What does relevance mean to you?

Recently, I was privileged to work with an older gentleman as his coach.  After surviving cancer, he had returned to his role as Senior Vice President.  6 months in, he was questioning what he was doing and why he was doing it.  He had worked for the company for over 30 years and knew that the hours he had put in had almost killed him. But he still loved what he did and the people he worked with.  He just recognised that he was in danger of becoming irrelevant.  With its international spread, the company had become less like a family – relationships still mattered, but systems and process were now critical.  There had always been bright young staff – hell, he’d been one of those bright young things at one time – but now he was working with multi-tasking, 24/7 connected, hungry for positive feedback, (sometimes!) entitled millennials.  He also had more women as peers than at any time in his career.  He was worried about his sense of humour being mis-interpreted.

Another client is a female exec working in a ‘boys club’ product-based organisation.  Over the last 6 months, she and the consulting services her team have supplied are the only things adding value to one of her company’s customers.  She has the relationships with the customer’s key executives.  She has sold two projects.  Meanwhile, new sales boy on the block, brought in to ‘save’ the customer, while happy to piggy back off her relationships, excludes her from key internal strategy meetings and has made it clear that what she is doing is of no consequence for the big multi-million dollar picture. 

She knows that if she succeeds in developing relationships at the customer and product sales are maintained, new boy will take all the credit – success will have arisen as a result of his actions.  If the customer fails to sign off on further sales going forward, she knows she will be blamed.

And then there is my fledgling entrepreneur.  She grew tired of the negative culture of the large corporate where she worked.  And despite her high profile, pivotal role within the organisation, her stressed out boss gave her little recognition.  So, she leaves and, from scratch, creates a business that gets her back to even in terms of her earnings within a year. After delivering huge value to her clients, she wants to improve her services further and so asks for feedback. She is ghosted and no one writes back.

She’s stunned and left wondering if she over-rated her own value or whether she might have offended them in some way.

So, what are some of the associated feelings for these three? 

Older SVP:

• Loss with regards to the passing of the old ways of doing things at the company – a certain sense of disconnectedness from people he’d known throughout his career.
• Falling short in terms of how he was managing his millennial staff – not giving them what they needed and certainly not getting the best from them. Nostalgia for his own youth.
• Confusion and anxiety as to how best to be with his female colleagues.

Female exec:

• Frustration with her colleague and by extension her company because they cannot get out of their own way.
• Insecure that what she is doing is not of value – believing the scratchy comments of her co-worker v’s the customer’s words of satisfaction.
• Worried about being set up in a Catch 22.
• Beat up by the old boys’ network!

Young entrepreneur:

• Loss of confidence – have I added anything of value over the last year?
• Anxiety and a sense of being overwhelmed – should I have taken this step to start my own business? Where is my next pay cheque going to come from?

Taken together this is a lot.  People continue to give everything to their work, often to the detriment of their personal lives.  Worse still, while often acutely aware of the different issues they face, people often don’t know where to start in order to fix them.  And even if they do, they can be tired – fatigued by the battles.  Our SVP client wasn’t sure that he could muster the energy that he knew intellectually he would have to invest to take positive effective action on a number of different fronts.  He said he felt lost. 

Does any of this resonate?  Forget about having a mid-life crisis.  From our experience with our clients, this questioning of personal relevance is becoming more prevalent and it’s not just a function of age, gender or culture.

I would like to ask you some questions and get some answers.  I will then pull together your answers into a thematic summary and publish what you tell me about your own experiences with relevance.  And then, for those seeking relevance, let’s see if we can find a way through to a brighter more relevant existence.

So, let’s start with: What does relevance mean to you?