Knowledge Is Free > What Took You Here, Won’t Take You There

I was once talking to Telkom’s former HR Director and also a founder of one of the biggest Indonesia’s online HR practitioners community. He was mentioning that human resources practice today is merely all about leveraging people’s capability yet forgetting how to de-leverage (diminishing to be exact) the pre-existing mental blocks that might slow down the overall leveraging process. I was confused, so I asked him “Why should we diminish one’s capability when he still capable of moving forward by leveraging him/her with new capability? Wouldn’t be that a waste of time and money?”

He replied “That is correct in a narrower perspective, but completely different on the other end. When we started to move upward the ladder, we most of the time still thinking with the same paradigm of the lower ladder. We are urged to have higher degree of knowledge and behaviors on that new position, yet we fail to let go of what we have learnt so much in the past, and in the end, we start doing new things with the old way.”

He added “What took you here, won’t take you there… It is an inevitable fact that your past achievement brings you to your current position, say from staff level to supervisor level, It was your past that took you here, but it won’t take you higher if you don’t let go of what you’ve earned so far. What will make you step forward are the new capabilities as supervisor. It’s not only applicable to the vertical movement (promotion for example) but also to the lateral movement (e.g. specialty shift). If you were a Change Management expert shifting to become an HR Strategist, it requires transformation of your mindset to achieve the new goals.”

He make an example of one of his subordinate who were promoted from payroll admin to become an HR head department. Instead of trying to be a generalist to manage his HR team as a new responsibilities, he still focus on the payroll side which he excel at. And duly the fact, he was demoted back to his previous position.

We know that knowledge is valuable, but it will work best for what it was meant, not for something else. It doesn’t mean that we have to forget it, we just can’t use it for different case. And if we don’t try to step it aside for a while, we might fail to learn new things. What took you here, certainly won’t take you there…