The Secret to Success

Posted on September 20, 2010 by

Everyone wants to be successful right?  Or more accurately, no one wants to fail.  But how can you find success in your life, your job, or anywhere else?  The answer is simple.

Love what you do.

There’s nothing that will make you better than doing what you love and pursuing it with all your heart.  I was reminded of this over the weekend after I learned that George N. Parks, the longtime director of the UMass Minuteman Marching Band had passed away suddenly.  While most of you probably don’t know of him at all, those of us who attended UMass saw him every week in the fall standing in front of thousands of football fans, loving his job.

Here’s a clip of him speaking to new drum majors about leadership.

Of course he did have a pretty cool job…

Who wouldn’t want to stand up and direct a fabulous band in front of thousands of cheering fans?

But even a great job sucks sometimes – that fabulous end product was the result of hours of practice night after night slogging it out on the field.  Just ask anyone who was ever part of that organization.  It wasn’t right until it was perfect and if it was worth doing at all, it was worth doing right.

So how do you continue to love your job even when it’s hard and frustrating and boring?  That’s the real trick.  Here are some tips that I learned from Mr. Parks and others which might help you keep going when the going gets tough:

  1. Eyes (with pride) on the Prize – You (and your team) need to know there’s a reason for putting in all of that effort.  Whether it’s a great performance, a satisfied customer or a big bonus, there’s always a payoff.  The more concrete you can make that prize, the better.
  2. Swagger… with class – Be proud of what you do and how well you do it.  Let your team know that what they do is important and that they are great at doing it.  Encourage classy behavior – don’t overshoot confident and hit cocky.
  3. Care – The worst advice I’ve ever heard:  Don’t get personally involved – it’s just business.  That’s crap.  Personal involvement is one of the key components of management success (if you don’t believe me, go read First Break All the Rules).  Care about your team members, care about the quality of the work you do and care about your customers.  Take care of each other.

I know a lot of you are reading this and saying “but what if I’m doing something I don’t love?”  Maybe you are settling for a comfortable job and a paycheck instead of pursuing your passion.  Sometimes you have to take that road to make ends meet but keep your eyes open for opportunities because in the end you will be happier and more successful if you love your job.

UMass lost a great asset this week, and those big shoes will have to be filled by someone.  In the meantime, rest in peace George Parks and go UMass!

Posted in Building Relationships, Communication, General, leadership, Motivation, Team Building | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

10,000 Ways to be Wrong

Posted on August 19, 2010 by

“I haven’t failed, I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” ~Thomas Edison

What he didn’t say is how long it took him to get through those 10,000 wrong answers.  Being wrong (or finding a way that doesn’t work) isn’t a problem in and of itself.  The problem is when you’re wrong and you can’t move on to the next possible solution.

Sure it’s easier to wait and see, and to hope that a problem will resolve itself on its own rather than to take action, but doing nothing is just as bad as doing the wrong thing.  In some cases its worse.

Last year a friend of mine who runs a small nonprofit hired someone to help her out with the administrative aspects of her program.  She needed this person to fill two functions within the organization – the first was to interact with volunteers, and the second was to document processes and procedures.  After a season it was obvious that things weren’t going well.  While she was great with the volunteers, she wasn’t so good with technology and failed to understand the processes and procedures well enough to complete them correctly let alone document them.

Frustrated with this outcome, my friend then hired a very tech savvy, detail oriented person as a replacement.  I’m sure you can guess what happened – the new hire was great at the technology piece but failed to connect with the volunteers.

So what should my friend do?  Trying to hire again seems like a lost cause.  Trying to do the job herself in addition to her own responsibilities is overwhelming.  Her solution?  Split the job into two parts and offer each small part to a volunteer.  While this might or might not work, it’s definitely a move forward and it’s another opportunity (whether it’s right or wrong) to potentially solve the problem.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing today that you did yesterday and expecting different results.  If you are faced with a challenge and find yourself in a rut trying the same solution over and over again, reach out for advice.  Ask your team members for their thoughts.  Have a brainstorming session with your managers or peers.  Call a mentor.  The only choice that’s off the table is giving up.

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A Professional What?

Posted on August 4, 2010 by

Be professional – you know you’ve heard it – probably from a mentor, a parent, or a manager.  And it’s pretty good career advice…  if you know what it means.  The challenge is that professionalism means different things to different people, and professional behavior varies widely depending on your working environment. Dictionary.com gives us a few choices:

1. following an occupation as a means of livelihood or for gain: a professional builder.
2. of, pertaining to, or connected with a profession: professional studies.
3. appropriate to a profession: professional objectivity.
4. engaged in one of the learned professions: A lawyer is a professional person.
5. following as a business an occupation ordinarily engaged in as a pastime: a professional golfer.
6. making a business or constant practice of something not properly to be regarded as a business: “A salesman,” he said, “is a professional optimist.”
7. undertaken or engaged in as a means of livelihood or for gain: professional baseball.
8. of or for a professional person or his or her place of business or work: a professional apartment; professional equipment.
9. done by a professional; expert: professional car repairs.

Hmmm – not very helpful.  Mostly it seems to mean working…  for money.   Merriam-Webster gives us a bit more of a clue in the last part of the first definition:

1 a : of, relating to, or characteristic of a profession b : engaged in one of the learned professions c (1) : characterized by or conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession (2) : exhibiting a courteous, conscientious, and generally businesslike manner in the workplace

OK now we’re getting somewhere.  Courteous and conscientious is something I can get my head around (although “generally businesslike” is a bit vague…).  Googling  “professional behavior” gets you a variety of opinions on the matter ranging from “conduct appropriate to your workplace” to “don’t lie, spit, swear or steal”.

A thorough analysis of what is meant in the U.S. by “professional behavior” can be found on the Grovewell, LLC site here.  But at the end of the day for me, professionalism boils down to a single concept introduced to me by my parents when I was about 10.  It goes like this:

Treat others as you would like to be treated and you will always be invited back.

The first half is the good old golden rule and it’s still the most practical guidance I have found for professional behavior.  In any situation I put myself in the role of my peers, subordinates, clients, vendors or managers and visualize how my actions will be perceived.  If I don’t like the result, I find a better way.  And my goal is always the second half – to be someone that others want to work with.  There is no better measure of success as a professional than to have your employer be sorry to see you go and happy to have you return if the opportunity exists.

What are your benchmarks for professionalism?  We’ve all seen unprofessional behavior (like pornography – we know it when we see it…) but if you have great ideas or resources for workplace behavior that gets you invited back, please share!

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Seeing the Other Side

Posted on June 3, 2010 by

When I was 17 my car broke down on the side of the Mass Pike out in the middle of nowhere.  This was many long years ago before cell phones (shortly after the earth cooled – I know…) so I was pretty stuck.  So of course I panicked and worried and wrung my hands which accomplished exactly nothing.  And then I had a brilliant revelation…

I realized that there would be a point in the future where this immediate crisis would be over.  No matter how bad the situation looked to me at the time, I knew that I would not be standing on the side of that highway forever.  At some point I would be back in the kitchen of my parent’s house looking back on this moment from a safe and happy place.  So from there the situation changed from “eek I’m in a bad place” to “ok how do I get from the bad place to the safe and happy place.”

Now this may seem a little silly to you right now if you’re sitting in your safe and happy place at home or at work, but when you are immersed in a crisis, all the experts say that the biggest danger is panic, and the faster you can get past the “oh sh*t” feeling and move on to the “ok let’s find a solution” mindset, the more likely you are to survive.

What does this have to do with management?  Ask BP or Toyota or any of the other big companies that have found themselves recently immersed in a corporate crisis.  As a manager your job is to pull your team through whatever comes your way.  You need to be the one that calms the panic, stops the unproductive worrying and finger pointing and moves your team into the productive process of solving the problem.

So as silly as it seems, what works for me in that moment of initial panic is to remind myself that this will be over at some point.  I don’t yet know when or how, but I do know that every crisis passes and that at some future point I will be sitting on my porch with my dog watching the sunset.  Then I concentrate on getting myself and my team there.

Posted in Conflict Management, General, leadership, Motivation, Team Building | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Compromise…

Posted on May 3, 2010 by

Last week I was out scouring the internet looking for the exact words (and source) of the quote about a good compromise making everyone unhappy.  Not only did I find multiple versions and sources of it, but I found something else that interested me even more.  Depending on who you ask, compromise is either the key to a successful negotiation or the worst thing in the world.  There seems to be no middle ground.  Why the disparity, you ask?  I wondered the same thing.  Basically it comes down to two points of view.

On one side of the fence are the people (most notable engineers and entrepreneurs) who are strongly of the opinion that compromising the “right way” ruins the product.  It’s the “good is the enemy of great” hypothesis taken to the extreme.  The theory is that if your idea (or design) is great, and then you start getting other people involved and trying to incorporate their opinions, you lose the purity, the originality, and the integrity of the original.  Therefore the advice from the people who live in this camp is “hold the line”.

On the other side of the fence are the mediators, lawyers, psychologists and other folks who believe that without compromise a way forward cannot be reached.  Their opinion is that everyone has to give a little bit in order to make the product better – that no one person can have all the answers or make the perfect solution.

There is value in both of these positions, and I found myself struggling to form an opinion without a concrete scenario to work with.  So I’m going to take the easy way out and rather than taking a strong position I will say that it’s worth knowing, as a manager and a human being, that sometime compromise is necessary to move forward, and sometimes compromise really does damage the integrity of the original concept.  It’s up to you to evaluate the particular situation in front of you and decide when to hold the line and when to consider other options.

Posted in Communication, Conflict Management, General, leadership, Prioritization | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Is a College Degree the Right Credential for Business?

Posted on April 22, 2010 by

As a manager I spent a fair amount of time hiring and training entry level candidates.  In the tech world we are not as picky about college degrees as in some other industries because technical skills can be acquired through training programs and certifications.  But soft skills such as an understanding of business, communication skills, etc are harder to see on a resume.  So where do candidates acquire those skills and how do they demonstrate them to potential employers?

The great higher education PR machine would like you and I to believe that the best place to acquire those skills is through a liberal arts education.  This method of learning, requiring a 4 year (at least – usually more like 6) commitment and literally hundreds of thousands of dollars is increasingly coming under fire from business leaders (see this 2008 study from LEAP and the AACU) frustrated with the fact that college graduates lack the skills required to be successful in the real world.

As hiring managers we tend to use the B.A. credential more as proof that candidates have completed something vs. having any specific knowledge or skill.  So here are my questions for you:

1.  What skills do you expect college graduates to have?

2.  Do they actually have the skills they need to be successful (in your experience) or have you had to do remedial training in subjects such as business communication, finance, business operations, etc.?

I personally know plenty of really successful business people (some entrepreneurs, some individual contributors and managers) who either don’t have a degree at all or who got their degree after they spent 5-10 years working (and usually only when it became a barrier to higher promotion…) I would love to hear your thoughts on this…

Posted in General, Hiring, leadership, Staff Development, Technical Management | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Great Review of Survive Your Promotion!

Posted on April 13, 2010 by

Midwest Book Review has released their review of the book – you can check it out here or on Amazon’s listing for the book itself.  Here’s what they said:

A new job comes with a higher paycheck, but there’s also more stress for your buck. “Survive Your Promotion!: The 90 Day Success Plan for New Managers” is a guide for those who have attained new careers and want to succeed at them rather than be quickly used up and spit back out by the harsh difficulties of management. Time management, strategies to motivate others, Katy Tynan gives readers a fine list of thoughts and ideas to make their debut as managers strong ones. “Survive Your Promotion!” is a top pick for any new manager doubting their abilities.

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