A fellow once quipped, “People who think they know everything really irritate those of us who do!” Of course, he was jesting. No one knows everything there is to know about any subject. We all have knowledge gaps and blind spots. The statement of Confucius hits us right between the eyes because it rings with obvious truth: “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” Some questions should never cease being asked: What do I not know about turnarounds? What new advancements have I not heard about yet? What are the knowledge gaps in my team members? Why do the same issues keep coming up in our lessons learned meetings after our turnarounds? Most of us can identify with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, one of Germany’s greatest literary figures, when he said, “There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.” As leaders and professionals in the industry, we have a fiduciary responsibility to be on the cutting edge of technology, technique and team building. In a very real sense, our quest for excellence is a quest for knowledge.
The most successful leaders somehow manage to maintain a “professional discontentment.” They are never satisfied with the status quo. They are not lulled into complacency by achieving the state of the industry. They maintain a passion for learning and are always pushing the envelope and seeking new paradigms. They invest consistently in their pursuit of knowledge and they invest consistently in the training of their teams. They conscientiously seek out contractors who mirror their passion for continuous learning. Following a five-year research project on why some companies achieve greatness and others don’t, Jim Collins noted in his watershed book, “Good To Great,” “Greatness is not primarily a function of circumstance, but largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.” Continuous learning is one of those key disciplines that must be maintained. Collins further notes successful companies spend more time hiring motivated people than trying to motivate people. But he cautions motivated employees can be de-motivated. There are very few things that are more motivating to motivated people than learning and growing. Lots of money has been spent on safety training, technical training and project management training, and rightly so — those are really important topics where learning must never cease. But there are other areas that seem to get less focus sometimes, like soft skills training and team cross-training. Soft skills can hardly be overstated since healthy people are foundational to healthy, productive work teams. When people truly understand themselves and truly understand their team members, only then are the “group chemistry” barriers removed to allow undistracted focus on the common goal. Cross-training is an area that is begging to be expanded since cross-training allows for a much more flexible team and has the added benefit of allowing team members to better understand, appreciate and support one another. For instance, when planners can help with scheduling and schedulers can help with estimating and estimators can help with cost engineering, there is no down side to that! As many managers have experienced, cross-training your teams pays for itself many times over.
In summary, an open mind is the best policy — always being aware that we live with knowledge gaps and blind spots. That means we maintain a non-negotiable commitment to lifelong learning. We must be ever mindful our teams need to continue learning in order for them to remain motivated and cutting edge in a very competitive industry where market share is gained and lost all the time. And while technical training is so important, it can never negate the necessity for soft skills training and team cross-training. Rather than viewing training as an expense to be incurred, we should view it as an investment with good dividends to be paid. Unless you are from a neighboring planet, or were born very recently (as in this morning), you have doubtless heard the words of the Harvard law professor (who eventually became president of the university), Derek Bok: “If you think education is expensive, try the cost of ignorance.”
For more information, contact Mike Bischoff at (281) 461-9340, email sales@tamanagement.com or visit www.tamanagement.com.
