I came across a TikTok post analysing why two different Starbucks CEOs failed and succeeded at revenue growth. The carousel post suggested that hiring a McKinsey career consultant as a CEO was a mistake as it’s one thing to do flashy PowerPoints for executives and quite another to actually lead a firm. One is inclined to agree – I doubt a 21-year-old fresh graduate can really glean what makes or breaks a billion-dollar business after two days of prep (or decades of the same slides and fire-to-improve-your-bottom-line mentality), but then again consultancy remains a billion-dollar business in itself, so what do I know? Still, one thing caught my attention. This Tiktoker listed lessons, one of them being ‘Execution > Ego’.
Maybe Remember My Name
The chorus of the song Fame ends with these words: ‘Baby remember my name’. Our (Western) world likes to highlight individuals who succeed and many aspire to be famous or recognised for this thing or that. I’ve noticed this phenomenon at corporations, too: ‘regular’ employees want to make their mark, not only or necessarily because they actually care about their work and want to feel that what they do bears meaning, but because they need to get another notch in the belt to get that promotion or that new, better title at a different company. There’s nothing inherently wrong about wanting to get far in life. It’s just that if a company of 100 employees has 100 signature initiatives led by 100 different people, all at the same time, there’s no one left to actually execute the projects. And 100 initiatives run by 100 different leads likely compete for the same, finite resources within a company, meaning that the company as a whole will likely not get a head.
I was quite young when I first observed this tendency. I mostly worked with lower middle management at the time, and it seemed they all wanted to get approval for a project they’d lead and secure the budget for it. As a junior, I assisted in many of them and got the sense that there was quite a bit of overlap in many of them. But no one wanted to give up their lead role in order to support someone else’s project. That’s why I believe that it’s all about getting that tick on your CV checklist: yes, I have led a project I initiated.
No organisation can afford to have endless concurrent projects. Even if they’re not overlapping or contradictory, they’ll still be using the same, limited resource pool. Given that no company benefits from giving its employees vanity projects that primarily aim at giving the project lead a slightly undeserved promotion or a leg up outside of the organisation, executing should be regarded as much more important than it may be. Sure, if a project delivers great results, its lead should get praise. Go for it! But you can be equally instrumental in birthing someone else’s vision, perhaps others are even better at it. Salary raise budgets are, as any others, limited so not everyone can be rewarded the same way, but likely, not everyone would need to be. I’ve personally never felt it is any lesser to be instrumental in delivering someone else’s project (especially when it should really be a project that serves the company, not the project lead) than having my name at the top. Yes, please, remember my name for when you need someone who gets it done! But I don’t need that for my ego. I can stroke it myself just fine.
Sidetracked 