Invisible Greatness
I recently read a post by Chris Butler titled “You can be a great designer and can be completely unknown”. Chris is a graphic designer with experience in interaction design, product design, and design leadership and training. His post hit on a perspective I appreciated about designers and creators. It framed a parallel to my own observations in organizations and their accepted talent development and management practices. The core parallel idea is that organizations are, in fact, full of great creativity and high-value work product but that broad recognition of it can be rare. Here is a key excerpt from Chris’s post that really outlined the idea for me.
“We live in an attention economy that equates visibility with value. Social media follower counts, speaking engagements, press mentions, and industry awards have become the measuring sticks of design success. This creates a distorted picture of what greatness in design actually means. The truth is far simpler and more liberating: you can be a great designer and be completely unknown.”
This is also true of other domains and tradecraft in many organizations regardless of the industry it is in . Organization carry built-in incentives that heavily reward action and visibly, often even when actions may not hit exactly the right target. Show-and-tell theatre can pull organizational energy and momentum off balance from generating increasingly beneficial and higher impact behaviors.
The irony can be palpable. Typically, organizational intent is to enable their talent to create the best of an organization but often fosters patterns that unintentionally limit the value generation and contribution of their talent. For instance, it’s easy for organizations to be developmentally constrained by its own prescriptive standardization in the pursuit of predictability and efficiency. This often creates average outcomes leading to somewhat mediocre and non-competitive ecosystems. This is never the desired intent, but organizations can find themselves victimized by their own unintended consequences if they can’t follow the through-line to what effectively raises the individual, team, and organizational performance.
The result is that organizations can end up painting themselves into a performance limiting corner. A common example of this is when there is an open role in an organization and management insists on placing an available but unqualified person be placed in that role and hope for the unlikely best. The incentive for keeping the workforce fully assigned to any available work, outweighing the increased risk of failure and creating an impact that lowers performance on a given team or within the organization.
In today’s attention deficit and social media conditioned environment, organizations have a heavy bias toward action and are especially tuned to activity driven cultures with incentives organized around task or initiative completion. It’s common to hear leaders offer one variation or another of the productivity quote, “What gets measured gets managed (or done).” and attributed to Peter Drucker. An interesting fact is that this quote was never uttered by Drucker. Sometimes quotes or ideas get popular because we want to believe they are true. Why do we want them to be true? Because they confirm our own belief system, filters, and mental models so they make us feel comfortable and help us make sense of things even if not entirely correct.
One of most effective counters to this challenge is to ask some illuminating questions for those who dare to foster a little organizational introspection.
1. Can you see value around or beyond the activities that are at center-stage and under the spotlight? For every leading character there is a much larger supporting cast. Can you see the full cast of contributing characters and identify their importance?
2. Are recognition behavior patterns in place that hold and foster the less visible extended value that is holding your organization together and enabling broader success?
3. Are there low-visibility activities, initiatives, design, or even foundational thinking that should be given some sustaining oxygen?
As Butler indicates, every organization is “scattered with the artifacts of unrecognized ingenuity”. Sometimes, excellent performance and contributions are great because they don’t call attention to themselves at all, like a well-oiled wheel that does not squeak. High impact design or high-performance contribution can be invisible greatness.
When visibility commands all the attention, there is risk that being noticed is the priority over being meaningfully useful to the organization. Benefit to the larger organization should be a clear target. The popularity or visibility of an activity can be important, but it does not always equate to the best outcomes or competencies. The larger “greatness” within organizations is likely significantly facilitated by more than what you think you can see. Look around for that invisible greatness right next to you and say “hello” and offer it some recognition.