Dolly Parton Built More Than a Career

When Dolly Parton died in August, much of the attention understandably focused on her music, personality and generosity.

There was also another part of her life worth examining: Dolly Parton was an exceptional businessperson.

She built a career that lasted seven decades. But she also built businesses, created jobs, established a foundation, launched a literacy program that eventually reached children around the world, and continued developing new projects late into her life.

It would be easy to explain that success by pointing to her work ethic.

That explanation is incomplete.

Hard Work Has Limits

Individual effort matters. So do talent, persistence and judgment.

But there is a point at which one person's effort cannot produce significantly more output. There are only so many hours available, only so many decisions one person can make and only so much work one person can personally complete.

Dolly Parton's career expanded well beyond what one person could execute.

Dollywood opened in 1986 and became part of a group of businesses that created jobs and economic activity in East Tennessee. The Dollywood Foundation followed in 1988. Dolly Parton's Imagination Library began in her home county in 1995 and eventually distributed hundreds of millions of books to children.

Those results required more than Dolly Parton working harder.

They required other people, resources and systems capable of carrying out the work.

That's where Shared Capacity becomes important.

Shared Capacity Changes What Is Possible

Shared Capacity is one of the six JL³ Performance Levers. It looks at whether enough people, time and organizational resources are available to meet the demands of the work.

When capacity is inadequate, even highly capable people eventually reach a limit.

When capacity is intentionally built, the organization can accomplish work that no individual could sustain alone.

One detail released by Parton's team after her death illustrates this particularly well. Her longtime manager said she had spent years working with a handpicked team to create a roadmap for projects that could continue after her death.

That is not simply hard work.

It is capacity planning.

She wasn't only completing work herself. She was creating the conditions for other people to continue it.

Priorities Matter Too

There is another performance condition visible in Parton's career: Mindset Alignment.

Mindset Alignment examines whether people understand what matters, where organizational priorities are focused and whether decisions about people, time and money support those priorities.

Parton's businesses changed substantially over seven decades, but several priorities remained remarkably consistent.

Her connection to East Tennessee showed up in Dollywood and other businesses that created employment in the region. Her concern about literacy, influenced by her father's inability to read and write, eventually became the Imagination Library. Her interest in helping children and families appeared repeatedly in her philanthropic work.

The individual projects were different.

The priorities behind many of them were consistent.

That matters in organizations because employees notice where leaders actually put resources. A stated priority becomes much more credible when staffing, funding and leadership attention consistently support it.

The Lesson Isn't to Work Like Dolly

There will be plenty of lessons drawn from Dolly Parton's work ethic. She clearly worked hard.

But telling employees to work harder is rarely a useful performance strategy.

A better question for leaders is whether they have created conditions that allow capable people to turn effort into results.

Do important priorities receive enough people, time and resources?

Can the work continue when one highly capable person isn't available?

Do employees know which priorities should guide decisions when demands compete?

Are leaders building capacity, or are a few dependable people carrying more and more of the work?

Dolly Parton's accomplishments were extraordinary. Her career also provides a useful reminder for much more ordinary workplaces.

Individual capability matters.

What an organization builds around that capability matters too.

Look at the Conditions Behind Your Team's Performance

When a team isn't producing the results you expect, the problem isn't always effort, motivation or individual capability.

The JL³ Performance Pulse™ helps leaders look beyond the visible performance problem and examine the workplace conditions that may be contributing to it.

Take the JL³ Performance Pulse™ to identify which conditions may be making performance easier or harder for your team.