Attitude

it’s not what you know…

Funny how people often lament that, “It’s not what you know, [say it with me everyone] it’s who you know.” People rarely ever says this when they benefit from a relationship, it’s always said to justify setbacks, as though knowledge/skill and relationships are mutually exclusive.

Why is it that this maxim is never taken to the logical next step? I’ve never, ever heard anyone say, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know so I better start getting out and meeting more people and really developing new relationships and strengthening my current ones.”

What if the what and who go together? Who you know will absolutely get your foot in the door and create opportunities, but those opportunities will start evaporating if you don’t bring the knowledge and skill to get the job done. On the filp side, demonstrating strong knowledge and skills will get the attention of people who can open doors and connect you with opportunities, but all the skill in the world won’t help much if you continually burn bridges and ignore the human side of it all.

Consider the possibility that your success is not based on what you know or who you know, but what AND who you know. That changes the game just a bit.

foolproof 2-step plan for success

1. Be awesome.

2. Repeat.

shrinking comfort zones: the quick path to nowhere

Your comfort zones are either expanding or shrinking – there isn’t any middle ground. Either you’re stepping across the line, challenging yourself, moving a bit into the unknown and pushing back the boundaries OR you’re backing away from the line. Each time you step back so that you can stay with the familiar and comfortable, the line draws in, so you have to step back again, and again it shrinks.

The world it is a changin’ (duh!). Jobs are moving off shore or going away or radically evolving. A sure ticket to failure is to stand still, refuse to change and insist (insist!) that the world not change either. Problem is, the world’s changing whether we like it or not. The jobs of tomorrow are not going to look like the jobs of today. Want to stay employed? Stay relevant. Challenge yourself. Learn. Grow. Push your boundaries. Take on challenges you wouldn’t normally take on.

The more we try to stay safe by not changing, the more at risk we are of being completely behind. My prediction is that anyone who isn’t focused on improving and developing new skills each and every year will soon be either underemployed or unemployed. BUT, I’m not necessarily referring to technology. Technology facilitates a lot of changes, but is becoming more and more user friendly (anyone remember punch cards?).

The biggest growth potential that I see needed is in change, communication, and relationship development. As an HR pro or manager or employee, can you have the tough conversations you need to have? Can you hold people accountable? Can you influence people who don’t report to you? Can you use technology to enhance your communication instead of complicating it? Can you develop the trust and relationships that will enable you to get twice as much done with half the angst? Or do you leave it up to other people who are “better at it.”?

You’re either moving forward or falling behind in direct relationship to the rate you are pushing your comfort zone. Avoiding the difficult or unpleasant parts of the job – often the parts that involve other people – is a fast track to irrelevance.

quick career advice #1

For those just starting out in their careers Woody Allen gave the shortest and best career advice when he said, “80% of success is just showing up.” You want success (or even gainful employment)? Show up in body, mind, and spirit.

It’s common sense, but the power in it is that every knows it but not everyone does it. Be one of the few who does it.

In any job, but especially entry level jobs there is a ton of competition. There are lots of people out there who can: a) do your job better; b) do your job cheaper; or c) both. Here’s how it works when a manager is deciding who to keep and who to drop: Proven person gets some grace, person who looks like he/she has potential might get a little slack, and new person/warm body is first to go. We all have to start out as new person and the key is to show potential and become proven ASAP. First impressions make a HUGE difference. Gotta kick butt from minute #1.

good enough isn’t, but great enough is

I was discussing the idea that good is the enemy of great the other day and someone said, “You ever notice how people say something is’good enough’, but they never say it’s ‘great enough’?”

Great enough. Love it.

I’m a big believer in the concept that good enough isn’t. Hitting the bare minimums isn’t success, it’s temporary survival. Sadly, most companies seem to struggle to reach even the level of good enough. They shoot for good enough customer service, good enough prices, good enough hiring policies, good enough management development, good enough training, etc. The problem is that, at the very theoretical best, it will only be good enough. In the real world, a bunch of attempts at good enough added together tends to equal not good enough. Aiming for “good enough” seems to get us to “doesn’t completely suck”.

In fact, I’d like to propose a real world rating scale. Feel free to use it for performance appraisals, evaluating processes, due diligence for investments, whatever you need a rating scale for. Here it is:

  1. Sucks
  2. Doesn’t completely suck
  3. Good enough
  4. Great enough
  5. Phenomenal, but exceeds the point of diminishing returns
On this scale, there is only one rating worth hitting: “Great enough.” Although “Phenomenal” sounds like a good thing, there comes a point in any quality improvement where the costs/effort/resources required for additional improvement become an exponential curve while improvements move along a very flat linear curve. In other words, you’re spending tons of resources for ounces of improvement.
But, “great enough”… Getting to great enough requires a completely different set of questions, decisions, actions than it takes to be merely good enough. Consider this: getting your life to good enough is easy. You’re probably already there. But what would having a great enough life look like and what would it take to get it there?
How freakin’ cool would it be to work for a company that focused on doing everything great enough? How incredible would it be to know that all your efforts at work were consistently great enough? Who wouldn’t sing the praises of a company that only hired people who were great enough?
I’ll give you tonight to mull it over. Tomorrow morning, what are you going to do to start kicking butt and creating great enough relationships with your friends and family? What are you going to do to create great enough health? To start getting your finances into great enough shape? Come Monday morning, what are you going to do to take your team to great enough? If you’re in HR, what are you going to do to create great enough selection and onboarding processes? To help the managers you serve to become great enough leaders? To create a great enough company culture?
Great enough. Love it!

what’s stopping you?

Ironman Kona was this weekend. This is the big daddy of triathlon. There are several Ironman length races held around the world, but this is the one with all the street cred. It’s a 2.4 mile swim in the ocean, 112 mile bicycle ride, and a full marathon distance 26.2 mile run at the end. Throw in wind and heat and that’s more fun than 99+% of the world can endure.

This year the course record was broken by Craig Alexander. He finished the sufferfest in the 8 hour, 3 minute range. Reflect on the distance and the time. Yeah, I can’t get my head around it either. And as impressive as that finish is, it’s not the most impressive finish.

I’m told that three of the finishers are over 80 years old! Plus, another one of the finishers, Rajesh Durbal, is a triple amputee. My brain goes all slack jawed when I try to think about those four people. I need to go rethink my life.

It reminds me of the scene in “Dodgeball” (easily one of the greatest comedy movies ever made) where Joe (Vince Vaughn’s character) has quit the dodgeball tournament. He’s sitting in the airport bar when Lance Armstrong steps beside him and orders a bottle of water. Lance says that he’s a big fan and tells Joe that he once felt like quitting when he was diagnosed with brain, lung, and testicular cancer all at the same time, before he overcame it to win the Tour de France five times. Then he says: “But I’m sure you have a good reason for quitting. What are you dying from that’s keeping you from the finals?” Joe responds: “Right now it feels a little bit like… shame.”

We’re not all Lance Armstrong and I’m comfortable using that as an excuse. But when I think of those four finishers, I have no more excuses. It’s not about finishing a premier triathlon, it’s about becoming the person I want to be and doing the things I need to do before dying.

What was it you wanted to accomplish again? What was the “reason” (read as: lame excuse) you tell yourself you can’t? Now that all excuses have been removed by those finishers, what’s stopping you?

innovation leads to failure leads to innovation

People tell you that you should be creative and innovate to get ahead of the competition. What they don’t tell you is that creativity and innovation lead to failure. That’s right failure.

Whenever we try something different it is probably not going to work, particularly the first (few) times. It will fail. True innovation comes from learning from that failure and tweaking and experimenting and playing with it until it works.

When developing training programs, the bulk of the work is done in the back office. But the magic happens in front of a group of participants. I rarely have an insight on how to improve wording or flow when sitting at my desk. Some of my biggest breakthroughs have been from failing in the field – forgetting what I was going to say, getting ahead of myself and presenting the sequence out of order, or getting a question that I didn’t anticipate. Getting it wrong, recovering, and seeing how it can be even better leads to huge gains.

Thomas Leonard, considered by many to be the father of personal coaching, used to intentionally overload systems and processes to see what would break first. Then he’d correct that and overload it again. This allowed him to quickly understand what worked, what didn’t, and to create airtight processes.

In the mid 1980’s Suzuki developed a groundbreaking sportbike – the GSX-R. To make the engine lighter than many thought was possible, the engineers would shave weight from a part, test, and shave more weight until it failed. Doing this over and over with each component taught them the lightest reliable weight each part could be.

The problem is that we usually try something new and when it doesn’t work we deem it failure and give up. But each failure holds a lesson that we can use for improvement.

If we’re willing to learn.

why are your employees leaving you?

A friend posted this on Facebook recently: “People don’t leave because things are hard. They leave because it’s no longer worth it.”

I tried unsuccessfully for three or four seconds to track down the source, but it seemed to be anonymous. Most of the places I found it were using it as relationship advice, but the first thing I thought of was leadership and employee turnover.

It’s not hard work or tough situations that causes good people to quit. It’s rare that people find easy, simple work satisfying or fulfilling. Think back to the times when you were most satisfied and fulfilled at work. Chances are you had recently earned a hard fought success, pressed hard, stretched your abilities, and just generally kicked booty. Think back to the times when you were just coasting along – how satisfied were you? People don’t leave because work is tough. People leave because the upsides don’t balance the downsides.

They leave because of fire drills, knee jerk reactions, lack of appreciation (or even acknowledgement), thankless efforts, frustrating co-workers, stifling bureaucracy, arbitrary decisions, favoritism, patronizing attitudes, harassment, and even apathy. When people leave because of “more money” it is often not about the money. The extra dollars are nice, but what they’re really saying is, “I don’t get rewarded enough to put up with this job (and/or my manager). This new job looks like it won’t have these headaches and, even if it does, I’ll at least be paid more to deal with it.”

If you’re experiencing unwanted turnover, the question to be asking is: “What would make it worth it for people to stay?”

 

 

do you have a job or a career?

I was watching Chris Rock’s “Kill the Messenger” the other night and was really struck by one of his comments. I’m paraphrasing, but he basically said that you know you have a career when there’s never enough time. You look at your watch and it’s already after 5pm so you plan on coming in early the next day. With a job, there’s too much time. You look at your watch and it’s just after 9am and the day stretches out ahead.

Absolutely brilliant! It doesn’t matter if you’re overpaid or underpaid, hourly or salaried, educated or uneducated, or what field you’re in or company you work for: if there’s never enough time to accomplish all that you’re excited about getting done, you have a career; if time is your enemy, you have a job. There’s a lot of people with college degrees in high paying jobs and there’s a lot of people just getting by (for now) who are forging their career.

So, what’s the scoop. Do you have a job or a career? If you have a job, what would it take to get a career?