Pawel Motyl
Pawel Motyl has 20-plus years of experience in business, including 10 years in management consulting and executive search as well as 7-plus years in the CEO role (ICAN Institute – Harvard Business Review Poland publishing house and leading executive education firm in Poland). He is one of the leading European experts on decision making, leadership, personal effectiveness, and talent management; in 2016, he was chosen to join the 100 Coaches group, selected and led by Marshall Goldsmith.
A speaker at Harvard Business Review conferences in Poland, Pawel has delivered presentations with Marshall Goldsmith, Dave Ulrich, Andrew McAfee, Joseph Badaracco, Neil Rackham, Heike Bruch, and many others. He is a facilitator of C-level workshops and training programs and top-ranked trainer in executive education projects. As architect of consulting solutions and advisor to the management boards of leading companies in Poland, Pawel has managed and participated in numerous international assignments.
Pawel’s book, Labyrinth: The Art of Decision-Making, became a Harvard Business Review Poland all-time bestseller in just four weeks. The book won many prestigious awards in Poland, including 2014 Golden Owl, and will soon be published in English.
More: www.pawelmotyl.com.
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I never predict. I just look out the window and see what’s visible – but not yet seen.
—Peter Drucker
In July 2017, I ran a quick poll among more than 30 of my friends, asking for their interpretation of these words by Peter Drucker. Each of my respondents came up with a response that fell into the same category: visionary leaders. Seeing things others cannot see yet is usually interpreted as having a vision. Thus, the quote evoked profiles of the greatest entrepreneurs and business people (from Henry Ford to Steve Jobs and Elon Musk); inventors and scientists (Nicola Tesla, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking); spiritual, political, and military leaders (Alexander the Great, Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama); and, a little surprisingly, a ski jumper from Sweden named Jan Boklöv, who back in 1986 was brave enough to introduce what we would call a breakthrough innovation today: a V-style of ski jumping.
I was not surprised. When I first came across this quote many years ago, I felt like the Back to the Future protagonist, Marty McFly, miraculously shot back in time to 1963 in Washington, DC, to watch Martin Luther King, Jr., expressing his compelling dream from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. That dream was a vision of the country and the society that was looming on the horizon, but was still invisible to many.
We have always been awed by such people.
In the years that followed, I found out that there is one more important perspective in Peter Drucker’s words, a perspective that goes beyond visionary leadership and often becomes paramount to one’s personal effectiveness.
Let me share a story that explains this perspective – my story.
I was born in Poland in 1975, during the Communist era, and as a teenager, witnessed the 1989 collapse of communism across Eastern Europe and the rise of a free market economy. After graduating from Cracow University of Economics and earning a postgraduate degree from Jagiellonian University, I was accepted for an internship with the Polish office of Hay Group. This began an eight-year journey that brought me from a junior consultant level to the team leader position, where I was responsible for the organizational research and diagnostics business in the Central and Eastern Europe region. In 2006, I decided that I wanted to understand general management better and I started looking for a CEO or a managing director position. In early 2007, after a very short recruitment process, I was appointed the CEO of ICAN Institute, Harvard Business Review Polska (Poland) publishing house.
I was proud to be part of the local edition of the world’s greatest business magazine, a member of a relatively small team of 30 super-professional, dedicated people. In the following months, I was interviewed by some business magazines in Poland, and enjoyed my new status as one of the younger CEOs in the country.
Now let me fast forward to 2013. The company was doing well: in spite of the 2008–2009 worldwide economic downturn that hit the emerging markets severely, the ICAN Institute continued to grow, with both its publishing and nonpublishing businesses thriving. We became the market leaders in executive education programs and conferences, and our latest additions – management consulting and organizational diagnostics units – were helping fuel our growth. The company grew to 200 people and it showed a healthy revenue structure and margins. People kept congratulating me.
And then I made a mistake.
I invited Marshall Goldsmith to be the keynote speaker at ICAN Institute’s November 2013 conference.
It was the first time I had worked with Marshall. He turned out not only to be extremely professional, but also amazingly open and easygoing. We had a couple of Skype calls before he came, discussing the event and the target audience. During Marshall’s two-day stay in Poland, we co-delivered a workshop for 100 managers of one of the country’s leading banks, had a fantastic dinner, and then worked together during the conference. The conference was an incredible success, with Marshall earning top scores in the customer satisfaction surveys. This was the highest-rated ICAN Institute’s event ever!
In the evening, when the conference was finished and participants were gone, Marshall asked if I had half an hour to talk. Of course, I gladly agreed and we had a coffee. After some small talk, Marshall asked me quite a surprising question:
“Do you think you are a good CEO?”
For a moment I did not know what to say, as these were the most unexpected words I could imagine, especially after such a successful event!
Being totally frank, I said:
“I am an average one. Being a CEO is a combination of two roles: the one of a leader, which is about vision, inspiration, and people; and the one of a manager, which boils down to execution, control, and concern for order. I am good at the former and weak at the latter, which makes me – statistically – an average CEO.”
And then Marshall shot the question that changed everything:
“So why do you spend your professional life doing something you are only average at?”
I was speechless. Marshall’s words were so obvious. So rational. So true. So powerful. So unexpected. So painful.
I had to admit that being a CEO was a compilation of good times and bad. I loved working with clients, delivering workshops, and acting as a consultant, speaking at conferences across Europe, and sharing know-how through articles, podcasts, or webinars. But I hated all the operational drudgery and quite often felt unmotivated on the days that were filled with this type of activity.
Marshall looked at me with this funny spark in his eye and finally said, “Pawel, why don’t you focus on things you are exceptional at?”
In a split second, I understood the truth: For many years, I had been held hostage by the expectations of other people and by the clichés that imposed a specific career path on me. The dream of each graduating student in economics is to climb the ladder to get to the position of a CEO, and then continue to move up that ladder.
Marshall’s questions unveiled a new vantage point for me. I understood that for my entire professional career, I had been blind, following the dreams of other people, dreams that had never been my own. Deep in my heart, I never wanted to be a CEO or to manage a company. What I always really wanted was to create, gather, process, and share business knowledge from the world’s best (sometimes counterintuitive) sources in order to help other executives become more effective and lead their companies in a better way. This was my unexpressed mission, my purpose, my professional raison d’être. And I had been compromising it because of what other people viewed as a career success.
In the nine months that followed the conference, together with the owners of ICAN Institute, I prepared a succession plan, finally resigning from my role in August 2014, with the CFO of the company assuming my duties.
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It’s time to come back to Peter Drucker’s quote.
Obviously, it is awesome to be a successful visionary leader, and there was a common denominator in the backgrounds of all the great leaders mentioned in the beginning of this chapter: their genuine passion for what they were doing. There is another quote from Peter Drucker that I love:
Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.
Let’s take one step backwards. Are we doing what we are best at? Are we in the right place? Do we realize our full potential? What are our perspectives for development? Are we happy with who we are and what we do? Do we really have genuine passion for that?
The point is, that when we look out the window, we usually see the picture that is either blurred or distorted by many triggers, both internal and external. There are expectations of others, there are stereotypes, there is our own ego. Consequently, sometimes we cannot see (or do not want to see) the truth.
In Marshall Goldsmith, I met an exceptional ophthalmologist, who fixed my sight just by asking several questions. Today when I look out the window, I can see things as they truly are. Sometimes, these are the things that others cannot see.
This is my understanding of Peter Drucker’s words.
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How to get there? Following are several questions and exercises that you might find useful in adjusting your own vision.
This question seems easy, yet exploring it almost always brings some surprising outcomes.
Start with what I call the Five-Color Calendar Test.
Book at least two hours of your time, prepare markers or Post-it™ cards in five colors. Print out your agenda from the past several months and stick it to a wall. Now, move backwards in time, analyzing the events on each day at work. Mark the printed calendar entries with five colors:
Take a step back and look. The interpretation of results is obvious: the more red and orange you see, the more concerned you should be!
Run this exercise again in four weeks. Have a notebook and pen handy, and write down your thoughts and feelings after each event you participate in at work. Mark the event with one of five colors.
Finally, talk to several people who love you, asking them a series of straightforward questions: Do you think I am happy with what I do? Am I good at what I do? Should I keep doing that? Don’t be satisfied with their first answers; dig deeper. Then, ask the same set of questions to someone whom you dislike. Don’t get defensive. Listen and appreciate their honesty.
There are many psychometric tests and 360-degree assessment tools that help us understand ourselves better. But let me describe a much simpler, yet equally powerful, exercise that you can run in a short time and at no cost.
You most probably work with an organization that has a specific mission, vision, and values. These reflect the identity of the firm and become the social glue for employees, creating a specific company culture. Through specific associations, they are also part of the brand.
But have you ever thought about your own brand?
What would be your personal mission? What about your vision? Where would you like to be in some not-so-distant future? What values do you follow and want to be associated with?
I ran this simple exercise with many of my clients. They were usually shocked by my questions, as they had been spending much time discussing the mission-vision-values of the company they manage, but had never reflected on themselves.
There is another part to this exercise. Write down your personal mission, vision, and values and put this sheet of paper in a sealed envelope. Now go to several people you have worked with for a long time and ask them to anonymously share their opinions on the accuracy of your assessment of your mission, vision, and values. Don’t forget to fasten your seatbelt before reading their replies!
One of the worst enemies we face today is, paradoxically, our own success. Success usually diminishes or kills our openness to and readiness for change; if things have worked fine so far, why change? A triumph of yesterday often sets a foundation for the failure of tomorrow.
Therefore, never stop exploring. Be hungry for new experiences. Force yourself to get out of your comfort zone. Do things you have never done before. Never participated in charity work? Try one Saturday next month. Never gone fishing? Check if anyone you know would take you for an early morning fishing trip. Never climbed? Find the nearest mountaineering club. That boring couple living across the street? Have a glass of wine with them.
Be prepared to abandon stereotypes and clichés! I will never forget one of my climbing expeditions to the Pamir mountain range in Kyrgyzstan, where I met a Russian guy, who – apart from being a great mountaineer – spoke very good English. We spent some time in the camps on the mountain we climbed, talking to each other pretty often. He said he moved from Russia to the United States and worked there. Automatically I had a stereotype of a blue-collar worker from an Eastern European county. We climbed and talked. It was on the last day, when I was just about to leave the basecamp, that we exchanged our e-mails, so as to share pictures taken during the climb. I could not believe what I was seeing: his e-mail was in the @Princeton.edu domain! It turned out that, over the two weeks we were together, I had wasted a chance to talk to a great applied physics specialist working at a prestigious university by continually discussing weather forecasts.
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There is a wonderful scene in the 1989 film Dead Poets’ Society when the unforgettable Robin Williams, playing English teacher John Keating, stands up on his desk in front of his somewhat shocked students, none of whom can answer his question: “Why do I stand up here?”
He explains:
I stand upon my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way. You see, the world looks very different from up here.… Just when you think you know something, you have to look at it in another way. Even though it may seem silly or wrong, you must try! Boys, you must strive to find your own voice. Because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all. Thoreau said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Don’t be resigned to that. Break out!
I was lucky to meet my John Keating on a couple of rainy November days in Poland. Remember that your personal Marshall Goldsmith might be somewhere nearby.