“How do you manage the lack of recognition?”
“How do you know your efforts are worthwhile?”
“Have you ever wondered if your days spent behind your computer or in meetings could really contribute to the challenges of today's world?”
"How do you know when it's time to pull out?"
I remember hearing those questions during one of my speeches in front of a community of corporate sustainability enablers. Such doubts were not new to me. I have heard them a lot for the past decade. I myself experienced them.
If you are acting in favor of sustainable change and if those questions resonate with you, this article is for you! It’s maybe time to rethink your success as a change agent.
Your value is not in being recognized as great or indispensable. Your success lies in your ability to disappear, to become useless.
I can sense your knee jerk reaction:
"Really?”
“No, but the poor girl has been smoking."
"What a naive ideal!"
"I'm not Buddha”
"What is she talking about?”
The real external recognition you will get from your ecosystem will only be a hollow one. It’s good news. Let me elaborate.
You may remember a time when a colleague proudly explained a sustainable solution to you ... that you had spent months trying to get him to pay attention to. You probably had to bite your tongue to keep from jumping in his face. Well, what you thought was an affront was, in fact, a proof of recognition. It was proof of your legitimacy, not your insignificance.
Your goal is for your transformation project to be fully accepted by your ecosystem, isn't it? It is because a change becomes a new norm that it is successful. As a result, the behaviors and thoughts that make you look strange today will be "business as usual" tomorrow. Everyone will embody the desired change. But by then you will also have become like everyone else.
Your banality, your invisibility, will be your success. It is because your words have become useless because they have become redundant with the behaviors around you, that you have succeeded. The more your interlocutors are active in demonstrating that they too are super active in favor of the environment, society, shared governance, or new forms of management, the more you will be able to gloat. The change will take shape outside you. It will overtake you.
Your mission is to disappear and for the change to remain visible.
Activate towards change
When sharing such a vision with my relatives, peers, employees, managers, and clients, I often perceived a relief in their eyes.
Here are some ways people related to this approach:
“It makes me think of my role as a mother. I am here to enable my kid to not need me anymore.”
“A long time ago, I was involved in a change management project in favor of simplifying the access to health services for my country. I spent hours trying to persuade doctors to buy into a process that would reduce their administrative workload and increase their availability to patients. Last week, I benefited from this process and realized this has become the norm. I don’t care whether or not my name is mentioned. I am proud to see the positive impact for the health practitioners and patients.”
“Our big boss came back on our goal to eventually disappear as a result of the new sustainability and purposeful norms. He loves and spreads this vision. This is motivating” .
"I am proud to see that this event is a success without me. This movement is bigger than me".
Some may still be doubtful. I understand. I myself have often wondered whether I was in serious denial of reality.
Until the day I realized that my mission was to create the conditions for sustainable change, not to change all business models and practices by myself. My mission was to inspire, support, and challenge engaged professionals to create a collective commitment, so as to activate a systemic change in a given context.
Today, after 10 years of experimentation, I know that this is my place and that it is worthwhile. I will tell you more about my approach to creating these conditions and ways to proudly disappear.
Tool
What matters now, is to help you skip years of self-doubts in shifting your view of success. Here are some questions to help you define your ambition:
What stage of your transformation project would let you know it is time for you to disappear with pride?
What would you have created at your level? What legacy would you leave behind?
How would you feel about your contribution?
How does your view of external recognition change when considering that your success can be measured by your ability to slowly fade into the background?
Now, what is the first thing you need to do to move towards that kind of success?
Quote
“The greatness of a man is that he is a bridge and not an end”
Call to action
As a changemaker, if this message stimulates your thoughts about viewing your success in a different way, please like and share it with people around you and subscribe to be notified of new articles.
Hello everyone, I am Nina cambadélis, a coach and facilitator, specializing in sustainability and organizational transformation. I am also a corporate changemaker in charge of deploying my company’s purpose at the heart of the business.
What I like to do through my activities is to inspire professionals to rethink the business and make them proud to contribute, in their own way, to a more sustainable, human, and nature-friendly world.
If you wish to be supported to:
Become the changemaker you want for the world you expect
Find and assert your leadership or promote the emergence of new leadership styles
Integrate sustainability, purpose-driven initiatives at the heart of your organization
Accelerate your ecosystem's engagement to create systemic change
Make an impact while preserving energy and well-being
Here is a link to an exploration call and a form to further elaborate on your ambition and challenges: English