This is a tough skill to master, but absolutely critical. This is figuring out the right balance between “inspecting” vs “expecting”. It’s knowing when you need to ask the questions, and when you don’t. It’s giving people enough latitude without micromanaging, but not so much latitude that you’re an absentee manager. Continue reading
So, assuming that you’re a good performer, and you’ve met your company’s requirements to be eligible for a mobility move, how does one go about figuring out what their next move should be?
Here’s a framework I suggest to people:
1. Assess yourself. Two categories of skills: capabilities and product/technical knowledge. Make a list of what you have in both these categories NOW. Capabilities are broad: people management skills, business requirements documenter, presentation skills. Product/technical is the deep detailed knowledge, like knowing a particular product. This is what you bring to the new job.
2. What do you love, what not so much? Write the elements down. If you don’t want to manage people, you need to write that down. This is what you want your future job to have.
3. Show your assessment to your manager and have a conversation to narrow down the options. If you don’t want to manage others, you’re not going to run a line. If you hate strategy, you’re not going to want to be in a planning function. The purpose of this is to narrow down all the options to the best few.
4. Once you’ve narrowed down the list of functions/areas, ask your manager for 3 names of people you can talk to. Often, the next move is about timing. You want to do your due diligence as well as make sure people have you in mind when an opening does come up.
5. When you interview for the role, there are 3 people you need to talk to: the hiring manager (but take it with a grain of salt since they’re selling you), your current manager (they probably know you the best, so their opinion is important), and someone who works for the hiring manager (“What are the 3 things you love about the job? What frustrates you?”) They’re most likely to be honest with you.
Lastly, be patient. It’s better to take longer to find the perfect next move, than move too fast and jump into the fire.
I use the term “optics” to describe when we don’t do something because of the way it looks. Not whether or not there’s a rule we’re in violation of. It goes above and beyond the written rules and is a higher standard.
There will never be a rule for everything. And situations change. But the ability to exercise good “optics” awareness is key in a career.
Good optics awareness requires you to ask yourself constantly, “Could this be construed negatively?” No one ever intentionally wants an optics problem. It’s almost always an unintended consequence.
It can be as big as auto makers flying on corporate jets while asking for a billion dollar bailout. It can be as small as a team going out for drinks three times a week, a manager appearing to favor one person over another, having a big party when the company just let people go. No rules were technically broken…but it probably shouldn’t have happened.
Optics matter. If you’re not sure, ask someone you trust. It’s a 30 second conversation that can save you a lot of damage control cleanup.
You can learn a lot through reading, school, on the job classes. But unless you couple it with experience, it’s like a free floating fact in your brain…interesting, but what do you do with it?
If you haven’t had the experiences yet, listen to your instincts.
A good friend who astonishes me in his ability to size people based on very little information explains his prowess this way:
“I grew up in a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn. So when a guy’s walking down the street towards you, you need to be able to size up pretty quickly whether or not he’s going to shake your hand, or knock you out. Are they a friend, or a hustler?”
Our ability to rationalize and over-think things often gets in the way of our instincts. When your instinct kicks in, listen.
At some point in your career, you might be asked to organize a planning session, 2 day offsite, something that a group of people will attend. You will be in charge of what they do for those 2 days. Having planned many, and attended many, here are my top 5 lessons learned.
1. Schedule the subjects and speakers in an order that makes sense. Think of it like organizing chapters in a book. If you’re going to have a discussion about strategy, make sure the key subjects are teed up ahead of time.
2. Schedule 30 minute breaks. 15 minutes turn into 30 minutes anyway. People need to return calls, read blackberry. If you don’t give them sufficient breaks, they’ll do it during the meeting. I always schedule a mid-morning, and a mid afternoon break and order snacks, coffee, water to keep the energy up. Sometimes it’s a working lunch, but they always get the breaks.
3. Be available to review decks and provide feedback, but don’t get too hung up on form over substance. Now some meetings, you won’t have a choice and will need to follow clear guidelines. But I like to let people reuse materials they may have already created. Be clear about deadlines, and let folks know: miss the deadline, you’re walking in with copies for everyone. Most people want to avoid showing folks that they were late. Don’t cut production time too close.
4. Make sure someone is keeping track of key questions, subjects, and follow ups. I keep notes during the session, and will type them up at the end of the day, and distribute them the next morning for comments from the team. It keeps the material fresh, the group focused, and makes it a lot easier to remember the takeaways post meeting.
5. Leave room for the unexpected. If it’s a large group, and a controversial topic, I’ll give the speakers 30 minutes, but I’ll schedule an extra 30 minutes for “buffer time” in the agenda. Nothing’s worse than having to cut off a great conversation because of time. I’ll also schedule a few “free-floating” topics which can be moved around if we go over.
The point of the offsite is to bring the group together to be updated and informed, but also to enable the group to make decisions in a short period of time. The best ones accomplish both.
TV shows always depict the workplace to be a place of general hilarity and fun.
So not true. A workplace is where you do work, it’s not where you play.
In my career, I’ve seen people play pranks, send emails, make a joke in the spirit of “being funny.” So here’s the biggest difference between work and personal: in your personal life, if someone thinks it’s not funny, they’ll just ignore you. When someone at work thinks it’s not funny, they can make a complaint or worse, or you can set off a chain of events which you did not intend. (BTW, I have never seen this end well, no matter how innocent the act was.)
Once there is a complaint, it will need to be investigated. And your intent will not matter: what will matter was whether or not the injured party was justified feeling the way they did. They will look at emails. They will look at text messages. They will interview other employees.
If it crosses your mind that “this might not be a good idea”, listen to your instincts and suppress the urge. Want to be funny? Poke fun at yourself.
It’s rare I hear anything really new in the way of advice (this is what happens when you’ve worked as long as I have). But I recently attended an event where a senior woman shared that this is what she tells her children, which I thought was very true.
“Find a good person and make your problem their problem.”
Very often, we’re afraid to ask for help, or we go to the wrong people. When you’re stuck with a problem, this is a great thing to keep in mind.
It’s easy to avoid antagonism, arguments, aggressive people. It’s much easier to conform and be politically correct. But if you want to learn, lead, and innovate, you have to be brave.
Being brave is always about two things: 1) speaking up and 2) taking the unpopular, but what you believe to be right position.
This is an interesting article by Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal, among other achievements. He talks about how great companies succeed, not by competing with each other, but by being so good at what they do, no one can provide a substitute. I think this is also how people succeed: not because they compete with each other, but because they are great at what they do, and because not many others do the work necessary to come close.
He also talks about the problem of conformity “We never really push the envelope; we never really ask the tough questions.” I love the last line of his article: “And remember, we live in a world in which courage is in far shorter supply than genius.”
So don’t let the moment pass by being silent. Speak up. Be brave.
I am a big believer in mobility because I like variability. In college, I liked the electives better than my core courses. I like the sides better than the main course. I like accessories better than the outfit.
A lot of people ask me about mobility: how I did it. It happened two ways for me.
1. Someone told me I was moving. Now at the time, I was often not happy about it. I felt like I had just gotten the hang of things, and they were moving me already? Looking back, those moves were the best opportunities of my career. I learned how to adapt to change, how to get the lay of the land quickly, how to assess people, and how to build relationships and teams. Every time I moved, I had to do all of these things all over again. So it was great practice because those skills are important in managing your career. Others saw in me potential I didn’t see in myself.
2. I raised my hand. There were times when I felt that I had “overstayed” my welcome. That the job was pretty much business-as-usual, and that there wasn’t anything that was going to surprise me. My gut would tell me it was time to move…to try something else, to challenge myself, and keep learning. In those situations, I would have a conversation with my manager about possible next steps.
Regardless of which way mobility happens, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:
1. Stay in your job long enough to have contributed. Jumping from one role to the next isn’t a sign of progress, it’s a sign of someone who’s chasing the next thing. And jumping for the money alone isn’t a good enough reason.
2. Be patient about your next move. Good moves take time (great jobs don’t tend to stay open long). Sometimes it’s about timing.
3. Don’t lose focus on the job you’re in today. You still have to perform. Don’t neglect your day job.
4. Educate yourself: talk to people in different roles. Ask them what they like about their job. Ask them what they don’t like. A peer is likely to be a lot more honest with you than a manager who’s selling you a role. I always spoke to someone who worked for the manager who was interviewing me.
5. Be picky. I have turned down roles I didn’t think were right. I’ve never looked back and thought : “Wow, I really should have taken that role.” I have thought: “Gee, I should have stayed longer.”
Out of all the lessons learned, I would put this one in my top 3.
Being a team player is not about lip service. It’s about truly believing that the power of a team will be better than the single contributor.
I have never, in my entire career, met someone who was so good that they did better than the team would do. So here’s some observations about what it takes to be a true team player, all learned when I played JV basketball in high school, which I loved. But was terrible at.
1. You communicate quickly to help those in trouble.
This means you don’t just watch people go over a cliff if you think they’re headed the wrong way. It means you figure out a way to help them, to pull them aside, to guide them. On the court, that means you yell at your teammates “Heads up!” so they know what’s going on. You are fast and loud, but for their best interest. Teammates don’t take it personally.
2. You go after a loose ball, even if it’s not your job.
One of the rules of basketball: you go after the ball. If it breaks loose, is headed out of bounds, you go after it if you’re the closest to it. You don’t argue whether or not it’s your job. When you’re on a team, if you see a ball that needs to be picked up, do it. You can argue position later.
3. You work with each other to get better, but you don’t ignore your skills either.
For basketball, that’s practice every day for hours. Individual training and team play practice. And scrimmages against each other. And of course, the games.
At work, it comes in the form of staff meetings, individual development plans, individual and team goals, and execution. Every day you’re going out on the court. How did you play today? How did your team do? You can’t win as an individual if your team loses. And your team can win, but not be helped by you.
4. You have coaches, you have captains, you have stars.
Their job is to win, and do what’s best for the team. You don’t get to pick if you want to be the coach, captain or star. The coach is the one held accountable for how the team does. The captain is elected by the team. And you’re a star if you are clearly the go-to person. You’re not always going to like how this plays out, but it is what it is. A lot of people want to be stars…but are you the go-to person? And don’t resent the stars: support them, and be glad for the lift they give the team. If you want to be a captain….did the team elect you? If you’re a coach, do you hold yourself accountable for the team’s performance, or do you look for excuses?
5. The team is bigger than just the players on the court.
Teams are big for a reason. When someone gets hurt or tired, the second string gets tapped and has to perform. Everyone matters. Don’t make the mistake of defining your team too narrowly (“My team is just who reports to me”). The more you exhibit teamwork across the biggest, most inclusive definition of team, the more successful you’ll be.
When you win, you savor the moment for a few hours. But you’re already onto the next game, the next challenge. Nothing promises that you’ll do it again next time. Just like work.