EBITDA.

Yet, when I asked him to tell me his story as he prepares for his next gig, I heard a story that went something like this. “I am good at team building and creating order out of chaos, but I am not a charismatic leader. I expanded a local company and turned it into a national company, but it wasn’t growing at 10x multiples of earnings. The company had up and down years before I took over, and under my leadership, results were consistent, but not double-digit.” 

With all these “buts,” he was an unreliable narrator of his own story.

The unreliable narrator is a storyteller who withholds information, lies to, or misleads the reader, casting doubt on the narrative. Authors use this device to engage readers on a deeper level, forcing them to come to their own conclusions when the narrator’s point of view can’t be trusted. 

While this is a useful device to keep our attention in a novel, when we tell the story of our lives and our career, it can send us down a rabbit hole of self-doubt and lies we tell ourselves.

What to do? Here are two approaches that I have found helpful:

  • Try telling your today story and your tomorrow story in the third person; write it as though you are talking about someone else.
  • Find a friend, a family member, a coach, someone that either knows you well, or is good at asking questions to draw out the real story. In short, find an editor to become the reliable narrator of your real story. 

YOU PIVOT™: What Is Your Tomorrow Story?

by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

In my work with CEOs and senior executives in my YOU PIVOT™ Program, I ask them to begin by telling me the story of who they are today. Then, I ask them to consider and share what matters most to them.

Only then, when they have clarity on their today story and what matters, I ask them to craft their vision for the next version of their life and career. I ask my clients to write this vision in story form. It’s hard to write a story about ourselves. For me, I find that just the act of thinking about the story, perhaps writing some notes about it, is a helpful way to get started.

I am a big fan of Steve Covey’s Seven Habits, and one of my favorites is, Begin with the end in mind. That said, without a good understanding of where we are today, how that is working or not working for us, it is impossible to craft a future vision in the context of what matters. So, we begin with the end in mind, AND we examine the life we are currently living so we can notice what is in our path and perhaps blocking our way.

  • Who are you? What matters to you?
  • What version of your life and career are you in?
  • What is your tomorrow story?