The Heavy Lifting of Career (Re) Invention-5 Keys to Moving Forward
Filed under: Career, 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.
Make Meaning as a Leader
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leading Change, Performance
Guy Kawasaki’s “Make Meaning” encouragement for entrepreneurs described in his book, The Art of the Start, and here by Guy himself in this brief video clip, has always resonated with me as a rallying cry for leaders hoping in their own way to make a difference.
Kawasaki suggests that the most successful start-ups aren’t preoccupied on making money, but rather they are focused on changing the world in some unique way…fundamentally on making the world a better place. While he describes his belief as perhaps naïve and romantic, in my opinion, the most successful firms and leaders incorporate a hefty dose of big dreaming as rocket fuel for their efforts.
Dream big and the nature of work changes to the art and thrill of creation. Fail to identify a dream to chase and work becomes a series of endless tasks without meaning.
The best leaders that I know are driven by an internal belief and desire to create something good and significant through their leadership efforts. They are egotistical enough to understand that they want to pursue greatness in some terms, and they are humble enough to know that none of this is about them, but rather it is for and with and by others that this something can be achieved.
They also are confident enough to recognize that the big dream might just be in the mind of a soft-spoken team member or in the collective consciousness of a team that has long wrestled with serving customers. Their job is not fundamentally to create the dream, but rather to extract and form it and make it tangible. Their job is to give meaning to a dream.
Kawasaki offers three suggestions for “making meaning” on a societal scale as an entrepreneur:
- Increase the quality of life
- Right a wrong
- Prevent the end of something good
While the scale may shrink a bit depending upon your leadership view, you will be well served to operate with a “make meaning” mindset and to help your team frame and chase a dream. The alternative is that all of this is just work.
The Seven Critical Conversations of Great Firms and Great Leaders
Filed under: Leadership, Leading Change, Performance, Strategy
You learn a great deal about an organization’s current state, near-term prospects and about the health and effectiveness of a firm’s leaders by looking for and listening to the quality of the conversations in the working environment.
Visit and spend time with the people inside an organization that is climbing, growing, reaching and striving for new heights, and you observe that the conversations take on a consistent, high-energy, action focused tone. You also observe and hear constructive and even passionate debate around topics that other organizations and individuals would lack the courage to raise.
Switch sites and visit a struggling organization and you get the impression that the more that people flail, the faster the organization will disappear into the economic quicksand. The conversations, if there are any are stilted, leadership edicts are dictatorial and the person-to-person dialogue is fueled by fear and buffeted by rumor.
I see this constantly in my practice and I’ve observed it consistently over decades of private industry experience. The best firms and the best leaders hone in the right topics and teach their teams and organizations how to talk openly and comfortably about those topics. Easy words, but no small feat when you take into account the common barriers to open dialogue of politics, siloization and the seemingly endless supply of people that have no business being in leadership roles.
The Seven Critical Conversations:
There are at least Seven Critical Conversations that I observe taking place over and over again in organizations that that are either successful or improving. These same conversations are often nowhere to be found except perhaps behind the closed doors of a firm’s leaders in less successful firms or organizations that are struggling and sinking.
1. Vision. Great firms make this often lofty and meaningless agglomeration of words under glass come alive and permeate the culture of a firm. The “V” word instead of being consultant or MBA-speak is the source of energy for humans. It defines a goal, a championship; a destination that once arrived at will be a great accomplishment. Great visions…those that resonate are visions that inspire and challenge and motivate and help individuals and teams rationalize putting their hearts and souls into an enterprise.
2. Strategy as an “All Hands on Deck” Action Statement!
While Vision creates context for the goal, strategy defines how we are going to get there. The books written on this topic fill entire shelves and many are brilliant in describing the tools and techniques, but most in my opinion miss the point.
Great, growing and successful firms leverage the tools of strategy to promote the right conversations across and up and down the organization. I’ve observed that the most vibrant of firms find ways to get everyone involved in strategy. At a bare minimum, the firm’s leaders ensure that everyone can connect their goals to the core strategies—the Walk In the Door test.
However, the real gold in creating the organization-wide strategy dialogue is in capturing the ideas that flow from so many parts of the organization that see ways to improve the customer experience and add important context to ideas and certainly how to translate ideas into actions and then provide feedback on the results and ideas for improvement. It’s a beautiful cycle of ideas execution, learning and adaptation.
3. What Are the Leading Indicators?
The gross majority of firms measure and report on history, with little ability to look forward. The best firms get people involved inconstantly seeking to identify, hone and build processes around early and leading indicators.
A simple example is sales pipeline, yet that measure is often so isolated, convoluted and unreliable as to be nearly meaningless. Alternatively, firms that connect their lead system to their sales pipeline (much like a lead to sales refinery) and work hard to develop an increasingly reliable set of metrics that quantify changes and outputs, are a bit closer to having a reliable leading indicator. This is just one of many leading indicators that can be developed across functions that will tell you a lot sooner how things are going versus waiting for the quarterly financials, which are truly interesting but irrelevant for the future.
4. What is the Customer Really Saying?
Good firms ensure that customer-facing associates have systems to collect and communicate feedback. Great firms ensure that there are people immersed in their customer’s environments, listening and observing and looking for the real problems.
A customer may complain about a particular product or request a certain feature, because their context for you is your product and your features. However, the right observation might uncover that your product and the feature is relatively insignificant compared to other unresolved problems that new products or services from your firm might well address.
5. How Am I Doing?
Like a championship sports team where the athletes and coaches are constantly critiqued and critiquing, feedback must flow quickly, honestly and with expectations of accountability.
None of us are great judges of our own performance although we have a gut feeling as to whether we are in the ball game or not. Great cultures create an open feedback culture that requires the tough discussions to take place up and down and across the organization.
Easy words, but when was the last time you gave your boss or your peer in another department robust feedback? And then saw them do something with it?
6. What’s Next for Me?
All of the above conversations are critical to creating a healthy work environment, but at the end of the day, we make very personal decisions on where and why we work and how hard we work.
The most successful leaders and teams ensure that there is a constant dialogue flowing about next career steps and that this dialogue is backed by actions.
Charan’s “Apprenticeship” model is a perfect metaphor for a vibrant development approach, except that Charan focuses it on finding the next CEO and I want to use it to test, assess and support the development of the people on my team or in my department. As a leader, there is nothing nobler, more appropriate or more valuable that you can do for a person than help them grow and develop. Some people resist that support, but most will be thankful to you for a lifetime.
7. What did we do that made a difference?
This last conversation is a bit controversial even in my mind, but it strikes me as important to build a strong culture on layers and layers of achievements that give credence to what we can accomplish.
Firms that don’t talk about past successes and individual and team heroics feel to me like soul-less, heartless structures, whereas environments where the stories and heroes of the past are celebrated and used as models for the future seem so much more alive. This topic invites “Mission” into the discussion and shows how the collective and individual efforts lived up to “the reason for being” of the firm. I don’t want to dwell on the past, but our history is a powerful teacher and guiding force for our future.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Long post and to me a fairly meaty topic. I would love your input, including your suggestions on whether I am on the mark or off the mark (in your opinion) on my set of “7” for the critical conversations. Passionate discourse encouraged!
The Drive to Create—Rocket Fuel for Entrepreneurs
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Professional Growth
I sat and talked yesterday with a uniquely impressive entrepreneur. She is not yet successful, and in fact she is barely two weeks young in her new adventure. If I was asked to handicap her chances of success, the odds would be very good.
I’ve known this professional for a number of years and it’s always been clear that she would move out from underneath her position as an employee and go off on her own. It was just a matter of time.
The time happened recently as the work environment became untenable not only for my friend, but for a number of the other talented members on her team. Bad Boss syndrome came home to roost as cutbacks and new policies were implemented that both destroyed internal morale and damaged the customer experience.
My friend and her team took matters into their own hands, and in a mere few weeks in their new service business, schedules are filled, business is good and the air in their shop is filled with the excitement of something new being created.
As we chatted about the experience, I asked my friend some of the vexing questions that trip up so many big organization executives.
- What’s your vision for your practice?
- What do you want people to associate your business with?
- What’s unique about your practice?
- 5 years from now, when you look back, what will you have accomplished?
- Why did your team follow and what makes them tick in this venture?
She fielded the questions effortlessly and offered simple but powerful answers that stopped me in my tracks. I’m not used to hearing answers to these questions without them being couched in business-speak and filled with lofty, mission-statement sounding answers that are like sugar-free frosting on a wedding cake.
Her answers focused on creating opportunities for employees, working with customers that the team loves and finding ways to contribute to the community. The answers came from the heart, were offered without hesitation and were backed by specific ideas.
There was also an underlying theme that the fuel propelling the team was the ability to do something truly unique in building a business. I sensed a burning desire on the part of my friend and her colleagues to create their own great organization, and to provide opportunities for those interested in working hard to pursue them. The talk on the floor was all about creation and avoiding the mistakes of former bad bosses and building for the future.
Money was not singled out as a driver. However, when I inquired about the “M” issue, she looked at me and indicated that they were already profitable and exceeding their best expectations in just two weeks.
The drive to create is powerful and while the pilot burns in the background for many, for the few that dare to jump in, the power to create is what fires the rocket.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Is your pilot burning? What do you want to create? What will push you to move from ideas to actions?
“It’s Simple” and The Six C’s that Enable High Performance
Filed under: "To Do" List, Management Innovation, Performance, Professional Growth
Earlier in my career at one of the world’s great companies, Panasonic, I worked for a gentleman that taught me a valuable lesson about business and about leading that I carry with me to this day.
We had embarked on some ambitious new product development and growth plans and were struggling with a fair number of uncharacteristic but vexing software quality problems. I would from time to time sit down with the group manager, a man that I’ll call Sam, and I would painstakingly describe the problems I was seeing in advancing our business.
Sam was a good listener and he would nod his head, stare out the window deep in thought and when I was finished, he would sit back in his chair and close his eyes…in obvious contemplation of the very challenges that I had just outlined (or so I thought).
After a few minutes of silence…and I was sure the silence was needed to let his great brain process on the issues, he would leap out his chair, smile at me and say, “But Art-san, the solution is simple.” And with that, he would walk away, usually at a brisk pace.
I only had to experience this situation twice in order to appreciate the two deep lessons that I had learned from these encounters.
First, I learned that it was a complete waste of time to bounce these problems off of Sam!
And second, I realized that he was right. We tend to take complicated situations and look for complicated solutions when most of the answers are pretty clear. They may not be easy to implement, but they are usually clear. Indirectly, Sam had given me a valuable lesson in Management by Occam’s Razor!
The 6 C’s: Your Leadership and Performance Power Tools
The same lesson goes for leading. While there are no silver bullets for becoming an effective leader, there are in my opinion Six Power Tools that a leader can use to improve his or her effectiveness and drive performance excellence.
1. Context: people do their best work when they can link their efforts and contributions to a bigger cause. Ensure that your team understands your firm’s core strategies; leverage the power of a clear vision to provide high-level context and constantly involve everyone in providing input back into strategy. And don’t forget to feed people’s hunger for results and progress updates.
2. Connection: related to context, study after study shows the important human need to be connected and to feel valued and appreciated. As a leader, pay attention to your people; empathize with their issues and give them the respect of asking for their input and listening to their concerns. You will promote strong performance if you establish a personal connection with your team members.
3. Credibility: people and teams do their best work for leaders that they respect. My own research indicates that many leaders shoot themselves in one or both feet by not backing words with actions, by not treating people with respect and by not paying attention. Treat every encounter as an opportunity for you to strengthen your credibility.
4. Conditions: your principal job is to create the environment for your people to succeed. It’s as simple as surrounding yourself with great individuals and then working unceasingly to do everything possible to ensure their success. Focus on creating a high performance environment where values are clear, feedback is constant, goals are meaningful and accountability is the de facto expectation for and from every member.
5. Customer Connection: it doesn’t matter whether our customer is internal or external, we do our best work when we are armed with a clear understanding of how our efforts will enable our customers to succeed.
6. Communication: master the art of feedback—this is your most powerful communication and performance tool. Maintain a Questions to Comments ratio that helps you understand at a deep level, and when it is time for you to be understood, provide context and link your communications to vision, strategy and customer.
As another career mentor once indicated to me in a slightly awkward but nonetheless meaningful phrase, “You will be as successful as you are able to communicate.”
The Bottom-Line:
So, you are concerned about high performance and improving as a leader.
It’s simple.
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