5 Trade Skills to grow your career

Hey,

I hope you are doing safe and well. Welcome to another edition of Meeting Notes and today I'm going to chat briefly about Trade Skills and why I think it's a good idea to build them. There is also a link worthy of your energy and attention - and this week's is a real gem.

This week I posted a long form article on the blog about building a strategy where I shared the three core principles I use when doing strategy work.

I've also started a behind the scenes creativity newsletter called "Creative Soul Projects" which is where I share many of my more creative endeavours, in case you're interested.

I'm super stoked to be running the Communication Super Power Workshop at the SEETEST conference in Zagreb in September. It's been a while since I did an in-person comms workshop. I have some new ideas to weave in and we may even create a short film or podcast.... still playing with that idea.

For those new to the Meeting Notes newsletter, welcome, I’m Rob, Chief Globalisation Officer at Cultivated Management. Every two weeks I publish this newsletter about envisioning bright futures of work, as well as tips and advice on improving communication skills - a genuine super power in the world of work.

Trade Skills

Long time readers will know that I re-read Paul Hawken's book "Growing A Business" every single year. In fact, when I get stuck with anything in my own business I just flick open a page and read.

In one chapter Paul introduces an idea from two authors, Phillips and Raspberry, called Trade Skills. I cannot for the life of me find their book "Honest Business" so if you know where I can get a copy, I'd be grateful.

In the book they describe four Trade Skills which I think are wonderfully apt in today's business world still (and are lacking in many candidates and employees):

1. Persistence
2. Ability to face facts
3. Ability to minimise risks
4. Ability to be a hands-on learner

Paul then adds a fifth to the list:

• Ability to grasp numbers

A few years back the company I was working with were recruiting hundreds of new people. They lined me up with positive sounding candidates with fully loaded CVs. Yet I rejected almost every single one.

They asked why I rejected so many seemingly good candidates. I explained that my bar for the team was high and these people didn't meet it. The reasons were simple and two-fold.

The first being none of these candidates had what I call commercial awareness behaviours. In some respects this bucket term covers many of the trade skills above. The second reason was their communication behaviours were lacking.

Without commercial awareness it's nigh on impossible to coach and consult with senior leaders who live and breath commercial realities. And even if they did have these skills they often couldn't listen well or communicate with clarity - another core behaviour needed when working with executives.

Communication aside, commercial awareness or trade skills are super important in almost every role.

Persistence

I'm a big fan of getting to the root of a word; etymology.

Persistence comes from a latin / french background and literally means "lasting, enduring, permanent".

It's about picking yourself up after set backs and failure, and trying again. Persistence is about enduring the highs and lows of business. It's about lasting and sticking with something. It's too easy to give up.

A few years ago there was a theme going around the tech conference circuit about "avoiding bad work". People were presenting from the stage and telling people to avoid "bad work". Work that didn't sing to their soul, or was too hard to tackle, or was just tedious and dull. Of course, we should all avoid immoral, illegal and dangerous work (unless your very job is a dangerous job), but should we really avoid "bad work" that is hard, tedious or doesn't play to your soul?

It's through this bad work that I've made the biggest differences to myself and the companies I've worked for. On the other side of that bad work is often breakthroughs and massive improvements that can literally shift an organisation into higher gears.

This is persistence. And it's a trade skill many companies are really looking for as they navigate complexity, competition and changing challenges to their very existence.

Ability to face facts

This is a wonderful Trade Skill. I call this "leaning into the current reality" but it's the same thing.

It's about taking in facts, inputs, data and observations and leaning into what you see. And facing up to the fact that life and work may not be as you want or wish it to be. And then to move forward from a knowing place.

When we face facts we can decide a logical and right next step. I talk about this a lot in my recent article on strategy. Many leaders shy away from the current reality and pretend it's not real, likely because they helped to create it in the first place.

Facing facts is about self reflection, humility, objectivity and truth. If we can lean into our current reality and face facts, we are empowered with a solid base to move forward from.

Ability to minimise risks

This trade skill is all about taking in enough information, data and observations to move forward with minimal risk. This is not about avoiding all risk but about minimising it.

There are risks with most things in life and business, so it's important we develop this skill of taking in insights, thinking through the consequences and considering the effects of our decisions.

Risk is subjective. What I see as risky may be a "walk in the park" for someone else.

One of the many wonderful aspects of being a parent is I get to see my boys live their lives. They play football, do extreme sports and have a more care-free attitude to life than I do in my season of life. I had that same sense of invincibility too at that age and recoil in horror at some of the stupid things I did as a kid. Did you know I've broken almost every bone in my body? 😄

When we go out on our mountain bikes they take jumps I wouldn't dare to now. Risk is subjective.

But, when we're in an organisation we are often playing with other people's money, our colleagues careers and the reputation of the business. We should do what we can to think through our actions, decisions and where we invest company resources.

We won't always get it right but that's all part of the learning.

Ability to be a hands-on learner

Yes. Yes. Yes. Learning through doing is always my preferred mechanism. Long time readers will know I call this task acquisition learning, or sometimes "on-the-job training".

Everything I share with you on this site and in my books, is from first hand experience. Theory is just that, theoretical, and until we've tried to put that theory into practice we cannot be certain whether it will work.

My entire Personal Knowledge Management System of Capture > Curate > Crunch > Contribute is built around putting information into action. Information in action creates knowledge.

We learn best when we try the activity and get feedback.

This trade skill is essential in business. We do something, we learn, we improve. Every time we do something we build in nuanced changes and tweaks for next time.

In a previous newsletter I shared the idea of how the Wheelsmith cannot possibly teach you how to be an expert - because they could never deconstruct the years of minor tweaks and changes that developed this expertise. Nothing worth knowing can be taught.

Learning by getting stuck in and doing the work is the key to getting better.

Ability to grasp numbers

I'll be honest, I'm not a numbers guy.

Math was never my strong suit. At one point my maths teacher at school told my parents that I couldn't "tell the difference between my backside and my elbow". I think schools have toned down their feedback in recent years.

But I suck with numbers. Saying that, I know enough to talk profit and loss, lifecycle customer value, EBITDA etc with leaders; enough to understand where we need to play to make the business better.

This is a trade skill I need to improve, but right now it's not holding me back. I know enough for what I need to do. Understanding the numbers, even at a superficial level, may be enough.

I run my own business and have an accountant - and I understand just enough to be know the health of my business at any given time.

In every company where I lead a team, I always get someone from the finance team to create a simple guide to the numbers of the business.

What do leaders talk about a lot? Put it in the guide and explain it in simple terms. Deconstruct the acronyms. Simplify the ratios.

We create guides and easy to follow crib sheets so that everyone in the team knows how to talk about numbers. They know how to decipher corporate messages and they know what numbers matter to the business leaders.

It's a good trade skill to have and one I will, at some point, learn even more about 😄

So there you have it - 5 trade skills that I think are indeed needed in the workplace.

I bucket many of these under "commercial awareness" but I'm doing them a dis-service. If I ever re-write the 10 behaviours of effective employees, I may add a couple of these in.

1. Persistence
2. Ability to face facts
3. Ability to minimise risks
4. Ability to be a hands-on learner
5. Ability to grasp numbers

A link worth your energy and attention

This is a good one. Trust me.

As we've talked about learning in this edition, and the last, I'm going to share a phenomenal learning resource with lots of free courses.

Some of the courses are even on stuff we've talked about today - I've bookmarked the advanced business finance course for example.

It's Open Educations website where they have hundreds of free courses on business, sports, communication, learning, science, math etc.

It really is a treasure trove of learning resources.

From the Cultivated Editorial Desk

• Latest Podcast on HAIWPW - Nash's use of leisure time
• Learning Note - Ethics and journalism - and what we can learn in work
• Article - Building a strategy

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Rob..