Side Mirror: Find your element

In this episode I talk about how I began to transition very deliberately and intentionally from being in what was already a very good place career wise to now being in my element.

I describe at a high level how I now spend most of my time engaged in work that I absolutely love doing. 

I share why I decided to create this role for myself.

I also explain how I set about doing it by describing the first steps which led to me identifying what my element is.

I refer to the following additional resources:

Release the handbrake! The Fulfilling Performance Hub.
Our weekly newsletter where I write about how to enable Fulfilling Performance for yourself and those you lead and care about.

About Andy

I'm an experienced business leader and a passionate developer of people in the automotive finance industry, internationally.

During over twenty five years, I have played a key role in developing businesses including Alphabet UK, BMW Corporate Finance UK, BMW Financial Services Singapore, BMW Financial Services New Zealand and Tesla Financial Services UK.

At the same time, I have coached individuals and delivered leadership development programmes in 17 countries across Asia, Europe and North America.

I started Aquilae in 2016 to enable “Fulfilling Performance” in the mobility industry, internationally.

Connect with Andy

LinkedIn: Andy Follows
Email: cvm@aquilae.co.uk

Join a guided peer mentoring team: Aquilae Academy

Thank you to our sponsors:

ASKE Consulting
Email: hello@askeconsulting.co.uk

Aquilae
Email: cvm@aquilae.co.uk

Episode Directory on Instagram @careerviewmirror

If you enjoy listening to our guests career stories, please follow CAREER-VIEW MIRROR in your podcast app. 

Episode recorded on 10 July, 2024.

Transcript

Ed Eppley: 0:00

I am sitting in lovely Siesta Key Florida.

Sherene Redelinghuys: 0:03

I'm coming from Bangkok in Thailand,

Daniel van Treeck: 0:05

Prague in the Czech Republic,

Osman Abdelmoneim: 0:07

Cairo in Egypt,

Holger Drott: 0:08

Auckland, New Zealand,

Shannon Faulkner: 0:09

London, England.

Andy Follows: 0:10

Welcome to CAREER-VIEW MIRROR, the automotive podcast that goes behind the scenes with key players in the industry looking back over their careers so far, sharing insights to help you with your own journey. I'm your host, Andy Follows Hello, listeners, and welcome to this Side Mirror episode of CAREER-VIEW MIRROR. If you're a regular listener, thank you and welcome back, you'll be aware that most of our episodes feature interviews with people with a link to the automotive industry who kindly share their life and career journeys with us. We celebrate their careers listen to their stories and learn from their experiences. From time to time we also publish these Side Mirror episodes to introduce concepts, tools and experts to help you enable Fulfilling Performance. If you're listening for the first time Hello, I'm Andy Follows, I help business owners and executives to enable Fulfilling Performance for themselves and those they lead and care about. If you'd like to know more about Fulfilling Performance, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter. In it you'll find easily digestible ideas on how to increase levels of performance and fulfillment for yourself and those you lead and care about. Go to Andyfollows.substack.com, or use the link in the show notes to this episode. If you listen to podcasts like CAREER-VIEW MIRROR, I'm guessing that you recognize you can learn from other people. When I'm not recording these conversations with inspiring individuals, you'll find me facilitating guided peer mentoring teams in our Aquilae Academy. We bring together small groups of business owners and senior leaders from non competing organizations and create a virtual environment in which they can get to know and trust each other and share and support each other with their current challenges. If that sounds interesting, email academy@aquilae.co.uk and we'll send you more details. You'll find that address in the show notes to this episode. This week, I kicked off our latest Aquilae Academy peer mentoring team, a diverse group of business owners and senior leaders from non competing organizations who didn't previously know each other have come together to begin their journey of becoming a team. They'll support each other over the coming months. And if they experienced the same level of success as some of our other teams, potentially years. I was excited and just a tiny bit nervous. How would they get on? Will each of them recognize the value that they themselves bring and the value that their new teammates bring? I've witnessed multiple times the good that can happen when we create the right environment and intentionally develop deep connections between team members, connections built on mutual understanding and trust. I thrive on connecting coaching, mentoring and facilitating others to experience insights. It's a privilege and a pleasure for me to preside over the development of each of these Aquilae Academy peer mentoring teams. Sir Ken Robinson, the late educator and renowned TED speaker, wrote a book called The Element, how finding your passion changes everything. When I assemble an academy cohort, introduce them to each other, and then guide them on their journey to become a team. I am in my element. And I would say it's pretty obvious to the members of those Academy teams that I'm in my element too. But this has not always been my job. 10 years ago, I was in my mid 40s, and working as the CEO of BMW Financial Services, and Alphera Financial Services in New Zealand. The position I find myself in today is the result of a long running experiment to create a role for myself in which I spend as much of my time as possible in my element. Your element will be unique to you. And maybe you haven't identified what it looks like yet. Let me tell you a bit more about how I discovered mine. And what being in my element looks like for me. I fulfill a number of different but complementary roles, and when I'm carrying out any of them, I consider myself to be in my element. As well as supporting the wonderful individuals in their academy teams to mentor each other, I also work alongside business owners and senior leaders and their own teams helping them to become more cohesive and effective. My mission is to enable Fulfilling Performance and I write and I speak about how to do that. I design and deliver programs to help leaders enable Fulfilling Performance for themselves and those they lead and care about. I deliver bespoke one to one coaching programs for executives and senior leaders. I connect with colleagues from the automotive industry and I share their life and career stories in CAREER-VIEW MIRROR to celebrate what they've done and help listeners to learn from their experiences. I satisfy my own curiosity and facilitate additional insights for listeners by inviting non automotive guests to create Side Mirror episodes, sharing their expertise related to professional and personal development. I also use these Side Mirror episodes to share aspects of my own career and life journey to help others too. In this episode, I want to talk about how I began to transition very deliberately and intentionally from being in what was already a very good place career wise, to now being in my element. I want to do this in case it's an idea that also appeals to you. I started by describing at a high level how I now spend most of my time engaged in work that I absolutely love doing. Now, I want to go back and share with you why I decided to create this role for myself. I'll also explain how I set about doing it by describing the first steps which led to me identifying what my element is. Let me take a moment to tell you about our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by ASKE Consulting who are experts in executive search, resourcing solutions and talent management across all sectors of the automotive industry in the UK and Europe. I've known them for almost 20 years and I can think of no more fitting sponsor for CAREER-VIEW MIRROR. They're the business we go to at Aquilae when we're looking for talent for our clients and for projects that we're working on. ASKE was founded by Andrew McMillan, whose own automotive career includes board level positions with car brands and leasing companies. All ASKE consultants have extensive client side experience, which means they bring valuable insight and perspective for both their employer and candidate customers. My earliest experience of working with Andrew was back in 2004, when he helped me hire regional managers from my leasing Sales Team at Alphabet. More recently, when Aquilae was helping a US client to establish a car subscription business, ASKE Consulting was alongside us helping us to develop our people strategy and to identify and bring onboard suitable talent. Clients we've referred to ASKE have had an equally positive experience. Andrew and the team at ASKE are genuinely interested in the long term outcomes for you and the people they place with you. They even offer the reassurance of a two year performance guarantee, which means they have skin in the game when working with you. If you're keen to secure the most talented and high potential people to accelerate your business and gain competitive advantage, do get in touch with them and let them know I sent you. You can email Andrew and the team at Hello at askeconsulting.co.uk or check out their website for more details and more client feedback at www.askeconsulting.co.uk. ASKE is spelt A S K E. You'll find these contact details in the show notes for this episode. Okay, let's get back to our episode. To help inform this story, I turned as I often do to my diary and specifically to my diary from this week, 10 years ago. As luck would have it, I couldn't have asked for a more helpful illustration of where I was at. I'd just flown back to New Zealand after delivering the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People program to BMW colleagues in Hong Kong, and then South Korea. This was during a wonderful phase in my corporate career where, thanks to a visionary boss and a great team of my own in New Zealand, I was able to balance being responsible for the market with finding my passion as Sir Ken Robinson would say. Alongside running the business, I was developing my facilitation and coaching skills around the Asia Pacific region. Rereading my diary entries, there's no doubt that I was feeling conflicted. I've had conversations about my next role potentially being CEO of BMW Financial Services in Korea, which would have been a real step up in terms of market size and responsibility. At the same time, I was getting clearer about the kind of work that I really wanted to be doing. On the eighth of July 2014, I wrote I just waver from time to time as I stand at this crossroads. One road leads to me spending more time speaking, writing and creating programs, the other to the glamour of running a larger company. I'm pleased that ultimately I chose to prioritize the path that would enable me to spend more time doing the type of work that I love over the path that would briefly satisfy my ego, but most likely leave me less fulfilled. But how did I even get to that crossroads? How did I know enough about myself to be able to weigh those two options as equals? To answer that I have to go back to July 2008. In a bookshop in Singapore, I came across Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath. It's a book about the strengths movement initiated by the American psychologist Donald Clifton. And it included a link to an online assessment. I completed the assessment and received a report outlining my top five themes or areas where my natural talents lay. It also provided guidance on how I could invest my time and effort to develop these talents into strengths. I was impressed by the insights that the report contained and the findings were another step towards me gaining greater self awareness. A few years later, when I was established in New Zealand, I set about rolling out a strengths based approach to leadership across our business there. We purchased the assessment for every member of the team and asked them to complete it. Everyone I know who has completed a Strengths Finder assessment gets a buzz from doing so. They recognize themselves reflected in the reports description of them, complete with their preferences and their natural talents. I think they feel understood and valued and appreciate having some actionable suggestions to help them progress even further, in a direction they're already predisposed to follow. I'm pleased to say we got a good initial reaction from the team. I was keen to create an environment in which team members and leaders would be aware of their own strengths and those of each other and will be better able to find opportunities to play to those strengths. I wanted people to feel able to shape their own roles to maximize their performance and sense of fulfillment. Gallup are the organization behind Strengths Finder now. And their research demonstrates that when people get to play to their strengths, their levels of engagement increase, they perform well in their roles, and they continue to grow. They say that a good indicator of being on the right track is being able to say at work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day. Having everyone take the assessment put them in a position where they are now aware of their unique blend of talents. We encourage them to focus on what they do best, rather than on fixing weaknesses, which can often be the default approach to people development in organizations. Unfortunately, that alone didn't seem to change much. We looked for additional ways to embed this strength based approach, we created a spreadsheet showing everyone's top five themes identified by their strengths finder report, and placed it in a shared drive. We hoped that it would help us understand each other better, and encourage us all to play to our own and each other's strengths. It didn't seem to make much difference. We speculated that our spreadsheet in a shared folder was not visible enough to remain front of mind. So we created individual mugs for each person to have on their desk. On one side was the statement at work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day with their name underneath it like it was a quote by them. On the other side were their five themes. Again, not a lot changed. What did finally make a difference was when we deployed an exercise from Marcus Buckingham's book, Go Put Your Strengths to Work. It's called Love it, Loathe it and it works like this, you draw a line down the center of a piece of paper to create two columns, you head the left hand column love it, and the right hand column loathe it. As you go through each day for a week or two, you make a point of noting down key activities that you've been engaged in, placing them in their appropriate column, depending on whether you loved or load the activity. Once you have your own unique list, you drill down into each activity to explore why you love or loathe it. And whether there are any additional circumstances that affect how you feel when you engage in that activity. I would ask team members, does it make a difference why you're doing that activity or with or for whom you're doing it or when you're doing it? I'll give you an example to explain why this extra stage is critical. One of my team members had noted a networking activity in her love it column. Shortly after we'd done this exercise, I received an invitation to a networking event organised by the management company of the business park where our offices were. I asked her into my office, I was excited to be able to demonstrate to her how our new strengths based approach was already going to provide her with an opportunity to play to her strengths and engage in something she loved doing. When I asked her if she'd like to represent us at the networking event, I was surprised by her reaction. She said no. Oh, no. That's not the kind of networking I like. The type of networking that she was referring to in her love it column was networking within our global organization. She enjoyed helping a colleague in one country make a useful connection with a colleague in another market, or perhaps in the headquarters. She did not want to walk into a room full of strangers from our business park and start making connections. This is why it's important to test our understanding of what we put in our love it column, so that we understand what circumstances need to be in play for us to love that activity. To give you another example, whatever I'm doing, I prefer to have time to prepare. I'm not a fan of spontaneity. Some of my favorite activities I may no longer love doing if I'm obliged to do them at short notice and without advanced warning. Once you've identified your love it and loathe it activities, and tested how they're affected by circumstances, you can start to craft detailed strength statements that take all these factors into account. Strength statements, start with the words, I feel strong when, and they go on to describe the scenarios and activities which you have identified not only leverage your talents and play to your strengths, but actually make you feel stronger when you do them. You'll know when you've achieved this, what looks like a normal sentence to anyone else will have the effect of a magic spell to you. You won't only read it and understand it, it will resonate so strongly with you that you'll literally feel it. It may make you tingle with excitement because it's so succinctly and accurately describes a scenario in which you know, you'll be performing at a high level and experiencing fulfillment from doing so. An example of a strength statement for me is, I feel strong when I'm on my feet in front of a group of interested people telling them an entertaining story that has a point. We go through the same process with activities in our loathe it column to arrive at the opposite of our strengths statements, which begin with the words, I feel weak when...... As you can probably tell by now, I consider this to be a highly effective and rewarding process to undertake.The benefits of knowing in detail what activities under what circumstances will result in us performing at a high level and experiencing fulfilment, and what activities will do exactly the opposite put us in a very good place to evaluate our next steps and shape a role and ultimately a career in which we will love the work we do, perform well at it and derive fulfilment from doing so. Some might say I took this approach to an extreme by launching an experiment to see whether I could create a role for myself, where most of the time I feel like I'm playing to my strengths. You don't have to leave your organization like I did, you can use your findings to improve your current situation, your level of engagement and your performance. Of course, only you can do this initial work and it does take some thoughtful self reflection and iteration to arrive at the quality of strength statements that make you tingle with excitement. But the rewards are immeasurable. And if you don't do it, you're more likely to end up doing what other people think is best for you. However well intentioned they may be, nobody can know better than you how the work you do makes you feel. And as you may already be thinking this work is only the start. Once you have a sense of knowing what it would entail for you to be in your element at work most of the time, you then have to start making the decisions and taking the steps in that direction. After that little reality check, let me end with some more encouragement. Yes, it may require you to do the hard yards in terms of self reflection, and you may then have some difficult decisions to make. But you will thank yourself when you can truthfully say at work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day You've been listening to CAREER-VIEW MIRROR with me, Andy Follows. If you're not able to say at work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day, I hope this episode will inspire you to take some action to rectify that. If you found this helpful do take a look at Release the Handbrake, the Fulfilling Performance hub, it's a resource and virtual community designed to help you enable Fulfilling Performance. Go to Andyfollows.substack.com or use the link in the show notes to this episode. If you enjoy listening to our episodes, please could you do me a huge favor and share them with someone you lead parent or mentor or a friend you think will also appreciate them? Thank you to our sponsors for this episode ASKE Consulting and Aquilae and thank you to the Career-view Mirror team without whom we wouldn't be able to share our guests life and career stories and publish these Side Mirror episodes. And above all, thank you to you for listening.

Osman Abdelmoneim: 19:41

No matter how hard you try. No matter how hard working you are. You're never going to be able to do it on your own. It's just not possible.

Paul Harris: 19:47

You know, at the end of the day, you're steering your own destiny. So if it's not happening for you and you're seeing what you want out there, then go out there and connect.

Sherene Redelinghuys: 19:56

Don't rely on others. You have to do it yourself. Have you have to take control

Rupert Pontin: 20:02

If you've got an idea if you've got a thought about something that might be successful, if you've got a passion to do something yourself, but you just haven't quite got

Tom Stepanchak: 20:11

Take a risk. Take a chance stick your neck out what's the worst that can happen? You fall down, okay, you pick yourself up and you try again.