Secrets of My Success

Hi Team,

I’ve written another guest post over at Blog@Work. Cheers to Anastasia for thinking of me!

This time, I’m revealing all my special secrets — the amazing formula for success that I followed that got me where I am today.  Amazing secret formula! Or is it??

Here’s an exerpt:

Do you have to script a 10-year and a 5-year plan, follow them to the T, and ensure every action of every day furthers you to those goals? Hells no. But some healthy post-mortem self reflection will show you the hidden patterns underlying what at the time seemed like you were just doing what seemed interesting, or were lucky – position X opened up and you got to have experience Y. Look for them. Can you repeat the patterns again? Can you use those patterns to help you take it to the next level?

Patterns and formulas can help you be deliberate when you feel the need for a structured push. But don’t forget to just go do what seems interesting.

Go check it out!

Start ‘Er off on a High Note

January was a grousy month.  The general consensus around the office last Friday was, “Whew.”  It was a tough week getting through the layoffs, and it was a tough month all around at the F50C.  I think it was a tough month for many of us, having to confront 2008 actuals for both our personal finances and our companies’ performance. Good thing I have a blog, because venting here is definately better then pouring out my angst all over my family.

Actuals are in, goals are locked, and all we can do now is go forward.

So I’m done complaining. We’re gonna start February off on a high note. Here’s what I’m excited about at work right now:

• I have almost unlimited potential to expand my responsibilities right now. I think for a little while this was giving me pause — I have a lot of big things do do.  But big responsibilities mean opportunity to make a real impact. And my boss is more of a point-and-push kind of guy, so I have a ton of potential to define my world as big as I want.

• I have a lot of opportunities to make my boss’ life easier by taking on meetings and statuses so that he can exit and focus on other stuff.  And the good news is that these are almost all either decision-making meetings or statuses with folks way above my pay grade. More exposure for me, plus my boss is happy that is world is simpler.

• I am really excited about the direction one of my employees is going in this year. Her major project will be ending and what’s next for her after that is both cutting edge and a great fit for her sweet spot of skills & strengths.

• I totally schooled my Gen Y employee in my expectations — I used him as a guinea pig to talk expectations in a way that was far more specific, blunt & spelled-out than I ever had before. It’s already sooooo much easier to catch issues & redirect before they get big.

• Another employee asked for some really direct & blunt feedback on Wednesday, and I was very honest and gave examples of behavior and consequence. We also talked through tactics and the fact that she’s more empowered than she thinks she is.  Already on Thursday she was applying some of what we talked about. I hope it sticks!

• I had a great presentation on Friday to one of the VPs and his management team. We have good support from them for a new initiative I’m trying to start up.

• After the presentation, I had coffee with my old Director.  She soundly reconfirmed that I’m being positioned to promote (even though the timeline may have slowed for all promotions, given the layoffs) and that she supports me.  Even better, she highlighted for me the exact key strength that she sees me bring to my boss & my peers on his management team and said she’d see a huge gap if I wasn’t on his team.  It’s really nice to have this confirmed by a third party whom I really respect!

• There’s a posting that went out this week (despite the layoffs….It must be one of the only postings in the company) and two people approached me to apply. It’s a communications-specific role, but I’m highly skeptical that it would be a lateral move with no promotion potential. I’m also a little skeptical about whether the hiring manger’s style is a good fit for me.  My former Director said that while she’d love to have me in the role, it’s probably a poor move career-wise.  I’m not gonna lie: I love that I was approached, I love the vote of confidence and mentoring from my former Director, and I love the power of saying, “no, thanks!”

• Oh, and that big, big f#%! up? My client is a total trooper, he got the retraction out within a day, totally took responsibility & ownership, kept it professional and kept it friendly.  We had a big apology fest, apologizing to each other, and he also apologized to my boss.  He models all the best in professionalism, and between the two of us, I think we underscored my favorite career truth: failure and screw-ups are less important than how well you move forward and deal with them.

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!

How to Tell If Your Goals Are Good

Team, of all places, Babycenter has a great article about how to make sure your goals are reasonable and you’re focusing on what’s important.

How to Fail-Proof Your New Year’s Resolutions is (duh) actually about setting good new year resolutions that you can actually achieve. But aren’t new year resolutions just a type of goal?

Some of the rules tie together good goal setting practice with other key traits of successful people. This list is fresh. Here’s the excerpt:

1. Know the purpose of your list. (Uncover your core values by asking yourself  “What kind of person do I want to be?”

2. Focus on what you already like about yourself and your life, and take it from there.

3. Make sure your goals are intrinsically motivated. (Meaning: Don’t use your life to try to impress other people.)

4. Think about what you want to do, not what you want to have.

5. Keep it fun. (If it’s not, you won’t do it.)

6. Keep it positive. (Language counts. More action, less reaction.)

7. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. (Think small, easily digestible bites, instead.)

8.  Read your list to yourself. (How does it make you feel? Intimidated, empowered, challenged?)

9. Include your wildest dreams, and be ready to abandon, or change any items on the list at any time.

My reactions:

#2. You’re always going to be more successful when you focus on maximizing strengths instead of improving weaknesses.  When it comes to weaknesses, figure out how to neutralize or mitigate them and be done with it.  Why sign up for a goal that’s going to be painful or impossible to achieve? If you’re consistently asked to take on goals that involve fixing a weakness or having to primarily use traits that are weaknesses, then you’re probably in the wrong role.  And PS for resolution-setters: I don’t mean we should give up on difficult outcomes like losing weight.  But if portion control is a huge weakness, don’t focus your goal on portion control – focus it on lifting weights or cooking whole foods, or cycling more often.

#3. This is a big problem for me.  I do like me some extrinsic attention from authority figures.  How annoying! This trait does not serve me at all.

#4.  This is right in line with some of the best career advice I’ve ever been given

#6.  Absolutely. If you focus on eliminating something you don’t like, you’ll still get the outcome you don’t like, because even focusing on something’s absence still keeps the “something” front and center in your conscious and subconscious focus.  My boss & I are constantly trying to get our team and partners to define business cases for projects and strategic initiatives in terms of what we will do instead of what we are not. It’s a much better sell.

#7. Oh, I struggle with this every day during our goal setting process!  I think we absolutely have bitten off too much.  We’re not so good at tightly defining success, and I am weary, weary, weary of trying to boil the ocean.

PS – Gotta credit Free Money Finance for the quote-react format, which he uses all the time. Love it.

Feeling Really Discouraged

So I found out Friday that two colleagues whom I like and admire have been promoted. This is great news and I’m very happy for them.  I am also feeling super discouraged.

Why does this bother me?

Because these two, I thought of them as peers.  Peers who were one management level ahead of me, one title ahead of me. (This isn’t about pay or pay grade for me, it’s about title and the publicness of title.)

So I was behind, right? This is my thinking. If they’re a title level ahead of me, yet my peers, I must be doing something wrong and need to catch up.  They were a yardstick of sorts, because we were more alike than different.  And I did not measure up.

And now they are two title levels ahead of me.

So I feel stuck. Stupid.  Not even stuck: sliding backwards.

But why does this bother me so much?

I have been asking myself this for a year, ever since I read The Resilience Factor and took a class from the author.  I’m not yet 100% sure.  I know I have big hot-buttons, icebergs the book calls them, about:

• Recognition, especially by authority
• Public recognition of success, in this case via my publicly-known title
• An idea that I’ve failed if others succeed at a faster rate than me

Icebergs are those really deep-seated beliefs, the ones that are hard to even make yourself aware of, let alone let go of.  I am not sure where these icebergs came from. Something in childhood, early school perhaps? My parents set high standards, but never unrealistic expectations nor conditional love.

These icebergs do not serve me.  These icebergs directly contribute to my caution in reaching out to take risks with big payoffs (like aggressively positioning myself for promotion) or trying new experiences (it took me a year to decide to start this blog, and six years to decide to go to graduate school).  Of the several types of resilience the authors have identified, I am far less resilient than the norm on reaching out.

Plus, these icebergs make it easy for me to feel embarrassed and ashamed about myself, depressed, and apathetic (“why try”).

So what am I gonna do about it?

Two things.

1. I will work to neutralize icebergs when they get activated. (The book has useful tactics for doing this, but they are new behaviors I have to learn.) I will keep working to consciously make myself aware when an iceberg gets activated, deliberately choose to feel differently instead of giving into the auto-emotional response, and tell myself, “This doesn’t serve you at all, let it go.”

I will also make lists of factual proof contrary to what the icebergs are telling me.  In this case, proof that I am not failing nor unpromotable includes my stellar performance review score and explicit statements from my boss, former boss, and director that I am ready to promote and that they are positioning me for promotion.

2.  I will figure out how to more effectively and aggressively promote my career. Advocating for myself is perhaps my biggest weakness. I’ve long complained that I don’t know how to promote myself, but this isn’t true: via feedback I know I’m a great career coach to my employees and other colleagues.  So I will become a student of this. (I’m the daughter of academics, after all).  I will look for concrete, actionable tactics. I will ask myself what I’d council another to do, and take my advice.  I will seek out blogs & books about career advancement and study them.  And I will ask a couple of trusted colleagues for recommendations on a mentor for this specific topic/skill set.

Oh, and I will blog about it

That’s why I started this thing, yes?  Among other reasons, I just need to lay bare my biggest shame and my biggest blind spot. Ruminate on it, learn from others, hear comments & feedback, think out loud.

Is She Good?

Today I have to write about someone else’s performance, in order to write about my own performance.  For both of us, the question to answer: Is she good?

Let me start by saying that I firmly believe that my first job as a leader of people is to coach, develop & empower my team to be highly productive and to advance in their careers. (Be that advancement to higher levels or advancement as individual contributors to higher challenges).  Of course, I also need to set vision & strategy and at my management level I also have individual contributions, but my primary job is my team.  Why else am I managing people?

On all my teams, I’ve had mixes of star, average and poor performers.  Any team would have this, yes? And where my people land on that continuum — where any of us land — is not fixed through time.  Performance improves, performance slips, new challenges emerge and we rise to meet them, or not.

So when my client, who is several pay grades above me, asked today of one of my team, “Is she good?” it broke my heart but I had to assess fairly and answer no. She is good at some things, at work that is tightly scoped and appropriate for her pay grade. But my client was questioning whether she is good at handling the challenges before us, challenges that have evolved over the year.  And she has not risen to them. As much as the skills required to meet these challenges are crucial to moving our initiative forward, my client was also asking, “Is she good enough to promote?” and the skills are even more crucial at leadership levels.  So: No.

Here is why this is also about my performance: My primary job is to develop and empower my team.  In the first half of the year, I considered this employee one of my stars.  But over the year, she has slipped from star into average and seems to be continuing her slide. Granted, I was on maternity leave for part of this slide, but I have been asking myself what I could and should have done better to help her prevent her slide (and the disengagement that is going with it).  I have also been asking myself whether I even assessed her correctly in the first place.  And this is soooo important to me, because my primary job is my team.  How could I not have seen this coming, or stepped in to prevent?

Here are some of the things I have learned from the situation, that I’ll try to apply going forward:

• I bias towards seeing the potential in people.  This is a good thing.  But some people give strong early impressions, and then can’t follow it up.  I’m going to be more cautious about assessing people as high-potential for promotion until I see a longer period of consistent strong results. And a long period of not being overly dramatic and acting overly entitled.

• The higher you go, the more important become communication, ability to reduce confusion & ambiguity, delegation, and ability to see the big picture and focus on what’s important.  When giving feedback in the future, I’m going to be more blunt about these being big limiting factors if people can’t get a handle on them and mitigate weaknesses in these areas. I’m good at giving actionable, behavior-based feedback but I think I haven’t been as blunt as I should have been about consequences, particularly promotion consequences, of not addressing problems in these areas.

• I am going to talk to my boss and my most trusted manager peers more regularly about their impressions & assessment of my team members. We do this well at my company at review time, and I do regularly ask the vague, Do you have any feedback for my team? I want to start asking specific things like, What do you see as the biggest value [name] brings, or How do you think [name] has been doing at [activity] or What do you see as [name]’s next destination? Also: How do you think I am doing coaching [name] around [issue]? Asking these things throughout the year will give me a pulse check on my assessments of their performance and my success at coaching, and give me insight into behaviors or interactions I may not be seeing directly.

How to Clean Up a *@#%ing Mess

It’s only day two back and it’s already apparent that several things fell apart while I was gone.  This is not to say I’m such a superstar that my absence is the direct cause of the chaos (although it has been made abundantly clear to me that I was sorely missed).  It’s more the nature of project work and IT project work specifically:  crap happens, things go wrong, and perverse incentives exist that cause people to hide bad news until it’s too late.  Yeah, OK and some of it is because I was gone.

The task before me is to quickly get back up to speed at a deep level of detail so I can get back to working my mojo and getting things moving forward again. I need to diagnose just what the heck is going on and then I need to ensure we are moving, moving MOVING FORWARD people!

Here are my favorite techniques:

1.  Play dumb. I’ve been away for four months so I’ve missed a lot of the history, nuance and back story.  I get to ask all the dumb, naive questions I can think of, and play that magical role called “new person” even though I’m technically not new.  Having to answer the dumb, obvious questions can help people cut through the spin, justifications and finger-pointing.  Plus, I really need all those dumb details! Did I mention it is such a relief to let my inner dumb come out of the closet?

2. Ask for post-mortems. What happened? Why did it happen? What specific cascade of events occurred?  Tell me about it in plain English. Where are the exact points where things broke down? Are we likely to repeat these mistakes? How can we ensure this doesn’t happen again?

3. Set the standard for no finger-pointing. Goodness knows, the team has done enough of that already.  Business blames IT, IT blames the business, project managers blame the clients, fingers pointed all around.  Say aloud, to everyone, over and over again:  “I’m not interested in pointing fingers.  I just want to understand what happened.  What’s important is what we do now on our way forward.”

4. Bias for action. Corollary to #3.  Once I understand exactly what happened and what the current state is, I want to know what we will do about the current state.  I do not want the team, partners or clients moaning and bemoaning.  I want some specific next actions.  I do not want an overblown, over-engineered, re-engineered gantt chart.  I do not want a month of planning or a 60 day rebaseline. I want some specific, concrete, do-able next actions.  I want some small, achievable wins (to help morale and momentum).  I want them time-bound and deadlined, and I want them executed.

5. Open the communication floodgates. When *@#%ing messes are developing, communication clamps down.  People don’t want to share bad news so they keep it to themselves.  People are pointing fingers, so they talk behind each other’s backs to sympathetic ears.  Decisions aren’t being made and time pressure is mounting, so communication stops.  Time to open back up the communication floodgates and send clear, simple messages to all the stakeholders.  No overwrought, convoluted status reporting, just simple clear current state and way forward statements, and consistent messages.  Use multiple communication channels — one-on-one statuses with leaders, broadcast emails to the virtual team, broadcast emails to the stakeholders, in-person steering committee meetings, etc.  Give consistent statements and clear facts, avoid finger pointing, clearly outline accountability (who will do what now, and by when).  But tailor the style of message to the audience.

6.  Re-introduce discipline. Once the way forward, and specific time-bound next actions are identified and publically announced, ensure that the plan is being worked.  Pull the core group together for regular status updates.  Communicate those updates.  Work the plan, mitigate the risks.  If the facilitator or manager of the project execution is largely to blame (no public finger pointing!) for things falling apart, replace them. (But no public finger-pointing! This step is for leaders to handle behind the scene).  Do a deeper dive into timing/action; set milestones. But don’t plan to plan.  Motivate the team. Light a good fire. Get them moving forward again.

7. Re-introduce feedback. Keep a pulse on client happiness. Schedule regular in-person or email check-ins. How are things going? How do they feel about the way forward? Keep a pulse on the project team.  Are they executing? Are they burnt out? Do they buy into to the end goal? Answer concerns as promptly as possible. Insist on people talking directly to each other (not complaining to third parties), but if they have bad blood or poor communication styles, help them out.  Use every interaction to ask, “What can I start, stop or continue doing to help you? Do you have feedback for me or my team?”  Hold the partners and virtual team members accountable — provide specific, actionable, behavior/consequence based feedback as soon as possible, but not in public.

8.  Celebrate wins. Bomb the team and clients with positive feedback when warranted. Publically celebrate (announce, aknowledge, point out, you know what I mean) small wins, big wins and interim milestones achieved. Catch people doing things right.  Catch them some more. Catch them some more.  Reward what you want more of.

Failure: Keep the Benefits, Drop the Pain

Failure is kind of becoming a hobby of mine.

I want to learn to embrace failure and learn from failure, because popular business research seems to continually bear out that highly successful people generally have significant failures in their background and those experiences –  how they chose to respond and whether they noted and used key learnings – directly influenced subsequent successes.

Failure is a fact of life, because none of us are perfect.  Response to failure is what sets us apart.
I’ve got one failure in my past frpm which I’ve applied a ton of learnings:
•    Choose only roles that let me operate only from within my strengths
•    Ask for mentoring and promotion; don’t wait for it to be offered
•    Seek client, partner and peer feedback outside the “official” channels of annual review time
•    Manage my brand
•    Advertise my wins
•    Define my own success. Never, ever, let others define it for me.
•    Never give up. Do not hide. Do not quit.

Here’s what happened:
I was a financial analyst.  I’m a basically competent financial analyst, but I am not talented at it, I find it hard, and I find it annoying. But I was doing this work because I had a shiny new MBA and I thought I was “supposed” to.  One day, with no warning and contrary to recent prior feedback and review score indicators, I was the only member of my cohort to not be promoted during a time of very public social promotion.  I can’t underscore enough how public this was. Then, a few months later during a big reorganization, I was told that the Finance leadership didn’t see me at all as a leader – no potential, and that if I hadn’t already found a new role they would have helped me find one outside of the track I was on – I would have been kicked out.

I largely view my failure as a good thing, because it lead to a great, new role and helped me clarify my value proposition and stand up for myself in terms of what I wanted to do.

But here’s where I need your help:
Three years later, despite the positive outcomes the failure eventually led me to, I still stew on it and carry a ton of embarrassment about it.  I often assume I’m walking around the office with a big neon sign over my head, flashing the backstory just in case someone isn’t up on the details. I often still let myself get angry or mortified when someone who was a peer or lower pay grade in those days is promoted past me now on that track. Despite the fact I have removed myself entirely from that track. I’m also still mad. Nothing makes me madder than being told I do not have leadership potential.  Because I have plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Crowdsource me some solutions, team!
How do I give up the embarrassment, anger and negative head-bees from my failure?

Big Plans and Big Fun

Shoot, this is a lot of fun.

Starting this blog has given me a ton of ideas, all kinds of crazy excitement racing around my head.

J from 101 Smackdowns and I have been talking about leveraging each other’s networks, guest-posting and other ways to increase or audiences and build our brands.

One of my goals for this blog is to content and a forum that’s really useful to me and to others as we develop our careers — and to help myself and others hack and re-engineer our careers instead of blindly accepting other peoples’ definitions of success.

Now I’m getting all kinds of great ideas of specific steps to take to help achieve this goal. So exciting and so much fun. It’s blue-sky! Anything is possible!

I am not limited, because I have never done this before. So I don’t know any better! I can make really clever decisions and make really excellent mistakes.

Has anyone read the book, Blue Sky Strategy? It’s waiting on my shelf for me. If you’ve read it, have you applied any of it to your own career or life?

WTF is the F50C?

You’ll forgive me if I learned my lesson from Dooce. No giveaway details here. You will have to content yourself with the following tidbits:

I work for a Fortune 50 company – the F50C.

Success in my industry, under the current business model, depends on sustaining the rampant consumerist culture, personal debt levels, outsourcing of jobs, dependence on foreign manufacturing, and trade deficit levels that are contributing to the economic meltdown.

I have some serious cognitive dissonance about this, since I believe in personal financial responsibility, being debt-free, living below one’s means, and supporting local and artisan producers.

I have a boss. Generally, he’s a pretty good boss but he has big blind spots and sometimes I like to blame him for my career malaise.

I have employees. Generally, I’m a pretty good boss but I’m sure I have big blind spots and I’m sure they like to blame me for their career malaise.

I have an MBA. I focused my studies on finance & strategy.

I started out doing financial analysis in a leadership development program at my company. I pretty well suck at financial analysis. Also I hate doing it.

It took some big, public failure at doing financial analysis to give me the kick in the head I needed to find a new role. And to become obsessed with developing my strengths and mitigating my weaknesses – rather than trying to fix my weaknesses.

Failure is really important. I’m trying to learn to love failure. It’s just an academic respect right now — I’m still deeply embarrassed every time I fail. Maybe my love will blossom over time.

Now I do project management work in a business unit that partners with IT to serve Finance clients. Sometimes I marvel that I get paid so much (and wow, do I!) to do this work which is so easy. Other times I marvel that this work is idiotic, silly, and if I were truly driving value for the F50C I would figure out how to eliminate my own team & job, and fix IT such that they didn’t need the business to baby-sit them so much. (Yikes, did I say that? Sorry, nerds!)

Whenever I think the grass is greener at some other company, I take a really hard look at that company’s culture and compensation: the F50C always ends up greener in the end. The one major failing is that it’s still the Corporate Treadmill.

Fire away: I’ll answer questions about the F50C in the comments — if I can do it in a Dooce-proof way.