it’s not your positive thinking that’s the problem – it’s your lack of action that’s getting in the way

I really dislike the term “positive thinking”. Not because I don’t like positive thinking – I’m all for it. Rather, because many people have a skewed idea of what it means and act as though it’s a bad thing.

I find that when people have a negative view of positive thinking it’s because they are confusing it with Pollyanna, happy-sunshine, ignore all the problems, ain’t life wonderful thinking. A recent blog on Fast Company’s website “How ‘Positive’ Thinking Sets You Up To Fail” referred to research that indicates that “positive thinkers” are less likely to take action.

If you read the blog you’ll see that what the author’s really talking about is that happy-sunshine daydream thinking without action sets you up to fail. I’m in total agreement. Mr. Positive Thought himself, Zig Ziglar famously commented that “Positive thinking won’t let you do anything but it will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.” Jim Rohn said similarly, “Affirmation without action leads to delusion.” It’s not positive thinking that’s the problem, it’s the lack of action.

Let’s quickly look at these three types of thinking:

  • Happy-sunshine thinking: belief that all is going to work out, only look at the good of any situation, all you have to do is think good thoughts and all will come to you. This is what many people do when they try to “think positive”. Putting your head in the sand is just denial. It has nothing to do with positive thought.
  • Negative thinking: belief that nothing is going to work out, there is no good in any situation, why bother thinking good thoughts because nothing goes right anyway. This is victim mentality. A refusal to try with a built in excuse for failure.
  • Positive thinking: recognizing the obstacles and challenges and problems of a situation and taking action with belief that it can be made to work out. The author of the blog refers to this as “good negative thinking”. But this is NOT negative thinking of any kind. It’s simply being real about the obstacles and acknowledging that life is hard and anything worth achieving is going to take some effort. We have to believe that we can overcome the challenges or we won’t attempt it. That’s positive thinking.

Notice that happy-sunshine and negative thinkers both operate on blind faith and neither takes action. Positive thinkers assess the reality, devise a plan, and take action because they know that thought without action is worthless.

Imagine a person wants to lose weight. The happy-sunshine thinker visualizes it, thinks good thoughts, but takes no action. The negative thinker gives it up as hopeless, blames their metabolism, and does nothing. The positive thinker recognizes that losing weight is a challenge, it will involve changing a lifetime of habits, and acknowledges that there will be set backs, but has confidence that they can do it. Then they develop a plan and – here’s the important part – they take action.

So what’s this look like in business? The happy-sunshine thinker ignores the recession, keeps the same expenses, pricing, and strategy as before and merrily goes out of business. The negative thinker believes confuses a slowing of the economy with a stopping of the economy, and either gripes and does nothing (except letting customers and employees know how bad they have it) or completely overreacts. The positive thinker acknowledges the situation and adjusts their strategy accordingly while keeping faith that with the right action they will get through it.

leaders: what would you do?

I’m torn on this one and wondering. When a person wants to leave a company, do you fight to keep them or let them go?

Obviously the low performers have already overstayed their welcome, so they’re free to go. But what about the high performers? How do you react when a great employee says that they are moving on? Do you counter offer, beg or guilt them into staying, feel betrayed and get mad?

I hate to let a great person leave too easily. Often, when a person receives an offer from another company (especially if they weren’t job hunting) it can be a huge ego stroke. “Wow, this other company really appreciates and wants me!” They may not even want to leave their job, but it feels so good to feel wanted that they are willing to part ways. So, I want them to understand that they are valued here. And, if I’m doing my job as a manager, they already know how much I count on and appreciate them.

On the other hand, I don’t want to get caught up in a bidding war. In some cases, with non-compete clauses, etc. I could force them to stay, but if they want to leave that bad, I’m pretty sure I don’t want them around.

I’ve seen many examples of managers bemoaning losing a great employee only to replace that person with someone even better. Every time a person leaves it’s an opportunity to reshape the team and make it stronger.

I see both sides, think I prefer to let them move on, but I could be completely wrong.

time spent does not equal results accomplished

How much time did you spend today focused on actions that directly led (or will lead) to the accomplishment of your most important business outcomes (goals)? How much time was burned on the kind of important outcomes – the ones that would be nice to accomplish, but aren’t crucial?

How much time today did you choose to spend on unimportant tasks?

No judgment. Just a reminder that our results are a reflection of how we choose to spend our time.

don’t mistake a tailwind for greatness

About once a year I get totally suckered and start believing my ego. It’s usually after I haven’t been on my bicycle in a while. This happened the other day: I’m out on a ride and just be ripping along. It feels effortless. After a few miles I start to think that I’m actually in pretty good – no, great – shape. Then the road turns and I realize that I had a decent tailwind pushing me along. Worse, I’m now going into a headwind. I’m not flying, I’m crawling. Ugh!

The exact same thing happens in business. When times are good, the economy’s booming, and we’re making money hand over fist it is easy to get suckered into thinking that it’s our innate skills propelling us along. Remember all the folks who quit their jobs to become day traders during the dotcom boom? What about all the real estate “experts” during the housing bubble? Then, the wind changed… Those who have been through the cycles before tend to do ok; those who mistake the tailwind for greatness tend to flame out spectacularly.

Why? Because they probably weren’t doing a good job of managing the business – conditions were simply so favorable that they could be ineffective  and still get away with it. The booming economy masked their errors. When the economy shifts, there is no longer a margin of error to permit sloppiness. Additionally, if they think it was them rather than the circumstances that enabled success, they will continue doing what they’ve been doing rather than adjusting to changing conditions.

There’s no shame in making money during an economic tailwind. The trick is to recognize that it’s simply part of the cycle and realize that there’s a headwind coming. Then you can plan, prepare, and be ready for it.

The flip side is that when ride in a headwind, it feels miserable and hard and like it will never get better. Right now there’s a headwind. A tailwind is coming again and 99% (I just made this number up, but think it’s pretty accurate) of us will forget the lessons of the current economic headwind. Just like we did after 2001 and all the previous recessions before that.

Pedal hard.

 

[As an aside: I have a suspicion that many (not all, but many) of the investing or business gurus got in and out during a tailwind and confused ideal circumstances for brilliance. Fortunately for them, we don’t realize that and buy their ideas (which may be irrelevant or even detrimental during a headwind). ]

how to ruin a business (and an athlete)

In business, learning and development is often viewed as a necessary evil or even an expensive distraction. In sports, on the other hand, athletes spend an enormous amount of time learning, practicing, and improving.

Imagine if you owned a sports team. It would be absolutely ridiculous to hire great talent and then not develop them further. Would you say, “I already spent millions on them, why should I spend more? They need to just get out there and play.”? Would you save money by not allowing them to practice? Would you worry that if you invested heavily in training them, they might someday leave for another team? Would you hire an athlete who wasn’t willing to spend most of their career getting better? Would you tell them that you can’t afford to develop them and they better just do their best?

Absolutely not! It would obviously be insanity. If you took that approach, your team might do well occasionally, but would be crushed in the long run. Luck and residual talent will only get an athlete so far. All great athletes know that the competition is always gaining and if they aren’t continuously improving their game, the competition will soon pass them by.

Are you letting the competition pass you by? How much of a learning (read as: performance improving) environment do you foster with your team? How much do you hold people accountable for continuously developing and improving their results? What about for yourself? Are you a business athlete on autopilot, hoping that what you learned years ago will carry you through? Or are you forever looking for ways to step up your game?

when training doesn’t make sense

I am passionate about personal and professional improvement, firmly believe in investing in employees, yet recognize that training doesn’t always make sense. Here are a few of those situations:

  • Your company is hyper-focused on quarterly results. Training is a long term proposition. If you only look at immediate performance, investing in tomorrow is counterproductive. Unless you think you’re going to want the business to get better a couple of quarters from now, training is pointless.
  • Your company is more focused on saving money than making money. Training is expensive and an easy way to save costs. You can also save a few more bucks if you fire your maintenance staff and never upgrade your equipment. After all, the corresponding decline in individual and organizational performance will take time to show up. Two years from now, when you are in steady decline and your competition blows past you, you can blame the economy. If you try hard enough, you can save yourself broke.
  • You like mediocrity. Not everyone wants to improve their results. I get that.
  • You cannot handle the idea that some of your best performers will leave. Yep, if you really invest in your people, some of them will be lured away. If you want to keep the completion from eyeing your employees, be sure to hire underperformers and keep ‘em stupid.
  • You are so behind because of perpetual fire drills that you can’t keep up with today, let alone think about tomorrow. Don’t worry, once the company goes under, you’ll have plenty of free time.
  • Your employees hate training and complain loudly. Don’t bother wasting training dollars on them. They won’t learn anyway. Good job on selecting people who will save you money by refusing to improve. Maybe you can hire some more just like them – then you’ll really be profitable.
  • You can’t afford high performers. High performers cost more to hire and cost more to keep. They tend to want to get better and be attracted to organizations that will invest in them.

So you see, training and development really only makes sense if you want individuals, teams, and an organization that performs well and improves over time. If you don’t want that, you needn’t bother with training.

eleven thoughts on finding a job in THIS economy (continued)

… continued from last time.

6. Don’t take it personally. This is a tough one. It’s HARD not to take being turned down as a personal rejection. It’s HARD to watch another great job  pass you by. But, just because you thought you were a great fit, doesn’t mean that their wasn’t someone who wasn’t better. This doesn’t mean you weren’t good enough, only that someone looked to be an even better fit. Should the company have communicated better and more often? Yep. Should the person you spoke to about the job not been such a jerk? Absolutely. They didn’t and that’s a reflection of them, not you. Right now, your priority is to find a job and taking time and effort to be mad at the jerks of the world is a luxury left for another time. Plus, sometimes the jobs we don’t get are the best things that happen to us.

7. Understand it’s a long process and never stop moving. Getting hired can take a month or more even if a company is very interested in you. Hiring takes time and the company’s timeframe is most definitely not yours. Your efforts can take months to pan out. And things can fall apart at the last minute because of factors far beyond your control. The lesson here is to keep applying, keep looking even when it seems that nothing is happening and even when it seems that you are a sure thing. Ever forward.

8. Talk to people. If your field has a professional organization, talk to the leaders. Take them to lunch and ask for their thoughts on what companies you might want to target, what regions are doing better than others, etc. Ask them who else you might want to talk to. You’re not asking them for work, you’re asking them for advice and most people enjoy giving advice and helping others out. Let people know you’re looking. One of my best leads once came from the husband of someone my wife worked with. I met with him and asked for his advice. He put in a good word for me with someone in his organization and it went from there. Another leader invited me to attend a regional conference and was kind enough to give me a passes to attend. I had never met any of these folks before contacting them and introducing myself. This experience taught me that people like to help. If you’re only applying over the internet and aren’t talking to people, you’re missing out on a great job hunting resource.

9. It’s a full time job finding a full time job. If getting a job is your #1 priority then you should be spending 40+ hours a week actively looking. Keep a log and record your time.

10. Keep records. Keep a log of who you’ve applied to, when, who you spoke with, outcomes, when you followed up, next steps, etc. This helps prevent opportunities from falling through the cracks, lets you know who you applied to (after a while, job postings all start to sound the same), and it helps keep you honest. I suspect it’s human nature to think we’ve done more than we have (that’s why diet and exercise logs are so useful) and accurate records help keep us honest. Records also let us analyze which approaches seem to be working best and which aren’t so that we can adjust accordingly.

11. Keep the faith. This is the most difficult thing on this list. It is so easy to get beaten down and feel like you’ll never make any progress. But defeat and bitterness shows through. It affects every interaction and become a self-fulfilling prophecy and a nasty downward cycle. No matter how low you feel, it’s imperative to keep the optimism and enthusiasm during interviews, when writing cover letters, and in every email and phone call. This is really stinking HARD! And it must be done.

There will always be some level of unemployment even in a thriving economy. Your strategy should be to set yourself apart. Clearly, I recommend a systematic, flexible approach base on the idea that finding a job is the absolute #1 priority. That’s what worked for me and what I’ve seen work for others. That said, it’s not easy. It’s never easy. But I hope it gets easier for you. Best of luck!

eleven thoughts on finding a job in THIS economy

I’ve been seeing more and more blogs, articles, and news stories about finding a job as the economy grinds on. From my experience as a former recruiter and someone who was laid off right when everything started to tank, most of them seem to leave out some key points or ideas.   Here’s the advice I’d give to anyone looking for work. Not all of it applies to everyone, but experience shows that most of it applies to most people.

 1. Give up your “shoulds”. Finding a job is your #1 priority and you don’t have the time or energy to spend on shoulds. The economy shouldn’t have failed. Your employer shouldn’t have laid you off. You should be able to maintain your lifestyle. You shouldn’t have to make sacrifices. They should know how qualified you are and give you a job. They shouldn’t treat job candidates that way.

All of this may be true, but it doesn’t help you find a job. In every endeavor, the people who are most successful get past the shoulds, get out of the victim mindset, and charge forward. It’s not easy to do, but when you’re in the shoulds, you’re in denial. Just because the ship shouldn’t sink, it doesn’t mean it isn’t sinking. You can argue all the reasons it shouldn’t sink or you can find a lifeboat. Your choice.

2. Don’t confuse activity with progress. Posting a resume on one of the big job boards is a start, but it’s not everything. Sending resumes to every single job posting, whether you’re qualified or not, feels like you’re searching, but that’s time that could be spent sending fewer but more targeted and customized resumes. Remember, the point isn’t to do a job search, the point is to get a job (sounds the same, but isn’t always).

3. Search nationally. There are a few who can’t relocate at all, but for every person in that situation, there are many more who could but really, really don’t want to. They are caught up in the fear of change and all the shoulds, and it’s a tough place to be. I sympathize: After being laid off, I lived apart from my family for five months until I could move my family. We couldn’t sell the house so we ended up renting it out and losing money each month. No fun, but it had to be done, and no one went hungry.

Although many areas of the country are suffering (and will continue to suffer), there are other areas where the local economies are just fine. Industries have been hurt, some jobs may never come back, but there are other jobs in other areas. Those who limit themselves to one town or even one state are really limiting their options.

4. Resume writing is a skill. People often thing that recruiters and hiring managers spend a lot of time going over each resume, analyzing it, thinking how that candidate will fit in the organization. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Each resume gets looked at for about 10-20 seconds. IF it catches their eye, they’ll look at it more closely. If not, it’s on to the next resume. (Of course, it may be scanned by computer and not even looked at unless the computer approves it first). Should it be this way? No. Is it this way? Yes.

Writing a resume so that it conveys all the information a person is skimming it for is a skill. Also, it’s really, really hard to write your own resume. Even those who are very good at editing other people’s resumes often struggle with their own. The best approach is to get input and feedback from others. Find people who are friendly, but not your friends so that they can give unbiased thoughts. Find someone in HR, or a manager you know, call up the career center at the college you went to, or hire someone to help. Once you have a polished resume, it may still need to be tailored to each job you apply for so that it emphasizes the most important skills for each job.

This is time, effort, and money well spent. After all, if your resume doesn’t catch people’s attention, you won’t make it to the next stage. Simple as that.

5. Interviewing is a skill. The interview is your chance to demonstrate why you are an outstanding fit for the position and the company. If you cannot convey that, you will not get the job. Further, studies have reported that many interviewers will form a strong opinion about you in the first few minutes. Should they? No, but they do.

People often think that they can just wing it or don’t even realize that interviewing is a distinct skill. I used to be terrible at interviewing until I became a recruiter, now I understand the types of questions people will likely ask and the information they are looking for. The good news is that you can learn this, too.

Go to the library and check out books on interview questions. Practice answering them with several different people. Can’t say it enough: practice, practice, practice. An athlete wouldn’t show up at the big game without practicing and you shouldn’t show up at the big interview without practicing. The best interviewing advice I received was to think of five different situations you’ve been in when you really did a great job and practice talking about those situations. Chances are, you can adapt those situations to any behavioral interview question (“Tell me about a time when you took initiative, handled change, had to assert yourself, etc.”).

To be continued…

why I wouldn’t hire an HR person for an HR job

I can be pretty judgmental about Human Resources because it’s my field, I’m passionate about what it can do for business, and I’m appalled at how many HR “professionals” want to hold the field in the stone age. But really, Human Resources is no different than any other field. A few people are really, really passionate about and great at their jobs, most are fair to middlin’, and there’s a group at the bottom that really drag things down. As the old saying goes: there’s the people who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened.

If I were filling an HR spot today, I’d be inclined to look well outside the field. I’m pretty sure I could train a top performer to be a great HR pro quicker and easier than I could take an existing HR pro and help them to be great. That was Nucor Steel’s insight when they located their plants in rural areas outside of the rustbelt: they found it easier to teach farmers to be steelworkers than to teach steelworkers a different way of doing things. I’ve seen this applied in other industries: I know of an owner of auto repair stores who hires his store managers from popular restaurants. He has found it’s much easier to teach a restaurant manager about the auto repair business than to teach mechanics to excel at providing a great customer experience.

Would I really not hire a human resources person for a human resources job? I would, but here’s what I’d be looking for:

  • They really, really get that the focus is on customer service and managing the customer experience.
  • They are collaborative problem solvers who strive to figure out how to do something vs. deflecting innovation with the shield of bureaucracy.
  • They view themselves as a business person with an HR focus vs an HR person who somehow ended up working in a business.
  • They are FUN. I want to surround myself with people who enjoy their job and enjoy their lives. Managers and employees should look forward to visiting HR, not feel like they’ve entered a crypt. HR is tough, tough, tough. A lot of the job involves difficult conversations because people haven’t been at their best. It’s easy to get bitter, cynical, and self-righteous. But please do it at my competitor’s company, not mine.
  • They get stuff done. They don’t talk about how busy they are or use “I tried, but…” as an excuse. They produce.
  • They enjoy helping people.
  • They love learning and improving their skills.
  • They are driven to succeed AND value the team’s success as much as they value their own success.
  • They have been exposed to finance, accounting, marketing, sales, etc. They don’t need to be an expert, but should understand how the business works and how all the departments fit together.
  • They like innovation and view change as a core part of progress. If you hate or fear change, please go work for someone else.
  • And, yeah, they should probably know something about employment law and HR best practices. But, if they have the rest, this one is the easy one to teach. I can’t teach someone to have fun (even when the job isn’t fun) or to enjoy change, or to enjoy the hard work of self-improvement, but HR basics I can do.

That’s my wish list. What’s yours?