Don’t Expect Easy-My Top 15 Suggestions for Coping as a Professional
Filed under: Developing Yourself, Leadership & Career, Leadership Tip of the Day
“Easy” is not a term that should be on your mind, except when it comes to improving the experience for your customers. Outside of making life easier for your customers, there are few circumstances where “easy” shows up or where you are justified in expecting things to go that way.
If you’re at the early stage of your career, the transition from home to school to job is an interesting one. If you are a recent graduate, chance are that you’ve already discovered that things aren’t so easy in this economy as you pound the pavement looking for a job. While this awkward phase will pass in time, your immersion in the workforce will underscore why “easy” is a foreign term.
And of course, if you’ve been around the block a few times, you’ve already discovered that “easy” is rare indeed.
Things That Are Most Definitely Not Easy in Business:
- Working for a difficult boss
- Becoming a boss
- Becoming a good boss
- Finding great people
- Hiring the right people
- Undoing the process of hiring the wrong people
- Competing in the market
- Competing internally
- Leading without authority
- Creating a new strategy
- Implementing a new strategy
- Getting others to follow
- Following
- Making mistakes
- Learning from mistakes
- Developing as a senior contributor
- Switching jobs
- Switching careers
- Continuing your education
- Reinventing yourself
- Balancing life and work
Guidance-My Top 15 Suggestions for Coping with “Not Easy”
- I’ve known a few people that seemed to have a free-pass through life’s difficulties, but for the rest of us, here are my suggestions and words of encouragement:
- Attitude is everything. Make certain that yours stays positive about the challenges in front of you.
- There is no substitute for hard work. Keep pushing the rock.
- Success is in the details. Don’t be a 70-percenter. Learn to finish.
- It’s all about learning. Mistakes are your best teachers, just don’t make the same ones over and over again.
- As my former boss would say, “Man plans and god laughs.” Interpret that to mean that things mostly don’t go as you expect them to.
- Hope is a crappy strategy. See also the note on hard work.
- You’ll make mistakes. Don’t wallow for more than a few minutes. Then shrug your shoulders and move on to your next challenge.
- There are no guarantees. There are no guarantees of how long any of us will be here, much less guarantees of employment and advancement.
- You’ll have to work for everything you get. Get over it.
- Fear is the mind-killer. I love that quote from Frank Herbert. Don’t let fear rule your life.
- Measure-twice and cut once. An extra emphasis on quality will serve you well.
- Compensation is nice. Ultimately enough is enough. It’s a hollow goal to just chase the money.
- The joy is in the journey, not the destination.
- Touch people in the right way during your journey. You go through this once. Make it count.
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Notes from Art:
-Don’t miss the latest issue of the Management Excellence Newsletter. Register at Building Better Leaders or Management Excellence (far right column)
-Just announced: The Management Excellence Book Series, with episode #1 featuring an interview with Bob Sutton, author of Good Boss, Bad Boss.
How Not to Build a Better Leader!
Filed under: Developing Others, Developing Yourself, Leadership & Career
I had a great conversation the other day with a talented twenty-something who just exudes confidence, competence and excitement about her career and her interest in professional development. Her reviews are top flight, she has been managing a major client account to great results, and she is actively pursuing her M.B.A. degree. This is one motivated young professional!
It’s too bad that her biggest dilemma is, “My job is fine, but I’m starting to get bored. I want some bigger challenges and I want to lead, and they keep telling me that they are working on a program for that. They also tell me that they are worried that any new projects will distract me from my main job. But I have the time and energy to do more.”
First, let’s tackle the program issue. A program for what? A program to figure out how to give an aggressive, capable person more responsibility? A program to magically teach someone how to lead, when there are ample opportunities to begin learning in the workplace every day?
You don’t need a stinking program to sit down with your team members and talk about next steps and then work together to define some good developmental challenges. You as manager and leader must be interested in ensuring that people are challenged, learning and growing. There’s no HR program in the world that replaces your responsibility to spend time challenging and coaching your team members. You own this responsibility.
As a manager and developer of early career talent, here’s a newsflash. Leadership and talent development is free. Your only cost is time and maybe a bit of creativity.
I like to apply Ram Charan’s “Apprenticeship” approach, where you as the manager are responsible for providing your employee with a series of increasingly ambiguous challenges. Over time as the individual confronts the challenges, they are gaining valuable and relatively risk-free experience learning to cope with the realities of more responsibility. (Note: I guide participants through one of these programs in my course: Considering the Move to Leadership-What to Expect and How to Prepare.)
Often, the outcome of this program is that individuals begin to zero in on what they truly want to do next…manage others, manage projects or focus on developing their skills as an individual contributor. Without the apprenticeship program to uncover interests and identify strengths and weaknesses, everyone is left guessing.
As for my conversation partner, I encouraged her to take the initiative to outline her own rough career plan and next general steps (she wants to lead) and then sit down with her managers and share this plan and ask for their help. She of course is responsible for convincing them that she is capable of executing here current role without missing a beat, and I encouraged her to position herself as someone both interested in contributing more and solving more problems as well as someone that welcomes coaching.
She will learn a lot about her managers if they continue to push her off, and she will learn a lot about herself if they appropriately support her. Either way, it’s worth politely pushing the issue.
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