I F#%!ed Up

Days like today are the best days to have a blog, because what else would I do with my angst? With a blog, I can store it all neatly right here and get it out of my head.

So….I f#%!ed up today in a very big and very public way.

Actually, I messed up back at xmastime; it just came out today.  I have a client, who is sunsetting a Small Subject-Area Tool.  At xmastime, I proofread a newsletter release he wrote about the sunset.  I failed to catch a critical error: He stated that Large Important Tool (the parent of Small Tool) was being eliminated entirely in 2009.  Not true. Only Small Tool is being eliminated.  It was my responsibility to catch the error — my client wasn’t in a position to know.

The newsletter went out over email today, to a third of the company.  The newsletter clearly & falsely stated that Large Tool is being eliminated. This caused quite the shock & surprised, and the newsletter began being forwarded.  Within minutes it had hit my boss’ boss’ inbox.  She’s the SVP.  If she got it that quickly, it was only minutes before the Executive Committee and the CEO got it.

The Executive Committee and the CEO loooooove the Large Important Tool. News, even false, of its demise  has likely triggered heart attacks.

But you know what? I’m not worried.

Sure, it’s an incredibly public mistake. Right before review time.  Visible to important people who control my promotion. And I have to publically issue a retraction. And apologize to my client for my mess-up, since he never would have released the news item if I hadn’t green-lighted it. And I don’t get to be a jackass and hide, or point blame at my client, or in any way deflect my responsiblity.

I‘m not worried, because I’m confident that I’ll be judged not on the fact that it happened, but on how I fix it. The fix — the retraction — is already underway, and I’m managing my SVP’s expectations. My boss is in the loop, and I’m over-communicating to him (insurance he likes).

Bear in mind, my personal brand is protecting me. If I wasn’t a great performer, and if my past actions hadn’t consistently showed I deliver results, prevent problems, fix problems and communicate well, then I would be judged on the fact that I caused the problem.  I think about a couple of my employees, past & present, whom I would have judged very harshly if this had happened on their watch, because they were inconsistent performers and this would have reinforced my perceptions of  spotty performance.

Great performance, a willingness to take partners and consistent ownership of weaknesses & mistakes are like money in the bank: I’ve got a little checkbook balance now I can spend, without being over-drawn.  If I handle the fix well, I might break even or end up with net positive credibility.

But GOOD GRIEF, there’s nothing like public massive fail in an area of strength to really make a gal feel like a million bucks! Plus, I broke my mother’s car key today, the remote-access kind of car key that costs $300 to fix/replace. MASSIVE FAIL.

Guess all I can do is keep on dancing, and laugh a little, so as not to end on a sour note.  HAHAHAHAHA!

Love the One You’re With

Ok, I’m pretty happy about work right now for two reasons.

The first is that our goal-setting process is coming to an end and I’m locked. My colleague spoke up today in front of my boss and said he thought I’d been asked to take on too much given the resources I have, and I appreciate that. But even though I’ve been tasked to boil the ocean, I’m OK with failing on some of my objectives since you learn and grow most from failure.  And because of the way our points system is set up — voluntary assignment of points, and no hard correlation of points-to-objectives — I’m already strategizing to game the system and claim full points no matter how many objectives I actually achieve. Broken system, loose rules, break the rules, set new rules: learn to love the broken system, love the one you’re with.

Second reason I’m happy, and second way to love the one you’re with:  my current job is my dream job. Here’s how this works.  Under the theory that if you don’t define yourself others will define you, I’m going to define my current job in ways that establish me as working on, known for, an expert in, etc., my dream job.

The thing I’ve been craving to do is to have a leadership role in the communications field.  This is problematic for several reasons, the first being that there is zero up, down or lateral movement going on at my company right now — as with many firms these days.  Even more problematic is that leadership roles in the communications department and my current pay grade totally don’t jive.  I’m over-paygraded for a leadership role in that field. (People with director and VP titles in small agencies come to our communications department as individual contributors, manager titles at best, sometimes even specialist titles.) Finally, I have no direct experience in that field and I know I often over-romanticize what’s on the other side of the fence.

But thinking about my goals for 2009, I relized: I’m already doing much of what I think my fantasy job is all about. I am managing director-, possibly up to VP-level leaders. I am doing complex, cross-functional communication and change management with a huge group of stakeholders. I am developing strategy, then seeing it executed. For the applications & projects I own, I am steering them for the future.  I have a nice balance of extremely strategic and precise, tactical actions.

So I am going to talk about my work in ways that establish me as deputy-chief (I think my boss gets to be chief) strategist for EBI from the business side, and EBI communications director.  And I am going to talk about strengths & weaknesses in ways that support this. Establish goals in a way that supports this. Take on new work only if it supports this. Help my boss continue to position me, market me and brand me as chief strategist and communications director.

Two titles I’ve always wanted!

It’s an evolutionary process, but I’m very inspired and now firmly believe that anyone can evolve their current situation into their dream situaion — without a lot of fancy interviewing, jumping-ship, or etc.  My formula (and I didn’t realize this was a formula; hindsight is 20-20) is this:

• Consistently outperform in current role
• Consistently build deep, sustained relationships with boss, peers, clients
• Build trust and get known as a reliable expert and learner
• Fill gaps no one else fills. In my case it’s a sophisticated level of communication, and successfully guiding teams through confusion/ambiguity.
• Talk about the type of experiences I want, not just the job or title I want. In my case, for a couple of years I’ve been a broken record talking about managing people, communications, strategy development, managing complex virtual teams/stakeholders and the ability to execute a few very tangible deliverables.

Since I’m trusted, fill gaps and am known for delivering outcomes, it’s been easier for my leadership to keep attaching me to new work & open opportunities that match the type of experiences I’m looking for.

So since I don’t have the title I want yet, and moving to the communicaions department may not be the best/easiest/smartest/possible move, I will now just:

• Behave as though I already have the title I want
• Behave as though my current job is my dream job, to the point of describing what I do in the terms of my dream job.

I apologize if this all is total Duh to you but I suddenly put it all together today and I’m very inspired to create my own reality right now.

Do any of you create your own career reality like this?

My Performance Review

My mid-year performance review was yesterday. (Mid-year huh??)  It went very well! One of the things I really appreciate about my company’s culture is that reviews are expected to be no-surprises events.  You should be hearing about your strengths & weaknesses all year long in direct and actionable feedback from your boss.  Your boss is supposed to be  your partner in this — I like that expectation.

Here are my results:

+  I keep teams focused on delivering the high-value items, especially when chaos or scope creep starts up.

+  Excellent communication

+ Excellent execution, especially with large, complex projects.

+ Several partners, including three directors, expressed relief that I’m back from leave. One said, “I just feel more comfortable with her around.”

- Don’t over-use my communication strength.  Influence the communication strategy but hold others accountable to deliver, instead of stepping in to do it for them.

- Leverage my communication and relationship-building strengths to influence more without authority, particularly with a project that is at risk for derailing.

No promotion yet, but I’m working on it!

How I Manage Up

Everyone’s boss is different — we all have our weird blind spots and paranoias and strange weaknesses and hyper-focused strengths.  So my tricks for managing up may not work for you, in fact they probably won’t.  But if my boss ever hires you, you can use these tactics on him.

1.  I debate with him. He likes debate.  He likes to argue the point and the merits.  Once I got some feedback that he & my former director liked me because at the time I was one of the only people pushing back.  That little reinforcement was all I needed to get super comfortable saying, “I completely disagree, and here’s why.”  The real tactic here is that I communicate with him using his preferred style.

2.  I give him direct, relatively blunt constructive feedback. He’s from Jersey, he likes direct communication.  We live in MN, there’s a lot of passive aggressive communication.  I try to be plain & straightforward.  I give direct feedback to him on his performance and style because 1) he’s not very self-reflective and doesn’t always monitor the interpersonal after-effects of his approach.  And 2) he once invited me to give feedback.  The first time I gave it, it felt like a big risk.  But there were no bad consequences to me; in fact he thanked me.  And that encouragement was all I needed to keep doing it.  The real tactic here is that I help identify pain points & friction points, and suggest possible solutions, before they cause trouble.

3.  I demand clear expectations and well-defined, specific desired outcomes. Actually, I need to get better at demanding these things, at the time, in the moment, when the confusion is happening.  He’s strategic, and he’s often thinking out loud at a mile-a-minute clip.  He usually locks onto his desired outcome like a pit bull locking it’s jaw, but often the outcome is not fully baked and it’s up to the rest of us to bake it.  A lot of the time I feel like I’m trying to mind read.  Or, I’ll have to digest our conversation for a while and then go back to say, “This is what I think we discussed, and now that I’ve mulled it over, here’s what I actually think I should do.”  This, more than anything, directly causes most of my stress, so my goal in 2009 is to stand up for myself right in the moment and get specifics and clarifications.  Just like the ROWE people say I should.  The real tactic here is that I [should] insist on specifically defining, and agreeing on, desired outcome and timing. Also I [should] ask for proof/data/objective facts when he makes an assertion that’s way out of left field.

4.  I take abstract, vague ideas and execute them. I take the crazy ideas and make them happen.  Like I said, he’s often stuck in his desired outcome without a clear path to getting there or an understanding of all the steps to take and issues to clear, and a lot of the time he’s lighting a panicky fire to get there.  He’ll be the first to admit, he isn’t organized, task oriented or a process master. (On the HBDI: no green.)  So he hires people like me, who are.  The real tactic here is that I complement his weaknesses with my strengths. Part of the success here is that he hired me to be this complement — however, I spent a lot of time early on figuring out what his strengths & weaknesses were so that I knew where I could add value.

5.  I make sure he recognizes the team. I show off their wins to him, insist he send thank-you’s or notes, nominate them for awards he gives.  Because it’s not a strength of his at all, and because it helps him not be scary.  The real tactic here is just a variant of both #2 and #4.

6.  I make him look good. Because: DUH. His priorities are my priorities. I’ll drop everything to get him a deck for a meeting with his boss or an important client.  I scan his calendar to figure out when big-deal meetings are happening and either offer or ask what he needs. I feed him wins & measureable successes from my team so he can in turn show them off to his boss and partners. I get shit done. I warn him when trouble or stupidity happens, if it’s likely to get back to him — no surprises. The real tactic here is that I make him look good. Dang, I wish my own team would take this one more seriously with me! LOL.

7.  I delegate up. I am not afraid to give a clear request or assignment back up to my own boss.  I particularly like to deploy him when I think some particular action on his part will make it easier for me or my team to cut through an obstacle and move forward.  Becuse our success is his success. Also sometimes I just think there’s something he should be doing, not me. The real tactic here is that I protect the boundaries of my own work, and ask for the resources (usually action from my boss) I need to be successful.

Blunt Feedback I Wish I’d Given

Some of this is blunt feedback I wish I’d been given, early in my career.  Some of it is blunt feedback I wish I — or someone — had given various colleagues & employees. Why is it so hard for people to be frank about this stuff?  Maybe it’s because I live in Minnesota, where the official state personality is passive aggressive, but sugar coating or ignoring this stuff doesn’t do anyone any favors.

1.  Stop obsessing about pay grade. Obsessing about pay grade is the wrong strategic move. The more you obsess about your pay grade, the more I think you have no common sense and the less I want to increase your pay grade.  Why? You care about pay grade because you want to make more and feel like you’re being promoted.

But to make more and get promoted, you should instead obsess about outperforming in your current role, getting new marketable experiences, and getting marketable title advancement. These are the things you talk about on your resume and in your interviews, not pay grade.

Plus, pay grades usually overlap by enormous amounts, so is not necessarily an indication your compensation,  just your upside. Jumping pay grades doesn’t guarantee more cash.  But outperforming and racking up marketable experience both increases your likelihood of getting a raise (more cash) and jumping pay grades (more upside).

PS: title is more important than pay grade because title goes on the resume and sets compensation expectations.  For example, in my company, there are certain Analysts who are higher pay grades than some Managers.  But Manager flags as higher-compensated on a resume.

2. Fix your image. Sorry to remind you but humans are evolutionarily wired to make snap judgments based on appearance.  Image includes clothes, hair, makeup, ironing, tie, jewelry, fingernails, etc.  For goodness sake, use a q-tip! Want to advance? Dress like you mean it. Don’t dress like your kid, or yourself from ten years ago,  or the funky free spirit that you think you are.  Right now, you are over estimating how professional you look. If you tell me that “suits are uncomfortable,” or “suits don’t fit me,” than I believe believe you’re not thinking maturely or strategically about your career, because it’s plenty easy to find a suit that fits, and by the way you need to get comfortable with using a tailor.

This rant about suits comes from the suit culture I work in:  you need to carefully examine the culture of your own organization.  How do the leaders in your company present their image? How do the people you admire in the job you want (not the job you have) present their image? Follow their lead.

3. Your communication style is getting in your way. If you are not an excellent communicator, people aren’t recognizing your smarts & your contribution.  People are getting tired of fighting the communication battle with you, or being eternally confused by you. The more tired you make them, the less they will want to work with you, or for you, and to promote you.

4. You need to manage up more. If you don’t know what that is, you need to find out or get a mentor.  It is not the same as brown-nosing: it’s managing expectations, ensuring your actions are aligned with your manager’s goals, appropriately triageing issues, ensuring your manager knows your successes, making life easy for your manager and making your manager look good.  Everyone wants their manager to have their back, right?  Think of managing up as returning the favor.

5. Invest more time in your boss and your boss’ boss. You can have the greatest relationship in the world with the client or your team, but if you don’t ALSO invest in having a great relationship with your boss – and for that matter, your boss’ peers, your boss’ boss and anyone filling in for your boss  – than you are not going to have a great review or get looked at as promotable, or get great new assignments. Or be able to have a candid enough relationship with your boss such that you can say no, influence priorities, and call her on her bullshit.

6. Own your own weaknesses, start mitigating them and take off the blinders.  Why is are so many people so reluctant to own their weaknesses? Maybe because so many of us have been punished for weakness in the past. But what, do you think you are perfect? Only a perfect person would either have no weaknesses or not have to mitigate them.

7. Stop taking everyone’s advice indiscriminately. Instead ask: out of the menu of advice I’ve gotten, which is most applicable for this current situation or this current culture or this current personality?

This goes for my advice, right here, too.   I’m just a data point for you, and you can’t use every data point — I might be an outlier. I don’t have some magic solution or the key to it all.  If I had the key, I wouldn’t need to be writing this blog to figure out what I am doing.

7 Tips for Early Success When You’re New to the Organization….

….Or, What I Realized Today While Putting Out an 8:00a.m. Fire Involving the New Person, and Also Later While Eavesdropping Against My Will on the New Person:

1. Figure out the organization’s culture, and let go of your prior job’s culture. Invest some time in this; do it thoughtfully and deliberately. Is it command/control? Is it consensus-based? You have to be successful in this culture, because this organization is where you now work.  Don’t try to force your old culture onto your new job: nothing pisses off consensus people more than a dictator and nothing annoys command/control folks more than someone wasting time trying to build consensus.

2. Meet the communication needs of your clients & peers. You are new.  You will not be able to influence well right off the bat. You have to build relationships and deliver results in order to build credibility, reputation and influence.  You cannot build relationships if you are not communicating well.  Communicating well means figuring out what your partners need to hear from you and how they need to hear it.  It means explaining the context and the why’s of what you are doing and recommending. It means asking more and talking less.

3.  Don’t assume you know how the process/business/department works. Instead, watch, listen and learn. Listen three times more than you talk.  Draw out your partners, ask them what do they do, why do they do it? What are they concerned about? How do they measure results? What are they frustrated by?  Find out what are the sacred cows.  Don’t challenge the sacred cows too much until you have built up some credibility.

4.  Build up some credibility. Deliver excellent results.  But ensure you bring your partners & staff along fro the ride.  Great results alone don’t give you credibility, if they aren’t embraced by the client, or understood by your staff.  Develop a reputation for delivering, for innovating, for adding value to other teams, for helping other people.

5.  Keep a pulse on perceptions and manage them. The last thing you need is to have a client or partner think what you are up to is a direct threat to their job, methodology, way of life. If you were not hired to threaten or change those things, then monitor for signals that you are sending a threatening message, figure out what you are doing that sends the message, and stop doing it. If you were hired to threaten or change those things, then work hard to bring your partner along for the ride and generate buy-in instead of just compliance. Either way, reach out to those who feel threatened and clear the air. Approach it as a partnership and appeal to shared goals.

6. Be graceful in how you challenge & debate. Don’t be a steamroller, deliberately or accidentally.  Aknowledge you are debating; state when you are playing Devil’s Advocate.  Paraphrase back others’ points to demonstrate to them you heard and understand. (Engage in a little meta-communication).

7. Don’t assume your analysis is better. If your analysis is better, you’d better employ change management!

Hmmm, I’m seeing a communication theme here.

Well, good communication is 50% of the battle.  Does this battle sound too hard or too time consuming?  If you think like that it’s going to be a big limiting factor for you.