193: Breaking Career Plateaus

Rens Hayes is the passionate and insightful host of "Design Development." With a wealth of experience in architecture and engineering, Rens has dedicated his career to advancing professional growth within the industry. He leverages his podcast platform to share invaluable lessons, engaging discussions, and expert advice to help individuals overcome career plateaus and achieve their professional aspirations.

Episode Summary:

In this episode of "Design Development," host Rens delves into the crucial topic of breaking through career plateaus. The episode aims to challenge conventional career-growth mindsets and provide tangible strategies to advance professionally.

In a thought-provoking segment, Rens emphasizes the importance of judgment over time, referencing Naval Ravikant's insights from "The Almanac of Naval Ravikant." He draws analogies to illustrate how individuals can maximize their value by enhancing judgment and credibility. Rens also underscores the significance of refining weaker areas instead of focusing solely on already strong skills, thereby fostering continuous personal and professional development.

Key Takeaways:

• Judgment Over Time: Leveraging superior judgment can significantly amplify one's professional value, especially in decision-making roles.
• Holistic Skill Development: Professionals should focus on improving weaker areas to become more valuable team members and leaders.
• Effective Communication: Managing every interaction, whether with clients or colleagues, can create compounding positive effects on one's career.
• Transitioning to Management: New managers must reframe their understanding of success, focusing on team development and strategic alignment with company goals.
• Embrace Lifelong Learning: Continuous learning and adapting to new perspectives can prevent career stagnation and promote growth.

Notable Quotes:

1. "In an age of leverage, judgment is far more valuable than time." - Naval Ravikant 
2. "If we only play to our strengths, we might never overcome our weaknesses." - Adam Grant
3. "Every single conversation is an opportunity to leave a positive impression." - Rens Hayes
4. "Success as a manager looks different from success as a doer; it's about developing your team and aligning with strategic objectives." - Rens Hayes
5. "Lifelong learning involves challenging what we believe to be true and thinking differently to solve problems." - Rens Hayes

Resources:

• Naval Ravikant's "The Almanac of Naval Ravikant"
• Adam Grant's "Think Again"

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Transcript

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Rens Hayes 0:07

Hi everyone, welcome to design development brought to you by HO Structural Engineering. This is your hub to learn direct from top performers in real estate development, design, and construction. I'm your host, Ren Tays, co-founder of HO, lifelong learner, and I'm obsessed with high-powered organizations and the leaders that guide them. If this is your first time listening, welcome. And if you're a returning listener, I can't thank you enough. Let's go. Today on design development, we're going to talk breaking career plateaus or recognizing you're doing exactly what you want to be doing. Before we dive in, I want to take a second to thank everyone for tuning in to Design Development. It's been a ride a little bit over a year and a half. We're approaching 90 episodes currently. I, for one, am having a blast, but we've received a lot of notes running to people in the industry and getting a lot of great feedback. And to learn that you're enjoying the guests, the stories, the takeaways is extremely gratifying to me. I appreciate those comments. Books, audiobooks, podcasts have had a tremendous impact on my life for the last decade. So it's an honor to be able to share some of those lessons that I've learned and lessons from our guests over the last decade to the industry. So thank you for making this worthwhile. If there's any topic you want us to hit, if there's any guests you want to hear from, please send me a note and we're going to do our best to make it happen for you. Moving on to career plateaus. One thing I believe to be true is I think many people would find comfort in their current job if they felt like it was their position, their choice to be there. I think many people would find comfort in their current job if they felt like it was their decision to be there. Career plateaus, which is often misdiagnosed as burnout, is because people feel stuck. And if you feel what does it mean when you feel stuck? It means you don't see additional reward and opportunity from the efforts that you're putting in day to day. So if I work harder, I've been working harder, but my career status and compensation is not continuing to grow in parallel with my effort. The realization there is any course skill has a plateau. Engineer, architect, builder, dentist, mechanic, doctor, you name it. At some point your course skill is going to plateau. In the early years, say five, 10, 15 years of your career, when you're building technical acumen, you're building that subject matter expertise, you're going to have a lot of career growth just as you gain experience and knowledge in your field. But at some point, you're going to been there, done that sort of thing, and you can deliver the work product. I'll have one caveat there is making sure that you're in a business or a part of the market that's best leveraging your skill. If you can design a high-rise building, but you're working on houses, you're not going to be able to be compensated like someone that could design a high rise because your service to the market is on houses. So you can't maximize that value. When I think of burnout, I really break it down into two pieces. You feel that your current competencies and value delivered should equal career advancement, but that has not become a reality. This conversation is really looking internal. You could be at the wrong company under the wrong manager, working in the wrong part of the industry. There are outside factors that can kind of curb or cap your career ceiling. But you need to first look inward before you start pointing the finger outward. And even if that is true, you still have the right to make the decision. So you can still take those outside barriers, those outside hurdles and take responsibility yourself, right? If you're working at the wrong company, how many other companies are you talking to right now? Are you looking for additional opportunities? What skill sets are you working on to break through that? And maybe your company is creating the career ceiling, but if you can recognize that career ceiling and help them see the problem, maybe you can help solve that for the whole company. Because at the end of the day, you have to align employee success with company success. So if the company isn't succeeding, the employees can only go so far. Second one is the status and compensation received for your current efforts and your role is no longer important to you. Let's take the small business owner, for instance. Maybe they've run a successful small business for 20 or 30 years and they have found financial independence in their life for their lifestyle. They're completely content outside of their career, and their financial independence allows them to live their life in perpetuity to their current lifestyle. Because if they're invested, they own assets that are spending off money that can afford their lifestyle. They no longer need the grind of their career to earn that anymore. So although that person's being compensated fairly in their career for their role or their business, it is no longer important to their lifestyle. Their priorities have changed, so that's no longer fulfilling. And when that's not fulfilling or required, burnout really can set in. Put another way, you could get burnt out digging holes, for instance, if somebody's paying you $100 a day. But if somebody started paying you $20,000 a day to dig holes, you'd be like, I'm going to go dig holes. I'm no longer burnt out. I'll dig holes every day for $20,000 a day, right? It's all perspective. Is it is the is the results of your efforts in your daily job rewarding enough to your entire lifestyle that make it worthwhile? Because if it doesn't feel that way, then you're going to get burnt up. And that's going to look a lot like a career plat. All that said, let's talk about the four key ways that we're going to break a career plateau. I'm going to share a quote here from the almanac of Naval Ravacant. This guy is a modern-day Darwin. I've talked about him on this podcast before. And this statement is profound and one I find to be extremely true. In an age of leverage, judgment is far more valuable than time. And I'm going to share this excerpt to drive that message home because it is so good and it is undeniable. Imagine someone comes along who demonstrably has slightly better judgment. They're right 85% of the time instead of 75%. You will pay them $50 million, 100 million, 200 million, whatever it takes, because 10% better judgment steering a hundred billion dollar ship is very valuable. CEOs are highly paid because of their leverage. Small differences in judgment and capability really get amplified. Demonstrated judgment, credibility around the judgment is so critical. Warren Buffett wins here because he has massive credibility. He's been highly accountable. He's been right over and over in the public domain. He's built a reputation for high integrity so you can trust him. People will throw infinite leverage behind him because of his judgment. Nobody asks him how hard he works. Nobody asks him when he wakes up or when he goes to sleep. They're like, Warren, just do your thing. None of us are going to hand Warren Buffett money and challenge him or question what he's doing. We all know that he has great judgment and he has a track record to hold about. It makes him credible. No one cares how much he works or if he's working nine to five or if he's at the office or at home. It has nothing to do with the results he's able to deliver. In the age of leverage, judgment is far more valuable than time. This is this comes back to me beating that lifelong learning drum. Without lifelong learning, without consistent reading, without the audio books or podcasts, I personally wouldn't have the judgment I have today. Learning from our own experiences is far too slow. And those books, those resources challenge us to think differently. They give us new perspectives that increase our awareness, increase our judgment, and increase our value to them. Second part here, what questions, decisions, problems, or opportunities go over your head? What do you why do you think that is? I think it's easy, our ego, our human nature is to blame others, blame the client. Why did the client go over my head and ask my boss about X, right? Why didn't they come right to me? Why is my boss keep going over my head and talking to the client when it's something important? I would really challenge what you could do differently to change that narrative. A junior architect, let's say a client comes to the architect, or we'll call it a subconsultant, an engineer comes to them to talk to them about the envelope. How's the how's the waterproofing, the passive house, the wall detail at the window joint? How is that detailed in the architectural set? And you say, I'm gonna go ask my manager, Doug, about the detail and I'll get back to you. What's that person gonna think next time they have to talk to somebody about the envelope? They're thinking, I'm just gonna go straight to Doug because you weren't able to communicate and get them the answers. You deflected accountability by saying you were gonna talk to Doug instead of just saying, I understand what you need, I'm gonna have a detail back to you tomorrow morning by 10 o'clock. You can still go ask Doug, but your the subconsultant or your client doesn't know that Doug was the resource of some of the technical knowledge. They just know that you are accountable for getting them the answers they need. And the next time they need to talk about a detail like that, they're gonna come straight back to you. If you think about someone more senior in their career, I would really challenge you to think about what are the things you talk to your industry peers about. What do you talk about? I'm gonna assume that you're really good at what you do, you're really good at coordinating projects, you're really good at just being a good person. People like you. You talk, you don't just go straight to work, you talk socially, you ask about their family, their vacations, whatever they're doing on the weekend. But if after that, the we'll call them the social conversation, if all you talk to your industry peers about are the details of the job, that's all people are going to think about when they have, if they have a detail or a job question, they're gonna call you. But if they have anything else to talk about in the industry, whether that's their business, their design process, reading the market, what deals are going on in the market, what's our read on like onboarding, hiring, like what's the future pipeline look up? No one's gonna come talk to you about that stuff if that's not the type of things that you're bringing up in conversation. So if you want people to come to you with proposals, with new opportunities, with positioning in the market, with company or organizational level conversation, you need to be bringing those up with your peers. And maybe you're a mid-level project engineer, but you're aspiring to be a principal and lead an office someday. Who do you see across the table at the other companies that you collaborate with that might have that same desire? Do you ask them about their career? Where are they trying to go? Oh, that's great. You want to be a principal? That's what I'm trying to do. I'm reading X, Y, and Z book. Like what resources are you leaning on to gain the experience and the awareness to be a successful principal? How are you tackling that career goal? Right? Those are powerful conversations that change how people think about you. And they're going to change the type of conversations that they bring up when they come to you. So if you think about a company, the higher your position, the bigger the problem that ends up on your desk. The buck stops with you. So the biggest problems in the company, the biggest problems in the market end up on the CEO's desk or the owner's desk, and so on and so forth. So, what your goal, if you want to climb the ladder, you got to increase your ability to manage bigger and bigger problems and make sure you're taking accountability for those results. It's going to change the trajectory of your career. Quick break from the show. Thanks for tuning in to design development. We're trying to help as many people as possible. So if you could subscribe and leave a review on today's episode on whatever platform you're listening, it would be a great help. It's the only way we're going to reach more people. Let's get back to the show. Next, I'd like to talk about the transition from a doer or a maker to a manager. And I this is critically important for design professionals, engineering, architecture. Let's also call it the working foreman. You're running a small team, you have resources to help you get a job done, but you're still doing the work. You're still a part of your job is executing design, it's executing construction. You're still hanging steel, you're still flying the crane, you're not just managing people. You're a manager and a doer, which can make your job pretty difficult in terms of growth as a manager. So the biggest challenge you have in the transition from a doer-maker is you got into the industry because you love the industry. Like you want to engineer buildings, you want to be an architect of residential buildings, of commercial buildings, you're a framer, you're an ironworker. That was your first love, right? That's what brought you to this industry and you excelled at it. So somebody promoted you and they wanted you to be a manager. You didn't go to school to be a manager, you didn't get a degree in management, and it's nothing that you focused on to this date in your career. So, how are you going to be successful there? It's the Peter principle. When we are in that position, it's really hard to feel like we had a great day or a great week because we judge success differently. And a part of growing as a manager is reframing what success looks like. When you're the doer, I'll use an engineer as an example. You hang your hat on, building a design model, engineering a building, putting together a BIM model or a set of plans, hitting a design deliverable for a client, answering an RFI, getting through shop drawings, they're tangible results. You can you can look back on a day, on a week, on a month, and say, like, I did great. I executed all of my objectives. Measuring a manager's success is a lot more difficult day to day, week to week, unless you're hanging your hat on your team getting stuff done. But when you're also a part of the team operating in that design, it's harder to see. And what can happen is you don't feel so successful week to week, month to month. And subconsciously, we want to feel successful, right? We want to do a good job. And that's what pushes you back into the micromanagement. So you might see one of the direct reports, a younger engineer that was supposed to do this part of a design task or put together a drawing set, and all of a sudden you're noticing, hey, they didn't do it as good as I would have. Like I don't like how they did X, Y, and Z. They made this mistake. And so you jump in, you save the day by fixing the problem and delivering a result. That feels really good for you, right? It kind of feeds that ego and that need to be valuable in the way that you knew how, which is as the doer. But as a manager, it's actually a bigger mistake because the manager, the manager needs to develop talent. The manager needs to learn what are the capacity, what are the capabilities of the people reporting under them? What's the makeup of the team? What's the direction of the team in the future? The next level of management, not only managing your team and getting out a result, but it's also thinking about strategic alignment with the company's objectives in three to five years. Like what does your team need to look like in three years? Right? What type of skill sets need to make up that team? What do you, what pieces do you have now? What pieces do you have to add next? And what pieces can you wait on a year or two to build out that team? If you're building a team at 10 to 20, you got to be developing leaders and managers, you got to hire people. So those opportunities, when the mistakes happen on a job, instead of jumping in for micromanaging, it's taking a second to reflect on what went wrong here? Why did this mistake happen? Is it training? Is it onboarding? Is it training? Is it our hiring process? Is it our design process? Did something get through quality control? And if you don't have a good handle on all of those things, then it's really hard to point the finger at just the employee. You can't just blame them. They did a bad job. Well, the company probably did a bad job too. So you want to learn those mistakes as soon as possible. And the only way you're going to learn and expose those mistakes is by letting people make mistakes. I'll have one caveat to letting people make a mistake. I got this from Joel Trammell, I think you say his name is American CEO, uh, successful uh nine-figure entrepreneur. He's he's built two businesses over nine figures, and now he's a built a CEO operating system. And the example he uses is a ship in the water. Now you can very easily picture a ship, part of the boat is underwater and part of the boat is above water. So your goal as a company is to take is never to take a hole below the water, because the hole below the water is going to sink the ship. And as a manager, as a leader, as a business, you're trying to create a hiring process, a training process, a design process, an execution management, right? Quality control to get the big things. The big things are the things that are going to sink the ship. So you want to have those systems in place so that you'll never sink the ship. And then for everything above the boat above the water, you want to rely on the team and the personnel to help work through that and get those things right. And those are, they're going to make mistakes, but they're going to be able to fix those mistakes because they didn't sink the ship. That's a like a I love that analogy. It makes it so crystal clear. But that allows that person to learn, it allows them to grow, and it allows everybody to reflect and improve the business, which is going to make it a more valuable company down the line. Super important. So we go back to reframing what success looks like. The doer is successful by doing the work and hitting results. It's tangible. The manager that becomes less tangible. You're doing things to develop people, reflect on the process, and still deliver a result, trying to resist that urge of micromanaging. And then the strategic manager that's starting to lead through others and contribute to strategic is how are they connecting their team and their team's needs, skills, competencies, and what that team needs to look like in three years to the strategic objectives of the company. Super powerful. And that when you start having those conversations, again, this kind of relates back to my second point about what questions, decisions, problems go over your head. It's like, what are you talking about with your industry peers? It's the same thing. What are you talking about internally? That's going to have the same effect. Because if you're a manager talking about team development and process development and how it's reducing risk and connecting to the strategic objectives of where your company's trying to go in three to five years, like you're going to get invited into those conversations more, more and more. But if you never bring them up, people aren't going to look to talk to you about them. You got to contribute. We're going to round out our fourth point on breaking a career plateau with a quote from Adam Grant. He's the author of Think Again, which is a great theme for today's conversation because we have to think again if we want to break through a plateau. If we only play to our strengths, we might never overcome our weaknesses. Chances are, if you're at a career plateau, it's because you've maximized the leverage, you've maximized the value of your strengths. So if you want to break through that plateau, you have to overcome your weaknesses. So let's think of the structural engineer. The need to stay in our comfort zone really stems from ego. We stick to what we know because it's how we define our sense of self-worth. If you're the expert engineer talking about engineering, you're in a high position of status. But if you step out of engineering and you start talking about real estate development or investment or culture or team building or management or negotiating or marketing or sales, you're not at a high status position in those conversations because it's not something you're familiar with. Right. So if we want to grow, if we feel like we're at a plateau, that is that's because we've maximized the value of our core skill set, our core strength. And if we want to break that plateau, we have to start to look to our weaknesses so that we can shore up our weaknesses, we can improve on those weaknesses and create more leverage on our core skill set and increase our value. Another analogy to drive this message home is let's say you're you're in the NFL and you have a football player as the fastest player in the league. Is that person, let's say it's a 98% rating, is him working on improving his speed the way that he's gonna become a more valuable football player to his team? Probably not, right? Because he's already the fastest player in the league. But let's say he struggles with ball security. Maybe it's strength, maybe it's field vision, maybe he's a running back, but he struggles catching the ball. Those are holding back his value, his ability, his value is how he can contribute as a member of that team to winning games and winning the Super Bowl. So him working on his speed when he's struggling with catching and ball security isn't necessarily the way that he's going to become a more valuable player, is it? Right. That correlates to the subject matter expert, the engineer who's been in a decade and is a really good engineer and just enjoys it and they're trying to become a better engineer. But maybe that's not driving more value to the company, right? Maybe they have to look at the holistically, their field vision, their ball security, their strength, their ability to catch the ball in other facets. Like, what are those other skills in the professional world that they could work on to improve their value to their team, to their company, and to the to achieving the objectives? Judgment in conversations with other industry professionals and clients, right? Powerful stuff right there. I I'm thankful to have learned that lesson. It was a lesson I learned and why I beat that lifelong learning drum about 10 years ago when somebody introduced me to the book, The Compound Effect. Again, I've shared that on this podcast, but it should it taught me the importance of daily habits to continue to challenge my perspectives, what I believe to be true, and to get me thinking and solving problems differently. And that's what I hope to share with you today, that lifelong learning journey, reflecting on what is and isn't working so that you can achieve whatever goal you want to set. One last thing, if if you've listened to this episode and you're at a career plateau, you're feeling burnt out, and you go through this exercise of reflecting on what you what it is you want in life and is your career on a path to achieving that lifestyle. If you find that, like, hey, I really don't want to dive into my weaknesses and continue to invest in developing in those areas. I just really love being an architect working on uh designing buildings. I love being an engineer engineering buildings. I love being an ironworker building steel buildings. That is okay. Thank you for joining me on this week's episode of design development. This topic, breaking career plateaus, I couldn't be more passionate about it. And I hope today challenged you to think differently about your career. If you're feeling stuck, I hope it opens up a new way of

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Rens Hayes 22:43

thinking and helps you see an opportunity to achieve whatever goal it is you want in your career. I'm gonna wrap that up. In an age of leverage, judgment is far more valuable than time. Start to question and ask why certain questions, decisions, problems, and opportunities go over your head and think about what type of conversations you're having with industry peers inside and outside your company, and it will change that toward the long run. You got to reframe what success looks like. If you're the type of person that hangs your hat on the work product that you create and you're now looking to move to management and leadership roles, success looks a lot different. And until you educate yourself on that, you're gonna always fall victim to that natural, the human nature to micromanage and go back to what you do well to feed that ego. And a lot of times our growth as an individual, especially when we're plateaued, it's chances are is that we're maximizing uh the value of our strengths in our current role in our current business and our current market, and that if we want to increase our earning potential and move up in our career, we're probably gonna have to look to our weaknesses and building other competencies that increase the value of our core strength. If there's any other topics you want me to tackle, please send me a message, leave a note, LinkedIn, email, you name it. I will get it. And if there's a guest out there you want to hear from, please send me their name. I want to get them on the podcast and keep bringing the value to the industry. Have a good day. See you next week. Hey everyone, thanks for tuning into design development. Real quick before you leave, our goal is to help as many people as possible. We're a growing community and you're a big part of it. So just click that send button. Send this episode to a friend to let them get those same insights that you got today. We appreciate you. See you next time.