Here's an idea worth playing with

Hey, everybody. This is Rob, and here's an idea worth playing with. Today, I wanna talk about five trade skills that I think are essential in business and really in life too. If you've been following me for a while, you'll know I reread Paul Hawkins' excellent book called Growing a Business. I read it every single year.

Whenever I hit a sticky patch in my own business, I flick the book open any page, any chapter. There's always something useful. It really is a wonderful book, so much so you may as well dip almost the entire book in highlighter fluid. But one chapter really stood out for me. This is where Paul Hawken introduces an idea from two authors called Phillips and Raspberry from their book Honest Business.

And honestly, I've never managed to track this book down. So, of course, if you know how I can get a copy of this book, please do let me know. They talk about what they call trade skills. Now, they list four of them and then Paul Hawken adds a fifth to it. The original four, persistence.

Number two is the ability to face facts. Number three is the ability to minimize risks. Number four is the ability to be a hands on learner. And then the fifth one that Paul Hawken adds is the ability to grasp numbers. Now looking at these five trade skills, I can't think of any that are more relevant in today's business world.

If you're a long term listener or you're a reader of Cultivated Management or any of my work, you'll know that actually I focus on behaviors, not necessarily skills, but I will call them skills here in this podcast because that's what the original authors called them. But think about these more in terms of a buckets of behaviors. So a few years ago, I was helping a company recruit hundreds and hundreds of new people. They sent me a few candidates, quite a lot of candidates with glowing CVs. You know, they had every certification you could imagine.

They seemed to have a wealth of experience. Now, obviously, with a CV, you can't always tell. So during the interview, of course, we dug deep into the behaviors and the outcomes and the results that these people achieved. Yet, I rejected almost every one of them, literally probably 99% of these seemingly awesome, outstanding, amazing candidates. Now, as you can imagine, the HR team and the recruiting team were getting pretty frustrated with me.

So I offered them some advice on, you know, what kind of candidates we're looking for. They ultimately wanted to know why was I rejecting these people. Now the reality is, if you've listened to any of my work, you wanna keep that bar high when you're recruiting. I mean, recruiting is pretty much one of the most fundamental aspects a leader or a manager or a team lead could do. You get recruiting wrong, you make your whole life and the life of the employees and teams and business harder if you get it wrong when you come to recruiting.

So I wanted that high bar and I wanted to keep it there, and these people just didn't meet it. Now when I was chatting with HR and the recruiters, I essentially boiled this sort of feedback and the rejection down to two core behaviors. The first one is commercial awareness. Now that's basically all of those five trade skills combined together is what I would call commercial acumen or commercial awareness. Understanding how leaders and managers and businesses actually run.

And then the second one is no surprise to long term listeners. This is communication behaviors. All of these skills, all of these abilities, all of these competencies, all of these certifications doesn't mean that you can communicate effectively, and that's what we found. Their ability to listen, to interpret, to clearly articulate their ideas just wasn't there. Now, without commercial awareness, it's nearly impossible to consult or to coach or to work directly with senior leaders because they live and breathe commercial realities.

They've got profit and losses. They're thinking about how to generate value, which is always external to the business. And they're also trying to think about how to do that without elevating costs at the same level as the value that they're bringing in, otherwise they're just breaking even and a huge amount more work's going on. So they're always looking to mitigate and manage and handle costs, and that's why commercial awareness is so important in business to understand how value is generated and how to control and offset and mitigate and reduce costs. And you combine that with clear communication and you've got very employees.

So they're the two behaviors that I really focus on. And that's exactly why trade skills matter. They're practical, they're real, and they genuinely make people effective. So the first one is persistence. Now, I love the etymology here.

It comes from the Latin and French meaning of lasting, enduring, permanent. Persistence is about enduring highs and lows, picking yourself up after setbacks, trying again and again. Falling down seven times and standing eight is a Japanese proverb and it's a wonderful proverb. It's persistence. Business is never all plain sailing and never should always be swarming around in the quagmire of sort of pain and misery.

It's highs and it's lows like a roller coaster. Now when I was first starting out on the speaking circuit, maybe 10/15, you actually, probably twenty years ago, There was a meme going around the technology industry at the time which was to avoid bad work. Meaning don't do work that's tedious or hard or doesn't feel meaningful all the time. Now of course avoid immoral, illegal, dangerous work obviously, but avoiding hard work entirely, that's not possible in a business. And that's often actually, I found, where the breakthroughs really happen for the business and for you as an individual.

I've made some of my biggest contributions to companies and to myself on the other side of work I initially didn't want to do. It was hard, was gnarly, it was tricky, it was difficult. That's persistence. That's a trade skill companies still value, trust me. Especially in complex competitive environments.

Number two is ability to face facts, which I often call leaning into the current reality. If you're familiar with my releasing agility communication framework, you'll know that this is step two. Being honest about your current reality, no matter how bad. If it makes you cry a little, then that's fine because you're being honest about where you are in your business. If we can't face the facts, how are we going to move forward with the right positive solutions?

This is about seeing things as they are, not as we wish them to be. This is about collecting facts, data, observations. It's about studying. It's about the art of noticing. And it's about being honest about where the business is.

Put your egos to one side and look at the facts. Face them head on. Then you have an opportunity to move on from the right point. Unfortunately, most leaders and managers tend to avoid this. Really often.

I'm being honest here because they created this reality in the first place, and then they have to confront it. And that takes a huge amount of self reflection and honesty and, you know, bravery in a sense because, you know, the business that you're looking after, the business that you're supervising, the system that you've helped create as a leader and manager, when it's not working, well, you were part of that. But pretending problems don't exist, well, that doesn't help anyone. Facing facts requires that humility, that courage and that honesty. But when you do lean into the current reality, you can make those smart logical decisions.

You can plan the next steps from truth, not from wishful thinking. You can design a plan that moves this business, not design a plan that's almost been created for a business that doesn't exist because you've used wishful thinking. Now the third skill or behavior here is the ability to minimize risks. Now this isn't about avoiding risks. If you're doing things that are pushing the boundaries, that are on the edges of that commercial growth, if you're a business that's going places and trying to change the world, you're going to be encountering risk.

You can't avoid risk. But it is about gathering information, weighing up options, and protecting people, money, and reputation as best you can. It requires studying, slowing down, thinking about things, and contemplating the consequences of the actions that we're doing, that we're taking. But risk is subjective. I see differently now than when I was 15.

My kids play football, they go mountain biking, they do these big jumps. I can't do it. I can't do it anymore. But I did when I was their age. It's subjective.

But in business, careless decisions can cost careers, money and opportunities. For sure, I've seen this firsthand. So think through those outcomes carefully. Understand your risks and try and prevent them from turning into issues. It's a skill that is superbly in demand at the moment and much needed in many organizations.

Now, the fourth trade skill is learning by doing, which is my personal favorite from these. So long time readers will know that I call this task acquisition learning. It's basically learning by doing the work itself. It's on the job training, you could call it. Theory, information, it only gets you so far.

Until you try something, until you put it into action, until you deploy the tactics and the behaviors and the skills, then you don't know something. Because when you deploy it, when you try it, you can adjust, you can improve, you can learn, you get feedback. But you don't really know if it works or not if you're just basing things on theory and information. So every action in business builds knowledge. Now the best way to do this is to do the job itself, ideally with, alongside, be mentored or supervised by somebody who's already excellent at doing that particular activity.

Every mistake, every tweak, every adjustment adds nuances. It develops a skill that you just can't write down. You can't codify half of, you know, somebody who's a true expert in something. That's how expertise develops through those micro adjustments, reflection, that change, that adjustment. No one can teach all of this, all of these years of these micro adjustments and nuances, and then turn that into mastery in somebody else through information alone.

So this to me is is wonderful. Hands on learning, get stuck in, ideally supervised or partnering or mentored by somebody who's already pretty awesome for what it is you're trying to learn. But even then, just doing the work itself, if we just get stuck in on new things that nobody's done before, we're gonna learn. Deploying those tactics while the strategy sits there on the shelf gathering dust, you're in the mix, you're in the weeds, you're in the work doing it and learning. Now finally, the fifth one that Paul added himself, is the grasping of numbers.

I'll be honest, I'm not a natural numbers person. Maths is never or was never my strong suit. In fact, at school, my maths teacher told my parents that I couldn't tell the difference between my ass and my elbow when it came to maths. Now back then in the eighties, obviously feedback was a little bit more brutal than today. I'm sure you couldn't say that in today's day and age.

But she was right, maths is not my strong point. However, I have learned enough to talk about profit and loss, customer lifetime value, EBITDA, and all of the other financial numbers and ratios that people use in business. This is really the value cost sort of, conversation. Now, leaders and managers live and breathe in these numbers. That's their job.

Their job is to grow value for the organization or at least retain value and to minimize costs so that the business makes more money, so that it can keep doing the things that it's trying to do. So even a basic understanding of basic business financials is a superpower. And there are tons and tons and tons of free resources online where you can learn the basics of business accounting or business numbers or business terminology. There's tons of resources online. But here's a little micro tip.

Every organization will talk about things differently, but underneath this, the same sort of numbers so you can compare markets and companies in markets and, you know, trade on the stock market and what have you. They're pretty consistent. So what I do as a leader and manager is I create a very simple cheat sheet of the numbers and the measures and the terminology that makes sense for that organization. And I turn these into simple guides to be put into induction packs to be shared with the organization so that everybody understands these numbers and what's important to the business. So when the leaders are doing a town hall and they're talking about EBITDA or customer lifetime value, everybody knows at a basic level what that means.

So there you have it, there's five trade skills that I think are still as relevant today as when Phillips and Raspberry and Paul Hawken were talking about these back in the eighties in their wonderful book, Growing a Business. Their persistence, facing facts, minimizing risks, learning by doing, and grasping numbers. I often bucket all of these under commercial awareness, but they do deserve their own spotlight in a sense. They're practical, timeless, foundational behaviors. If you're interested, I do have a free ebook called The 10 Behaviors of Effective Employees.

You can grab this at cultivatormanagement.com/ten. I wrote this before I discovered these five trade skills. I'm tempted to go back and, maybe weave these in, but that would be putting it towards 15 behaviors. It gets a bit tricky and a bit more complicated to communicate that. But anyway, here's a question for you.

Which of these five do you already lean on? Which ones have you got? Which ones would you say of these five are behaviors and skills that you currently are excellent at, that you demonstrate in work all the time? Are any of the five behaviors that you wish to develop? And if so, how can you sharpen them this year?

So thank you for listening to this podcast, and I hope that was a good idea for you to play with today and have a think about. I was a little bit over the time that I'd set for this. I do apologize for that. But if you would like to find out more about leadership, communication, creativity, and learning, then please do check out all of the resources, the books and the articles and the courses available at cultivatedmanagement.com, and I look forward to speaking to you in the next episode.