Dispatch 2

Several years ago, when I was asked to reduce costs in my team, a few names were suggested to me. One of them was the person who had hired me.

He was what I'd call a legacy, a walking, talking institutional knowledge house. Years of context, relationships, and memory. Great person. The only issue - nothing documented, never transferred, all inside of him.

I've written elsewhere about what I call Coasting, a phase in someone’s career where they get protected by institutional knowledge no one else holds and by relationships built over years. Looks like stability, but is the riskiest position of all. When restructures happen, they reveal the coasters first. Experienced people floating with no real visibility and no real upskilling over the years.

And that’s what had happened, the company underwent major restructure org design change, and before I knew it, I became his boss and for several others who’d been in the business long before me. Still remember the discomforted look on that video call, took a few weeks but we adjusted.

And then few months in, had to tell him that his role had become redundant which meant he was being asked to let go. I'd never been in that situation before. No reference point for it in my memory.

I had sat in such meetings before but never with the person who hired me. Well, first time for everything.

How did I deal with it? How would you deal with it?

As soon as the meeting started, I immediately knew that my ‘experience’ was all useless!

Often we mistake tenure or seniority for experience. I’ve come to realize that experience is nothing but accumulation of variety of reference points that rescue you in the present. You don't always know you're using them. You just find yourself reacting differently to a situation than someone less experienced would. One could have 20 years of experience and yet have very scant reference points.

It’s this ability to look at a high-stakes situation and know that you’ll be okay there as you’ve been in a version of it before. You are both in the situation and outside of it simultaneously. Being in the situation gives the human context, outside gives the confidence and composure.

But in that meeting, I was 100% in, not outside. No reference point to fall back on. While there was a script to lean on (which is mechanical devoid of any emotion), I relied on my other reference points of me being in other high-stakes situations before; while I haven’t done this exactly, but have survived being ‘not ready’ before. Many call it as ‘winging it’! But this is more than that.

It’s not about having all the answers, but about accumulating enough proofs in the past, either of successes or failures that you no longer feel nervous when you don't have the answer.

And this is why also you cannot shortcut experience. You can read every management book ever written, and know all the concepts and frameworks, but the reference point only forms when you yourself are in the situation.

When a young person encounters a difficult conversation, they're inside it for the first time. When you've had that conversation forty times, you're inside it and you're watching it from a slight distance simultaneously because a version of this moment already lives somewhere in your memory. That distance is what people call composure, or judgment, or in other words true experience.

But the challenge is you cannot receive someone else's reference points. Yes, we can learn from others experiences as I did from another manager who had done this before. He described the how and why of it and the usual mechanics that go with it. But the reference point itself - the physical memory of the pressure, the emotion, the doubt, the decision belongs only to that manager who was there. I couldn’t and cannot inherit it. I had to build my own version of it by being in that situation myself.

This is why the best thing a manager can do for a younger person is not to protect them from tough situations but to give them enough exposure to them, with enough support nearby, that they start building their own collection. The discomfort is not a cost of development. It is the development.

But there’s a flip side as well. The same reference points that make you effective can also make you rigid.

People who’ve gathered so many reference points in the past, that they start treating those as rules. They stop seeing the individual or sometimes the situation itself and solely rely on the past reference points. Points that once sharpened their judgements begin replacing their actual observation. The world around has changed and the previous reference points may no longer fit.

I’ve seen the best leaders hold their reference points lightly, to be used as hypotheses, not verdicts.

That meeting with the person who hired me - while I felt I needed every reference point I had, am glad I didn’t have any at the time, because I saw a person, an early mentor and not just a fat number on excel.

There will come a time in every manager’s journey where they will have to encounter situations they wish they could avoid, yet these very situations are exactly where our reference points are built to grow us into more grounded and rounded leaders. Sooner or later, managers have to come to terms of the reality of how businesses operate and must become comfortable with the discomfort.

Obviously, the jitters don't disappear. The first ball is always the first ball. But you've been ‘set’ before (as in a batter once set). You know what getting set feels like. And that knowledge is what carries you through the next first time.

That's what reference points are. Gather as many and as varied as you can.

- Pankaj