Side Mirror: How I experienced Fulfilling Performance in my first job

In this episode I use my first job to illustrate the contributing factors that came together to enable Fulfilling Performance for me.

If you consider your current situation through the lens of Fulfilling Performance, how does it look?

Does it provide the healthy levels of Clarity, Culture, Capability and Purpose required for you to experience Fulfilling Performance?

Which of those areas, if they were improved, would have the greatest impact on enabling you to perform at an even higher level and experience more fulfilment from doing so?

What can you do to improve that fundamental contributing factor?

What about the people you lead and care about?

Consider each of them and their current situations through this lens.

What is the biggest handbrake preventing them from bringing more of their talent, intelligence, creativity, capability and resourcefulness to their roles and lives?

How can you release the handbrake for them and enable Fulfilling Performance?

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 2 August, 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.

Aquilae: 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

Andy Follows: 0:40

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. When I graduated from university in 1990, with a degree in French with Italian, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I hadn't wanted to do French with Italian, I'd wanted to do business. But I'd made such a hash of my A levels that none of the academic establishments I'd applied to were interested in having me. My saving grace was a B grade in A level French that was enough to secure me a place at university through the UK's clearing process, whereby initially unsuccessful students are matched with available places. The factors that had contributed to my poor A level results continued to affect my performance at University for the first two years. Fortunately, two events helped turn that around. My third year was spent working abroad which gave me additional time to grow up. And just before leaving for France, I began a relationship with my girlfriend. She brought more love, a stable relationship and even additional motivation to do well. As a result, I graduated with a good degree but that had taken all my effort and I hadn't given any thought to what next. I certainly hadn't looked at any of the graduate schemes with major organizations that some of my classmates had secured. I'd learned that I was not a great student. I was pinning my hopes on being a better employee. I had no desire to go traveling. I knew I wanted to start work and discover whether I could apply myself more effectively in a commercial environment than I had in an academic one. Back at home, I scanned the local newspapers for job adverts. One that stood out was with a book printing company in the nearby town of Reading. It was called Cox and Wyman. It had been established in 1777 and was the largest specialist printer of paperback books in the UK. It stood out firstly, because I'd always liked books. As a child, I was notorious for always having my head in a book. Once during the holiday with my parents when I was about 11, I'd read all the books I brought with me. And so I resorted to reading a romantic novel published by Mills and Boon or Harlequin for our US listeners. The second reason this company stood out was that they were looking for candidates who spoke French to work with their publishing clients in Paris, so I'd get to use my language skills. I'll happily admit that without any planning or prior intention, I stumbled across that opportunity and fell into my first proper job. With hindsight, I can say I landed on my feet. In this episode, I'll share why I believe that and I'll use my experience to illustrate the contributing factors that came together to enable Fulfilling Performance Let me take a moment to tell you about our sponsor. This episode for me. is brought to you by ASKE C onsulting 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 for 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 the team at Hello@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. I spent four and a half years at Cox and Wyman. It was only looking back later that I was able to appreciate how much I learned during that time. My job was to liaise with the production staff at book publishers in the UK, Europe and Scandinavia. They had their publishing schedules. They'd send me the camera ready copy for the text, and the film for the covers of their paperback titles. I'd create job tickets for the various departments in the factory and send the materials on their way. Often the publishers would be late providing copy or cover film, but they wouldn't want to adjust the delivery date as it would affect the entire publishing timetable. The day started for the factory team, with a meeting between Ray the production manager and all the various department managers to agree the production schedule for the next few days. Straight after that meeting, the shedule would be posted in Ray's office and I'd be scanning it for the titles I was responsible for. I'd often see one was missing, or sitting too far down the list to have a chance of meeting the delivery date my customer was expecting. At this point, beginning with the end in mind, this was before I'd even read the Seven Habits, I'd head to the dispatch area. Dispatch is the final stage in the process of literally getting the finished books out of the door. I'd ask one of the two Peters, who managed the shifts in dispatch to organize a truck to pick up my consignment of finished books tomorrow afternoon in time to reach the customers distributors by their deadline. They'd look at the same production schedule I'd seen and say, Andy, that title isn't even down to be bound tomorrow. Why would we get a shipper in? I'd say I need you to trust me on this. It will be bound tomorrow, please, we make sure there's a truck here to pick it up. Then I'd had to the bindery. I'd asked the bindery manager Ian to move it up his list of titles to bind. He'd tell me that he couldn't move it up the shedule because the books inside sections and covers weren't due to be printed for a couple of days, so they'd have nothing to bind. And I'd say I need you to trust me on this. The sections and covers will be printed in time. Please can you schedule this title for binding so that it will be ready for the shipper who's coming in to collect it tomorrow afternoon. I'd work my way through all the departments in reverse order. From the end of the process to the beginning, negotiating with the managers. I'd go and see Mick in the cover printing department and Martin in the machine room and Brian or Andy and the origination department and repeat the same process until they'd all amended their schedules so that my title would be going out the door and arriving at my customers warehouse when I said it would be there. Ray the production manager would shake his head and occasionally get frustrated by the limited shelf life of the production schedule that came out of the morning meeting. But as far as I can recall this approach never got me into trouble. This was over 30 years ago. But I remember these people clearly. And I recall walking around the factory having these conversations, I was 22 or 23 years old, they were good enough to work with me and help me get my books out on time. When I look back now, on this period of my career, I can see that I was set up to experience Fulfilling Performance. As a recap, Fulfilling Performance is an outcome when we get to use as much of our talent, intelligence, creativity, capability and resourcefulness as possible. We perform at a high level, continue to develop and experience a sense of fulfillment from our work that energizes us to be great partners, parents and human beings. To enable Fulfilling Performance requires four fundamental contributing factors to be present in healthy quantities. We label those four factors Clarity, Capability, Culture, and Purpose. Because those words may mean slightly different things to each of us, we have Four Diagnostic Questions to help explain what we mean by each of them. For Clarity, we ask how clear are you about what you're supposed to be doing and how you're performing against those expectations? For Capability we ask how well equipped are you in terms of knowledge, skills, experience, mindset and resources to perform at a high level? For Culture we ask how is the behavior of the people around you, at work and at home, supporting you to perform at a high level? And for Purpose, we ask how much does it mean to you what you're doing? When I review my experience at the book printers through the lens of Fulfilling Performance, and I ask myself the Four Diagnostic Questions, I notice that I had plenty of Clarity, I knew exactly what I was supposed to do, which was to get my publishers books printed, bound and delivered on time. And I knew how I was performing against those expectations. It was obvious whether I was meeting their delivery dates or not. I had enough Capability, that is knowledge, skills, experience, mindset and resources. Taking those one by one and starting with knowledge, I knew enough about the process of getting books printed and bound and out the door to perform well in my role. In terms of skill, I had my communication skills, including being able to speak French, and I paid attention to detail and submitted accurate instructions to the factory. That's important when people are about to make 50,000 copies of something according to your remit. I didn't have a whole lot of experience. This was my first proper job, except perhaps I was used to dealing with people from different backgrounds, and I was making up for a lack of experience with curiosity, respect and enthusiasm. As far as mindset goes, I was committed to doing my job well and providing a good service to my customers. And when it came to resources, I had a whole factory behind me capable of producing 100 million paperback books a year. There were always conflicting demands on those resources, but they were there if you were able to get them allocated to your projects. Looking at the fundamental we call Culture, I was fortunate to be surrounded by colleagues and department managers who would do what they could to support me and wanted to provide good service. Without their willingness to alter their production schedules, there's no way I could have achieved my goals. Finally, considering Purpose, this job meant a lot to me. Often we think of work as being meaningful when it contributes to making the world a better place. In my case, the measure was more personal. At this stage of my career, I was intent on proving myself to myself, I needed to find out whether my struggles in academia related to my character, or whether they were simply a symptom of not being particularly motivated by what I was doing. It meant a lot to me to perform at a high level in my role, and be seen to do so by my managers and customers. I've used this first job of mine to demonstrate how we can assess a situation based on the extent to which it's providing the four fundamental contributors to Fulfilling Performance. I was benefiting from healthy levels of each of the fundamentals, Clarity, Capability, Culture and Purpose. They enabled me to perform at a high level and experience fulfillment from doing so. What evidence do I have that I was performing at a high level? Over time, I was given bigger and more demanding accounts to look after, including eventually, the Us number one publisher of romantic fiction Mills and Boon. You've been listening to CAREER-VIEW MIRROR with me, Andy Follows. If you consider your current situation through the lens of Fulfilling Performance, how does it look? Does it provide the healthy levels of Clarity, Culture, Capability and Purpose required for you to experience Fulfilling Performance? Which of those areas, if they were improved, would have the greatest impact on enabling you to perform at an even higher level and experience more fulfillment from doing so? What can you do to improve that fundamental contributing factor? What about the people you lead and care about? Consider each of them and their current situations through this lens? What's the biggest handbrake preventing them from bringing more of their talent, intelligence, creativity, capability and resourcefulness to their roles and lives? How can you release the handbrake for them and enable Fulfilling Performance? If you find this content 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. And finally, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with someone you lead, parent or mentor who you think will also benefit. 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 episodes. And above all, thank you for listening.

Andy: 16:21

No

Osman Abdelmoneim: 16:21

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: 16:28

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: 16:36

Don't rely on others. You have to do it

Rupert Pontin: 16:36

If you've got an idea if you've got a thought yourself. You have to take control. about something that might be successful, if you've got a passion to do something yourself, you just haven't quite got do it.

Tom Stepanchak: 16:53

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.