Management and Career Miscellany on the Lighter Side
Really Bad Career Advice:
A friend embarking on a next-step job search initiated a conversation with the recruiter she had used for hiring purposes for several years. While most of the conversation was spent listening to how horrible his business was, he finally listened to my friend’s next steps plan and offered up this priceless advice. “You may just have to face up to the fact that your career is over.”
My friend is an experienced, passionate leader with impeccable credentials, current certifications, great management experience and technical skills in a hot industry.
The recruiter must have been talking to himself.
Project Management Success-It’s the People, Stupid!
The most complex part of project management is not mastering the tools or the Project Management Body of Knowledge. It’s all about leading people.
Organizations interested in improving project performance are well-served to improve selection, coaching and mentoring and yes, even training so that their project managers develop critical experience in dealing with the most complex of all projects…the human participant.
Speaking of Project Management-Regarding the PMP Certification Exam:
“It’s the most god-awful test I’ve ever taken.” -Master degreed nurse and operations executive on her recent, successful certification.
More than a few have indicated that this increasingly important certification is a test of your ability to take a test. Hmmmm.
Read Somewhere-A Great Idea for Improving Your Decision-Making Effectiveness:
Attributed to the late, great Peter Drucker, his suggestion was to develop the habit of writing down and filing your rationale for a major decision and then reviewing this document six to nine months down the road to find out how wrong you were.
I love this idea for the learning opportunity as well as for the expected shock value of, What was I thinking?!”
Social Networking-Everyone’s Shouting, But is Anyone Listening?
Spend a few minutes observing a twitter-stream and you’ll notice that interaction has all but disappeared in the noise of people shouting about something. It’s like 20 million people on a street corner all hawking a newspaper with a different headline at the same time.
Here’s to creating more high quality conversations and interactions….likely off Twitter and on something old-fashioned, like a telephone.
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Mid-Career Professional-It's Time to Push Out of Your Technology Comfort Zone
It’s easy to step out of sync with the modern world and find yourself lost in a sea of terms, tools and technologies that are foreign and even intimidating.
I’m working with more and more mid-life individuals interested in reinventing themselves in new careers, and I’m finding that a fair number of them are wholly unaware of or just plain frightened of the ever-increasing array of tools and media for networking, communicating, learning and collaborating.
I empathize with these individuals a great deal. If you’ve been laboring somewhere in mid-management for the past few years and you’ve become accustomed to the tools of your job, chances are you’ve not been pushed to understand and embrace the new methods for connecting and communicating.
You’re to be excused for the moment if you find Twitter silly. After all, who wants to know what you’ve had for dinner. And what’s the big deal with blogging? I hear you when you are quick to indicate that no one cares what you have to say. And why would you share your Rolodex of contacts with the world on something like LinkedIn?
Yes, I empathize with you, and now you must get to work!
WAKE UP!
In this most competitive of all environments, it is easy to become technology road kill somewhere on your journey to oblivion. Everything about this world is different now as compared to when you graduated college. If your degree date doesn’t have a 2 as the first digit, chances are you are technologically obsolete.
While I am by no means a technology whiz kid, as a 48 year-old professional, I’ve forced myself to learn a host of technologies that I now incorporate in my practice everyday. Two years ago, I wondered what blogging was all about, and I’ve been thrilled to reach thousands daily at my Management Excellence blog.
Two years ago I wondered how anyone could have a good education experience in an on-line setting. I’ve now taught on-line courses at the MBA and undergraduate levels and recently launched this site and business, Building Better Leaders, to offer on-line professional skills development blended with personalized mentoring.
I’ve met some of the greatest professionals of my career via blogging and twitter, and I’ve learned that the old world of marketing along with old style marketers now belong to the ages.
If I can manage a good part of my professional life from my iPhone and engage thousands daily via a variety of social networking tools, you can certainly bring your skills and knowledge up to speed.
Some Guidance on Joining the Modern Era
- Find some favorite blogs and discover RSS and feed readers. Don’t know where to look for a blog? Visit Alltop.com and Guy Kawasaki will help you.
- Got something to say? Sign up for a free wordpress or blogger blog and experiment.
- Get a twitter account, but don’t sign up and then do nothing. You have to build a profile, seek out people that share your interests and engage them in discussion. I know people that signed up and then gave up because nothing happened. Of course, they didn’t put anything into making something happen and the outcome was predictable.
- Build a professional profile on LinkedIn and help past colleagues and customers find you. Learn how to use the power of LinkedIn for professional networking and brand building. Again, you have to provide input to get output.
- Sign up for an on-line course and learn how to use the tools of a Learning Management System and the benefits of adding the vast resources of the web in real time to the learning experience.
- Sign up for a Building Better Leaders course and discover the power of on-line learning plus professional mentoring! (Shameless plug, but it’s true!)
- Buy and use a PDA or mobile phone with the ability to access the internet and to take advantage of applications. Hint: they’re not just phones anymore. They are pocket computers.
- Buy a Mac and discover how enjoyable and powerful and stress free the digital experience truly is.
The Bottom Line for Now
If you are fearful, take baby steps on the above and build your confidence. Beware of the potential for the wrong technical activities to suck you into the black hole where time moves on but you don’t. Focus on gaining new skills to help advance your education, build your brand or network your way into a new job. And in the process, you’ll enjoy almost catching up to your kids!
A Friday Time Out to Say Thank You
I’m way overdue to provide some thanks to a number of great people and organizations that I’ve worked with or that have supported me over this past year, and the deep freeze here in Chicago is no excuse for delaying this post any longer. Nor is the fact that I’m horribly behind on holiday shopping (the economy is waiting!), not to mention that my wife and brother both have birthdays within 6 days of Christmas. (Parents, in the future, better planning please!)
I turned up the heat a bit, refilled my coffee cup and pried myself away from this week’s all consuming collaboration on my next Building Better Leaders program (mentoring plus distance education) entitled Leadership and the Technical Professional, and here are just a few of Thank You’s that I would like to extend.
My Thanks!
-Thank you to the editors at SmartBrief for including a number of my posts in their great bulletins during the past week and over the past year. I particularly enjoyed contributing to their 2009 Leadership Review and was in some great company with Wally Bock (Three Star Leadership), Dan McCarthy (Great Leadership) and others. If you don’t subscribe to one of their many bulletins, you are missing out on an outstanding opportunity to stay informed and gain access to great content.
-Speaking of Wally, I am thankful for his great support and for his frequent inclusion of my posts in his great feature, “Midweek Look at the Independent Business Blogs. The best part of the inclusion is that he puts me in good company with some of my favorite business bloggers.
-We have a great resource in my county called the Shah Center for Corporate Training, affiliated with our community college. This organization, its Director and team do an outstanding job bringing all manner of professional training to businesses and non-profits all year long. I was honored to write the cover article for the Q1 2010 issue of their publication, CATALYST, and noticed the other evening that it had published. My article is perhaps timely given the state of our economy, and I encourage you check out the pdf version of “Rethink, Renew and Recover,” as well as take a look at the expanse of what this great organization provides to our community. They are certainly a model to learn from.
-My recent collaboration partners, Chris Colbert, Joe Zurawski as well as the team at DigiSage (web development/hosting) have all been in overdrive helping on various projects, including the Building Better Leaders launch. Joe and I will launch the new technical leadership program in early January, and Chris is working evenings to help out. The DigisSage team never sleeps.
-Thanks to one of my favorite bloggers, Mary Jo Asmus of Aspire Collaborative Services for collaborating with me on two, “Two Voices” posts.I’ve rarely worked with anyone as creative and frankly as fun to work with as Mary Jo and I look forward to more opportunities for us to pool our thoughts. Of course, her pool of thoughts is much deeper than mine, so I am the beneficiary in this arrangement.
-Thank you to my Twitter and all of my blog readers. Who would have imagined that the world of social networking would lead to so many amazing and productive new relationships! I’m working with a dozen or so great professionals and organizations that I’ve met through blogging or on Twitter and look forward to some great new ventures in the upcoming year.
-Thank you to the great professionals, deans and department chairs at DePaul, The Illinois Institute of Technology and McHenry County College that have invited me to participate in serving their students and communities as a management and leadership educator. Thanks as well to my students! The secret here is that when I’m teaching, I’m learning. The pleasure is all mine.
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Saying “Thank You” is always in style, and all too often, we let the pace of life get in the way of these two simple but important words. For anyone reading, please accept my sincere thanks. Now it’s time for you to pay it forward.
Twitter and Social Networking: Job Search Power Tools or Time Killers?
Filed under: Career, Life and Business, Marketing, Marketing Yourself, Professional Growth, Social Commentary, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
One of the best lessons that I’ve learned from working on about two million fix-it and improvement projects with my Dad is to match the right tool to the job at hand. This is particularly true in searching for a job, which can be one of the more vexing projects for many people.
Fortunately, there are a number of interesting new power tools available in the form of social networking platforms, to help today’s job seeker. However, unlike the tools in the picture, there are few guidelines on how and where to to use these tools to good effect.
Sidebar 1: Most of us probably know more than a few great people looking for work, and hopefully, you are providing your help and support in the form of networking contacts and moral and morale support.
Sidebar 2: A friend indicated that she now knows what it might feel like to suddenly be the person that no one is comfortable interacting with anymore. It seems her friends have responded to her lingering unemployment by doing what many people do when someone gets sick or suffers a personal loss…they disappear. Please don’t do that.
OK, back on topic. One of the issues that I make it a point to always ask my job searching colleagues about is their social networking strategy. I’m both curious how people are using the tools and whether they are finding them helpful or distracting. The feedback is mixed and interesting.
My informally captured, non-scientific research findings indicate the following about the use of social networking tools in the job search:
- Use and enthusiasm for social networking seems to vary by age and experience, with younger job seekers comfortable leveraging a broader swath of the social media spectrum than the more experienced (translated: older) professionals. No surprise here.
- LinkedIn is the most common tool that senior managers opt for initially. Again, no surprise.
- The minority of people that I’ve spoken with are Twitter users, and the perceptions of what Twitter is/can do are all over the map. Again, not surprisingly, there’s a great deal of ignorance about Twitter and a fair amount of cynicism. It usually goes something like, “I don’t know how telling people what I had for breakfast will help me find a job.” That’s certainly one point I agree with…, there’s no chance that telling people what you had for breakfast is correlated with landing a job!
On the positive side, I’m also hearing some interesting ideas and uses of the various media coming from some of the more adventurous job seekers.
The tone/theme of this feedback is: I don’t expect social networking to replace the hard work of researching, live networking and effective marketing and selling, but it is a valuable supplement and source of ideas, leads and contacts.
That’s a good, well-grounded perspective.
Some of the best uses that I’ve heard are (paraphrased):
- Targeting: I target the firms that I’m interested in working for, then I leverage the social media platforms to learn as much as I can about the company and the people. I’ve openly shared with people that I’m interested in their company and have received some great insights and suggestions.
- Culture Assessment: I look at how involved a company and its employees are in social media as one indicator of culture. I don’t want to work for a firm that is restrictive or paranoid.
- Pure Networking: I use the tools to meet people and learn about exciting new firms.
- Research: I use the tools to find people writing about or offering advice for job seekers.
- Power Research: I use the research capabilities of Tweetdeck (an application to help organize your twitter world) to search on key terms and find firms and people talking about things related to the type of work that I do.
- Introductions: Several times I’ve asked for help from my LinkedIn colleagues for an introduction to a contact of a contact, and they’ve come through for me every time.
- Rest, Relaxation and Rejuvenation: Social networking is my life-saving coffee break. I let myself jump into the conversations twice a day for about 15 minutes each time, and I come out rejuvenated. I meet great people and we exchange ideas and then I get back to work.
The Bottom Line for Now:
My two-cents suggests that it’s critical to use all of the tools available in securing a new opportunity. Social Networking may not hold the easy answer, but it certainly can be part of finding the answer. Savvy job seekers recognize the information and research power of social networking and are leveraging these new power tools to help get the job done.
Friday Fare and Summer Shorts
Filed under: Career, Life and Business, Marketing, Social Commentary, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
The summer days are growing noticeably shorter here in the middle of the U.S., and while it seems remarkably early, both of our sons will be off at college within the next week. Since it was just yesterday that I was in college, this new empty nest phase is a little hard to digest. I’ll have to live vicariously through our sons!
Fresh off of the coldest July since AD 85 here in the Chicago-area, the weather is finally warming a bit and I’m breaking out the Summer Shorts for this Friday Fare post here at Management Excellence. (Since my wife didn’t get it either, this means that today’s post is going to include brief snippets instead of my usual lengthy essays. Get it…summer shorts! Hey, I thought it was a cute play on words.)
Here goes:
Help! I Think My Phone Bill is the Source of Funding for the Economic Recovery!
I’m still reeling from the eye-popping bill that showed up after we deftly moved all of our wireless phones under one carrier and merged it with our home line and internet to save money.
It seems that when you do this, you encounter some form of time warp that requires you to change billing cycles, pro-rate your plans and pay in one bill something like 2.5x what the normal monthly billing will be once this time warp passes. The AT&T rep gave it the old college try, but he could not adequately explain this near four-figure bill. I’ve had to hire an accounting firm to help audit the 4-pound stack of paper that comprises my bill.
For anyone like me that loves to hate big cable/phone/internet/wireless providers, you might find my rant: “The Insane and Confusing Battle for the Pipe Into Your Home” cathartic.
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Social Networking and the Average 40 or 50 Something Job Seeker
In spite of the fact that people that blog and tweet think that everyone understands blogging and tweeting and obscure terms like RSS and social networking, I’ve come to the conclusion that the majority of people are still clueless. They know the words and make funny comments about Twits that Tweet, but many are wholly uninformed about how these tools can be used to build visibility, promote a business or help find a job.
I increasingly find myself as an evangelist for these various tools…offering some explanation as to what they are and how they can help. While they are not silver bullets for any business or personal problem, the new tools are remarkably powerful and inexpensive ways to promote yourself, establish yourself as a thought-leader or expert and to make some great contacts. I’m thinking of putting on an on-line seminar series to help the growing legions of talented but unemployed learn to leverage the tools. Might be a nice public service.
Some Short-Shorts:
-Clunkers anyone? Anyone wonder what a “clunker” is and whether your car qualifies? I’m still looking at this program with eyes crossed and brow furrowed. It feels a lot like the jolt you get from ingesting a sugary drink or dessert.
-Small Biz Marketing: Like social networking, I mistakenly assume that everyone is familiar with John Jantsch’s great book, website and products under the Duct Tape Marketing label. I’ve run into a few people recently that have not heard of John or the book. It’s time to remedy that. If you are running your own business, Duct Tape Marketing is a must read and John’s site is full of remarkable ideas and resources.
Want to double your marketing pleasure? Pick up David Meerman Scott’s “The New Rules of Marketing and PR,” and you’ll be glad that you read both together.
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OK, that’s enough of the Shorts for one Friday. Have a great weekend and I’ll be back early next week with my regularly scheduled content, starting with some more Leadership Caffeine!
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