Above & Beyond
Role, Responsibility & The Contribution You Make.
Paraphrasing here, but...
“He’s a really intelligent, his biggest quality is that he makes the people around him better. He connects everybody.”
Or....
“The capacity he has to to lead, to understand, to find solutions, to make the rest of the team better, is unbelievable.”
Or....
“I’ve always said that he’s an example, a role model. And for all the kids, for everybody, you want to look in the mirror at somebody, just look at him and how he behaves.”
As much as I would enjoy these for myself, these are not from my last performance review!
They are instead, comments from Mikel Arteta on Jorginho after his Man of the Match performance for Arsenal last weekend.
Like I often do with art, sport offers me the opportunity to explore life and work - performance, contribution, storytelling, strategy and leadership, etc.
Since seeing and hearing the comments from the manager on Sunday, I have been thinking about a few different things.
First, this notion of the node or hub of physical mechanics and emotional stability that are needed. What I mean by this, someone in an organization or team, that keeps things ticking while managing the energy of the group. They have a functional responsibility, but create additional value by sensing wider phenomena impacting the others, distributing information or facilitating connections between ideas and people to move forward.
Orchestrating if you will.
Second, the above and beyond of the “job description”. In the longer passage from Arteta he speaks to other things that Jorginho brings to the table, often referred to as seniority/experience or the intangibles. He cites, perseverance through difficulty, being first in and last out, not only setting the standards in the game, but in practice and around the club as well.
I know that these contexts and scenarios aren’t exactly the same.
But the story of this player above, doesn’t work with out the other. The raw talent may get him the opportunity, but it’s all the extras they do outside the function that keeps them around and allows them to keep delivering and being a part of something.
The manager spoke about their on-field performance as much as he did their off-field performance. Take from that what you will!
Make It Make Sense
Speaking of reviews, a friend and former coworker complimented or gave me feedback one time that I can some times share things that don’t make sense to them in the moment but that come together or click later on. There’s often not much patience in the world of work for slow marinating ideas or things that are hard to grasp. Eg. How does this create value for me immediately?
But it’s the work for some of us out here to do.
This passage from a Christopher Nolan film provided me with some comfort.
“If you are experiencing my film, then you are getting it. I feel very strongly about that. I feel like where people have experienced frustrations with my narratives in the past is sometimes I think they are slightly missing the point. It’s not a puzzle to be unpacked but an experience to be had, preferably in a movie theatre but also at home.”
There’s More At Stake
Sticking with Nolan and film, here’s a piece of advice Gary Oldman received from the director on Batman. I think it’s brilliant in it’s simplicity.
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Right Here, Right Now
I’ve been energized the past two weeks as I have begun to put my thinking around what my consulting offer to the world looks like. During these last months I have distinguished between freelancing, consulting, building a business (with employees) or being an employee again.
Regardless of where one ends up in this journey I think it’s important (even just the exercise and for the learnings) to establish a thesis and a point of view of the challenge/opportunity you feel most connected to and then package and communicate it in a way to help someone.
Sharing with a friend today who asked about it and while, I choose not use the words “good enough” to describe things in my life, I shared that “I had struck the right amount of balance between effort and resonance for me to to feel comfortable and ready to share it.
That’s all this week!
Stay tuned in.
Jamie