Air Products, like many large companies, ran a rotational assignments program for new employees in engineering and R&D.  It was a great way to get to know the company and get experience in several different areas.  I myself benefited from that program.  Over the years, I coached many young scientists through the process of choosing their next rotation or their roll-off position.  These kids agonized about their choices!  “If I take an assignment here,” one would say, “it could set me up for this pathway.  But if I take an assignment there, it could set me up for this alternative possibility.”  “What if I choose this assignment,” another would ask, “and they end up closing down the project?”  Weeks would go by.  Interviews.  Discussions.  Pro and con tables.  More discussion.  Finally, I would encourage them with this thought:  It’s not about the decision itself, it’s about what you do once you’ve made the decision.  In other words, it’s more important that whatever you decide, you give it 100% effort.  You don’t look backward.  You don’t second guess.  Your performance in a role will determine your opportunities, not so much the role itself.

Don’t get me wrong.  Establishing a decision-making process is important.  But at some point, you have choices that are all above a certain threshold of “goodness”, and further agonizing is not going to add more value.  At this point, success is more determined by what you do once you’ve made the decision.  There is not a single pathway to success and happiness.  Many different choices can get you there—if you put your all into making it work.

Think about how you’ve made some of the most pivotal decisions in your life:  Where you went to school.  Where you decided to live.  Who you married.  Various job changes.  In some cases, those were highly considered multi-layered decisions.  In other cases, much less so.  I think about how I made the decision to go to Goucher College.  I knew I wanted a school known for its chemistry program.  I knew I wanted a smaller institution.  I knew I wanted to live away from home.  That narrowed down the choices, but left many others!  Mom, Dad and I made a campus visit one beautiful fall morning and that was it:  I went Early Decision and committed to acceptance on my application.  My choice of college led to my choice of grad school which led to my first job which led to living in the Lehigh Valley and all that came with that.  I could have chosen another college and chances are it would have led down a totally different path.  Is that a good or a bad thing?  I don’t think it needs to be considered either one.  My life surely would have been different, but most likely (hopefully) equally successful and happy. 

I also think about how my career progressed.  It sounds like a well thought out plan—one role leading to the next, building a set of skills that opened up other opportunities.  Those opportunities added more experiences that opened up other roles until I ended up as Vice President of a collection of North American businesses.  The reality?  I had no idea what I wanted to do.  I had no idea of even the breadth of opportunities that were open to me!  I took a job that looked fun and rewarding.  When another opportunity presented itself at a time I was ready for change, I took it.  That process repeated itself many times over.  Each step along the way, I refined my preferences.  I got a better sense of the alternative paths open to me and what skills and experiences I’d need to attain.  My “preferred pathway” changed many times. 

There was one constant in all of this:  I learned to focus my all on the job I was doing, not on the job I thought I wanted next.  I wasn’t always successful, but when I failed to do my best, it usually meant I had moved into a role that wasn’t really right for me.  I’d make a change and try again. 

That brings up an important corollary to this theorem.  Don’t let any misstep lead you to believe that you are destined to failure.  It emphatically does NOT—not if you keep giving each new opportunity your all.  Life sometimes gives you a little nudge to get you on the right path.  Some of my biggest professional disappointments ultimately led me to some of the most successful and gratifying phases of my career. 

I have been incredibly fortunate in my career and life.  I was drawn to a field that was in demand at the time I graduated.  I happened upon a string of managers and mentors who helped me improve my skills each step of the way.  And I learned to keep plowing through during the tough times, yet made some good choices when it was time to shift lanes.  I was blessed with parents that taught me to value knowledge, believe in myself, and comport myself with integrity.  But more than anything else, I had been given the gift of understanding early on that there are few truly bad decisions.  There is just the need to make a commitment and put in the effort to get the best out of each decision you make.

I’ve mentioned that I have been very lucky in life to have just the right mentors show up at just the right times.  Sometimes the mentoring bestowed was narrowly focused, like how Mrs. Cherry encouraged my interest in Chemistry in High School.  And sometimes the lessons were broad, on-going, and formative, such as those from one of my first bosses at Air Products.  I was extremely lucky to come under Tom’s guidance at a time when I was still really green from grad school and bumping into proverbial walls daily in a business environment.  His patience was legendary; his wisdom more so.  Over the years, my coaching has been peppered with “Tom”-isms.  The subject of this essay is one of the first he taught me and one of my favorites.

Let me set the scene.  Making that transition from school to “real work” was tough.  At least, it was in the late 1980’s when there was not a ton of interdisciplinary learning in school.  I knew Chemistry and lab work and research.  I loved molecules and they loved me.  However, I knew very little about how a laboratory discovery was turned into a viable product that people would actually buy and thus pay my salary.  I knew even less about the challenges interacting with associated divisions would bring.  Who knew what manufacturing, sales or finance needed to know to make my fabulous little discovery commercially successful?  I also knew very little about the politics of a working environment.  There were so many people working at different levels that I began pulling into myself more in order to avoid discomfort and conflict. 

This pathway is one that many people, especially scientists, end up taking.  They dive ever deeper into their own area of expertise and lose patience with those on the outside.  Not being able to connect with others is a huge issue not just in large corporations but in any venture where individuals need to contribute their part or the business will not be successful.  People talk past each other; they make incorrect assumptions around language and priorities; they minimize the difficulty of what other players contribute.  It’s not so much that people lack social skills (although that can be an issue) but that they fail to create a human connection that will allow more effective discussion.  Tom clearly saw me heading down this destructive pathway.

I don’t remember exactly what led Tom and me to have this discussion, but I sure remember the advice he gave me:  “Sherri, throughout your career and life you are going to have work with all kinds of people.  Some will be easy to connect with and some will not.  Here’s what I suggest you do: with every person you meet, find one thing about them that you can like or admire and one thing that you can learn from them.”  Simple advice.  But when I remember to put it into action, the impact is significant.  I have tried to employ this advice whenever I’ve needed to establish a new connection, be it professional or personal.  And I’ve had to establish a lot of connections over the years!

One area that this advice has helped me a lot has been at networking events.  I am a horrible networker!  I hate it, even!  I am an introvert and working a room is the biggest energy drain imaginable to me.  More often than not, I latch onto a couple of people I know and maybe let them introduce me to new people.  But when I remember to apply this Tom-ism, things get easier.  I start to ask people questions to find that one thing I like and that one thing I can learn.  Maybe it is a hobby they have, or a story they tell about some experience.  Maybe it is the way they smile or how kind they are to the person who interrupts our conversation.  Back in my Paint Chemistry days, I always appreciated when they knew something about corrosion resistant coatings or how to formulate better brush flow into a paint.  Maybe I just like their shoes.  But there is always something I can like and something I can learn. 

This advice is even more valuable, as you can imagine, with difficult work colleagues (or family members or neighbors or spouse’s friends or whomever).  It’s applicable not just to new people, but also to people that have become a challenge.  Here’s a good one.  After I came back from Mexico, I experienced something akin to career altitude sickness.  I jumped quite a few career levels and assumed a position that required way more political savvy than I had developed.  My timing was horrible, too.  I came back early in 2001 and we all know what happened that Fall.  When the economy fell off a cliff and business conditions soured, my lack of political skill was a real detriment to me.

One of my co-workers was not particularly happy that I was elevated to this new position.  Over the next few years, he took advantage of (and encouraged) my mistakes to slowly undermine my influence.  I gave him plenty of opportunity, too.  As I finally got my sea legs and worked to right the ship, I began to understand what he did.  Let’s just say he was not one of my favorite people.  But I had to keep working with him.  Find something you can like and something you can learn.  It was not easy.  But, over the coming years, I grew to appreciate his insights into the technology development process.  And I learned from him how to better use data and numbers to make a stronger case for a decision.  I focused on those things.  And by the end of both of our careers there was a thawing.  Dare I say even a fondness?  And, yes, even something of an apology for past indiscretions on both our parts.

I will admit that I am not always successful at putting Tom’s advice into practice.  With some people, finding the “something I like, something I can learn” is easy.  We connect right away!  Sometimes I don’t have enough time to find those jewels.  At times, like in the example above, it takes time, effort and persistence.  But I am convinced of this:  ultimately, you can always find something you like and something you can learn from any person.  Make the decision to do that and you can work with anyone.  And if you can work with anyone, you will find greater success.

I am a selective procrastinator and it drives me nuts.  “How,” I ask myself, “can you be such an organized, list-making, spreadsheet-loving, OCD-like person and yet put off seemingly random, often straightforward things for an eternity?!”  Here’s an example:  I’ve wanted to write about procrastination for a long time, but haven’t done it until now.  Seriously.  I kept putting off writing about procrastination.  Why?  Well, here’s the story.

I wanted to include a favorite cartoon that I cut out of the paper when I was in grad school.  The first five panels of this Sunday cartoon showed a woman going through a series of cleaning and other chores.  In the last panel, which is the one I saved, she lay exhausted in a chair with the caption:  “Beneath this workaholic exterior beats the heart of a lazy person.”  I loved that cartoon!  I was convinced that underneath it all I was really lazy.  I was never sure exactly how I got done whatever I did get done!  So, before writing this essay, I wanted to find that cartoon.

I could have sworn I kept that last panel on the door to my lab in grad school.  And I’m sure I kept taking it with me, office to office in Air Products.  So, it would have made it into the box of office stuff I took home after leaving Intertek, right?  Now, where was that box?  I searched through the basement.  I came back up to my home office and looked in various hiding places.  I saw most of the Office Items that would have been in that box scattered about so I must have unpacked it.  After digging around the office for hours, I think, “Let’s try on line.”  I searched first the website of the cartoon that I swore was the source.  Then searched more broadly with the text of the punchline.  All of this activity happened piecemeal over many, many days and weeks.  Meanwhile, no essay had been written.  I felt I couldn’t start writing until I found that cartoon.  See where I’m going with this?

There are lots of reasons people procrastinate.  There are lots of reasons why I, myself, procrastinate.  Sometimes it’s fear, like why it took me so long to try a spin class at the Y.  Sometimes it really is just laziness, like trying on the bathing suit I bought months ago.  But a good percentage of the time, I realize, I procrastinate because I’m a perfectionist.  I think about how I’ve coached many people over the years to get over their procrastination tendencies.  “Just start,” I say.  “Just create the blank file or a spreadsheet.  Start by making a list of the tasks that need to be done and then tackle just the first one.”  And then the clincher: “It doesn’t have to be perfect.  It just needs to get done.”   

But I want it to be perfect!  Not surprisingly, I’ve done some research on “perfectionism”.  There are two types of perfectionists:  Externally Motivated and Internally Motivated.  I am an Internally Motivated Perfectionist.  I couldn’t care less about YOUR judgement on my degree of perfection.  It is ME who wants everything I do to be perfect.  I like the neatness of it; the elegance of a perfect solution; the satisfaction of doing something as well as I can do it.  But being perfect at a task seems like such a herculean effort that it paralyzes me!  And so I keep on looking for the cartoon because the cartoon would make the essay perfect and I want it to be perfect.  And I delay writing the essay.  Or the business proposal. Or the performance review. If I can’t be perfect, I don’t want to do it at all.  Then I get mad and frustrated with myself.  And then I usually have a snack.  That leads to other issues that will be discussed another time.

While I share this trait with many, I don’t share it with my wife.  Trish is also an Internally Motivated Perfectionist, but instead of paralyzing her and leading to procrastination, her perfectionism drives her to complete any task on her to-do list as soon as humanly possible: to the extent that she drives herself nuts, runs around frantically, and usually ends up hurting her foot. 

Trish keeps a short list of must-do items and her drive is to get them DONE.  Me?  I have an endless number of potential tasks on my to-do list.  I don’t just care about getting them done, I care about getting them done PERFECTLY.  We balance each other well.  She can motivate me to get moving with a heavy sigh, an eye roll and a gentle “You haven’t done that yet?”  I can calm her down a bit and convince her that she doesn’t need to go outside in the dark in the rain to find out why a landscaping light isn’t working.  It can actually wait until morning.

The next step in this essay should be some magic words of wisdom about how to overcome this problem.  Sure wish I had them.  All I can say is that sometimes I can get myself going and sometimes I can’t.  What helps is that I’ve learned to give myself a bit of grace because I am old enough now to know that things that really need to get done somehow always get done.  True enough, I would sigh in frustration when tackling a business proposal that I just couldn’t get myself to start.  I’d read emails.  Or walk the halls.  Or even, lord help me, make a phone call I’d been putting off.  But, eventually, things would get done.  I wrote the performance reviews and business proposals.  I’ve written this essay.  No, they don’t necessarily reach the degree of perfection that I would want, but they are good enough.

So, give yourself a little grace, too.  We all procrastinate.  Most of us are perfectionists to some degree.  We all get paralyzed by a task every now and then.  Or sometimes we continue to plow forward to just get something done instead of taking a step back and assessing a better path.  Think about what is causing you to hesitate and who is relying on your output.  Sometimes just putting the reasons in context helps you get going.  Don’t beat yourself up.  You know that just makes it worse! 

Remember to give others some grace, too.  Yes, you are depending on that person to get something done.  You can’t do what YOU need to do until they do their part!  Help them get started, or at least offer.  And if someone else offers you help, take it.  

So how long did it take me to get this essay done?  Well, the bigger challenge was starting the blog.  Those who have known me know that I’ve been saying I’ve wanted to write for years and years.  I needed to figure out the “what” and the “how”, but more than anything I had to get over my need for everything I put out there to be perfect.  That activation barrier was huge!  Now if only I could get myself to organize this office space, but I think I’ll get Trish off that ladder in the rain before she falls.

In the title essay to this blog, “Don’t Leave Rocks on the Pavement,” I described how my time living and working in Mexico opened my eyes to a range of assumptions I make every day.  Anyone who knows me, or has been subjected to my energy on this topic, knows that I believe at the root of pretty much every bad thing in the world today are unarticulated and untested assumptions.  OK, maybe that’s a bit of hyperbole, but it’s an important topic.  So before I go much further, let me not assume that you know what I mean when I talk about assumptions.

The definition of an assumption is “a thing that is accepted as true or as certain to happen, without proof” (Oxford).  Assumptions are not, in and of themselves, bad things.  What trips us up is that pesky “without proof” part of the definition.  We have to make loads of little assumptions to get through each day.  Most of them prove to be valid because we’ve either seen the situation before or have been told something is true.  When so many of the little assumptions you make are either true or the consequences of being wrong are not visible, you are rarely even aware that you are making an assumption.  So, when one of them turns out not to be valid, the result can be a significant misunderstanding that can lead to even worse consequences.

The example I gave in my first essay was about a cultural assumption:  I did not believe that leaving rocks on the pavement was a big enough problem to require a road sign every few kilometers.  The result of that invalid assumption was my embarrassment at insulting my host.  However, the impact of untested assumptions can sometimes be physically dangerous as well.  Let me tell you another story.

San Juan del Rio, the pueblo in Central Mexico that I lived in, has been around since the 1500’s so there are quite a number of passageways too narrow for two cars.  One of those was on my way to the manufacturing plant where I worked.  The first time I was taken to the plant, we approached that narrow tunnel at the same time as a car coming in the other direction.  The other car flashed their lights and we stopped.  Had I been driving, I would have continued to plow forward.  The custom in the U.S., the custom my father taught me when I learned to drive and the custom that held up where ever in the U.S. I drove, was that the car that flashed their lights was signaling for the other car to go first.  Fortunately, I was not the one driving.  Just as I was about to question why we were waiting, the other car came through.  It never occurred to me that in Mexico, the custom is that the car flashing their lights goes first!  Another invalid assumption, one that would have ended in a head-on collision if I had been behind the wheel! 

These are just a couple of small examples around cultural norms, but we make all kinds of assumptions in our daily lives.  For example, there are language interpretation assumptions, such as the meaning of a word or phrase, or even the definition of an acronym.  I remember one really confusing conversation with a marketing team where one group was using the acronym PSA to mean “pressure sensitive adhesive” and the other group was interpreting PSA to mean “public service announcement”.  You would be surprised how long it took us to figure that out!

Then there are body language assumptions, either the meaning of a gesture (be careful in which countries you make the thumbs up or “OK” gestures!) or the meaning of a body posture.  And this is not just confusing between countries and cultures.  Folks in your neighborhood can mean very different things by their body language or tone.  It is natural to project the meaning you would use to explain an expression or gesture even when it comes from someone else, but that is certainly not always correct. 

Additionally, there are assumptions we make about a person’s education or intelligence or maturity or honesty, based on how they look or dress or talk.  I am forever impressed by people who speak English as a second language with any reasonable fluency.  I never got past the fluency of a native third grader in Mexican Spanish, but it was my vocabulary that was limited, not my intelligence.  How many times have you assumed that a new English speaker was not very intelligent simply because they hadn’t yet learned the words or grammar to better express their thoughts?

Unarticulated and untested assumptions run rampant in the workplace and not just related to how people interact with each other.  I firmly believe that the reason so many outstanding business plans fail in execution is connected to the different assumptions operating and planning personnel apply to the same terms.  As I began to tease this concept of assumptions apart, I began to ask a lot more questions.  For example, what do you mean by “marketing”?  One time, when I was negotiating for more “marketing” support, I failed to ask that question early in the process.  When I was asking for marketing support, I meant market research.  The person I was negotiating with was offering marketing communications.  Two very different aspects of “marketing”!  I also found that job titles carry assumptions, based on your experience.  The title of “Specialist” in some companies is the very top of the technical ladder.  In others, it is used for entry level positions.  Made for some very awkward job offer discussions!  Believe me, I could go on.

Clearly, you have to “pick your battles” because questioning every assumption will wear you out. And I certainly continue to make embarrassing mistakes!  However, you can stay attuned to when you might be falling into an assumption trap.  I encourage you to start asking yourself if you are making a judgement based on an untested assumption.  Does something sound ridiculous to you?  It may be because it clashes with an assumption you’ve made—one you haven’t tested in that situation.  Slow down.  Ask more questions.  Get others to articulate what they mean.  “Different” doesn’t have to mean wrong.  In fact, sometimes “different” can be better.  And that’s the real richness of testing your assumptions.

Don’t Leave Rocks on the Pavement and other things I’ve learned

I retired in June of 2016.  The timing was a little ahead of my planned schedule, but that’s a story for another time.  Since then, I’ve done a bit of consulting; a lot of reading; a bit of exercising.  A bunch of travel.  Friends ask me, “So.  What are you doing with yourself?”  The implication is more along the lines of “What are you doing with yourself beyond Sudoku and the YMCA?”  What was I doing with my time?  I was writing in my head.  I was writing in my head when I walked on the local trails, when I read interesting things, when I saw or heard or experienced something that made me think.  I’ve always wanted to write.  Nothing was stopping me from writing.  I just wasn’t getting it out of my head and onto paper.  What have I wanted to write about?  To explain that, I need to tell you a little story.

It was the fall of 1997.  My expat assignment in Mexico was a “go”.  I was preparing to uproot myself and move to a country where I didn’t yet speak the language and had only visited on short vacations.  I was excited; I was scared to death; I felt like I had the world by the tail!  In September or October, I visited Mexico to begin house hunting, getting to know my local colleagues (both expat and Mexican) and start to visit local customers.  Eduardo had picked me up at the Mexico City airport and we were on the two hour (or so) drive up to San Juan del Rio, where I would be living and working. 

As we drove and talked (in English), I was reading out loud all the billboards and translating them with Eduardo’s help.  Bless that man and his patience!  I can only imagine how annoying that was for two plus hours.  There was a road sign that kept appearing, every few kilometers.  I sounded it out:  No Deje Piedros Sobre el Pavimento.  I asked Eduardo what it meant.  “Don’t leave rocks on the pavement,” he answered gently.  My reaction was instantaneous and, now I understand, cringe-worthy.  “Don’t leave rocks on the pavement?!  What a ridiculous thing to put on a sign!”  I then proceeded to make a few other inappropriate remarks about Mexicans, including why on earth would anyone leave rocks on the pavement?  Are these people idiots or just drunk all the time?

Inside, I’m sure Eduardo was seething.  These arrogant Americans!  Think they know the whole world.  “Well,” he evenly replied (in fluent English with that beautiful sing-song accent that I love so much), “as you see, this road is very hilly.  It is a highway used as a direct connection between manufacturing in Central Mexico and the US border.  In fact, it is often called the NAFTA Highway.  However, many Mexican trucks are old and break down.  We don’t have the money to buy newer trucks.  The driver will use rocks behind the wheels to keep the truck from rolling backward.  Once the truck is fixed, they will often drive off, leaving the rocks in the roadway.  If we hit one of those rocks in this car, we would be in big trouble!  So, it’s important that people are reminded not to leave those rocks on the pavement.”

I was 35 years old.  I thought I had seen a lot in my life.  I thought I was “worldly” and empathetic.  But in that moment, I realized that my world had been pretty small.  I was embarrassed and apologized to Eduardo.  And clearly that moment stuck with me.  To say that my years living in Latin America changed me would be a vast understatement.  I quickly learned that I typically made hundreds of little assumptions about the world and the people around me every day—assumptions that don’t universally hold up.  I never realized that before because I didn’t notice when an assumption proved wrong.  I just continued to plow forward, looking at life through the lens of my very limited experience.  “You don’t know what you don’t know,” they say.  Living in Mexico forcefully pulled off a lens cover and I began to look at everything in my life differently.

My years in Mexico, followed by a series of powerful “learning experiences” (read: struggles) and equally powerful mentors have formed the basis of my perspective.  I began to build a list of maxims that have guided my personal and professional lives.  “Articulate your key assumptions and test them” is one example.  Others include “What problem are you really trying to solve?” “It’s not about the decision you make, it’s what you do after you’ve made the decision” “Find something you can like and something you can learn from everyone you meet” and “If something looks simple, it means I don’t know enough about it.”  Over the years, I have shared these thoughts and many others with people that I have mentored and guided, as well as friends and, occasionally, family.  Now that I am retired, it is time to capture these ideas and share more broadly.  I have been gifted both with these life experiences and the gift of expression.  Follow along with me on this journey as I share so much of the blessings, humor and hopefully wisdom that I’ve accumulated over the years. 

I hope I can help you to learn to look at the world around you (and within you) a little differently.  We affect so much around us with our words and actions.  It’s good to be aware of the rocks we inadvertently leave on the road that may be a problem for others.  So, lesson #1:  Don’t leave rocks on the pavement.

© Sherri Bassner, 2019