Wild Leadership

After the Big Job

You ran something. Now you don’t.

You may not be able to see what comes next. You may see several possibilities and not know which deserves the next year. Or you know what you want, and it is not coming.

You still have all of it. The job just stopped being where you used it.

  • VisionYou saw where a business needed to be in three years when everyone else was looking at the quarter. You still see three years out. Nobody is asking you what you see.
  • ExpertiseYou know things about your trade that are not written down anywhere. You learned them by getting it wrong once.
  • Emotional intelligenceYou read a room before the first slide went up. You knew who was going to object before they did. That did not switch off at the door.
  • ExperienceYou have been through a downturn, a sale, a restructure, a crisis that landed on your desk at six on a Friday. You know what the second week feels like. Most people don’t.
  • CuriosityYou wanted to know how things worked. You still do. The difference is that nobody is paying you to be curious about their business, so you have stopped asking.
  • AdaptabilityYour career began before the career path ended. You laid the paving yourself. You have changed how you work more times than you can list.
  • ResilienceYou have been knocked back before. You are reading this.
  • WisdomYou know what matters and what only looks like it matters. It took thirty years. It does not expire.

None of that has gone. It was expressed mainly at work, so it is easy to think it has. The question is where it gets expressed now.

At the top you had people to think with. They came with the job. The job has gone and so have they. You are working this out at the kitchen table, on your own, and it is taking longer than you expected.

I am in it too

Magnus Wood

Magnus Wood

It is Monday morning, or any day in the working week, and I am sitting down at my desk at home. No meetings. No office to go to. There are things I need to do, but nobody is waiting for me to do them.

I’ve been at the top of a business three times and left three times, not always when I chose. The last time was earlier this year.

I recently looked at a job well below my experience and seniority. 361 people had already applied.

I know what I’m good at. I want to know who’ll pay for it.

What would someone pay me to do?

You can describe thirty years of work. What you can’t yet say is what someone would pay you to do next, in a sentence they would repeat to a colleague.

Twenty minutes, on paper

  1. Write down three problems you were paid to solve in the last ten years.

    Problems, not job titles. “Took a business through a sale without losing its best people” is a problem solved. “Managing director” is a title.

  2. For each one, who had the problem?

    The kind of organisation, and the person inside it who would sign the invoice.

  3. Which of those people still have that problem?

    What does it cost them now?

  4. What have you done that proves you can solve it?

    Something a stranger could check.

  5. How would that person hear of you?

    Name the route. A newsletter they read, an event they go to, a person they trust.

  6. Write it as one sentence.

    I help [who] to [do what] when [it happens].

  7. Try it on two people who could plausibly buy.

    Ask who they know with that problem. If neither can name anyone, change something in steps two to five, not just the sentence.

What it can sound like

Your headline sells the last role. Reliable, senior, interchangeable with a thousand others. The market stopped paying a premium for reliable some time ago. What people actually ring you for is untangling operations that have outgrown their systems. Scarcer. Worth more. Nowhere on your page. You are selling the wrong thing.

A real read I wrote for someone, name removed.

Work through it yourself, with the sheet above. Or work through it with me.

PositioningWith me. £500. Next Move LabIf you are still choosing a direction.

Two ways forward

Follow the Story

What other people born between 1965 and 1980 are going through at work, in their own words, with the evidence alongside. Including what’s happening to me.

A Field Note every week and a roundup at the end of each month. Unsubscribe at any time.

Next Move Lab

The salary covered the money. The title placed the experience. The diary filled the week. Five weeks, with five other people who ran something, on what comes next. Two shapes of it taken outside and tested before anyone decides. From 13 January. Six places. £750.

See the Lab

Not ready for either? Thirty minutes, off the record. On Teams, no charge, not a step towards buying anything.

The wider evidence on Gen X, work and what happens in our fifties is here.