5. Always Run To Something, Not Away.

As noted in my first post in this 30-ish for 30 series, I believe firmly in mentorship and have been unashamed to tap my mentors at various points of my career. When faced with challenging situations or standing at a crossroad, I have always appreciated the opportunity to pick up the phone and call one of my mentors to pick their brains, gather their perspective, and ask them to challenge my thinking. I have found this to be invaluable and I’m sure many of you would agree.

There is one particular mentor session that stands out to me and has served as one of the most impactful moments in my career. It has also become a part of my leadership DNA and I have shared it with many people since. The situation was that I had come to a career crossroad and I was contemplating a change in employment. I had been reaching out to several of my mentors to share with them what I was thinking and asking for their input on the best ways to handle and move forward. In this particular situation, I reached out to my good friend John Bausch. John and I had grown close working together on Sageo and he was clearly someone on whom I could lean and trust, so I picked up the phone and dialed his number. 

I was quite unhappy with my current employment situation and dumped many of my frustrations and misgivings upon him. He took the time to listen, allowed me to vent, and when I came up for air, he paused and asked me a critical question: “Are you running from something or are you running to something?” His response was unanticipated, so I asked him to unpack his for me. He stated that much of what I had shared with him focused on the negatives of my current situation and not the positives of my anticipated situation. Furthermore, he shared that in his experience better outcomes are achieved when a change is made because of the excitement of the future vs the unhappiness of the present. 

This single comment caused a great deal of reflection for me and challenged me to rethink my situation. Was I considering leaving for the right reasons (to take advantage of a new, exciting situation) or was I leaving to rid myself of the challenges I had been facing. Through this conversation, I realized that it was more the latter than the former and I needed to refocus my energies and thinking. To be clear, a bad situation isn’t going to improve simply by staying put.  There may be a reasonable reason to make a change and you should. However, the challenge that John put before me was to ensure that if I was going to make a change, that the excitement of a new opportunity needed to be the driving force for making that change otherwise I would be running from something instead of running to something. 

Thanks to John Bausch, this question has become a large part of who I am, how I coach people today, and how I help interview prospective candidates. I will often asking probing questions of a candidate to assess whether they are interested in joining our firm for the right reasons or are they simply looking to shed themselves of a situation that they have found untenable. If the former, great. If the latter, thanks but no thanks – we’ll keep looking for a candidate that is running to us and not running away from someone else. The same holds true when coaching someone that is looking to make a change. Challenge them to consider whether their excitement to ditch the old is outweighing the excitement of joining something new.  Each time I issue this challenge to someone or myself, I can hear John’s voice in my head (and for those of you that know John, you’ll hear it too), “Sooooooo…are you running from something or are you running to something?” If it ain’t the latter, rethink your situation. 

Thanks John.