Embracing Transformation: The Key to Sustaining Success in Evolving Environments
Long Read - In a world driven by rapid advancements and constant change, the belief that reaching a milestone guarantees lifelong success is increasingly being challenged.
Introduction
This article explores the notion that personal and professional growth demands a continual process of self-evolution. From the relentless pursuit of academic excellence to the challenges of navigating career progression, the need to adapt and transform is evident. Through narratives of individuals' experiences, we delve into the transformative journey necessary for sustained success.
The Quest for Excellence: Academia and Beyond:
A lot of us tend to have this belief that if we reach a certain milestone in life, we are set. If you don’t agree with me, then look at the children who are pursuing some of the toughest competitive exams in the world such as USPC, IIT-JEE, GATE, CA, CFA, etc.
If you visit Kota in Rajasthan, you will see a flurry of children who are practically studying for 18 hours a day to get into IITs. Every single year 10 lakh students give JEE Mains, out of which 2.5 lakh qualify for JEE Advanced, out of these 2.5 lakhs, only 10,000 students get selected in IIT's.
The success ratio is out of every 100 students who appear for the Mains, only 1 student will quality for IITs. Just 1%.
Even from that 1% there are too many students who drop out in the middle of the 5-year intense IIT program. Maybe they can’t crack it or don’t have the mental capacity to take on an incremental load of studies or some form of peer pressure pushes them into quitting the dream that they sacrificed their childhood for.
The first thought that comes to our head when we hear about someone dropping out of IIT is - “pagal hai kya?” (Is that fellow crazy?)
Come on, you sacrifice your childhood by not hanging out with friends or playing sport. These days, it’s prudent to include their romantic stories that begin in 7th or 8th grade itself. Not just their schedules but even their parent’s schedules revolve around the dream of entering IIT.
I remember a dear friend of mine who is an IIT-Bombay pass out. His father would sit with a stick in his hand at night and would slap the desk if he fell asleep. My friend would study for 18-20 hours a day. He even had a nervous breakdown and was admitted into the hospital. When we visited him, he was studying there also.
Such is the intensity of a middle-income house in India to get into IITs. It’s their single-minded focus to get super rich and improve their quality of life.
Thankfully, my friend got into IIT Bombay and cleared with flying colors. Otherwise, he would have been at the receiving end of that stick all his life.
Coming back to our prior discussion on students quitting during their IIT program.
These students have the aptitude but lack the mental strength that’s required to evolve themselves further.
Because the new position in life will require a new YOU!
This is not just related to academia. It also happens when we are working in an organisation.
Case Study: Adapting to Post Promotion Realities:
I recently read a very interesting story about a person who miserably failed after getting promoted.
Sounds strange right? I mean, who fails after being promoted. It’s such a counter-intuitive statement. Yet, such events occur regularly. In our career that spans close to 15 years, we have seen many of our seniors, friends, and acquaintances failing miserably after being promoted.
However, this story caught my eye. Let's delve into their background a little bit.
The man (let's call him Ben) was everyone's darling at work. Ben would never say a No for any work that was given to him. He would burn the midnight oil to complete the tasks that were assigned to him even at the last moment. He had the energy of a Formula 1 car, as he would consistently churn some extraordinary results.
Who wouldn’t want Ben in their organization? Right.
He becomes the go-to man for all the critical tasks in the company. He has the energetic smile that we see on the face of Mahendra Singh Dhoni when makes a stumping and the batsman has no clue as to what transpired in the last few seconds.
Ben had been a consistent star performer for months now and everyone in the organization from the janitor to the management knew that a promotion was due.
It was a no-brainer. The day arrived when he was promoted and was given additional responsibilities that included handling a team and some clients.
To celebrate this occasion for which Ben had burnt several midnight oils, he went out with his girlfriend to have a lovely dinner. They raised a toast to Ben’s hard-work that brought him not only a fast-tracked progress in career but a much-needed recognition in the company.
Yet, little did he know that his world would turn upside down in a few days' time. His downfall was like a sunset waiting for the clock to strike 6 pm.
Ben did work hard like always but as time passed, things started to slip away. At first, he thought it was due to his promotion that people around him started to behave differently. He was disappointed in his team when they couldn’t understand the simplest of tasks assigned to them. On the client side, he would become rude when he thought that a silly question was asked.
He would tell himself how silly these people really are. They cannot even understand the simplest of things assigned to them. Some people call this ego, some call it arrogance. We like to believe that it's just an inability to adapt to the circumstances.
However, in a review meeting, he was berated by the management for not performing well.
What he did not understand is that when he got promoted, he was not expected to manage his WORK, but manage the PEOPLE under him to still get the work done. If he were to do the same tasks after being promoted as he was doing before, he would not add any value to justify the additional responsibilities and compensation.
Ben was now in a tough spot. He would get so angry at times that his girlfriend would have to bear the brunt. Eventually, she too left him. Ben was now all alone.
Just like we discussed previously that 10 lakhs kids appear for IIT exams every year and only a handful complete the course.
What could be the reason for this? Well, it’s pretty simple to explain but extremely difficult to implement.
Every new phase of life whether it’s your education, career or personal life – requires an upgraded version of you.
Change is the only constant. - Heraclitus
We often cling to our initial success in life that we resist change. Most of us don’t even feel the need to change. It’s the Indian mindset that at Indigenous Investors we discuss consistently, ‘if it’s not broken, why fix it.’ So, we practically wait for things to get worse rather than being proactive. That’s why, we also see so many research analysts in the financial services industry but very few portfolio managers. They just cannot upgrade themselves to think differently after mastering one area of their professional life.
It’s not just the individual that goes through such a block, but also a group of individuals who work together in a business tend to hit a wall in a similar fashion. Sometimes their own so-called success, which is largely driven by luck, tends to be the biggest speed breaker.
Case Study: Transitioning from Peer to Leader
Over the course of last 1 year, we have witnessed one such incident up close. A business that was so high in their own supply of success is struggling to find the next leg of breakthrough. When we discussed and spoke about opening different verticals where they could leverage their customer base and add professionals to manage it, they resisted.
Please note that these are not just any other individuals, but in a small industry, they are considered stalwarts. So, it was a real pleasure for us to connect with them and help them on their journey to discover the next breakthrough.
Here’s how it went.
The business was built on 2 verticals only. The problem really was that they were tired of running only 2 verticals for the last 15 years. Both these verticals have now reached their peak capacity from the founder’s perspective and now they are simply bored. There’s no excitement to work every single day.
When we looked at the business closely, we felt that there are natural fallouts to these 2 verticals, and they can be tapped easily and with minimum investment of time and money. As a result, we communicated our findings to them and spoke about it for months. They seemed convinced at first but would not execute.
Little did we know that the problem was never the scalability of operations. It was the perspective of the founders themselves. They really wanted to grow but were not able to delegate responsibility. On a closer discussion with the employees of the company, we realized that they felt suffocated doing the same job every single day. There was no real fun or learning left to be done. Most of them were quitting not because of better job opportunities, but because they were just not happy to be working in the same setup every single day.
Founders were the sole reason they left the company. They were little excited when the discussions were ongoing about starting new streams but quickly left when they realised that nothing fruitful is coming out of it.
Now the question that came to our mind was, what was the real reason that founders couldn’t translate their initial success into a series of big hits?
After giving it some thought, it dawned upon us that founders were mentally trapped in their own success. In their ego, they were blind to understand that everything that becomes large one day, tends to be a series of experiments at the beginning.
They were just not ready to experiment. It was supposed to live up to their brand name or otherwise they wouldn’t look to put their energies into it.
This sort of thinking is simply a mental trap. Many businesses have died a natural death when they are unable to constantly experiment on new things.
Yes, it does take focus to grow your business. But focus doesn’t mean sticking to your core strengths only. Focus also means doing what the business demands at a particular point in time.
If my business demands me to keep sharing my thoughts with the wider audience, then I need to prioritize it. Keep my inhibitions away and work to improve myself on that front.
Many entrepreneurs tend to forget that it’s the business that’s much bigger than them. It’s the kindness of customers and employees who have been generous enough to lend their capital and labor to the business. It’s never a one-man job, it’s always the collective. And the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
In a nutshell, the business needs extra verticals that would have enabled a wider reach in terms of products, employee strength, research and development division, so on and so forth. Yet, the founders decided not to go with it.
Because to add more verticals, they would have to depend on professionals who would come with their own brand image which might outweigh the brand of the business. It could have also been that the employees would start respecting the professionals more than the founders themselves. There are so many permutations and combinations to this subjective assessment.
Yet, we won’t be surprised to see that the business will struggle to scale in the coming years. The founders are not ready to give up their own identity of a caterpillar and morph into a beautiful butterfly. It’s the pain of transformation that makes them afraid.
It's this pain of transformation that keeps us in one place all our life. And since life is an incline, we perish when we don’t transform. So, what’s it going to be for you? What stops you from going that extra mile to learn something new?
Case Study: Embracing Long Term Success Oriented Mindset
There is yet another interesting story of 2 colleagues, Rajiv and Mayur who joined the organization together and thrived there for a good amount of time. Both worked as managers and oversaw a team of 8 people each. They were loyal and committed to their work and their teams. And we are living satisfactory lives. They were very competitive with each other and yet shared a good rapport. Both were so efficient in getting the job done that nobody could figure out who was the better among the two.
However, on the day of promotion, only Rajiv was promoted. To understand what went wrong and how he could have improved upon the situation, Mayur went to his seniors to ask them questions lingering in his head.
The senior explained, it was impossible to choose between the 2 except for one quality. While both were getting the work done, committed and worked in the best interests of the organization and their teams, Rajiv trained the people in his team to grow and undertake his own tasks too. Now that we have people trained under the organization under him to work on their own, we have more confidence in him doing better at the higher level.
Conclusion:
Success is not a static destination but a continuous journey marked by evolution and adaptation. The examples provided underscore the critical role of change in achieving and sustaining success. As we navigate a dynamic world, the ability to transform ourselves and our approaches becomes a defining factor. The pain of transformation may be daunting, but it is through this pain that growth, innovation, and long-term success emerge. Embracing change is not a choice; it's a requirement for thriving in an ever-changing landscape.