Tag Archives: diy executive development

July 13, 2012 · 5:10 pm

Trust me, damn it!

Demanding Trust Doesn’t Work

I once had a boss demand that I trust her again.  We can talk later about how I made the mistake of letting her know that I didn’t trust her (not a good career move, and no I didn’t TELL her that), but DEMANDING that someone trust you NEVER works.  If you have the kind of relationship where you’re demanding anything, it is a trust-less relationship.

Trust is hard to define.  I knew what she meant.  She wanted me to go back to being willing to do whatever she needed/wanted without doubting her intent or integrity.  She wanted our relationship to be based on mutual “confident expectation.”  I would have liked that too, but she had done something (that I felt was dishonest) that so violated my confidence in her integrity, that I no longer gave her the benefit of the doubt.  When I told her that I might be able to trust her again, but that it would take time, that was unsatisfactory to her.  At least it was all out in the open.  The consequences, however, were not pretty for either of us.

Since then, I’ve had the experience of people not trusting me.  Some didn’t trust me because I outranked them.  Some didn’t trust me because I was a different race, or age, or had a different nationality.  Trust is not an automatic gift, it has to be earned.  Not being trusted, however, is definitely not fun.

Trust MeYou CANNOT Be a Good Leader If They Don’t Trust You

Think about the people who you have trusted.  Have you trusted a boss?  A friend?  A stranger?  Someone from a different generation?  A pastor? A car dealer?  A banker? A lawyer?  See . . . all of these invoke different levels of trust reactions in you—and they are just labels.  What made you trust the people who you trust?  For most of us, it is consistent, persistent behaviors that we can predict and (for the most part) agree with.  It is rare that we trust someone instantly, although it happens.

Excellent leaders are trusted.  It is that trust that enables high performance teams.  All leadership gurus talk about the necessity of trust for great leadership.

So . . . How Do You Get Them To Trust You?

Want people to trust you?  Here are some important prerequisites:

  • Be trustworthy—Well, duh.  You’d be surprised, however, at how many managers bemoan the fact that no one trusts them while they are working secret agendas, regularly mislead co-workers, subordinates, and/or the community.
  • Trust others—It’s amazing how well this works!  The very experience of being trusted generates the willingness to trust in most of us.  When you trust people to do something they haven’t done before, or to speak in front of a group, or to represent you in a meeting with your boss, that makes them more willing to trust you to be telling the truth, to takes risks, or to move forward without all the details.
  • Be real.  Let people know who you are.  Let them understand your motivations.  If you are trying to do something and the motivation isn’t clear—people make it up.  If they trust you, they give you the benefit of the doubt.  Until they trust you, you are better off making your motives clear.  Even if they don’t like what you are doing, they learn to believe that there is nothing hidden.  It’s more important that people understand than that they agree.
  • Listen.  When people believe that you are listening, that you are trying to understand, they begin to trust you.  When you don’t listen, they stop trying to tell you.  When that happens, there is no trust.
  • Treat people with respect.  When people feel respected, they feel whole.  They feel more open to understanding and trusting.
  • Be loyal.  If people know that you are loyal to them, they are much more likely to be loyal to you.  Loyalty is closely related to trust.

These are simple things.  They are not easy to do.  When we are caught up in the day to day tasks of work life, it is hard to remember to do them all.  They are behaviors, though, with huge payoffs.  People who trust you can deliver miracles sometimes, because they are willing to go above and beyond and take the chance that it will be worthwhile.

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July 10, 2012 · 10:13 pm

Promoted to Manage Your Peers? Awkward.

Promoted to Manage Your PeersThey’ll Hate Me!

If you spend enough time climbing the corporate ladder, or if you work in a small organization, eventually you’ll be promoted to manage your peers.  This is one of the toughest developmental experiences there is.  It’s hard for you.  It’s hard for your peers.  It changes things forever.  It doesn’t have to change things in a bad way, though.  If you handle it right, you and they can grow from the experience.

I’ve known people who’ve turned down such a promotion because they don’t want to lose their friends.  This, of course, is an option.  It’s a short sighted one, in my opinion, though.   We’ll get to that.  First, let’s talk about how to handle it if you decide to take the promotion.

Get Your Head Straight

Remember:

  • Think of the best manager you ever had and act like him/her.  Don’t go into super boss mode.  Your peers will be super sensitive to any ‘power play’ and if you start making decisions without input, ordering people around, showing who’s in charge, then you will send off alarms that will be hard to turn off.
  • DO NOT go easy on everyone to keep friends.  First of all, it won’t work.  Second of all, you will fail as a manager.  Third of all, you will lose your subordinates’ respect.  Go back to the advice above:  think of the best manager you ever had and act like him/her.
  • Don’t assume that your friends among your peers will support you.  Don’t assume that your non-friends among your peers will sabotage  you.  You can’t count on anyone’s reaction to be as you expect.  Approach the situation as if you just got hired from the outside.  Look at each subordinate through fresh eyes.  What does s/he bring to the table?  What are his/her strengths?  How can you help him/her grow?  How can you form a real team from these folks?
  • Be trustworthy, and just as important, be trusting. Delegate things that you used to do.  Deal (in private) with the fact that others can’t do things as well as you did them–you didn’t do them as well when you started, either.   Never, ever use anything you know from you friendship to get someone to do something.  Give people the benefit of the doubt. DO  NOT play favorites.
  • Your job is to get results for the organization.  Your job is to understand your boss’ priorities and deliver them.  Your job is not to be ‘one of the gang.’  Do your job.
  • Your boss, your new peers and your subordinates will all be watching how you handle this new situation.

Now Learn From My Experience

  • There are people who will not like your promotion, although which ones might surprise you.  They will get over it (likely) or they will leave.  Either way, the problem won’t last long.  There are people who will not only accept your promotion (again, who these folks are may surprise you), but who will also help you succeed at delivering the results you need to deliver. Appreciate these folks.
  • Doing this right is hard.  You won’t be perfect at it.  All you can do is keep trying.  Treat people with respect and for the most part, they’ll appreciate it.  Everybody has to get used to the new normal of this.  It takes time.  Keep trying.  Act like (you should know where I’m going with this) the best manager you ever had.
  • I am friends, close friends, with people who have been my boss, people who have worked for me and with  people who have been both.  Friendship grows, changes, stalls, ends, and re-emerges (Facebook with anyone from high school lately?).  Work relationships affect friendship, but in and of itself, does not make or break friendship.  Take the promotion.

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July 5, 2012 · 10:49 pm

Become a Great Leader

Leaders and Leadership as a Process

Do You Want to Become a Great Leader?

How you think about leadership has a profound affect on your success in becoming a good leader.  We all have our individual idea of what a good leader is.  Then we assume that everyone thinks the same thing.  And that is what gets us into trouble.

There are three parts to this:

  • What do you think makes a good leader?
  • What is leadership?
  • How can you adjust to be a good leader for others?

What Do You Think Makes a Good Leader?

When you think of the best leaders you’ve ever experienced, what were their traits?  Were they organized?  Were they decisive?  Were they fair?  Were they nice? “In charge?” Inspirational? Ambitious?  Smart? Successful? Charismatic?  Make your list.

We idealize leaders.  We want them to be what we think a leader should be.  There is a bit of magical thinking about leaders—they are supposed to be what you want them to be, regardless of who they are or what their style is.

In the United States, we want our leaders to be out there in front—leading the charge.  That kind of leadership is considered  inappropriate behavior in some other cultures.   Leaders actually come in all shapes and sizes.  When you do the above exercise–asking what the traits of good leaders are–in a large group of people, they don’t agree.  Each has his/her own vision of what a leader should be.  This comes as a surprise to the people in the group, because we all assume that what we believe is a great leader is universal.  If you ask the group WHO have been great leaders, they generally agree on a (very) few–Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Lincoln, but can’t come to agreement on others–Jobs, Bush, Welsh, for instance.

So What is Leadership?

Leadership is more than just a person and who/what/how that person is.  It is results.  It is situational.  It is followers.  It is removing barriers for people.  It is connection. It is behavior.  It is communicating.  It is clarifying.  Leadership is the combination of all of these.  It is a process that combines all of these.

The leader is the instigator of this leadership process.  The leader is the instrument that stimulates and regulates the process.  The leader does not have to be a certain kind of person, but rather has to have the skills to manage this process and to integrate the elements of the process to achieve the results.

Now, rethink the people who you think are the best leaders in your experience.  How did they manage the elements of the leadership process?  Didn’t they do all of these steps well enough to get the results that the organization needed?

How can you adjust to be a good leader for others?

Reframe the way you think of leadership.  Think of it as a process instead of a particular way of being.  When you think of it this way, evaluate your ability to accomplish the skills of the leadership process.  How can you get better.  Depending on the results you need, the followers you have, the situation you are in, you need to remove barriers, communicate, clarify and adjust the integration of the leadership levers until you get results.  By thinking about it this way, it becomes a much more manageable task than if you have to have a personality transplant or develop charisma in order to be a great leader.

This view of leadership allows you to continue to ‘raise your game’ until you are a great leader.  Practice the skills that need development, hone the delivery of these tools, and learn to adjust to the situation and the followers.

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July 3, 2012 · 5:03 pm

Flip the Switch

Reframe by thinking differently

A Story

I’m going to tell you a story so that you can learn an important lesson without having to go through what I went through to learn it.  How’s that for a deal?  Then you’ll be able to do something that is incredibly easy and you won’t suffer through the lesson on how to do it.

A few years ago, I woke up to the news that there had been an ice storm and school was delayed by a couple of hours.  I was a single Mom and I did what most single Moms do when they learn they have a little extra time.   I decided to do something that I should have done and that I had been putting off.  I decided to go check on my empty house that I had for sale.  Now, why I thought it was a good idea to do that on icy roads, I don’t know, but I did.  As I drove across town to my house, my mind was full of all the things that I needed to do for work, things that wouldn’t happen because I was starting two hours late, and all the people who I  wouldn’t get to talk to because of the weather, etc.  You know how that is—work, work, work.

It was still dark outside when I arrived at the house.  I walked up on the porch and looked through the diamond window in the door.  I made my first discovery of this adventure—ice on the inside of the window.  Just so you know, that is a bad sign.  I opened the door and was astonished to find water pouring from the ceiling.  I reached over to turn on the light (bad idea, just so you know, when you’re standing in water).  The light didn’t come on, so I felt my way across the room and down the stairs to the basement where I felt my way along the wall to the water shut-off.  I came back upstairs and saw that the water had been turning to steam as it came through the ceiling (because the air was so much colder than the water) and then was forming ice on the walls and the floors.  The wind on an outside wall had apparently frozen the pipe, the pipe had burst, causing water to flow down to the basement and put out the furnace, which reduced the temperature in the house thereby freezing more pipes that then burst.  It was a mess!

What do you think happened to the thoughts of work?  Right.  Shoved aside.  Now I was thinking, OMG what do I do?  Is this insured?  How do I clean this mess up?  I called a plumber who came over.  He said, “Lady, we’re going to have to figure out what to do once we figure out if this house can be saved!”  SAVED?!  It’s a house!  It’s just water!

I spent the day dry vac’ing and mopping, calling insurance agents, and trying to get the mess cleaned up.  The house made the newspaper being described as “the ice house.”  (There was a spectacular ice flow that had made its way out the bricks and draped itself down the back wall of the house!)

The next morning was a Saturday.  Soccer practice and kid errands.  Before the kids got up, I decided to go check the house.   On my drive to the house, I was thinking about the house—how was it? What would happen?  What would happen to the floors?  The walls?  When I arrived at the house, I was relieved to see that the downpour had slowed to drip drip drips that were being caught by buckets.  The floors and walls looked ok (that was before I understood what happened to wood floors and paint when it dried out after a coating of ice).
I headed home much relieved.

I got out of the car and my feet slipped out from under me on the ice. The back of my head hit hard on the driveway.  As I was losing consciousness, I realized that I was going to be laying outside in way below freezing temperatures for potentially a long time (it was, after all, a Saturday morning and my house was full of teenagers—they wouldn’t even miss me for hours).  The neighbors would just think we left something in the driveway again and wouldn’t come to investigate.  I also realized that I couldn’t move—at all.  It really is true that all of these thoughts can happen very quickly.  I don’t think it was as much as a minute between the time my head hit the concrete and I lost consciousness.

Where do you think the thoughts of the house went?  Right.  Gone.  I was worried—in this order—about moving ever again and about living. I didn’t have a single thought about the house and work was so far removed that it probably wasn’t even in my brain anywhere.  I came to after a while—don’t know how long it was, but my fingers were frost bitten.  I could move when I came to and I crawled to the house and woke up a kid to take me to the hospital.  My brain didn’t work right for a while, but I learned a huge lesson.

And The Lesson

There is switch in your brain that you can flip. You can change your perspective on what is important, how you’re approaching a problem, how you think about things.  You can do it instantly.  Obviously it was forced on me.  But after I thought about it for a while, I experimented with it.  I would try to “flip the switch” about how I was approaching a problem.  Or a person.

I had a problem with my boss.  I “flipped the switch” and decided to think of her as a customer—customer is always right, right?  Once I started doing that, she didn’t get to me as much.  I started “flipping the switch” to look at problems from the other person’s perspective.  When I did it with work problems, it created more energy—it helped get me “unstuck.”

Try it.  Let me know how it works for you.

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July 1, 2012 · 8:47 pm

Is That Smoke Smell Your Burnout?

Are You Burned Out?

Burnout Burning From Both Ends

Here are the symptoms:

  • Everything looks bleak
  • You don’t even have enough energy to care
  • Your tolerance of other people is very low
  • You feel unappreciated
  • You feel like you’re going through the motions
  • It doesn’t seem like anything you do makes a difference
  • You’re tired all the time
  • You’re  accident prone/clumsy
  • You have low immunity and are getting lots of colds/illnesses

Burnout happens to everyone at one time or another.  Sometimes you can see it coming.  Usually burnout takes a while to develop.  Sometimes burnout catches you by surprise, when you didn’t notice it coming on.  It is caused by relentless stress.  This is not the same as too much stress.  You can have too much stress, too much work, too much responsibility and not be burned out.  Lots of overworked people still have a positive perspective and feel hope that the work will end/be done/get better.  Burned out people don’t.  “It’s always going to be this way.” “It will never get better.”

The things that cause your burnout are different than the things that cause mine. We’re all different.  If you need to be appreciated and you can’t get any appreciation, that can cause burnout.  If you need to be in control and the situation has you feeling completely without control (different from feeling out of control), that can cause burnout.  If you don’t get to take any time for yourself, and you need some quiet introspection or if you need to be creative and that is missing from your work–burnout.

So What Do You Do?

Curing your burnout is hard.  It is hard not because what you have to do is hard, but because it is hard to find the energy to do it.  So the first thing you do is acknowledge that you’re burned out.  Look at the list above.  Does that describe you?  If so, decide that you’re going to work on curing your burnout.  Think of it as a cold.  If you don’t take care of a cold, it can get worse.  If you don’t do something to stop throwing up when you’ve got the flu, you can get much worse.  The consequences of not fixing your burnout can be that you get stuck.  It can have serious consequences for your career, for your family and for your future.  So, even if you don’t feel like it–force yourself.  It’ll get better.

1)  Try to figure out what’s causing it.  Look at the list above.  Do you feel unappreciated?  Without control? Do you feel like you aren’t good enough?  Whatever it is, just recognize the issue.

2) Try to think of a way to “reframe” the situation.  Appreciate yourself — acknowledge why you deserve to be appreciated.  Know that you are always in control of the way you deal with a situation, even if you aren’t in control of the situation.  If failed perfection is your problem, understand that that is your standard–not others’.  Let up.  Spend the time and effort to try to figure out a way to think of the problem differently.

3)  Do something nice for yourself.  Several somethings.  Be your own best friend.  Go for a walk.  Go to a movie.  Take a Saturday just for doing anything you want.  Read a good book.  Get a massage.  Play handball. See a friend you haven’t seen in a long time.  Break the pattern of not seeing the good in life.  Force yourself.

4)  Exercise.  Eat healthy food.  Yeah, I know, everybody says to do this.  It will help your immune system.  It will make you think of yourself and do something for yourself.

5) Write.  Write about what’s bothering you.  Write about all the things that are good in your life, your gratitudes.  Write about all the nice things you can do for yourself.  Write about your goals and your bucket list.  Write, write, write.

6) Create something.  Woodwork.  Draw.  Sew.  Paint. Fix something. Make music.  Using the part of your brain that does, rather than the part of your brain than thinks, will help.

7)  Talk to someone.  Talk to a friend.  Talk to a therapist.  Getting someone else’s perspective usually helps.

Keep trying things till you break the pattern.  I know it’s really hard to believe because burnout feels so physical, but it is more in your thinking patterns than in your job.  Once you figure out a way to break the pattern–even for a few hours–then keep doing it.  Build your resilience.  The more skilled you get at diagnosing your burnout before it takes hold and turning it around, the more in control you are of your reactions.

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June 29, 2012 · 7:52 am

Diversity Makes Work Work.

Work Has Gotten More Diverse.  No Duh!

Have you noticed how diverse our work lives have gotten lately?  Not so much at the top of organizations–we still have a long way to go there–but in terms of getting actual work done, most of us are dealing with quite a bit of diversity.  Have you worked on a ‘virtual team’ with people in other countries?  Does your company have global customers?  Do you have to deal with other generations in your office?  Is your company part of a global conglomerate?

Age, gender, religion, country, neighborhood, state, region, race.  All of it contributes to the work of work.  We are most comfortable with people like us.  Even those of us who think of ourselves as diversity-gurus are more comfortable with people like us.  Back in the caveman days when we all lived in the same cave for all of our lives, that was OK.  Now it is absolutely necessary that we come out of our comfort zone and learn to work together, learn together, and yes, even enjoy each other.

self within culture

Even when we don’t venture outside of our own groups, there are enough issues that cause problems.  The things that we believe about ‘the way it should be’ come from our own thinking patterns, our values, our family input, the norms within our community, and the regional influences.  When we stay within our own community, we have conflict among each other (think your extended family Thanksgiving or the last family wedding your attended).  We disagree about what is right and how to decide that.  We disagree about what is important, how to raise children, politics, food, neatness.  You name it, we can disagree about it.

family within culture

As you add more individuals, more families, more communities, it gets more and more complex.  The things we care about are the same, but the ways in which we think about them are different.  Different cultures have fundamentally different ways at thinking about:

  • Time
  • Communication (directness v. indirectness)
  • Power
  • Status
  • Individualism v. communitarianism
  • Money
  • Emotional display
  • Ageculture at work

When you throw those complexities into the workplace, we’re all out of our comfort zone.  That’s not going to change.  So, we need to work to get to know each other.  We need to really learn to understand these differences and appreciate them.  We need to come out of the “I’m right and you’re wrong” automatic response that our brains do without our even thinking about it and adopt a more reasoned approach to appreciating the complexity of human interaction.

A Great Book That Will Help

One of the best books to help understand the differences across cultures (and oh, by the way, why you think the way you do) is Riding the Waves of Culture by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner.

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June 26, 2012 · 9:05 pm

What If Your Leader Won’t Act?

What if my leader won’t . . .

I get this question all the time.  My leader won’t make a decision; what do I do?  Why won’t the leadership in my company LEAD?  Things go up the chain, but nothing comes back down.  Why won’t they DO anything?  What do you do when you manager won’t . . . ?

These are hard questions.  There are all kinds of reasons why ‘leadership’ won’t act.  Your solution depends a lot on why.  Let’s take a few examples:

Your leader can’t/won’t make a decision.

Just because someone has a ‘leader-type’ title, doesn’t mean s/he is a leader.  Sometimes people are overwhelmed by the responsibility of making a decision.  Sometimes people get stuck making decisions because all the alternatives seem equally bad.  Or equally good.  Sometimes people are waiting for someone else and it isn’t obvious to the people waiting on them.

If this sounds like the situation with your ‘leader,’ then perhaps you can ‘lead’ from below.  Can you present the alternatives in a way that helps the leader choose?  Can you make a recommendation?  Can you help the leader talk it out?  Can you get some other folks to help the leader talk it out?  Can you just make the decision yourself?  (Remember, empowerment is not what others let you do, but rather what you step up to do?)

Don’t get stuck on the fact that the person outranks you and won’t do what you believe is appropriate to his/her role.  The important thing is to get things to the place that the organization can move forward, not WHO decides.

Your leader won’t step in and resolve a conflict.

Why don’t you figure out how to do this yourself?  You shouldn’t need an adult to get things resolved for you.  Figure out a process for resolving the dispute and get the other person to agree to the process.  Then apply it.  In other words, agree that you’ll ask others, or you’ll have a vote, or you’ll agree to disagree, or you’ll take turns.  Then do it.  Don’t let your manager’s conflict aversion cause things to stop.

Your leader won’t resolve a resource issue.

Can you figure out why your manager can’t/won’t resolve it?  Does s/he believe there is a resource issue?  Does s/he believe that the resource issue will really negatively impact the project/organization?  Does s/he believe that the answer will be no from his/her management?

Approach the problem by laying out alternatives.  “We can add these resources OR we can reduce the work OR we can slow things down.”  Sometimes helping the person see all the alternatives helps them pick one (which may not be your first choice, but may resolve/reduce the problem).  Think the problem through thoroughly.  Come up with at least three potential solutions–one of which is add resources.  What if there is no money for the resources you need.  Then what?  What would you do? HELP your manager figure this out.

Your leader won’t do ANYTHING.

First, make sure this is true.  Are you sure that this is reality or your perception–ask others who work for your leader or who have in the past.  Ask what has worked for other people.

If nothing works, then you have a choice.  You can either give up (I STRONGLY don’t recommend this) or you can  go find another leader.  If you allow your leader’s inaction to shut you down, then it will likely derail your career if it becomes a pattern.  If you decide to choose another leader, make sure that the new leader is what you’re looking for in a leader.  Just as there are patterns in the relationships we choose, there are patterns in the situations we get into at work.  There is no point in wasting years of your career in a no-win situation.

Fix it.

 

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June 24, 2012 · 8:36 pm

Are You A Wannabe?

Are you an Executive wannabe?  An entrepreneur wannabe?  An artist wannabe? A marathoner wannabe? An author wannabe?  Do you put one of those on your New Year’s Resolutions list?  How about your career goals list?

What Is Stopping You?

Look at last week’s calendar.  Look at last month’s calendar.  Is your ‘wannabe’ goal anywhere on your calendar?  If not, why not?  How can you possibly accomplish your goal if you’re not spending any time on it?  Don’t tell me you don’t have time.  People who really want to do something have time.  Every successful accomplished person who has done what you want to do has EXACTLY the same amount of time that you do.  It comes down to six things:

  • Priority:  If this is your future, then you need to put it sufficiently up your priority list that you are spending time on it
  • Motivation:  Understand what motivates you and put that in your life.
  • Focus: You CANNOT do it all (at once).  Turn off the TV.  Stop surfing the Internet.  Stop texting.  Take yourself to some place quiet and isolated.
  • Determination:  Keep working toward your goal, no matter what gets in the way.
  • Create whatever support infrastructure you need.  If you need training, get it.  If you need a coach, get one.  If you need a place, find one.
  • Action:  I hate to be repetitive, but JUST DO IT

Winning

So, How Do You Do That?

  • Write it down.  Be very specific.  Not ‘Write a book’ but ‘Write a novel, get a book contract, and get it published by this time next year.
  • Once you’ve written the specific goal, work backwards.  In order to write a novel, get a book contract and get it published, what do you have to do?  In order to do those things, what do you have to do?  Ask what you have to do and detail it several times.
  • Once you have a fairly detailed list, decide what you are going to do tomorrow.  What are you going to do this week.  Look at your calendar and put these tasks on it.  Take something off your calendar to make room for it, if you have to.
  • What reward will you give yourself for which accomplishments.  It doesn’t have to be something big–just something that you will associate in your mind with accomplishing the task.
  • What are the big milestones in your plan?  How will you reward yourself for these big milestones?
  • Hold yourself accountable.  Tell someone–that makes it harder to escape the accountability.

Great books to help with this:

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June 22, 2012 · 7:44 am

Not Your Mad Men Career Ladder

Way back, before most of us were working, you got a job with a company and you stayed with that company–making steady progression–until you retired.  You were, of course, a man.  If you got fired, you had done something pretty bad.  Layoffs didn’t happen very often.  There were career ladders that you took all the way from your first position to your last position.

traditional career ladder is no more

This is so long ago that many people reading this don’t get it, don’t know why we still talk about it, and think this is a no-brainer.  We still talk about it because this model still shapes our expectations in many ways.  Our infrastructure is not set up to support the current reality–if so, we’d have portable health insurance and retirement plans.  We’d also be much more focused on taking care of ourselves in our careers rather than leaving it to companies.  It is time for our mental models to catch up with reality.

The current ‘career ladder’ looks a lot more like those cool folding ladders that can be shaped over obstructions and can bend in several directions as necessary to do the job.

todays career ladder

The current ‘career ladder’ takes you up when that is possible and helps you deal with the plateaus, job losses, industry and functional changes that are necessary to remain resilient and successful in today’s economy.  Today’s ‘career ladder’ needs to focus on skills and trends rather than specific roles in specific companies in specific industries.  Find ways to “Genericize Yourself,” that enable you to move across industries.  Find ways to specialize (I know, those sound like opposite pieces of advice, but they aren’t), so that your value (brand) is obvious.  Build your resilience for all kinds of shifts in the economy–think of the shifts that have happened in publishing, electronics, e-marketing, and are happening in health care and communications now.  You can’t know what is coming, but you can be ready.

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June 19, 2012 · 8:46 pm

Manage Your Resistance

Manage Your Resistance

Put Your Leader Hat On

Who would you rather work with if you’re implementing a new change in your organization?  Would you rather work with someone who has been there for ten years–who knows his/her way around the organization, who knows how to make things happen in the organization?  Or would you rather have someone who has been there a couple of months, who has begun to know where the bathroom is and where important people sit?

The ten-year guy, right?

Wrong!

Why is that? Because the ten-year person is really committed to the way things are–‘the way we do it.’  Even if s/he doesn’t like it.  Even if s/he complains about it.  The ten-year person has been through all the ‘we tried that and it didn’t works,’ all the times s/he had to be reorganized or was left to do the work of those who left, who had to learn new systems, and who may or may not remember the good parts (results) of those changes, but who does remember the problems.  The ten-year person doesn’t want any more change (unless s/he gets to direct it).

The new person not only doesn’t have that history, or those scars, but also EXPECTS to have to go through those kinds of changes and challenges.  The new person follows directions and tries to please whoever is in charge.

Now, Which Are You?

Are you the new person who is emotionally and intellectually ready to not only participate, but also to help?  Or are you the long-term employee who isn’t?  You may be telling yourself that you are change-ready.  And maybe you are.  But change burnout, or change immunity, happens to all of us.  Yes . . . even me.

I’ve been doing change management for a long time.  I really know how to spot resistance and how to deal with it.  I got a new boss one time, after having changed bosses 3 times in the past 12 months.  I didn’t even realize how done with new bosses I was.  That is, I didn’t realize it until one of my employees said to me, “For someone who knows so much about change, you sure don’t handle it very well.”  She was right.  I wasn’t handling it well.  My capacity to deal with change had been used up and I was on the resistance end of the continuum.  My employee did me a favor.  I didn’t really realize how much my fed-up-ness was showing until she said that.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to put yourself in that new employee mindset?  Wouldn’t it be a good idea to try to think like someone new to the organization (while at the same time bringing all your organization skill, knowledge and abilities to the table)?  Whenever I become aware that I’m in ‘resisting’ mode, I remind myself–if I had just started today, I wouldn’t think about all the reasons this is a stupid idea–I would just accept it and do it.

Try it.  It helps.

Note:  I am not saying that you should blindly follow without contributing opinions and constructive criticism.  Just be sure that that is what you’re doing though, and not resistance.  Resistance is a normal reaction, but it isn’t helpful to your career, so learn to manage it.

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