Mid-Career Professional-It’s Time to Push Out of Your Technology Comfort Zone
Filed under: Developing Key Skills, Developing Yourself
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!
What the Boss Hears When You’re Talking and Why It Might Hinder Your Career
Filed under: Developing Key Skills, Developing Yourself, Leadership & Career
I’m not quite certain if this post is a violation of the “Boss’s Code,” much like that masked man on television who blatantly betrays the Magician’s Code (and ruins our fun in the process) by showing us how magic tricks work. Nonetheless, here goes.
Every time you open your mouth around the boss, she learns something about you that may determine your fate, or at least your fate while you are working for her.
As people of experience, good managers listen for and hear things during conversations that have nothing to do with the conversation but everything to do with how they view and value you as a professional.
There, the secret is out! We’re carrying on two lines of thought when you engage us. We’re appropriately staying in the moment and attempting to support your inquiry, while we are processing on the following questions.
What the Manager Hears-Or At Least Is Listening For:
- How complete of a thinker is this person?
- How strong are his critical thinking skills?
- Are his ideas creative?
- Has he thought through the issue from all directions?
- Are the solutions innovative?
- Is he a systems thinker, taking into account the impact of the situation/solutions on other parts of our organization?
- Is he asking me to do his job for him?
- Is he pursuing a political agenda?
- Has he sought out the experts for help?
- Do I have confidence in this person?
- Is he as smart as I thought he was?
- Is this someone that can do more for us?
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I could keep going, but by now, hopefully, you get the idea.
Someone once asked me when I take the time to evaluate performance and my response was something to the effect of “During every conversation and in every meeting.”
I was pleased to see that I was in good company on this point when I read Jack Welch’s book, Winning, and noted the following in his first of 8 points describing what a leaders does:
“Leaders relentlessly upgrade their team, using every encounter as an opportunity to evaluate, coach and build self-confidence.”
The Bottom Line for Now
Challenge yourself to develop your critical thinking skills. Think about the questions above and make certain that you are adept in scaling from the big picture to the details and agile enough to circle the issues. We like “complete thinkers” that take every opportunity to solve even bigger problems for our organizations. In fact, we like to promote these people, provide them with more responsibility and even pay them more.
All of that from a simple conversation.
To Lead or Not to Lead? 7 Key Questions for Managers and Aspiring Leaders
At some point in your career, either as an individual looking at your career path, or as a manager supporting the development of his/her team members, you will be faced with a decision on whether a leadership role is a good next step.
Most first-time leaders end up in their roles more by mistake than design, through battlefield promotions where an opening showed up and someone deemed you appropriate to fill it. Unfortunately, the statistics on the failure of first-time leaders are sobering. Survey after survey indicates that over 50% of most first-time leaders wash out in this initial role; a batting average slightly worse than getting married!
As an individual responsible for your own career or as a manager responsible for the development of individuals on your team, why take the chance with such lousy odds, when you easily improve your success ratio by asking and answering seven simple questions?
Guidance:
As a manager supporting the identification and development of first-time leaders, or as an individual contributor looking at your next career steps, consideration of and investigation into the answers to these questions will help minimize mistakes.
The Seven Simple Questions for Ambitious Aspiring Leaders (from the book, Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro)
1. Why do you want to lead others?
2. Do you understand the true role of a leader?
3. Do you understand that the skills that made you successful as an individual contributor are not the same skills you will need to succeed as a leader?
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4. Are you prepared to give up your domain expertise as the foundation for your results?
5. Do you understand the skills and personality traits required for success as a leader?
6. Do you understand that you are responsible for the output of your team and that you will be accountable for this output?
7. Can you imagine what your workday life will be like as a leader?
The Bottom-Line for Now:
As an individual looking at your next career steps, you owe it to yourself to investigate answers to each of the seven questions above. Seek out experienced leaders to interview, request the opportunity to shadow your manager for a day, find a leadership mentor and take on some informal leadership tasks (projects) at work or in your community to gain experience and context for this role.
As a manager developing others, The Seven Simple Questions offer you a framework to define a set of activities in helping individuals discover the challenges and joys of leading. Use these questions and the inherent issues to define an apprenticeship type program and ensure that anyone promoted to a first-time leadership role has experience-based answers to these questions.
(Plug) And of course, for additional support, consider the very powerful, practical, affordable Building Better Leaders Course, Considering the Move to Leadership-How to Prepare and What to Expect, where distance learning plus personalized professional mentoring will help you discover what leadership is all about.
In this situation, some good due diligence on everyone’s part will help prevent critical career and managerial mistakes.
The Leader’s Journey from Fear to Self Confidence
Filed under: Decisions, Developing Key Skills, Developing Yourself, Leadership & Career
In spite of the popular myth of the fearless leader, it is my belief that a large number of leaders at all levels struggle with fear. Some work through their fears on the way to developing self-confidence and others battle it daily and resort to various coping strategies, including over-compensating with extreme aggression or extreme timidity.
Learning to positively and productively cope with fear is an important part of developing as a leader.
My observations on fear are just that…observations gained in the workplace and through my own mentoring activities. This is not a water-cooler topic of conversation, nor is it one that jumps to the top of the noble and lofty “leader as mythical being” found in the majority of leadership writings.
Fear is palpable for humans, and those placed in positions of responsibility for leading others share the same issues as the rest of the population. Showing fear and vulnerability in the workplace is perceived as something to be avoided at all costs for all employees, and doubly so for those in leadership roles. Nonetheless, it exists.
Common Fears of Leaders:
- Early career leaders are often giant bundles of unspoken fears where everything is foreign and guidance is often nowhere to be found. They perceive that they are responsible for everything yet they don’t know how to do anything.
- Many individuals worry that it will be discovered that they are actually bluffing their way through their days and they fear being outed as frauds either to their team members or their bosses. There are often two different groups for this one. There are the conscientious individuals that are learning on the job and that few would perceive as disingenuous. And then there are those that truly don’t get it and as a result, they adopt bluster and bravado as their best friends.
- Many leaders fear specific tasks such as delivering feedback, dealing with personal and team conflict, interacting with senior management or getting up in front of the entire company to provide an update. The common response to these issues is avoidance.
- Fear of losing power drives some leaders to engage in all manner of destructive or at least counter-productive activities in an attempt to strengthen their hold on their slice of the kingdom.
- Fear of making decisions is often driven by political fear or the fear of being visible as having been “wrong,” and the result is an unwillingness to take risks and make decisions.
I could go on, but I’m at risk of practicing psychology with a license here, so let’s move to some solutions and coping strategies. A quick note…for those of you reading this far and looking forward to me launching on the evil leaders, you’ll have to wait for another day. The suggestions below are focused on helping well-intentioned professionals and leaders learn to cope with, overcome or at least harness their fears for productive use.
4 Suggestions for Overcoming Common Fears:
1. Dealing with anxieties around “what to do?”
Accept the reality that one of the key challenges and opportunities of leading comes from dealing with ambiguity. On the one hand, there is often not a clear way forward, so you are on your own or at least on your own with your team members to figure it out. The good news is that no one else knows the absolute right answer for most situations, including your boss or the CEO. Seek out the best information given the circumstances, involve your team members in developing ideas and approaches and help everyone move forward. If you’ve made a mistake, work with the team and take corrective action based on the lessons learned.
2. Dealing with the anxiety of, “I’m not sure how to lead.”
Regardless of how your role as a leader came about, someone somewhere observed something in you beyond just a heartbeat, so quit worrying about how you got there and start focusing on learning the role. My guidance is to arm yourself with a good understanding of the role of a leader-there are ample sources at your fingertips that describe this, including my version of The Leader’s Charter. Know your role, align your priorities around helping, enabling and supporting your team members and don’t look back. While we are born with various attributes that might help or hinder our leadership skills, in my opinion, most leaders are made. The only way to learn to lead is by leading.
3. Overcoming fear of tasks-the feedback dilemma.
It’s widely understood that the ability to deliver constructive, behavioral focused feedback is one of the most important tools and activities of a leader. It’s ironic then that in surveys and workshops, this activity is consistently identified as a personal weakness. Why?
People fear negative reactions, they fear suddenly not being liked or respected, or they lack the self-confidence to politely assert on the behaviors and actions required for the mission. Ironically, employees on the other hand generally value respectful behavioral feedback and grow frustrated when they don’t receive it.
Overcoming the fear of delivering feedback or the fear of public speaking is best accomplished through a combination of study and practice. There are ample sources on learning the very logical and simple approaches to delivering feedback and dealing with conflict (plug: including the Building Better Leaders programs), so take the time to learn the processes and best and worst practices and then go out and put this knowledge to work. The directions to Carnegie Hall are still the same: practice, practice, practice.
4. Dealing with a fear of making decisions.
You will be wrong. Probably more often than you would like to consider. Now get over it. The only thing worse than making a wrong decision is holding your team hostage by never making a decision.
I encourage and mentor young leaders on simple decision-making and risk analysis models and like any of the skills-based fears, as you add some context and structure to your thinking and then practice the activity in live-fire settings, your confidence will quickly expand.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Facing up to fear as a leader is an important part of growing up and succeeding. Ultimately, you will need to develop the right balance of self-confidence tinged with fearlessness and wrapped in a bit of humility to succeed.
Teams smell and sense fear and that breeds uncertainty in the working environment. On the other hand, teams and individuals sense bluster and bravado and that is destructive as well.
Learn to confront your fears head on and seek out the tools and training necessary to hone your skills. Then, put this to work and recognize that no one expects you to be perfect…but everyone expects you learn, grow and improve and to help them do the same. As you overcome your fears, remember to pay it forward.
Develop the Courage to Lead by Pushing Out of Your Silo
Filed under: Developing Yourself, Leadership & Career
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in my career shuttling between departments and scaling silo walls, and now I find myself working with and mentoring individuals that do much the same.
Hey executives, haven’t we advanced at least a few steps beyond the work style and structure invented somewhere around the industrial revolution? Or is organizing in and hanging out in self-referencing professional or vocational groups a distinctly human issue?
Instead of attacking the root causes and managerial laziness and lack of leadership creativity that perpetuates siloism in so many organizations (a good post for my Management Excellence blog), let’s dispel some common myths about people in other roles in your organization and focus on why you should spend some time knocking holes in the silo walls.
Some Observations About Our Still Siloed Workplaces:
- Contrary to popular myth, the people in other departments are not evil, don’t desire to take over your function (in most cases), and have not recently taken any members of other functions captive as a means of placing demands on your function to step it up a bit. The reality is that most organizations are filled with good people, working hard and wondering whether their work is making a difference for anyone else.
- Another popular myth that there are “the idiots around us,” is perpetuated by the everyday street slang of your co-workers. The phrases usually sound something like this: “Those idiots in marketing…” or “The idiots in IT…” There are far fewer “idiots” than you might think and often this unfortunate labeling comes from a wholesale ignorance of the challenges and activities of those distant colleagues.
- While the world of projects and project management is increasingly the norm for how work gets done inside organizations, there is still too much “throwing it over the wall” versus good coordination and collaboration.
- No one organization or function is any more or less important than another, yet to listen to some of my favorite professionals in marketing, sales, IT or Engineering talk, you would rightly conclude that they missed that memo promoting equal importance across functions.
How You Can Make a Difference and Enhance Your Reputation and Career:
- First of all, chase away thoughts of functional self-importance, and don’t engage in the cross-group criticisms. Instead, seek out colleagues that you interact with in the various functions and spend some time getting to know them, their roles and their challenges. Where appropriate, share these insights with your direct colleagues.
- If cross-functional animosity is high, serve as the peacemaker and broker. The issues are often something trivial…process problems, lack of understanding or a breakdown in communications. Learn to seek the root causes of problems and help broker process and communications improvements.
- Manage projects to include shared goals, and rewards and to encourage collaboration. Even if you operate in a heavily matrixed environment, every project team has the opportunity to coalesce as a high performance team or to languish as a transactional entity. Support and help promote a culture of involvement, engagement and share lessons learned, draw from a wide audience to solve problems and celebrate victories.
The Bottom-Line for Now
You can make a difference in strengthening and improving the culture in your firm. Doing this often requires that you run alone instead of with the herd, and that takes some courage and fortitude. The reality is that if you stay true to your approach of brokering relationships and building bridges, you might just find yourself in charge of the herd.
The Leader’s Daily Reminder List
Filed under: Decisions, Developing Key Skills, Developing Others, Developing Yourself
The gravitational pull of New Year’s lists is almost too powerful to overlook. You can hardly take a stroll through the blogosphere right now without tripping over these lofty, noble goals intended to guide behavior and ensure that we end up new people by the end of next year.
New Year’s resolutions ebb and flow much like health club attendance, spiking in January and returning to normalcy sometime in February, when those that are dedicated to daily fitness are thankful for a bit more breathing and sweating room.
I expressed my opinion on the ineffectiveness of making annual resolutions in January in a recent Leadership Caffeine post entitled, “An Effective Leader’s Resolutions are Calendar Blind.”
Translation: good leaders work on improving their blocking and tackling every single day. My suggestion is for you to create a “Leader’s Reminder List” and reference it every morning over breakfast, or keep it in your car and briefcase and review it before you walk through the door into the office.
Nine Starter Suggestions for Your Daily Leader’s Reminder List:
- Remind yourself that it is your goal today to improve your performance as a leader.
- Walk in the door with a smile on your face and take the long way around to your office and personally greet the early risers.
- Control your own calendar and manage the time allocation to ensure a preponderance of time for observation, coaching and delivering feedback. Calendar misuse and abuse is a huge contributor to leadership ineffectiveness. Don’t let yourself be victimized by the tyranny of others scheduling your time into useless oblivion.
- Speaking of calendars, what can you do to simplify and minimize the administrative time demand that you are placing on the people that work for you? Help your team members find some calendar time—and teach them to use this time properly and watch productivity soar.
- Spend more time listening and asking questions every single day. Translation: talk less. Your artful use of questioning and your reduction in hot air time will also free up time for everyone involved and improve the performance environment on your team.
- Spend more time engaging with your boss and your peers. Again, emphasize questions that help to uncover performance issues, opportunities for goals alignment and opportunities for innovation. Be certain to share your insights from these conversations with your team members.
- Find ways to encourage constructive debate on the tough issues. Improve the quality and openness of your team’s culture, and you will improve performance.
- Teach the art of decision-making to your team. Of course, this assumes that you have a good decision-making process of your own and that you avoid snap decisions that end up being countermanded or that you actually make timely decisions instead of holding your team hostage. Work to foster the processes that facilitate team and individual decision-making.
- Respond to adversity with grace and turn the most difficult and disappointing of outcomes into opportunities to teach and improve.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
While you may very well have some long-range performance improvement goals, I encourage you to exercise your leadership muscle on a daily basis and improve one work-day and one workout at a time. Do this, and you will be a very different leader sooner instead of later.
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