Archive | Work Style RSS feed for this section

25 tips for professionals under age 25

27 Apr 406295610_6ac305b653_z

As a big sister, I’ve had the privilege of mentoring my 10-years-younger little brother as he went through high school, college, several internships with my company, and eventually joined my company. He is now on a full-ride scholarship in grad school at Notre Dame. I couldn’t be prouder.

I’ve also worked with a number of younger professionals throughout my career, and I remember keenly being one of those young professionals—as a journalist, I was usually the youngest person in my newsroom (by far). There was so much I didn’t know, and wasn’t taught to me in college, about how to succeed in the business world.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the advice that I, at 35, would give to my 25-year-old self or other young professionals in their first few years of post-college employment. I don’t always follow this advice, but the results are infinitely better when I do. Here are 25 tips for success for young professionals under age 25:

  1. Take initiative. This is the most important thing you can do in any job, in any role—in life. Don’t wait for permission or a request, just see a need and propose a solution…better yet, start working on the solution!
  2. Dress for success. Senior professionals want to see you as an up-and-coming professional, not stuck in your college gear (and they’ll assume, your college mindset). Invest in a wardrobe that mirrors the executives (and by shopping sale racks and seconds stores like Nordstrom Rack and TJ Maxx, you can do this on your current salary). Don’t imagine “casual Friday” equals jeans and sneakers—choose better-than-casual shoes, slacks and a casual jacket to demonstrate your professionalism.
  3. Be polished. A dry cleaner and tailor will help—and don’t wear anything that is revealing, too tight/ill-fitting, or dirty/stained/torn. Iron your shirts, shine your shoes, file and polish your nails, get a good haircut. Carry a high-quality bag. Each small detail adds up. Look like the kind of person an executive would be proud to introduce to a client.
  4. Be polite. Manners count in business lunches, in thank-you notes and in small interactions. Read a book on modern manners—seriously! When flustered, keep your cool and be nicer than necessary.
  5. Polish your communications. Send emails that are properly capitalized, spelled and signed. (Don’t lower-case your name or the letter i—this reads a juvenile chat-room behavior.) Double-check documents and communications before sending—a small grammatical error or typo will make you look less smart than you really are, especially if you know better. Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Blowing up the garage with my chem set (and other curiosities)

7 Feb 4273225057_bcd1baf329_z

My friend has a sign in her office that has been top-of-mind for me this week: “Asking questions is a mark of success.”

Cool. So what does that mean?

Taken one way, it might mean that once you’ve risen to a point of being successful, once you’ve arrived, you now have permission to ask anything. And often this will go unchallenged—I know one tricky CEO who likes to ask stupid questions just to see if his staff is willing to challenge him! He calls it his “BS barometer.” I like that.

Taken another way, asking questions may be the pathway to success. Today, I got a call about something I’ve been preparing to do, and I asked several questions to try to be ready for a meeting about it later this week. The question I really wanted to ask:

“What do I not know now that I’m going to wish I knew six months from now?”

That is, what high-impact piece of information am I missing? And this leads me into further questions about whether the bridge to get this information is long (e.g. you must learn Russian) or short (you must learn the secret handshake).

So I started thinking of the questions I like to keep in my back pocket, the kind that automatically spring to my thirsty, curious mind.

One of the things I’ve disciplined myself to do is to compartmentalize my questions into three groups:

  • Thinking questions – These questions start with where, who, when, and how. They’re about facts that you can prove or disprove, and can measure objectively.
  • Feeling questions – These questions start with what, and they dig into experiences and personal assessments and perspectives. Don’t merely equate feeling with emotion; consider that a feeling question is a person’s subjective sense of the external world.
  • Knowing questions – These questions start with why, and they are about your core beliefs and intuition. They don’t rely on external perceptions—you know in your gut whether something is right or wrong, true or false.

I credit Shirlaws Coaching for teaching me this unique approach to questioning during a coaching skills workshop several years ago. They guide you to approach asking questions in this order, which allows a answerer to gradually move from answering from the head (logic) to the heart (feeling) to the gut (intuition).

I watched this questioning process conducted on a fellow coach and it was startling the degree biology came into play—the questioner probed with thinking, feeling and finally knowing questions, and when the answerer was done, he was just done. You could physically see the change in his body.

How do you approach questioning? Do you have a system to uncover the information you need? I find asking too many “why” questions in business up front can often put someone on the defensive, so that’s one more reason I try to use this system.

Consider testing a new product, for example. Let’s say you’d never even heard of the iPad. Here’s one way to organize your approach to learning more:

  1. Who is this for? How do you turn it on? How do you navigate? Who made it? Where can I get one? How can I use it? When do I need to charge it? When will I use it?
  2. What is this like? What is this totally unlike? What else can it do? What surprises me about this? What markets can it disrupt? What will I do with it?
  3. Why was it invented? Why aren’t there more products like this on the market? Why is it made in this shape and color? Why is it available only with X features but not Y features? Why am I reacting like this? Why do I like it? Why not?

So my question is this: how do you approach curiosity and questioning? How do you find out more about your world? I’m a kick-the-tires, take-it-for-a-test-drive kind of girl … I’ll get around to reading the driver’s manual only after getting stuck on the side of the road. My parents were smart enough not to get me a chem set or I would have surely blown up the garage. Instead, they shipped me off to courses in bubbleology and computer science (and this was 1984).

Once, a friend got mad at me—really, truly, angry—because I would not let him show me how to play a video game. I wanted to try it myself. And if I lost, well, I could start over, right?

Oh, no. In his mind, it was do-or-die, and he demanded I do it right the first time. Needless to say, we got in quite the tiff over whether it’s better to show someone the right way or let them figure it out for themselves.

You know which side I’m on.

I’m for experimentation. For mistakes. For more questions than answers. For try-it-before-you-buy-it. For fiddling around with all the knobs and levers until you’ve got things just the way you want them. For endless Control+Z do-overs until I finally, finally get it right.

That’s how I roll. How about you? GO.

Tags: , , , , , ,

“No” gives you power over your priorities (and the power to push back)

23 Jan OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Hi. I’m blogging about work, purpose and time, and inspired in this series of articles by a Harvard Business Review blogger’s post on “No is the New Yes,” in which he sets out several strategies for taking greater control of your time and as a result, focusing on what matters.

In my last two posts, I talked about the blind spots that crop up for people with various work styles. In this post, I wanted to make a point about priorities.

Make what matters to your boss what matters to you.

No matter your work style, it’s easy to get caught in a trap of working on the things you value. They might be what you assume is expected of your role, or something you’ve always done, or something you think no one else can do as well as you can. You might do them simply because it would take more time and effort to assign them and mentor that person into executing the task to your satisfaction.

But we ultimately report to a higher level—be that a manager, an executive, a board or shareholders—and so it’s critical to take the time to find out what these people see as important. Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

How to say No: Validate people and projects, and say it bravely

20 Jan Office tower

Hello, we’re talking about saying ‘No’ at work and how to finesse this with respect to work styles. I’m using Market Force styles—Control, Influence, Power and Authority—to illustrate how handing a deluge of projects and requests at work by saying no can challenge each work style.

In my last post, I listed these two lessons:

Lesson one for Controls: Balance time discussing what you’re working on with a healthy debate on why. This is because Controls often handle being overwhelmed by becoming micro-managers.

Lesson two for Influences: People are more important than projects. Influences will be sure they know it, but must be sensitive to people with other styles who might feel like they’re wasting time in meetings. They must also avoid over-promising (a habit because they value relationships).

And now here are the rest.

Lesson three: It’s not about time, it’s about value: validate your projects and contributors.

For those with the Power work style, busybusybusy is kind of a drug. When they say, “Oh, I have a million things on my plate right now! I’m working 60-plus hour weeks and still have more to do,” they’re not complaining. They’re bragging. The subtext is “Look how important and indispensible I am!” Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Just say No? It’s not that simple: your work style’s blind spots

18 Jan Birds on wire

In today’s Harvard Business Review blog, Tony Schwartz has a great post about “No is the new Yes: Four practices to reprioritize your life.” In it, he describes a typical executive workday filled with meetings, email and hair-on-fire requests that keep their wheels spinning endlessly.

The tyranny of the urgent over the important seems like an unchangeable force, as if we are constantly running on a hamster wheel. But doing so will leave us tired—or fired—unless we can find a way to hop off the wheel.

I observe that for some executives, the hamster wheel bleeds into relationships with colleagues and subordinates: they never seem to be present for the people they are leading. That’s why I wanted to offer five lessons I’ve learned about managing time, work, people and priorities that embraces Schwartz’s fundamental argument about saying no more often … but does so with finesse based on the styles of people you’re working with.

You might be familiar with a work style framework from DiSC, Meyers-Briggs, Kolbe, or others—my personal favorite is Market Force, taught by the folks at aPriori International. I’ll explain each type of style and their blind spots related to saying no.

Lesson one: Balance time discussing what you’re working on with a healthy debate on why. Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Getting lucky (The best job interview question, ever.)

16 Jan Clover

There’s a killer question one of my senior executives likes to ask of new people who are interviewing for a role at my company: “Do you think of yourself as a lucky person?”

This is a trick question, because there is a right (and a wrong) answer.

If you answer “No,” you will not be hired.

Let me explain. The executive asks this because he’s interested in whether interviewees have an optimistic view of life. He wonders if people feel they “get what they deserve” or if the universe does them one better, blessing them with great opportunities and people in their lives.

When we look for new employees at my company, we want a few essential ingredients, what we call SOAP: People who are Smart, Optimistic, Ambitious and Passionate. Some of my colleagues take this object lesson to its logical extreme and hand out bars of soap at our corporate training camps, reminding attendees (who are our rising stars) that we’re investing in them because Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Key question for innovators: How can we make this more fun?

30 Nov Fun paint

As part of my social media experimentation and engagement strategy (that’s code for “learning it by doing it”), I sometimes participate in one of Harvard Business Review’s #HBRchat sessions on Twitter about leadership.

These can be a great—if chaotic—place to discuss business and management issues with other leaders on Twitter. Even if you miss the weekly chat sessions, the posted recaps always include a few insightful zingers, in tidy 140-character bites.

One of the questions I recently answered was “What are the qualities of a great leader?” My immediate tweet back? “A sense of fun.”

Leaders generate better ideas (and greater innovation) when people are willing to take a chance in proposing a wacky idea. Fun breaks down the barriers and fear of failure.

During the chat, I went on to argue that the most effective leaders make a conscious effort to build a sense of fun in their teams. They are intentionally approachable, which in turn encourages people to go out on a limb, look silly and even fail.

Let me put it another way: I strongly believe that leaders with a sense of fun will get better ideas from their team, because their team members will be less afraid to propose or pursue them.

I can tell you this: I can offer up the most hair-brained idea to my CEO fearlessly. While I typically put serious effort and thought into honing things before they get in front of him, I still feel the sense of fun, the permission to be foolish that makes innovation possible.

For example, at Pixar, mistakes are celebrated along with successes—the nothing-ventured, nothing-gained mantra is “He who fails the most wins.” Pixar’s appetite for risk has removed layers of fear that stifle creativity and limit an individual’s willingness to go out on a limb with a crazy idea.

What I love is that Pixar hired top-notch creatives who were considered “unmanageable” and gave this group free reign to do their best work. Result? Their film, The Incredibles, won Academy Awards and became a best-selling DVD, even though its budget per minute was lower than any previous Pixar film.

I have to imagine that fun was more than just a movie goal. It was an essential mandate for being part of the team.

Google tells a similar success story; it enables its engineers to spend one day per week or up to 20% of their time working on anything that interests them. Here, I see fun at work as a product of autonomy—getting to choose to do what you love.

Both Google News and Google Product Search were spawned by this permission to innovate. Pulitzer-winning author David Vise explained, “Google … technologists think first of ways to solve problems; only later, if ever, do they worry about how to ‘monetize’ them.”

For an extra helping of fun, take your meeting outside, or somewhere more interesting than your office.

One of my most successful projects was proposed twice, dismissed twice, and finally left for dead by a boss that fostered a sense of fear, not fun, in the workplace. It’s hard to keep pushing your idea at what feels like a brick wall.

But, when things changed and I had a new opportunity to pitch my idea, the project was resurrected (and we had a lot of fun doing it).

Fun beat fear, and the results speak for themselves.

What’s getting in the way of your ability to innovate? Maybe it’s a lack of fun, or the presence of fear of failure. So instead of tackling the innovation problem, consider taking a step back and asking a simpler question: How can we make this more fun?

GO.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

What your work style says about you

17 Nov 11.17 Style

Have you interviewed for a job lately?

If you’re like a lot of my friends, the answer is yes.

And you’re probably been hit by the same question that most hiring managers ask: “Tell me a little about yourself.”

Ah. The big one. Where to begin?

When I’m hiring someone, one of the most important things I want to know is what that person’s work style is. How do they behave with groups? Under pressure? Left to their own devices, where would they start in a project?

Answer this: If you were planning a party, which of these roles would you be most comfortable filling?

You come up with the big idea—the party theme, the reason for having it.

You get everyone excited—call your friends, get people on board

You make it happen—call the caterer, the DJ

You make sure it works—check to be sure you bought ice, vet the DJ’s playlist to be sure it’s not lame.

If you could only pick one of these, which would you most like to do? Which would you be least likely to do? This is the type of question I ask to try to assess a work style.

The question of styles is answered by dozens of frameworks, including Meyers-Briggs, Kolbe, the Predictive Index, DiSC … the list goes on. My favorite, by far, is taught by aPriori International and my friend (and kickass coach) Travis Carson. It’s called Market Force.

In Market Force parlance, I’m an Influence. (I’d pick number two on the list above). Here’s what they’d have to say about me:

“The Influence is one of the easiest styles to pinpoint because they’ll be the antsy one at the end of the conference table, itching to end the meeting and talk about what happened in the game last night, especially if the meeting is dragging on. It’s not that the Influence doesn’t pay attention or is lackadaisical, they just have a lot of energy.”

Ha! Energy. My mother often tells people that when I was little, she’d just put her head in her hands and cry because I was such a busy little kid, she just couldn’t entertain me or keep up with me. But all that energy turned out to be a gift. She even goes so far as to tell harried parents of overactive kids, “Don’t worry, my daughter was worse! And she turned out OK.”

Here’s a bit more: “You’ll need to get them to focus that energy on a project. In doing so, watch for the Influence to go at it from a relationship perspective. They like team and social environments because that is what keeps them motivated.”

Right again. Take the people, the interaction, out of the project and you’ve taken most of the fun out of it for me.

More: “The Influence can take a project and run with it, and usually can do so without a lot of details. They use their energy to figure it out and are certainly ‘commit first, then figure it out’ types. If you want a project to get off the ground as soon as possible, hand it to an Influence.”

Yep, there’s the Firestarter in me. I make things GO.

But it’s good and bad: “Something to consider about the Influence is their propensity to over-task themselves. When they do, the response is to retreat and subsequently, neglect the request. Although cognizant of it, they’ll use their sharp verbal skills and, aptly enough, influence, to find their way out of a tight spot. They want to work fast and have no problem letting the discussion drift off into disparate subjects. Keep them focused but make sure they’re having fun and are in action as often as possible.”

You know what makes Influences crazy? Slow drivers. You know what makes us tick? Mood. We can smell it from a mile away. If the project’s not fun, if the mood is sour, we’re onto it and either working passionately to change it, or disengaged.

So, tell me about yourself.

Take fifteen minutes to figure out your own style (check out aPriori’s blog posts, mini-articles about each of those styles). I find that by learning more about my style and my natural reactions to stress and challenge, I’m more effective because I see the big picture—strengths, flaws and all. GO.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

You are not air-dropped into corporate culture

11 Nov Culture

Hi there. What’s your day been like? Meetings? Deadlines? Buzzwords?

Oh yeah, I hear that. In my newsroom, back when I was a journalist, we used to make fun of the worst corporate-speak press releases that came in. They were chock-full of business clichés like “leveraging synergies” and “thinking outside the box” and “win-win situation.”

But the most frustrating one for me was “corporate culture.” It was as if culture were an immovable force, a wilderness that you’re air-dropped into. Somehow, as the employee, you’ve got to survive it.

But I don’t buy it.

I see corporate culture not as something that comes at you, like a ball thrown for you to catch, but as something you constantly create and affect, like being in a swimming pool, making ripples of your own.

You heard me: you are responsible for your corporate culture. Not leadership. Not your manager. You.

I told you a while ago in Guiding by Goals that I developed a list of three business goals in response to a challenging colleague. Last on the list was “Thrive in a positive and professional work environment.”

But when that colleague was finally out of the picture, I realized I was wrong.

My goal assumed culture was something thrust upon me, something I had to react to. But it didn’t credit my ability to change things, to make the company I’m in become the company I intend. So I changed my goal. My new goal is this: Lead culture and best practices.

Let me give you an example of leading culture. This summer, I partnered with our Chief Information Officer to present a fun lunch-and-learn to our corporate team called “Apps & Apps.” I demonstrated six appetizers (I adore cooking), and the CIO demonstrated a bunch of cool apps for iPad and iPhone.

It was a hit! So many colleagues said it was the most fun program they’d seen. More importantly, I think it shifted the company culture just a little bit further toward what I intend—a place where everyone has something interesting to contribute, where we enjoy each other and have fun learning together.

I’m sure you feel like sometimes your corporate culture is lacking. Maybe your sense is that everyone’s got their head down, grinding under project deadlines, budget cutbacks and political wrangling that can truly take your eye off the ball of what’s important.

Out for drinks with colleagues one night, someone asked me how I’d handle a particularly cranky set of folks who never seemed like they enjoyed work or each other. What would I do?

“Forget ‘em,” I said (or another word starting with F), speaking from my gut and shocking myself as much as I did them. And then, I added this quote from another colleague: “You can’t get blood from a rock.”

My point is this: you can spin your wheels forever trying to “get everyone on the same page,” “achieve buy-in” or any number of other business clichés. Or you can just be who you were meant to be: a positive, dynamic, inspiring influence on the culture of your company.

I love the quote, “Don’t try to win over the haters. You are not the jerk whisperer.” (Another good blog on this here.) So that’s where I draw the line on creating culture—be the influence, but be OK with the fact that not everyone will follow.

That’s because some people show up for work and are unprepared to participate in culture. They see it as happening to them, and if they don’t like it, chances are they’re living in resignation and resentment, a hole they’re not likely to climb out of.

Take a risk. Throw ‘em a rope, be your authentic self, live the culture and values you intend to spread throughout the organization. You’ll surprise yourself with followers. And who knows? The haters might just come around, too. (I keep talking to those cranky people, thinking, Someday….)

Take 15 minutes to go affect your corporate culture by being the kind of person you want your whole company to be—inspiring, polite, thankful, collaborative, fun, engaging, risk-taking, authentic. Don’t wait for someone else to take the cultural reins. GO.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

%d bloggers like this: