Tag Archives: values

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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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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Because we’re “the sharing family,” that’s why

15 Nov 11.15 Water symphony

What are the rules that guide your life?

Today, “don’t hit your sister” and “don’t sass” were featured in my household. Ah, parenthood.  

I’m not one for issuing a lot of don’ts. In fact, if you know me at all, you’ll agree I’m not a rules-follower. I never follow a recipe to the letter (not even my own). Policies make my eyes glaze over. So you can imagine I wanted to take a bit more creative approach to rules for my family.

To guide our kids into becoming the adolescents and (gulp) grown-ups my husband and I intend, I felt like the rules needed to be relevant to all of us—kids and grown-ups alike. Here’s what we started with:

How we treat others: Share. Encourage. Be truthful. Be gentle. Keep your promises. Forgive. Love each other.

How we behave: Whatever you are, be a good one. Enjoy moments. Look. Listen. Create. Start. Keep going! Finish. Make the most of it. Be safe, but have an adventure.

How we treat our home: Ask first. Clean it up. Put it back. Care.

(By the way, if you are as awesome as my friend Katherine, you should definitely include one of her family’s rules on your list: #10. Rock and Roll!)

Inspired by the beautiful typography on Pinterest, I came up with this little graphic for our home. It’s still a work in progress. Design majors, don’t laugh. But it makes sense of all of the little lessons I’m trying to teach my little people, every day.

My son Drew has constant questions about why we do things, and I realized that being matter-of-fact was startlingly effective. It’s more subtle than “because I’m Mommy, and I said so.”

Instead, I say, “because we’re a ____ family.”

It started with the phrase “We’re a sharing family.” My CEO’s wife wrote an anecdote for a special book I assembled for his tenth anniversary with my company that struck a chord: She described how he has always been passionate about sharing and giving. From a very early age, their children were taught that they were part of a sharing family, and that they would share their means and their time with people less fortunate.

The story totally resonated with me. I decided immediately that we, the Tretheways, are a sharing family. I tell this to Drew over and over. It’s starting to stick.

Last March, on his third birthday, we weren’t allowed to bring homemade cupcakes to share with the class (and I won’t be caught dead buying cupcakes stuffed with unpronounceable, non-food ingredients from the supermarket). So, instead, we brought the one food item Drew loves more than anything: fruit leather.

Seriously. They’re my kid’s candy bars.

We brought them to school, and I told Drew he could start passing them out to his friends. He hesitated. (I mean, come on—we’re talking about a just-turned three-year-old giving away his favorite thing.) Then he went over to each of the dozen kids in his class and handed them a piece of fruit leather. “We’re a sharing family, so you can have one,” he said, seriously.

I was bowled over. It was working! Drew has even convinced me to share stuff I did not intend to share with him (um, no thank you for backwash in my root beer) because he’d remind me that we were a sharing family. And so, I shared.

I soon realized I could leverage for a few more salient points. And so, we are also a clean family. We take baths. We brush our teeth. We clean up our toys. We don’t waste.

We're a sharing family. Here, Drew shares his find: a tiny crab.

This summer, when we were at the county fair, Drew spilled some caramel corn on the floor and then picked up and ate the fallen pieces faster than I could intervene. “Drew, if you spill again, would you please just throw the popcorn away?” I asked him.

“Because we’re a clean family?” he asked. I was going to say because the floor probably had all kinds of germs growing in that accumulated funk, but I stopped myself. “Yes, because we’re a clean family, and we make sure not to leave our messes behind.”

“Here, Mommy,” he said, and offered me the bag of caramel corn. “And we’re a sharing family, too, right?”

Once I’d scooped my jaw off the floor, I literally stopped us among a stream of fair-goers, got on my knee and hugged that platinum-blond boy as hard as I could. “Yes.”

Uh-oh … I’ve gotten carried away telling the story and went longer than fifteen minutes. Sorry. It’ll happen again, I’m sure (I’m not a rules-follower). In the meantime, why not take fifteen minutes to consider what your rules for living are. And if I were to describe you and your family by one word, what would it be?

“We’re a ____ family,” you would say.

And I’d say, “Nice to meet you. We’re the Tretheways. We’re a sharing family.”

P.S. I’ll leave you with this little quote: “What I love most about my home is who I share it with.”

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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.

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Three things I can’t live without

10 Nov Three things feat

Hi, how’s it going? Good week? Big plans for the weekend? Me, too. A whole weekend on my own (away from the family). I hardly know what to do with myself!

There’s a game that circulates on Facebook from time to time, asking you to write in a few items that you’d take with you to a deserted island.

Well, sometimes they ask, “What would you take with you to a desert island?”

And (the writer geek in me speaks up now), if they were really asking that, I’d say: Enough food and water to last throughout my stay, and shelter of some kind. Because, really, if we’re talking desert island, it’s all about survival.

But if we’re talking deserted island—you know, white sand beach with palm trees and tropic fruits in abundance, but no people—then it’s not about sustenance. It’s about company and creature comforts.

(OK, desert island/deserted island lecture over. You may now resume reading a normal person’s blog.)

So what three things would I take?

Assuming I could get power, I’d take a laptop with Internet access (a girl can dream), my Kindle and my feather pillow. I’m pretty sure I’d get more novel-writing done there than I do here in the cycle of work/family/sleep/work/family/sleep.

But these are a far cry from what really matters to me. I have three words, imprinted on a silver bracelet more than a decade ago: “Adventure, Joy, Creativity.” These remain the hallmarks of what make me, me. These are three things I can’t live without.

One of the three things I can't live without? Being a world traveler. Feature photo by Kiwinz, insert photo by MikeBehnken.

And remember when I told you about the three business goals I developed for myself in Guiding by Goals? Well, I have three things I can’t live without in my personal life as well. I strive to be:

  1. A lifelong learner
  2. A world traveler
  3. An involved parent and partner.

I told a former boss about these three personal goals and she snorted. “That doesn’t seem very ambitious, Heidi, aren’t you already doing those?”

Well, yeah. I am. But I think of these goals as ever-present, not just something out in the distance that you have to work toward, bit by bit. In fact, their presence in my daily life is exactly what’s so important about them.

I have ‘lifelong learner’ on my list because I’m always on a learning curve. Whether it’s new technology (the impetus to start my blog, so that I could learn WordPress), or a new skill like embroidery (hey, if knitting can be hip, don’t you dare knock embroidery), I dig that experimentation phase when I’m not really sure how to get from A to B, but enjoy the trial and error.

I also can’t seem to get enough of smart people. I read more than a book a week, hopping from marketing books to general corporate strategy, then over to Chick Lit, taking a right at mystery and suspense, short jog to legal thrillers and rounding the curve with some literary historical nonfiction and memoir. (Hyperlinks are to recent recommendations.)

And to really plug into thought leadership, I go for Harvard Business Review (try #HBRchat sometime on Twitter, it’s fun and you’ll meet interesting people) and TED’s rich collection of presentations. (By the way, I’m putting you on notice that it’s now one of my goals to give a TED talk.)

So, do you have three goals for your personal life? (Or four or five, I’m not a stickler.) Are they goals with a finish line, like “Lose 20 pounds” or “Write a novel,” or are they goals that you are accountable to both now and in the future.

I’d argue that the best goals are those that you can and must achieve continually. Then, there’s no time like the present to achieve them. GO.

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Guiding by goals

4 Nov Guiding by goals

I live in Portland. I work in Seattle. And on those long, lonely drives down I-5, returning home from a two- or three-day trip to the corporate office, I’ve got a lot of time to think.

But as my brain spins through the trip, tallying up ideas and new projects generated by days I pack full of meetings, one thing that endlessly frustrates me is that I can’t write it down. (Ahem, I’m driving.)

Turns out, one rainy night was a blessing in disguise.

Rewind a bit: at one point I worked with a person who was, shall we say, not a good fit. Her attitudes and actions were inconsistent with the culture we intend—mutual respect, trust in your colleagues’ professionalism and good judgment, and a workplace where everyone contributes and everyone wins.

It was a bad scene. And I’d been beat up by it for more than three years. Since I’m loathe to speak badly of anyone, let’s just call her Lord Voldemort: She Who Must Not Be Named.

I was literally on the edge, considering my options—different department, different company, different industry, different career. Go back to school and get an MBA. Go independent, build my own book of business. I’d laid out all of these options.

What held me back was the knowledge that the rest of my job was awesome. I loved the company, and virtually all of my colleagues. I would lay down in the street for the senior leadership. I am fascinated by the industry—the business of buildings, urban development and helping businesses find spaces that create a competitive advantage. It’s a dynamic mixture of strategy and creativity.

But Voldemort was making me miserable.

As I drove, I started a list in my head. And because I couldn’t write it down, I was forced to memorize it as I built it, thinking through and rethinking my priorities for business and for life.

Here are the three business goals I chose for myself:

  1. Create and share intellectual property. I love writing, teaching and developing marketing tools, and I want a role that puts me squarely in a development space, not merely management of the status quo.
  2. Contribute to the strategic direction of my company. I might not be the CEO or even the CMO, but I have reached a level where I feel I have something to offer creatively and in business/industry acumen that can take our firm to the next level. This goal satisfies the passionate brainstormer, the “idea vending machine” in me.
  3. Thrive in a positive and passionate work environment.

Number three, I realized, was missing. Lord Voldemort had created a culture of suspicion, a “gotcha” mentality that pitted colleagues against each other. She treated everyone above her with kid gloves, and everyone below her like dirt.

But how to change that? I did it on that drive.

My 15 minutes are up, so I’ll be back next time to tell you what happened. In the meantime, do you have 15 minutes to spare? What are your three business goals, and are you achieving them?

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The first fifteen minutes

2 Nov What do I do in my first 15 minutes? Get quiet, get focused, and figure out how to create accomplishment. Photo by Photo by John Althouse Cohen

What do you do during the first fifteen minutes of your day?

Check Facebook? Twitter? Read blogs or news feeds? Read and respond to e-mails?

Yep, I do that too. But not in the first fifteen. The first fifteen are mine, all mine. They’re a chance to take a breath and figure out how to really put points on the board.

I imagine that sometime my boss might call and ask, “So, Heidi, what have you been doing all day?” And you’d better believe I’m going to have a good answer. I work from home, so there’s no way for him to tell whether I’ve been hard at work in front of my computer or watching soaps and eating bon-bons. Or doing laundry, or napping, or cleaning the kitchen, or any number of things that doesn’t involve putting my butt in the chair and getting to work.

To quote my favorite editor from my news reporting days, “Heidi: Shut up and type.”

In five years of working from home, I’ve been forced to develop enormous self-discipline. It’s easy to be distracted by the call of the DVR or a phone call from Mom or the treadmill that really would like me to spend some more quality time with it. (If we were dating, you’d call it an on-again, off-again relationship.)

Regardless of whether I work 40 hours per week, or 30 or 50 or 80, I am accountable to producing results. It’s the yardstick by which I am measured, and so when I find myself spinning my wheels on projects and not really moving the ball forward, I get antsy. Sooner or later, I’m going to have to deliver.

What do I do in my first 15 minutes? Get quiet, get focused, and figure out how to create accomplishment. Photo by Photo by John Althouse Cohen

So the first fifteen minutes are a little strategy session, a big-picture assessment of what matters and where I need to go for the day. I keep a handwritten list to the left of my keyboard (I’m left-handed), mouse on the right, and it keeps me focused far better than a micromanager ever could.

Sometimes I divide my list between “what’s important” and “what’s urgent.” Sometimes, it’s a list of “what I want to do” and “what I have to do.” Sometimes I separate out the deep-dive projects from those little things, like sending five emails, that just gotta get done.

In the same amount of time I use to write this blog, I plan. I consider where my energy is, whether I’m ready to focus on just one thing, or if simply crossing a dozen small things off the page will be most satisfying.

Some studies have found that most people have at least 80 hours’ worth of work on their desks at any one point. You get to the end of a 40- or 50-hour workweek, and guess what? New requests have rolled in. There’s more to do. The 80 hours of demands on your time are still there.

That can easily get overwhelming, so I change my perspective. If there’s no way I can get it all done—if I simply make the choice that it won’t get all done—then I am also free to choose which things will get done.

And there is such power in priorities.

With the freedom to choose, I can let my priorities—my mission, my values, my purpose at work—be my guide, rather than feeling the tyranny of an endless to-do list. I can feel like I’m accomplishing what matters, rather than spinning my wheels and wishing I’d traded and hour of time-wasting email exchanges for one glorious nap.

Today, I won’t choose just to do things, just to tick off a list. Today, I’ll choose accomplishment.

What will you choose?  GO.

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