Mind observing your ego?
Bring your family so we can get to know you … the words that stood between me and a job that would move the needle on my career, my life, and… my family?
I would be the Head of Engineering role at a global firm that ran the internet. Yes… a company DOES do that, and the team I would be leading was that team. A great friend got me the first interview… and that one sentence terrified me more than a bear. I told my wife, my peers, even myself that I had the situation “under control”…
… but my Mind said something different. While I knew I wanted the role, and had the experience, skills, and likely the mindset, here I was literally at the table… and could barely speak. If you know me at all, you know that is not a common problem…
…which is the most famous filing error in pop music…
By early 1996 Jagged Little Pill was a phenomenon, and its third single became the biggest chart hit of her career… and the most argued-about. “Ironic” went to radio in February 1996 and climbed to Number 4 on the Hot 100, still her highest. It earned 2 Grammy nominations in 1997, including Record of the Year. And almost immediately, the argument started: rain on your wedding day, the free ride when you have already paid… most of the situations in the song are not, technically, ironic. They are just miserable luck.
Here is the detail almost nobody holds onto. She has said the song was penned as a warm-up and was never intended for the record… other people encouraged it on because the tune was that good. The most scrutinized lyric of the decade was a throwaway that got filed as a statement.
…that the whole world refuses to re-file
For 31 years, people have been telling Alanis Morissette that “Ironic” is not ironic. She has been a good sport about it for decades… in 2015 she even performed an updated version on late-night TV and sang that the real irony is a song called Ironic with no ironies in it. And here is the part I cannot get past … the song is still enormous, still everywhere, and almost nobody ever went back and asked what it actually is. The world settled on the label and moved on.
T observe is not the hard part … senior leaders are excellent observers. The hard part is that your Mind names the thing within about 4 seconds, and after that you are not observing anymore. You are confirming.
What did you file under the wrong word this quarter?
Run your own org chart through it. The direct you filed as not strategic 2 years ago… has the file been reopened since? The peer you filed as political, the project you filed as a resourcing problem, the quarter you filed as a market issue? The labels were all applied by an excellent observer, once, quickly. Everything noticed since then has gone into the folder the label built.
The quiet leader who is the best developer of people on his team is usually the one who noticed everybody had the label wrong … and said nothing, because everybody had already agreed.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: take 1 situation you already named this quarter and write down what it would be if that name were wrong. Isn’t it Ironic… you saw it correctly and filed it incorrectly.
Oh, my own ironic ending? While I couldn’t speak… my daughter carried the day. She chatted everyone up while no one noticed that it was her DAD that was nervous 😉 Maybe that is why I have had a life long love of women leadership… a story for later 😉
Send this to the 1 leader you watched file something under the wrong word. They will know why.
Ironic.
