Leading With Experience

Does experience matter? Surely it does, provided you learn from your experience – mistakes included. Too often, older staff mistake years of work in the company as experience. Unfortunately, they do not equate; staff do fly under the radar and only do the necessary for years! Staff who have been retrenched tend to be resentful of younger staff, who join the company at higher and stringent entry levels. Being highly educated, skillful and tech-savvy, is the norm today for employment.

Re-hiring retired staff can be a useful approach, when these were your best performers. If you are able to download the tacit wisdom and experiences of valued staff, you may be able to transfer this body of knowledge across to the next generation of staff. Mentors, executive coaches and in-house trainers can found in both retired and retiring staff. To carelessly lose these staff would be to waste away years of valuable expertise and exposure. For example, you can rehire your top salespeople as a selling coach, so as to initiate new sales engineers into the industry. You benefit from marrying the ‘know-how’ with the ‘know-who’.

B K Liew was the coach for yesterday’s morning run session; this was second and final part of the series of free preparatory clinics for runners in the brand-new Marina21K Run (23 July). He has completed several Ironman triathlons, ran across the Gobi Desert, and done numerous ultra-marathons and adventure races – all in all, he is very experienced about taking on new physical adventures for solo or team expeditions. He covered in clear detail pre-race preparations, including how to train with periodisation. Periodisation is about cleverly training progressively to make incremental gains in one’s physical fitness. Essentially, you deliberately increase mileage and intensity, yet are mindful of periods of lower intensity, and time for rest and recovery. You cannot increase distance and intensity indefinitely without incurring injury and meeting a plateau in your performance.

Leadership Lessons: How do you retain talent within your company? How do you value experience? How do you recognize the mature worker? How do you engage your staff performance with periodisation? How often do you conduct face-to-face, one-on-one, conversations with your staff?