Working toward something...

Last Wednesday, I slipped into skin I thought I had shed forever. (Skin covered in business attire.) I had been asked to direct a discussion on Leadership during Challenging Times for a group that promotes career development for women who work in financial services. Though I don’t work in financial services, I happen to know a thing or two about challenging times, so I accepted the offer to moderate.

The program lasted the better part of an hour and the panelists were generous with their insights and advice, responding in detail to questions I had, for the most part, prepared them to face. When it came time for the audience to chime in with questions, one woman asked each panelist to venture a guess as to when the current downturn would end and we could expect a return to “business as usual,” meaning, I assume, business as she’d become accustomed.

Two of the panelists sidestepped the question with laughter, wisely refusing to be put on the spot predicting the future. The third panelist, however, offered a response that lingers in my thoughts today. “We’re not going back,” she said. “We are going to have to define success in new terms,” she added. The metrics need to change accordingly.

I thought about this woman’s take on redefining success on Thursday, as I once again slipped into different skin. (Skin covered by an old T-shirt and sweatpants.) I spent the latter part of that same week helping Hubby work his way through a lengthy list of springtime lawn “rescues,” a process clearly distinct from his specialty of seasonal lawn upkeep.

And so I pondered the heady days of past when it was common to see double digit gains in retirement plans and home values and business revenues. I thought about this heady past while pulling dead twigs off neglected shrubs, while blowing dry leaves off patches of River Rock and while filling bucket after bucket of decaying plant matter. I thought about how companies have frozen marketing programs and hiring; I thought about how people gripped by fear have forestalled plans to buy new cars or a new home yet, for some reason or another, still value a tidy lawn enough to hire a crew of able-bodied workers who (like it or not) will get plenty dirty giving them a springtime lawn they can be proud to come home to…home, from whatever challenges they happened to face during their work day…however they chose to measure it.

At some point between emptying the last bucket of dead leaves and today, it occurred to me that one metric from the “good old days” still applies: whatever labor you happen to apply yourself to, as long as you put your best effort into it, the end of the day should deliver just enough satisfaction to make you want to get up the next day and tackle yet another mess. That mess could be in financial services or it could be in some stranger’s backyard. And if that metric doesn’t work for you, it’s probably time to redefine something.