The Problem With Your Skills

…Is that you think improving them is all that’s needed.

Many times we’ve heard, “We’re the best in the business and we give to good causes, why aren’t we more successful?”

It’s often not skills you have holding your meaningful work back. It’s often the skills you don’t have – either within yourself or within your team – that are holding your work back. Could it be that you’re great, but you need others to be great alongside you? Or that you’re not great in certain areas, and need someone who is to join you for the journey ahead?

It’s often not the practice you’ve dedicated to your skills, but the commitment to a learning and development regime that echoes the needs of those you wish to serve. What use is a carefully-crafted discipline that doesn’t solve the very problems you’ve a moral responsibility to solve? Your craft isn’t about you, but for those who benefit from it, isn’t it?

It’s often not the care you bring to your work through skill, but the care you approach fully understanding the needs of those in your care. Great code won’t help if it’s incompatible. Exquisite design won’t help when it doesn’t express those who will experience it. Mouth-watering pastries and confectionary won’t necessarily address your coeliac customers.

We win when we nurture the skills around our core skills, too. We owe it to the causes we advocate for to do great work and bring it to market. To listen and empathize with those we serve. To fall in love with helping our market on its journey, not our way of getting them there.