Leadership Caffeine at Information Management and New Newsletter Resource
Filed under: Career, Leadership Caffeine, Management Education
Leadership Caffeine Syndicated at Information Management
As of February 1, 2012, the good folks at Information Management are kindly syndicating selected posts from my blog at their resource rich website: info-mgmt.com under my name and the Leadership Caffeine label.
I am excited about this for a number of reasons:
- Jim Ericson and the team are top flight professionals, and I truly appreciate their interest in extending their already rich and deep coverage of information technology to the leadership and strategic topics so critical for success.
- I have a long history (and some great friends) in the technology space, and it is fantastic to have an opportunity to connect in this forum and continue the dialogue on growing great careers and great businesses.
- I work frequently with some remarkable technical professionals. They are driven, creative, strategic, and almost to a person, passionate about their work in advancing their organizations. I’ve also discovered that many are incredibly hungry for insights into developing as leaders, navigating the challenges and politics of the corporate world and increasing their contributions to their firms as strategists and senior contributors. The opportunity to support their efforts is truly an honor.
Please visit Information Management and checking out the remarkable resources and even more remarkable host of featured bloggers. I’m honored to be in their company.
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Leadership Caffeine e-Newsletter Launches
After drifting a bit from the newsletter, and thanks to the prodding from clients and other fans of the blog, The Leadership Caffeine Newsletter is now in full production. Issue #1 was launched last week, with features on: Strengthening the Leader’s Self-Esteem, Ideas to Stimulate the Leader’s Learning & Self-Development, my Suggested Reading Resources and some perspectives on what I term Critical-Path Career Development.
The content is laser focused on supporting professional development, and is geared for leaders of all experience levels and individual contributors seeking to grow as professionals. The latest content is available for newsletter registrants only. Expect a one to two times per month frequency. And please be assured that your e-mail information is private and never to be shared. You can register at my site (right column) or by following the link below. (Note: I will forward Issue #1 to new Registrants in a follow-on e-mail over the next few days.)
I look forward to serving you with this new and professional development focused resource!
The Heavy Lifting of Career (Re) Invention-5 Keys to Moving Forward
Filed under: Career, Life and Business, Marketing Yourself, Professional Growth
Whether you are a few years removed from college or a few years removed from that time when prior generations began thinking about retiring, chances are, you or someone you know is involved in defining or redefining their career.
It’s a daunting task in a world where the old rules no longer apply. For those just starting on their career journeys, many have sprinted out of college only to run face-first into the brick wall that is the job market in so many sectors and markets. For this group, career development has turned out to involve a lot more work than just graduating.
For those of us with a few more laps around the block to our credit, the future doesn’t quite look like what we expected. The book on career management has a new chapter that many of our parents never experienced. It’s called, “Reinvention,” and it’s really daunting.
Regardless of where you fit on the chronological scale, there are at least five key issues that I encourage you to wrap your arms and mind around. Like much of the invention or reinvention process, tackling these items is challenging, uncomfortable, and critically important.
At Least Five Keys for Career (Re) Invention:
1. Aligning Your Values, Purpose and Goals around a Vision.
While your tendency may be to roll your eyes at the fluffy and abstract discussion of personal vision and values, the reality is that you do have a set of operating instructions (your core values) and there is a purpose that drives all of us. Sometimes we ignore that purpose (often for decades), but it is there and aligning values and purpose around some big, exciting and challenging goals is an important part of the process. It’s awkward and difficult and squishy to grasp but when you focus in on a vision for yourself, it’s transformational.
For some help here, check out Ed Batista’s outstanding post, “Developing Your Professional Vision,” and Jesse Lyn Stoner’s (with Ken Blanchard) excellent book, Full Steam Ahead.
2. Cultivating Your Confidence and Self-Esteem.
Confidence is critical for fueling invention or transformation. Without it, we just dream. With it, we take actions to build towards our dreams.
I’ve long believed the biggest barrier to individual success is self-confidence. Recognize this issue as human, get over any stigma attached to it, and seek coaching, help and guidance on developing the inner-strength to tackle problems and issues that seem foreboding and practically impossible. A good coach is priceless here. My post, “9 Ideas for Strengthening Your Self-Esteem” is a starting point.
3. Strengthening Your Professional Presence.
A critical part of the confidence issue is the ability to project this confidence and to engage as an articulate, intelligent professional. Those who lack confidence AND who lack the ability present themselves as confident, knowledgeable and interesting human beings are relegated to bit roles in their own careers.
From your posture to your eye-contact to your smile to your eyes to your ability to listen and importantly, your use of your vocabulary and your ability to articulate your thoughts, it’s all on display and it’s all being judged. Solicit feedback from trusted sources, engage a speaking coach and take deliberate action to match the vision. One of my favorite books on this topic: Seeing Yourself as Others Do, offers some great guidance.
4. Planning to Act…Creating a Strategic Plan for Your Career.
Pardon the lofty sounding label, but you cannot operationalize a vision…you can’t put into play unless you’ve created a roadmap complete with those items on the critical path that are essential for success.
Armed with a vision, you need to set clear goals and define those very clear actions and milestones required for success. My favorite definition of strategy: “integrated actions in pursuit of competitive advantage,” reminds me of the need to coordinate my activities, measure my results and adjust accordingly. Put pen to paper. The act of planning forces you to think through what it takes to succeed. And then engage. You can update the plan along the way.
5. Building Your Professional Brand.
There’s never been a better time to build and form and frame your professional brand…to build yourself as a thought-leader than now. The tools are there, they are mostly free and they are truly powerful. Sadly, just about everyone I know who is struggling with the career issue is failing to leverage these tools in the proper manner to position themselves as thought-leaders, as exciting and relevant professionals and as people worth listening to and investing in.
The person I pay attention to on this topic is Dr. Bret Simmons writing at Positive Organizational Behavior. Bret is a champion of the topic of building your professional brand…particularly when it comes to leveraging the power of social media to do this.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Whether you are building, rebuilding or transforming your career, the work described above is some of the sticky, dirty, roll-up-your sleeves hard work that builds towards success. There’s no silver bullet, no convenient short-cut and no getting away from the heavy lifting.
Are You Running in Place When it Comes to Your Professional Development?
Unlike the resolutions that so many of us make in January and discard just as quickly by February, our own professional development requires a deliberate and consistent effort to improve.
While most people in our organizations run in place when it comes to their own skills and knowledge development, a few committed souls manage to fight the gravitational pull of doing-nothing and break-away from the pack.
Is this your year to break-away?
Professional Development Success Stories to Motivate & Inspire:
Here are just a few of the examples I encountered in my work last year. They are to be commended for their efforts and results. Names changed for privacy purposes.
- Julie set her sights on moving into a front-line leadership role last year and was just promoted. Along the way, she took on every possible assignment she could glom on to that taught her what it took to lead. Not only did she prove to herself she was cut out for the role, she proved it to the people she worked with and importantly, she proved it to the person who had to select her for success…her boss.
- Mark had long struggled mightily with self-esteem issues in spite of his stellar performance. With guidance, coaching and a lot of effort on his part, he’s become more comfortable with himself, and his excellent performance is now matched with an appropriate level of self-confidence.
- Susan was given a battlefield promotion into what seemed like a no-win situation with the project from you-know-where. She inherited a demoralized and burned-out team and cost-overruns that would choke a good-sized horse. Six months later, after working unceasingly to lead and support this team and project back to health, the organization is looking to Susan and this groupas the model for how a high-performance team should function.
- Juan, consistently displayed great passion for his work, but was limited by his confidence…in part due to his struggles to master English. He did it…and his boss described to me that he could see Juan’s confidence and contributions grow overnight.
- A little over one year ago, Adam was told that he needed to develop more “executive presence” to break through to the next level. Armed with the world’s most ambiguous advice (“You need more executive presence”) he researched and worked to strengthen his presence, authenticity and yes, confidence. He got the promotion.
I love these stories…because their examples inspire us all. Will you write your own success story in the next year?
7 Quick Ideas to Help You Take That First Step Forward:
1. Call a personal time-out. Stare in the mirror for a few minutes and think about where you are going professionally and if you are comfortable with your vector, pace and progress. You know if you are running in place. You also know in your heart of hearts when it doesn’t suit you.
2. Ask Questions About You. While uncomfortable, you will be well served to find someone or some small group in the workplace and ask them what they think of your professional performance and areas for development and your visible strengths. Fair warning…not all feedback is created equal, so you need a few perspectives before you decide where to focus.
3. Mine the Performance Feedback on Your Reviews. While there’s not enough space here for me to pick apart most review processes, I’m a fan of mining them for nuggets of truth or at least clues to the truth.
4. Start Small and Build. You’ll be tempted to tackle the Ironman of professional development and “fix” yourself all at once. Resist this temptation…it’s a formula for failure. You’re better off running a 5K. Identify one thing to get better at…and develop a strategy for doing just that. Remember, if you improve 1% per day… , well, you do the math. The outcome will be impressive. Expand your areas of emphasis once you score some victories and build confidence.
5. Read Widely and Read Mostly from Outside the Business Genre. Regardless of my role as a management and leadership author, you’re much better suited reading about people who have overcome adversity and accomplished great things in the process. Histories and biographies are great! (Although, my Leadership Caffeine book, makes a nice mid-day energy boost!)
6. Get Away from the Naysayers. You are better off reorienting your workplace relationships to those who like you are striving and moving forward. Don’t let the “Run in Place” crowd hold you back.
7. Celebrate the Victories, No Matter How Small. Give yourself a psychological break or reward. When you’ve scored a point, moved the bar a bit, overcome a historic weakness or fear, celebrate for a few moments. And then get back to it.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Remember, if you are running in place, you’re falling behind. Here’s to moving forward!
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Art Petty is a developer of leaders and a strategy consultant. Art frequently speaks on leadership and management, and his work is reflected in two books (Practical Lessons in Leadership and Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development) and over 1-million words published at The Management Excellence blog. You can reach Art via e-mail to learn more about his leadership development, speaking and management consulting services.
Thoughts on Your Personal and Professional Success in the New Year
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Leading the Generations, Management Education, Performance, Professional Growth
Hang out with really smart people and teams and some great lessons can’t help but rub off on you.
I was truly gifted in 2011 to gain access to and work with and support some remarkable professionals across a number of different market segments…from high tech to professional services to manufacturing, and I learned something with every engagement and encounter.
Here are Six Lessons Learned that Can Help Us All in the New Year:
1. It’s Critical to Think Deeply About Your Business: Strategy still counts. The strongest teams/firms I observed are the ones who took the time to step-back and evaluate their situation and rethink their futures. And then back all of that lofty thinking with action, learning and adaptation.
Call it what you want…I call it strategy work…and done right…asking and answering tough questions and then backing the ideas with key hypotheses and experiments is the corporate equivalent of a continuous fitness program.
2. Operational Myopia Guarantees Mediocrity (or worse): Conversely, the firms and teams mired in the muck struggled to get beyond the endless operational discussions and move towards the tough questions that help assess the current state and begin to identify options for the future. Yeah, everyone needs to make sales in the here and now. We all know that. Adding in the work of thinking about and adapting your business in pursuit of better serving customers, finding new customers, extending into larger growth areas or more attractive categories takes that extra level of discipline that separates the big winners from everyone else.
3. Leadership Counts. More than ever…and not just at the top. High performance firms have an unrelenting focus on developing people who can think critically, lead others to challenge convention and stimulate people to provide their best results. And given the past decade or so of leadership failures, people are quick to sniff out and mentally discard the disingenuous leaders. If you are leading others, you need to bring your “A” game, and the game isn’t about you…it’s about everyone else and what you can do for them!
4. Behold The Rise of the Integrator Leader: individual contributors who embrace the role of integrator…bringing together disparate groups and resources to solve problems are the future formal leaders in organizations. We are all well served to view our own roles through the filter of the new integrator leader. Build your network(s) internally and externally and learn to connect networks in pursuit of solving problems.
5. Diversity is a Strategic Asset to Build Competitive Advantage: While we predictably and annoyingly gravitate to those who act, think (and yes, look) like us, the true opportunity for greatness is in bringing together people of disparate backgrounds, ethnicities and ages and setting them loose to change something significant. The best leaders get this. The rest are still mired in the misguided thinking from another century.
6. If You’re Not Learning, You are Failing. Learning is more important than ever. The top performing professionals are learning everyday in the workplace (through experimentation), are pushing themselves personally to continue to grow in their respective fields, are filling classrooms and demanding more from an old and mostly broken educational system, and leveraging technology and unparalleled access to information to expand their thinking. There are no time-outs allowed when it comes to gaining and applying new knowledge.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The short form:
Strategy isn’t a four letter word. We all need to find ways to break out of the day-to-day crunch to assess and learn and plan. Leadership skills are more critical than ever…and the best and most powerful leaders might not have people reporting to them. Diversity isn’t just an H.R. initiative, and if you aren’t learning every single day, you’re moving backwards at an accelerating pace.
May 2012 be a year of learning, growth and professional success.
Leadership Caffeine-Surviving and Thriving Under the Tough Empathy Leader
Filed under: Career, Leadership Caffeine, Professional Growth
If you work for a leader who practices what Goffee and Jones described in their HBR classic, “Why Should Anyone Be Led by You,” as Tough Empathy, you can expect to be on edge a good deal.
Respond well to this demanding but respectful leader’s style, and instead of teetering precariously on the bleeding edge of survival, you will be reaching constantly for the high performance edge. Read this leader incorrectly however, and you might be setting yourself up for a miserable experience.
There’s nothing group huggish and puppy dog warm about working for a leader who practices Tough Empathy. In contrast to a good deal of the leadership and management literature you run across, not every effective or inspirational leader is going to be good at small talk, show an intense interest in your outside activities or dress up in costumes and lead the charge around the building firing up the troops. Often, their behaviors and their demeanor may be quite the opposite.
However, don’t confuse slightly aloof or highly intellectual with someone who doesn’t care intensely about your development and how your work impacts the team. Goffee and Jones viewed this style in a large number of highly successful “inspirational” leaders, and their definition of Tough Empathy, “giving people what they need, not what they want,” underscores the approach.
Four Things You Shouldn’t Expect from Tough Empathy Leaders:
1. Small talk or even a modicum of interest in your personal life.
2. Warmth.
3. Much that feels like praise.
4. “How to.”
Six Career Changing Behaviors You Can Expect from a Tough Empathy Leader:
1. Respect, including a deep, unspoken concern for you as a developing professional.
2. A hefty helping of constructive feedback without the bread (positive praise) that surrounds most feedback sandwiches.
3. The next challenge…and the next…and the next.
4. High performance expectations and an attitude that serves to constantly remind you that you can do better.
5. Extreme questioning. The questions teach you how to think.
6. Freedom to pursue your activities subject to frequent challenges on your approach or direction. Don’t expect the Tough Empathy Leader to micro-manage you, but do expect a lot of questions and challenges about your direction with assignments. The challenges are simply to assess how well you’ve thought through the situation at hand.
Five Success Skills Required When Working for a Tough Empathy Leader:
1. Change your expectations on the level of “warmth” you need from you boss. As the saying goes, “If you want unconditional love, get a dog.”
2. Learn to welcome the questions and challenges. Your gut reaction might be to feel that you are being second-guessed. Your gut is wrong. The questions and challenges are teaching and evaluation tools used liberally by Tough Empathy leaders.
3. Never wait to be told what to do. Don’t hesitate to dive in to your assignments once you’ve clarified objectives and expectations. You’re being evaluated on the quality of your questions as well.
4. Skip the excuses. The best way to piss off a Tough Empathy Leader is to attempt to explain poor performance with lame excuses. Or, any excuses. Remember, this leader eats and breathes “accountability” and expects you to do the same. There’s room for a screw-up for the right reasons (striving, experimenting, pushing the performance edge), however, offer anything that resembles an excuse and expect to be professionally (and privately) eviscerated.
5. Judge your progress by your assignments. Don’t expect praise as a barometer of how you are doing. Look for praise in the form of your next challenging assignment. The Tough Empathy Leader votes with his/her continued investment in pushing you forward.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
We should all be so fortunate to work for a leader who cares enough to push us to be our absolute best. While the approach may not fit your preferred style, if you find yourself working for one of these characters, be smart enough to recognize the situation and to seize the opportunity to learn and grow.
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About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Art’s second book, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, will be published in September of 2011.
Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement.
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