Growth

Growth

A person's ability to disseminate information through instruction and communicate a process/issue is a direct reflection of their level of comprehension of that subject. The duration of time someone spends in a particular role does not always equate to competence or conceptual understanding / ample mastery of the skill-set needed to excel in that role. Jobs within the finance industry require a relatively analogous set of technical skills, yet there is an assumed ‘barrier to entry’ across finance distinctions. While much of the data, inputs and vernacular are the same, there are definite hurdles that discourage movement across the finance community, even within the same company.

Finance professionals in any setting will unanimously agree that unknown variables introduce risk in forecasting.  This same logic applies to roles in the finance community; the less you know about a different role within finance, the more volatile the result could be considering a move to the new group. Most people are happiest when they are comfortable, and frequent movement between roles in any distinction creates change and disrupts comfortability.

While change may discourage movement for psychological reasons, it should never be a professional deterrent. In order to find success in your career past being a mid-level employee, movement is not only advised, it is required. You cannot attain a diverse enough perspective unless you force yourself into unknown areas of the business. Once the learning curve has been met and you feel you’re getting into a routine - that is actually a comfortable sense of intellectual stagnation setting in. Think of a carpenter working for hours to sand down a rough hunk of wood into a wonderfully ornate silhouette – once the worst has been overcome, the surface becomes simpler to fashion. The resistance has been eroded, giving way to a smooth foundation in which the focus shifts towards perfecting the intricacies of the piece.

Every job requires you to adapt and acquire a specific compilation of technical expertise. In many cases this expertise is different from anything you’d acquired from educational or professional experience prior to the role, but take comfort in the knowledge that this learning curve is felt by everyone in any profession. Jobs typically do not have barriers to enter from a technical knowledge perspective, unless you are an astrophysicist or rocket scientist. I am speaking more generically towards economics, business, finance, and other interrelated professions. The difficulty is not born from entering a particular expertise, it is typically derived from a given department’s lack of 3 things:

1)      Documentation and examples of historical practice, work instructions and informational documents to help facilitate the enculturation process and movement of employees in and out of the department.

2)      Strong subject matter expertise residing amongst the remaining team – conceptual working knowledge of systems and processes,  a perspective of how the particular department interacts with and effects both internal and external customers, the ‘who, what, when, where and whys’ of any given process or procedure, and the ability to disseminate this information to management, new employees, internal and external customers.

3)      Universalized best practices utilized by the company: all similar departments follow a best practice for shared reports, processes, reporting functions, etc to facilitate uniformity and build on an already strong fundamental base of knowledge across a given company.

The three things above seem to be the biggest hurdles, from small nonprofit companies to big corporations.  You’ll often hear people mention, “We are all replaceable.” While that may not be the easiest contention to accept, it is true. The vast majority of people in any given industry, in any given department, are wonderfully replaceable. Many people don’t work to stand out, or to push their intellectual bounds; they work for a paycheck or to ‘punch the clock’. Whether your motivation is to ‘just get the job done’ or you’re lacking intelligence to do more, the fact remains the same – you are replaceable. Everyone in a company is actually replaceable. The number of people in a company employed for their aptitude for strategic decisions, utilization of their unbounded technical knowledge and unsurpassed leadership skills, are less than 2% of the total employees, and even less are given the power to utilize their full skill-set.  Think of a company comprised of 20,000 employees; 2% would mean 400 are key employees (cream of the crop, upper levels of management, etc), and even less than that are given ‘full reign’ to act on their own intuition. This should come as no surprise to say that these 400 are also replaceable.  There are less people attainable with the aptitude required to fill those roles, but as there are fewer roles, they can be competed on a larger scale and attract necessary talent to backfill in any case.

This started off as an informative blurb to what one might expect when changing roles across a company or industry, but then took a turn into the unapologetic, generic nature of many of our jobs.  The important thing at the end of the day is growth. If you are always looking to grow, whether personally, professionally, intellectually or emotionally, you will be building the tool set needed to make yourself an asset. An asset not only to an organization, but to your friends, in a relationship and to the world. If you strive to grow areas in your life you are lacking, you will stand out from the crowd. That type of reckless ambition is so brilliantly refreshing in a world that seems bogged down by negativity and selfishness.