Beyond the Certificate

One of the biggest roadblocks I’ve had to navigate throughout my professional career has indeed been knowing my worth. Far too often, I’ve struggled with the self-imposed limits of not completing a college degree. Sometimes, though, the companies I was employed by actually had those limits built firmly into how they defined advancement opportunities. That said, I’ve racked up a solid list of certifications over the years; some of which I still have framed certificates for laying around collecting dust, and some that got lost over time. Here are a few, in no particular order:

• Six Sigma Yellow Belt (through a Master Black Belt at Tenneco)
• Total Quality Management (internally at Tenneco)
• ISO-9001 (serving as an internal audit for years at Tenneco)
• Applied Ergonomics (through a company called HumanTech at the time)
• Lean Manufacturing Customized Program (University of Michigan - College of Engineering)
• DDI - Certified Facilitator (Development Dimensions International)
• SHRM-CP (Society for Human Resource Management Certified Professional)
• CHBC (Certified Human Behavior Consultant with Personality Insights)
• ACHBC (Advanced Certified Human Behavior Consultant with Personality Insights)
• Maxwell Leadership Certified Team Member (including stints as an Executive Director and serving on the organization’s President’s Advisory Council)

I'm sure there are quite a few others that I could list if I had time (or cared) to dig through old file folders or boxes from days gone by. While just this list could look relatively impressive on a resume or LinkedIn profile, I’m confident that the variety or number of certifications listed are of little interest to you on any given day. What I’ve come to understand in no uncertain terms is that there’s not a certification on the planet that offers value unless the individual holding it can deliver results. Without being qualified to actually help others understand and apply to subject matter, holding a certificate is little more than a feather in your cap.

I’m not exactly sure of the timing, likely somewhere between late 2013 and early 2015, Rod and I had a conversation about an open training and development manager position at the company he worked for at the time. Through the nearly fifteen years we had worked together, he was very familiar with the skill set I had developed. Since we weren’t in the same location the last few years we were with the same company and he had been with his new company for a while at that point, he was reaching out to see if I had ever finished my degree in Human Resource Management - which was initially an expectation when I moved into that field from behavior-based safety. Just a few months after taking on the role, I found myself working 12-14 hours each day so the coursework had taken a backseat. I carried a 4.0 GPA through what I had completed, but I wasn’t far enough along for Rod to make a case to his corporate team to consider me. I lacked the degree, but he knew I was far more qualified than anyone else who applied. No harm done; he and I still have a great relationship to this day.

Just a few years after that conversation with Rod, I remember sitting in a management team meeting led by the consultant my employer had been working with for a while. I had been with that organization for just over eighteen months and had been fairly involved with most of the group meetings he facilitated during the day or two he was on site each quarter. While much of what he covered made sense overall, I asked for a practical example for something he shared in that meeting. I was hoping to get more context for how we could implement it through anything he could offer detailing how he had seen other clients put it in place. He refused to provide any examples, saying that it would be different for everyone. Well, duh, but having a starting point - rather than a random idea he had read from a book - would have been helpful. At that point, I had grown frustrated with the number of ideas we had discussed without seeing any of them implemented or sustained. I made a comment about needing to see a tangible return on the investment the company had made with him (albeit it most certainly wasn’t my money or my decision), and he replied that if we couldn’t see at least a tenfold return then we shouldn’t renew his contract the following year. Being certain nothing of the sort would ever be achieved, I barked something back at him about not allowing him into the building the next day if it were up to me. Most of the management team looked at me like I had an elbow growing out of my forehead. One of the most senior members of that group, although not in an ownership role, quietly folded his arms in agreement and said, “Yep.” That fellow traveled all over and flashed his credentials for anyone who would look at them, but I have yet to see a measurable return any of the organizations he worked with could tie to his time with them. Certified? Apparently… Qualified? Not that I ever saw!

In all the years I trained teams on behavior-based safety, I never had a formal certification. I did, however, have a ton of hands-on experience - both in administering that process and in the type of work being done as we conducted behavioral observations. Soon after moving into human resources, I found myself doing nearly all the interviewing and hiring with external candidates, disciplinary actions with existing team members, and a host of other tasks that fell in my lap. Although I still hadn’t finished the degree showing I was certified, I had significant experience throughout the organization that helped me become qualified. Truth be told, the influence I had earned yielded a level of real leadership qualification that only comes through experience; a credential alone will never produce that.

As much as my experience helped, in the HR role and in so many other areas since, the mentors I’ve had access to have been even more important. Before we look at that in more detail though, I’ll challenge you to identify one real-world skill that you have and consider how you can ensure that qualification produces results that will likely never come from someone who just holds a certification…

The Value of Relational Experience

I’ve often heard the phrase, “Experience is the best teacher.” While I believe that can be correct, I’ve learned that far too many people refuse to evaluate their experiences, completely missing out on some of life’s most crucial lessons. In all the years we’ve studied John Maxwell, I’ve often heard him joke that “maturity usually comes with age, but sometimes age comes alone.” Where experience is concerned, I’ve met some folks who have twenty years of experience and some who have experienced the same year twenty times; picture the work version of Ground Hog Day… Even then, though, the people most determined to pull any possible lesson from everything they experience are limited by time and exposure. One of the most valuable assets I’ve had access to in my career, something that’s allowed me to become exponentially more qualified to deliver results around any certification I’ve ever earned, has come directly through the value of relational experience.

In complete transparency, Terry has shared a similar message with me directly for more than twenty years and I’m just now beginning to embrace it. Knowing our worth and uncovering our hidden strengths can be incredibly challenging. Praise God for mentors who are willing to point them out with specificity and help us understand just how much our unique voice can resonate with an audience, all while providing the ongoing alliance feedback we need to keep improving. Today, I have a clear perspective for how much my personal and professional experience allows me to connect with, relate to, and provide meaningful examples for nearly any audience we speak with or deliver training for. But without Terry emphasizing that for more than two decades, I’m not sure I’d have that clarity. And without having ongoing opportunities to learn from his and so many other mentors’ experiences, I can assure you that I’d be far less qualified to drive results behind any certification.

In more than 25 years of marriage, over a decade of which being as business partners, Cindy and I have worked incredibly hard to advance in our professional lives and we’ve invested heavily into developing our skill sets. While some of that investment has indeed yielded fancy certificates and a few credentials, the hands-on experience we’ve compiled along the way has always provided us with the most practical value. That said, the relationships we’ve built with so many amazing mentors has provided us with the ability to transform that experience into the leadership qualities we initially needed to earn buy-in with the teams we served, and now serves as a primary qualification for how we help organizations achieve measurable results today.

However, even the best relational experience won’t keep us from making mistakes along the way. We’ll take a look at how a willingness to learn from every failure can become a critical part of enhancing any qualification next. Before that, though, I’ll challenge you to seek feedback from a mentor on a practical skill you currently have that makes you uniquely qualified for something you’re not fully embracing. We can rarely see our own full picture while we’re standing in the frame.

Learning from Failure

In June of 2000, I was only about a month into my new role facilitating (I’m intentionally not calling it leading and you’ll see why shortly) the 5S implementation across 200,000 square feet of the facility I worked in. In case you’re not familiar with the idea, Sorting everything in a work area, Setting it in Order so you could find exactly what you needed when you needed it, Shining it to identify potential issues in advance, Standardizing the process to make training new team members very straight forward, and Sustaining each of those behaviors to capture long term return on the effort served as a very basic first step in a larger corporate Lean Manufacturing initiative. Each of those 5 S’s were simple but often required team members to change how they had been doing things for years. Habits are hard enough to change, but convincing someone what they’ve done for decades isn’t the best possible method treads heavily on feelings - regardless of how much logic the idea is based on.

Since four of us were selected to roll out the 5S initiative, we each gravitated to the areas of the facility where we had the most experience. In one of the first “training sessions” I delivered for a small group I had been part of just prior to moving into my new role, one of the most senior team members was visibly disengaged. I was still one of the youngest employees in the building but viewed this new opportunity as a bit of a promotion (even though I was being paid the same hourly rate as when I operated a press), so I felt somewhat entitled to push my weight around. That led to quite the pissing contest, which only resulted in both of us having wet shoes - figuratively, not literally. Truth be told, the only thing that came from me attempting to bust his chops in front of the rest of that small group was an argument with a guy I worked extremely closely with for four years leading up to that point. He and I made amends in the days that followed, and I quickly realized that any results I hoped to achieve would only come by earning buy-in. If I wanted to truly lead my coworkers through that 5S implementation, rather than just facilitate training sessions that never resulted in changed behaviors, learning from that failure and every other failure I would experience moving forward was critical.

Interestingly enough, I remember how concerned I was that this one interaction, a failure to gain that team member’s buy-in during that initial session, would ruin any chance I had to succeed in the role. With that example fresh in your mind, I’ll challenge you to consider what got more attention as we went through school: the answers we got right or the ones we got wrong? I can’t speak for you but I still have some mild PTSD from all the red x’s on nearly every test I ever took in an English class - especially when it came to grammar. And during my first four years in that manufacturing setting, the only time I received any type of disciplinary action was when I ran a batch of parts wrong; we were still able to use the parts, they just weren’t correct for the order that was scheduled. 

Far too many of us have been taught to view mistakes as failures instead of opportunities to learn and improve. In the fifth lesson of our Emerging Leader Development course, Cindy and I emphasize the importance of reflecting on not just what we’ve achieved but the actions we took leading up to those results. I share this quote from Peter Drucker to drive the point home: “Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From quiet reflection will come even more effective action.” I build on that by suggesting that quiet reflection can turn even ineffective action into more extremely effective action IF we’re learning from failure instead of allowing it to paralyze us.

As we looked at how influence has so much more power than the authority of a title, I shared something Mark Cole told me several years ago, “I trust leaders who make mistakes. I don’t trust leaders who make excuses.” I’ve never met someone who achieved anything worthwhile who hadn’t made a ton of mistakes along the way. We’ve all known people who ace any test they take without the slightest bit of preparation. Passing an exam can get you certified but learning from our failures is where we build the kind of qualification that will help others get better as a result. Pulling for the experience of others can certainly speed up our process, but being willing to pass along to anyone we’re able to mentor is where we really begin to establish our qualification - so we’ll pick up there soon.s.