TraCert: Where Champions don't hide™
Bill Holler · CEO, TraCert OÜ
I chose this line, and I owe you an explanation of it, because it can be read as a boast and that is not what I meant.
Hidden champion is a phrase for companies. I use it for people. Every organisation I have worked in carried ability it had never asked about, the colleague who could have run the training, the engineer who wrote better than the writers, the new starter whose CV somebody read too quickly.
Nobody hides on purpose. They are simply unlooked-for. So the line under our name is not a description of TraCert. It is a promise about how we intend to behave: we go looking.
The champion is a person
Companies do not have abilities. People do, and they lend them to a company for the length of a working life.
The phrase was invented for firms: world-class, market-leading, unknown to the public. Fair enough, we work with a good number of them. But nothing a company is good at happens without someone in it being good at it first.
I have spent most of my working life in aerospace standards, in committees and working groups across Europe. In all that time I never once met a capability that did not have a name and a face behind it. The organisation gets the credit; a person did the work.
That is why I am not interested in the modesty reading of hidden champion. Being noticed is not vanity. It is how ability gets used. A talent nobody knows about never gets asked, never gets stretched, and eventually stops offering.
Who we go looking for
Starting closest to home, because a claim that only points at customers is advertising.
Ability rarely fits the job description
We hire someone for a role and then find out what else they brought with them. So we ask early, and keep asking: what are you good at that this job does not use? Where the answer is useful, we build the job around it.
Titles here have changed because a person grew, not because an org chart moved. A company of our size cannot afford to leave an ability idle once it has already hired it, and nobody should spend forty years doing less than they are capable of. At the end of each year I ask myself one question about our team: did these people get bigger jobs, or just older ones?
We measure ourselves by what your people can do after we leave
Our contracts name systems and service levels, but the work is always with people: the editor learning a new authoring tool, the standards officer defending a deadline, the administrator who inherited a platform they never chose.
Making them productive is the order. Making them expert is the point. The best result we can achieve is that someone in your organisation becomes the person their colleagues go to, and no longer needs to call us to answer the question. I would rather leave a champion behind than a dependency.
Credit is not a scarce resource
Our systems exist because developers, standards bodies, working-group members and long-standing partners built them alongside us. When the work is good, we say who did it, by name. I insist on that.
Anonymity is a cheap way to lose excellent people. Nobody stays where their best work disappears into somebody else's logo.
Champions seldom arrive labelled
The people who have moved this company forward did not all come with the expected background: a different country, a different industry, a language learned late, an age at one end or the other of what our industry considers normal. I started this company myself at an age when most people are handing things over, so I have a personal stake in the argument that ability does not expire.
Our field is conservative about pedigree. We have gained by not being. It is also why our emblem shows people from behind, shoulder to shoulder, facing the horizon rather than the camera, you cannot identify a champion by looking at them.
A champion nobody has noticed is just a colleague with an unused talent.
Our software keeps records, standards, approvals, revisions, certificates. The motive is the same one. A record is how a person's work outlives the meeting it was made in. When an archive becomes a graveyard, it is not really the documents that get buried; it is the effort, the judgement, and the name of whoever got it right. We build systems that keep work attached to the people who did it.
More than
The four sentences I use to decide when something is finished.
- More thanthe job descriptionWe hired a person, not a function.
- More thanthe deliverableThe order describes the task, not what your team could become.
- More thanthe requirementA standard is a minimum, written down.
- More thanthe CV saidThe interesting part was never on it.
Champions don't hide. Mostly, they wait to be asked.
If you are one, or you have one sitting quietly in your team, I would like to hear from you. My inbox is open, no agency, no form, no ticket number.
Bill HollerFounder & Chief Executive Officer, TraCert OÜ
