You can’t hire your problems away
There is no saviour out there
This is a story from a few years ago. I was working at CORE, & my team had taken on a new project a few weeks earlier where the work was starting to ramp up. I had just gotten out of the daily meeting that I did with my team and they had started working weekends to keep things going smoothly. It was the fourth meeting I had recently where ‘Why can’t we hire a new person?’ came up.
Co-incidentally, a few weeks ago I was also given the responsibility of improving the company’s profitability - so I knew hiring wasn’t gonna happen.
Still, as I believed that my team was the one for which exceptions should be made - I went to my boss, Zoya to convince her. In classic Pious style, I over-prepared for the meeting with 5 reasons in 5 slides with graphs and charts on how this person will 5x the productivity of my team and solve all the company's problems.
The meeting was short though.
In classic Zoya style, she listened to everything I had to say and made some notes in her latest colorful diary. I was hopeful.
She shut the unicorn themed diary, and calmly said - “No”
“I’ll give you a solution though. Actually, you’ll find this solution for yourself.”
I roll my eyes.
“Is this new person’s work really important?”
“Yes!” I said emphatically
“Then do this - drop everything else that you are doing for the next three days, and you personally do everything that this person is supposed to do. If after doing that, you still believe you need a person, then let’s talk.”
That day, I repressed a greater amount of rage than I did on average.
Nonetheless, I always loved the idea of dropping all my day-to-day meetings and doing something interesting. Plus, I had the CEO’s blessings.
I did the work.
And as you would imagine from the spoiler in the heading of this post - I realized I didn’t need to hire anyone.
In fact, by immersing myself hands-on in the problems, it made me realize there were simple adjustments in the processes that would remove most of the burden the team was facing. The biggest impact was having a meeting with the managers of a few of the teams that were involved and letting them vent to me.
So what did I learn?
If you “accidentally” press “This and following events” instead of “ Only This Event” in the Delete Recurring Event option in Google Calendar, most people won’t notice that those weekly meetings are missing from their calendar and you can get 5 hours back from your week instantly. You’re welcome :)
Zoya loves to say ‘I told you so’
That our problems are rarely external. It was my lack of willingness to do the difficult work of immersing myself in my team’s problems, & having the difficult conversations that were needed that were the real problem.
We often think that there will be some magical person - that we will hire that will solve our problems. A person that will come with 10 years of work ex, in the same industry, having solved the same problem for other companies.
But that doesn’t happen.
Your company is unique.
Your problem is unique.
You - (the person who is going to select your Savior from so many others - with your biases and limited understanding of the actual problem) - are also unique
So - in all likelihood, you will never find that expert. Okay, you might find an expert that works for sometime, but you will not solve your problem.
Here’s what will most likely happen instead -
You will postpone all decisions & conversations about this problem - “Till when we hire our Savior”. You will hire the person that gives you the most confidence. (MBA or big co., positive attitude, can make nice presentations). You’ll burden them with that ridiculous expectation of being ‘The Chosen One’ and then blame them for everything that doesn’t work with their solutions. (Oh, In writing this, I’ve just understood the whole reason for the existence of Consulting firms)
“But Pious, I don’t hire people. Why have you made me read so much?”
Because this isn’t about hiring.
It’s about believing that the solution to your problem is outside of you.
It’s why paying $9.99 for a new task management app doesn’t help you get more work done.
It’s why hiring a nutrition coach works great for the first 4 weeks. Then suddenly one day you find yourself eating your whole daily calorie allowance in coconut ice cream from Naturals and you feel too ashamed to record it on the app. The next day the app is suspiciously not being opened and you are avoiding your coach’s phone calls. (not based on a true story.)
It’s why none of those online courses that are teaching you ChatGPT prompts will make you genuinely better at what skill you want to develop.
Yes, you can enjoy the “new shiny thing” for some time. You will enjoy the relief and the hope of you finally solving your life-long problems. But then your old patterns that you have not addressed inside will come for you.
You distract yourself from the fact that it didn’t work out. Blame the solution.
And then you wait till the next Savior comes.
And the cycle repeats.
Ultimately - we have to take charge of our own life.
We have to do the hard work of understanding what the repeating patterns are in our life that are holding us back. What frames we see and interpret the world through? What responsibility are we avoiding taking in our own life?
And then slowly doing whatever it takes to free ourselves from those patterns.
There is no secret ingredient
Inspiring and influential wordsmith😉
Good One Pious 👌🏾