Tag Archives: perspective

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 →

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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.

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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 →

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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 →

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The toughest apology I’ve ever written

10 Jan Apology

This is hard for me to write. An apology to my best friend. I’ve been paralyzed by fear that it wouldn’t be enough to rescue a relationship that endured for fifteen years before suddenly, almost inexplicably, it vanished. But here, I’ll try to explain.

It was November 7, 2009, and I was planning a trip to Seattle to celebrate two friends’ birthdays. I was going to take my best friend out to lunch during her short break from work (as a retail manager, her weekends were almost always filled with work), and then go to a dinner show with another friend for her milestone 30th birthday.

But when I got on I-5 to make the three-hour drive up to the Seattle area, a pounding rain storm slowed traffic to 25 mph, and I was stuck. I knew I couldn’t make it there by her lunch break, and so I called my best friend to tell her I wouldn’t be able to make it on time. She didn’t answer (she was probably working), so I left a message. I asked if I could take her to breakfast or lunch the next day.

I didn’t hear from her. I called her again that night, and again the next day. Nothing. Continue reading →

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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.

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You know you’re rich when…

29 Nov Are you wealthy? How do you define prosperity?

I watched with morbid fascination this past weekend as news reporters relayed the following Black Friday-related stories.

  • Stores including Target, Toys R Us and Wal-Mart opened on Thanksgiving night, further stretching the shopping marathon.
  • A couple camped outside of an electronics store from Monday through Friday morning (yep, they spent their Thanksgiving on the sidewalk) to be first in line to get $199 42-inch TVs and $299 laptops.
  • A dozen people were sent to a hospital after a woman pepper-sprayed a crowd during a scuffle involving sought-after items in a large retail store.

Do any of these stories bother you? At some level, each put me on edge.

The name Black Friday originated in Philadelphia, where it was originally used to describe the heavy, disruptive traffic on the day after Thanksgiving, according to Wikipedia. Later, an alternative explanation suggested that “Black Friday” is the point at which retailers begin to turn a profit, or are “in the black”.

That’s really what Black Friday is about—retailers making a profit. But at what expense? This year many national retailers set a new precedent by opening on Thanksgiving. It makes me sad, thinking of my best friend (a longtime retail manager) and how she was never able to spend Thanksgiving with her family 250 miles away because trying to get Black Friday off work was impossible.

The Macy’s CEO tried to spin it another way, saying that seasonal workers don’t mind the extra hours, but I still find it sad that many retail workers have to choose between being employed or being with family.

I also find the decision to camp out for bargains quite sad. Just how much money are they “saving,” anyway? I put a pretty high premium on the opportunity to sleep in (or even just be at home, not away on business), so the idea of spending several windy, rainy nights in a tent on a sidewalk does not appeal to me.

I do this mental arithmetic: How much is my time worth? How much money am I actually saving? The answer to this question informs lots of my choices about money, including whether to hire a housekeeper (it creates time I can spend with my family instead) and myriad other conveniences.

By the same token, when I don’t choose convenience, such as when I choose to make my kid’s birthday cupcakes instead of buying them at a store, it shows how much I value what I am creating.

My core reaction to all of the shopping lust that crops up during this so-called giving season is a real assessment of what wealth is.

Are you wealthy? How do you define prosperity?

Are you rich? Are you wealthy? Are you prosperous? By almost any measure, I am.

I should clarify. Before you imagine me in a totally different tax bracket, I’m not among those with elite wealth, what I’ve heard described as “jet money.” At that level, you aren’t just going on fancy vacations … you’re flying there in your own jet.

Sure, that’s wealth. But I think too many people see that as the only definition of wealth, and fail to appreciate the prosperity in their here and now.

One way I used to describe prosperity post-college was “you don’t have to balance your checkbook before ordering a pizza.” It’s great to be able to splurge—even on pizza—without second-guessing your financial means.

By far, my favorite description of wealth is from my mom. My folks married early, lived frugally and worked tirelessly for years to build a small business and raise two little girls. After more than a decade of work, my folks finally “made it,” which (to me, in middle school) meant the ability to buy clothes at the mall, not just at Goodwill and garage sales.

“I felt like we were rich when I could go to the grocery store and buy anything I wanted,” my mom said.

And isn’t that a great measure of wealth? Consider how few people in the world have access to a wealth of choices in a grocery store, much less the means to buy whatever they want?

So, throughout this holiday season as you enjoy giving and receiving, consider your own definition of wealth. Do you have enough? Plenty? Prosperity? Wealth?

I believe I do, and that alone frees me from the compulsion to shop at 4 a.m. or grapple with other shoppers over some discounted item. I have everything I need.

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I am thankful for … mentors who guide my career

24 Nov Hopscotch

Happy Thanksgiving! It’s my favorite holiday—we celebrate our many blessings, we give to the less fortunate, there’s always room at the table for another; we cook, eat, nap and watch football. What could be better?

There’s more: I’ve never had someone get mad at me for failing to buy them a Thanksgiving Day gift, or send them a Thanksgiving card. The hardest holiday shopping is the Costco parking lot the day before the big event, and even then, it doesn’t require traffic cops like the mall does on Christmas Eve. (Not that I’d be caught dead there and then.)

But I digress. It’s Thanksgiving, and I wanted to share what I’m thankful for. Since this is a blog about work and purpose, I wanted to specifically acknowledge mentors who have been important to me: I got a wonderful surprise via Facebook last week, which was a blog post via aPriori International about my blog post on styles. You can read the whole thing here, but my favorite part is this:

We don’t bring Heidi’s blog to the forefront just because she is a participant in our programs or because her latest post references the principles we espouse. Rather, we feel her documentation of her learning expands the risk that is inherent in learning. By jumping into Market Force courses, Heidi admitted to herself that there are things in her life with which she needs assistance, from employee assessments to personal time management to … whatever. And so by writing about her learning, she is taking a greater risk, a critical action in the process of becoming your “whole self.”

The thing that this post immediately brought to my mind was Charles Bukowski’s poem, “The Rape of the Holy Mother.”

Before that title freaks you out, read what this poem is really about: “To expose your ass on paper/ terrifies some/ and/ it should:/ the more you put down/ the more you leave yourself/ open/ to those who label themselves/ “critics.” (full poem here)

As Travis Carson, author of the aPriori post above, rightly says, learning is inherently risky. And that’s why today, on Thanksgiving, I am especially grateful for mentors.

Mentors challenge you. They allow you to fail. They guide your learning and your experimentation. They’re not about “thinking out of the box,” they’re about tearing that whole damned box apart.

Which is pretty cool, don’t you think? So here’s my list (and only just a start) of career mentors who have helped me make pivotal choices.

I am thankful for Yvonne Young, my second-grade teacher, who constantly repeated the phrase, “You are loveable and capable!” She built tremendous self-esteem (and daring qualities), and her expert storytelling remains so memorable that I try to mimic it with my own children.

I am thankful for Andy Gottesman, my high school debate coach. Winning in debate helped me feel fantastic about myself in high school even though I was pretty nerdy. That’s a big deal, but more importantly, I truly believe that speech and debate skills got me through college and prepared me for the world of work.

I am thankful for Cliff Rowe, my college journalism professor. Cliff literally changed my life when he prompted me to apply for a fellowship even though I hadn’t declared a major in journalism. I ended up winning the fellowship, a $1,000 stipend to intern at a newspaper, and then Cliff then directed me to an idyllic summer at the Port Townsend-Jefferson County Leader. By the end of five months there, I was hooked, and spent the next nine years in newspapers.

I am thankful for Pat Jenkins, my first, full-time newspaper editor. He took a chance on hiring me fresh out of college and pushed my writing far, far forward by taking the time to show me how I could improve (not just making corrections and moving on). He helped me develop strong reporting skills to really immerse myself in a community, and also helped me navigate some tricky political stories that resulted in the resignation of a judge.

I am thankful for Dan Cook, my business reporting editor, whose passion for digging into a story completely changed my reporting style, who managed to reign in this spitfire with good humor and tons of patience, and who taught me the value of having conviction in your work (and knowing when to take a pass).

I am thankful for Lynn Parsons, marketing and business development consultant, who understands the value of real business relationships (not just LinkedIn connections) and how to manage clients with diplomacy and grace, and who I admire tremendously for running her own firm through any economic cycle. She is the master of client service.

I am thankful for Craig Robbins, Chief Knowledge Officer and “dean” of Colliers University, who has given me hours of insight into work styles and systems, and who has the kind of advice that is tough to hear but absolutely essential if you want to get through any roadblock.

And I am also thankful for Katherine Steen, director of Colliers University, who since 2006 who has given me the platform and opportunity to speak to a broader audience, share my expertise and connect with people from around the world, and tackle challenging projects with zest.

There are many more on the list, but I wanted to recognize the people above because the each played a pivotal role in my career development. I am deeply grateful for everything they shared and invested in me.

If you’re from the USA, have a wonderful Thanksgiving. If you’re not, give thanks anyway. I’m taking this weekend off blogging to spend with my family, but I’ll send you a post later tonight on gift-giving and see you back here on Monday, Nov. 28.

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Want a reset button? Change lanes.

30 Oct Want a reset button? Change lanes. Photo by Zouny.

It’s 12:01 p.m., and I’ve got fifteen minutes. Let’s get cracking.

Remember the feeling in college at the start of a new term? It was so fresh, so open. You had a nice, thick stack of books, a syllabus and a course schedule. What you didn’t have was a B-minus on a midterm, two missed assignments or a backlog of reading haunting you.

It was as if each term was a chance to hit the reset button. And oh, how I loved that button.

That was college. After nearly seven years with my company and fifteen years in the full-time working world, I notice a key difference about work: there is no reset button.

Sure, you might take a week or two off for vacation, but how hard is that? There are late-night hours spent delivering projects right up until you leave for the break, and stuff that invariably bleeds over into vacation. There’s checking the Blackberry or iPhone until your spouse gives you the stinkeye, and the hundreds of emails that accumulate in your time away.

It’s like being punished for taking a break.

Lesson learned: there is no reset button. And so I often find that energy ebbs and flows—sometimes I’m on a positive high, delivering an exceptional project, or the excitement of brainstorming with smart and passionate colleagues.

Then there’s the low—watching a project get drop-kicked for other priorities, endless do-overs when you’d rather have just done it right the first time, and the frustration the creeps in when you’ve just spent 20 or 40 hours sweating over something that is either not valued, no longer needed or not putting points on the board for your team.

Ebb and flow. And in those times of ebb, I seriously need a reset button.

I love how universities and some companies (such as Intel) offer a sabbatical. That, I think, is the ultimate reset button—a way to so thoroughly disengage from work that you come back refreshed with a new perspective, new research and new skills.

I could put this pipe dream on a wish list, or I could do something about it. And I’m a Firestarter. I make things GO. So I decided to create my own reset button.

Consider that your life is like a wide freeway—maybe four or five lanes, each lane corresponding to part of your life. There’s a work lane, a family lane, a friends lane, a lane for hobbies or for self-improvement. You might have a lane for spirituality or a lane for learning.

Imagine yourself as a driver on that freeway, and each lane is occupied by vehicles moving at various speeds (these could be your boss, your colleagues, friends and family, or a personal goal).

Want a reset button? Change lanes. Photo by Zouny.

How do you navigate through the traffic? How do you get to where you want to be?

My answer is this: when you get stuck or slowed down in one lane, change lanes! Create momentum in another part of your life. If you let yourself get stuck behind obstacles in a single lane, but do nothing to change your focus, you won’t be going anywhere fast.

So if you’re stuck at work, look to your hobbies or your family. Sign up for a class. Plan a vacation. Kick off a kickass project. Call a handful of friends and throw a party for no other reason than to create more positive energy in your life.

Creating this momentum won’t make the work problems go away, but it will add perspective and release the pent-up energy you feel in that lane of life. And with some of the energy released (remember that reset button?), you might feel refreshed enough to regroup and tackle the traffic jam.

GO.

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