Do You Create Value

Many of the resumes sent to me read like a job description. The person lists the roles they had along with the responsibilities of the role. If I know a person well, I will tease them by saying they downloaded their resume from a Google search. After we enjoy a good laugh, we discuss how the resume should illustrate the value they have provided. Saved the company a chunk of money? Value. Taught a group of employees a new advanced technique? Value. Convinced your office to do a paintball outing as a team building activity? Plenty of value.

As employees, we are all on a continuum that starts at "Order Taker," and proceeds up to "Value Creator." Order Takers do exactly what they are told to do, they answer exactly the question you ask of them. Value Creators take ownership of items, figuring out the intent of the requests they receive, then going beyond the request to help people create the future. Order Taker and Value Creator are the two extremes between which most of us exist. Do yourself, and everyone around you, a favor. Create as much value as possible.

According To Your Faith

"Then touched he their eyes, saying, According to your faith be it unto you." - Matthew 9:29

You have to believe it before you see it. It's a faith principle, but it's also human nature. The hiring manager has to believe you can do the job before it is given to you. The customer has to believe you can deliver on what you promise before you receive the sale. You have to believe in you before anything of real substance can happen for you.

I coach and mentor many people. I can tell you that impostor syndrome is more rampant than any flavor of covid. I spend plenty of time helping people re-examine their own experience to convince themselves that they are the right person for the opportunity they are considering. These are people that have all the experience and all the qualifications needed for the opportunity. It's like they're waiting for some external source to give them permission to be great. You have to remember that what you receive is "According to your faith." You have to believe.

We all know the action oriented-person with endless optimism. They are like magicians. They believe they can make things happen, they take every action within their power to make it reality, and more often than not, they're right. They believe it before they see it.

Call it The Secret, call it manifestation, call it prayer, call it the energy of the universe, call it a genie in a bottle, call it whatever. Your belief....your faith....regarding what is in store for your career is a necessary prerequisite for you to receive all that is in store for you.

How To Join Amazing Project Teams

There is a portion of work at any organization that is pointless busywork. We've all been stuck on some of these. The idea starts off as something useful, but once the idea goes through a few meetings or committees, it gets whittled down to some atrocity of a project that bears little resemblance to the original awesome idea. Those who are sentenced to work on the project have their soul slowly siphoned from their body. We would like to have as few of these experiences as possible.

The best way to avoid getting roped into projects that don't matter is injecting ourselves into projects that do matter. This is easier said than done. First of all, it's not always apparent that a project is going to be a colossal waste of time from the onset. But even after we have tuned up our lame project radar to avoid the ducks, we need increase our influence skills to shimmy our way onto the awesome projects.

The biggest indicator of the potential success or failure of a project is the leader of the project. Some leaders have figured out how to marshal the resources and relationships to get pretty anything done within their organization. They are seemingly a never ending win parade. These people are easy to identify.

Once you have identified this titan of commerce, you have to prove yourself worthy of inclusion on the gravy train. Leaders that produce consistent wins are great at identifying top performers to collaborate with. Volunteer some of your time to assist with a project they have going on. Often this will mean more time at work for us, as we will be adding this project to our current work queue. If we deliver quality results in a timely fashion, we will earn invitations to do more work for awesome leaders.

At this point, it's usually time for some negotiation with our boss. Most bosses allow for a bit of extracurricular exploration into projects outside their portfolio, but we don't want just a little bit of that awesome project experience, we want the awesome project buffet. You can handle this negotiation yourself, or.....

Have the awesome leader negotiate a shared custody arrangement. This is easier to do in situations where leaders in our organization are aligned with the shared interests of the overall enterprise. Remember, the awesome leader understands how to get the resources they need for success. Once we have proven ourself as one of those resources in limited time, the awesome leader is more likely to advocate for us spending more time on their valuable projects.

Avoid the busywork, identify the superhero leader, prove ourself to be valuable, then join the Avengers. We owe it to ourselves, we're only doing this career thing once.

Handy Guidelines For Complaining

When the complaint train starts rolling, it's hard to not hop on and settle into a cozy seat. Everyone does it from time to time, and sometimes it's cathartic. We need to ensure we're not a frequent passenger on the complaint train. The following guidelines will help us determine when taking a ride to complaint town is appropriate.

If you have a firm understanding of the situation and ability to influence the situation, take action. We often underestimate the levers we have to influence a situation. Leaders and decision makers don't want to be seen as incompetent. If you can give them council that will help them look good, you can influence the situation through their actions. If you're the decision maker, no need to complain about the situation, start shaping it in the image you desire. Once you start heading in a direction, the next steps will become more clear.

If you have a incomplete understanding of the situation and inability to influence the situation, ignore it. 9 out of 10 studies show that the #1 cause of headaches is listening to people talk about things they clearly don't understand (I made that stat up, but you get the drift). Have you ever had a conversation about sports with someone were you wondered if they even watch the sport? If you don't understand something, and you can't influence it, don't let it raise your stress levels.

If you have a incomplete understanding of the situation and ability to influence the situation, please sit down, you are dangerous. These are the most frustrating folks in the workplace, those who have not taken the time to understand the situation in front of them before sending co-workers down a non-productive path. We don't need to wait for 100% of the information on a situation, but we also shouldn't make decisions in the dark. Our colleagues are complex, so making a categorical decision about their character and potential based on limited interactions creates the potential for disaster. Organizations are made up of the aforementioned colleagues, so organizations are very complex. Decision makers need to invest the bulk of their time understanding the people and relationships around them to have a hope of understanding any given situation.

If you have a firm understanding of the situation and inability to influence the situation, feel free to complain. Caveat: we often have much more influence on situation than we realize. If the decision makers for a situation are anywhere in our orbit, we have to be willing to tactfully suggest adjustments. Done the right way, this can make us a hero. In the event that we truly do not have any access to those that can influence the situation, and we have a firm understanding of what's going on, hop on that complaint train and have a wonderful ride.

Build Your Own Sponsor

Influential leaders in your organization need to advocate for you in order for you to advance up the corporate ladder. This practice is called sponsorship. Some companies have sponsorship programs that match high potential employees with company executives to facilitate sponsorship. That's awesome for employees who are selected for the program, but what about the other employees?

Many of us need the do it yourself version of the sponsorship program. That means being the type of employee that is exciting to the leadership in your organization. Bring new ideas, work on cross functional teams, be interesting (you would be surprised how valuable it is to just be interesting). Engage with the leaders of your organization and be yourself while doing so. You also need to have a understanding of your organization. Early in my career at Lubrizol, I told my boss that I wanted to be CEO one day. She set up 1:1 meetings for me with the CEO and COO. Early in the conversation with our COO, he asked me to explain how Lubrizol makes money. I gave some basic answer. He said "you don't know shit about our business. How are you going to be CEO?" He was 100% right. I did not build a sponsor in that instance. I realized that I needed to first do the work necessary to be worthy of sponsorship.

Leaders want to magnify the rising stars in their organization. This behavior is driven by the expectation that leaders can identify and develop talent in their organization. If you are excellent at what you do and keep your company leadership aware, you are making life easier for them. So for you, figure out how your organization delivers value to the universe, figure out how you help that happen, then create ways to expose your value to company leaders. Eventually your ears will burn as sponsors make you their topic of discussion.

Negotiation Tip: Create A Connection

People help people that they like. People like people that like them.

You would be surprised at what is possible in your interactions with people in customer service types of roles. The first person you encounter often has the discretion to make things happen for you. However, they’re only going to use that discretion to your benefit if you first value their position and power. You demonstrate that you value their position and power by being friendly and genuinely interested in them. If you create a personal connection and they don’t have the authority to grant your request, they’ll tell you exactly who to talk to and exactly what to say to give you the best chance of success with your request.

Since I know that nobody reading this post has ever started arguing with a customer service representative, how many times have you watched someone try to argue their way into something they want? They create a situation where there needs to be a winner and a loser. If a win/lose scenario is created by the requester, the requester is often going to come up empty.

A different approach is to enlist the customer service representative as an ally in your quest to jointly solve a problem together. 99% of customer service folks really would like to be helpful to their customers. If you’re creating a personal connection, then positioning your request as a challenge that you’re working to jointly solve, your chances of success improve. On the other hand, those who are demeaning to customer service folks and take an adversarial stand position themselves to get less from the customer service rep and the manager that they will subsequently request to see.

Create a connection whenever possible. And even if you don’t receive the outcome you seek in this situation, at least there is one person who’s day has been made a bit better by your kindness.

Love Your Craft

Have you ever committed to becoming excellent in your craft? I don’t mean that you’re merely naturally talented in the craft. I mean that you have decided to intentionally get better at your craft everyday. On the good days, on the hard days, on the days where you feel like your craft is no longer your thing. 

Are you taking your craft seriously? Halfway effort is going to get you halfway results no matter what your craft is. How many people do we know that were extremely talented, but did not think enough of their talents to do the work required to refine their talent into elite skill?

Are you working to intentionally improve at your craft? Continuous learning is necessary for us to advance in our pursuits. We’ve all heard from the person that touts their thirty years of experience in a field, but they demonstrate limited growth in their field over that time. The craft always evolves. Are you learning enough to evolve with your craft?

Are you organized in your approach to your craft? We all know the absentminded genius that surrounds themselves with chaos of their own making but is still amazing at their craft. Assume you are not that person.

Do you have urgency about your craft? You’ve probably seen the following quote: “Tomorrow - a mystical land where 99% of all human productivity, motivation, and achievement is stored.” We need to give everything we have to the current day. Then wake up the next day, giving it all again.

Do you love your craft? I’m not saying you have to love a craft to be good at it, I’m saying you have to love the craft in order to have a chance of being your best at it. We’re all born with certain talents. After we’re born, it’s up to us to maximize the talents we have through work and discipline in order to shape talent into skill.

When we commit to our craft in all these ways, we earn the opportunity to become excellent. If you have not yet committed to your craft, today (not tomorrow) is an excellent day to start.

How Are You

Our co-workers are suffering right next to us, but we don't know it. How did we arrive at the situation where we can be shoulder to shoulder with a person for forty hours a week, but not feel okay telling them that we're sad today because of any number of reasons?

For a long time, corporate wisdom was to keep our corporate lives and personal lives separate. This is impossible unless we have a separate brain that we will put in our body once we get to the office.

When our co-workers are experiencing crisis, either their own or the crisis of someone they deeply care about, there is rarely enough time away from the office for full emotional recovery. Part of their recovery should be a workplace where there are people that they can connect with in an authentic and vulnerable way. Employee Assistance Programs are valuable, but we can't replicate the comfort of knowing that the people we labor with care for us beyond the utility of the work we produce.

We all must do the work to ensure our offices are emotionally safe places. We don't need deep relationships with every coworker, a few close relationships will do for most people. We need an environment where it is okay to share what pains us without being judged or diminished, without being seen as weak or overly emotional. We need our office to be a place where humans show each other compassion.

Becoming Ghostbusters

Over the past few years, candidates ghosting an organization during the hiring process has become a regular thing. This is frustrating for organizations, as the talent acquisition process is time consuming with eager hiring managers providing plenty of additional "motivation." Organizations have been ghosting candidates since the beginning of time, but that's a post for another day.

Once we have decided that a candidate should advance in our hiring process, we have to begin making the process special for them. When we make the process special, we reduce the chance that the candidate will ghost us. Making the process special means treating them as an individual, reminding them at every turn that they are advancing in our process because they have the potential to add something special to our organization, something that is unique to them.

Once a candidate accepts our offer, we need to keep making them feel special. Between the time the candidate accepts our offer and their first day of work, we should be in constant contact with them, helping them to reaffirm their decision and preventing them from turning into Casper. Personalized welcome videos from leaders or peers are huge. Don't wait for them to arrive on their first day to get company branded swag, send it to their home. Send them a detailed schedule of their first two weeks so they know you are committed to providing them an amazing work experience.

The first day working at a new organization feels like the first day of middle school. We hope we don't dress funny, we hope we find kids to sit with at lunch, and we hope the other kids don't think we're weird. Zero percent of this changes when we become adults. And just like middle schoolers, sometimes we make the decision to transfer early. Our organizations have to immerse the new employee in our culture immediately so they can feel like they're one of us. Take the time to have them meet everyone. Give them detailed tours of every part of the operation. Make sure they clearly understand how their work is vital to the organization achieving its mission. Only then can you feel like you've done everything you can to avoid getting ghosted. Congratulations, you're now a ghostbuster.

Barbarians At The Inbox

I was having a coaching conversation the other day with an exceptionally high performer. As you could imagine, this person takes great pride in working long hours and getting plenty of stuff done. After a while, I asked my client to tell me how much value they’ve provided for their organization. They started to go back into the volume of email requests they receive and their list of action items when I stopped them again: “how much value have these activities provided for your organization?”

I don’t believe that everything that is important can be measured, however, we should be able to measure the value of some of this activity. In too many situations, we have substituted busyness for value creation. We feel that every request that lands in our inbox is validation that we are valuable and that we, and only we, have the ability to deliver on these tasks. Sometimes we skip asking ourselves “are these the right tasks to be delivered on?”

It’s easier to decide which tasks we should deliver on if we understand how our role is connected to our organization’s financial outcomes. What are the key parts of our role that deliver our organization the most value? Can that work be 60% of our time as opposed to 40% of our time? It’s true that we sometimes have to just do what we’re told, but we usually have the opportunity to give input on our work product. Especially if we have demonstrated that we will put forth significant effort for the organization.

We all need time and space to think. We need the opportunity to be thoughtful about our work and why we inhabit the role we do in our organizations. Let’s determine the highest and best use of our time, then dedicate more time in that direction. There will always be barbarians at our inbox ready to overrun us. We need to find more time each day to hold them at bay.

Supercharged Recruiters

Have you ever been an applicant for a role and felt like you didn’t receive enough communication from the organization? If yes, welcome to a club inhabited by most professionals. It’s frustrating for an applicant to navigate some clunky applicant tracking system, where your resume never uploads correctly, and the only message you receive is the automated response from your initial submission. 

On the other side of this equation, we have the recruiter. The position you applied to is one of 20 positions the recruiter is responsible for. Each of those positions has 50-100 applicants. Each of the positions is in a different phase of the hiring process, so every day the recruiter is reviewing resumes, doing phone screens, scheduling panel interviews (this circle of hell deserves its own blog post), and a gaggle of other tasks that are required in the recruiter position. So if the recruiter doesn’t have a snapstreak going with you, it’s not because they’re ignoring you.

Here is where AI has entered the recruitment picture in a major way, as the technology has made recruiters more efficient. Companies are now facing a choice when it comes to addressing the recruitment efficiencies created by AI: reduce its recruitment staff or enhance its ability to attract top-tier talent. Leveraging AI tools gives recruiters the opportunity to spend more time connecting with candidates. We have to remember that in the recruitment process, the company is marketing itself to the candidates just as much as the candidates are marketing themselves to the company. If recruiters can leverage AI tools to lighten their load on certain parts of the role, they can commit more time to the parts of the process where they add the most value: talking to candidates.

The companies that leverage the opportunity to supercharge their recruiters with new AI technologies will reap long term benefits in the quality of their workforce. The companies that justify reducing their recruiter footprint due to advances in AI will be left behind in the talent market. Choose wisely.

Love In The Air

For as much time as we spend talking about emotional intelligence and corporate culture, we don’t spend much time discussing office relationships of the romantic type. The Society for Human Resource Management sent this infographic out on Valentine’s Day. Apparently, there are plenty of folks exploring team building activities beyond those provided by the company.

It’s not a surprise that workplace romances happen, given that we spend so much time at work. However, if a break-up does happen with a co-worker, are you okay with seeing their stupid face every other time you go to a meeting? According to the SHRM survey, 10% of folks would rather take their talents to South Beach.

Most employers hate employee relationships. All they see is a harassment suit getting ready to happen. And if one of the employees has the ability to influence the conditions of employment for the other employee by virtue of their role in the organization, mayhem.

I’ve seen plenty when it comes to relationships in the workplace. “Love Contracts” where the two employees in a relationship have a signed document stating that their relationship is voluntary and consensual. Employees being transferred to a different department because neither of them can stand the thought of working with their ex. “Work Spouses” that go beyond being “Work Spouses.”

Wherever there are humans, romantic relationships will form. If you’re an employer, it’s your job to ensure your policies and procedures protect you as much as possible when relationships inevitably go bad.

Make The Decision

Just make the decision. Don't schedule 14 planning sessions and 37 focus groups. Don't wait for five levels of buy-in. Don't hide behind the parts of the situation that you don't have full information about. Just make the decision.

Sometimes you will be wrong, which is fine. You will rarely be catastrophically wrong if you've been paying attention to the people around you. It's fine if you need to adjust. You only find out how much you need to adjust when your ideas hit the real world. And your idea can only see the real world after you have made a decision.

Stop waiting to make one great decision, when you could have made ten good decisions in that same time. There is a velocity that comes attached to decision making. The more decisions you make, the more opportunities you will get to make decisions. More decisions usually result in adding more value. And as with anything else, the more you practice, the better you get.

That item on your to-do list? Just make the decision. That stack of papers in your office? Just make the decision. Those emails in your inbox? Just make the decision. Seriously with these inboxes. How many of the 1,000 (or more) emails in your inbox did you open and say "I'll make a decision on that later." Every time you open your inbox, you feel like a character in a scary movie hoping that they don't run into the axe murderer. Open email, make decision, repeat.

Decision makers advance in all areas of life. Sometimes they're not even good at making decisions, they've just been identified as "a person of action." If you can actually splice your solid expertise with some decisiveness, you get to rule a chunk of the world!

"In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing." - Theodore Roosevelt (Maybe. You know quote attribution can be pretty sketchy).

Everyone Is Part of Your Performance Evaluation

When it's annual performance review time, many organizations go through "calibration sessions." The goal of these sessions is to make sure the organization is consistently evaluating performance. In these sessions, your manager makes a case for your annual performance rating to their peer managers and their boss. The peer managers and boss give their perspective on you based on what they have seen, and often, what they have heard.

If your manager is not a strong advocate for you, well, better luck next boss.

If your manager's boss is not a fan of you, well, better luck next company.

These sessions are serious and impactful. The overall evaluation of your year (and the size of your merit increase and bonus) is based on the outcome of these sessions. Given that, you need to stack the deck in your favor. Following is my advice on how do so.

Do your job. This may look like an obvious starting point, but I promise you this point is lost on many people. You shouldn't be doing the "extra credit" in the following points if you're not doing your essential job functions well.

Be responsive. When someone says "I reached out to X, they didn't respond," the message received in my brain is "X is a lazy, unproductive moron that should be fired this afternoon." That is obviously an unfair assessment. But I'm going to guess a similar thought runs through your mind when a co-worker runs afoul of unannounced time limit you gave them to respond to your query.

Work on projects that give you visibility to other managers in your division. People beyond your manager need direct exposure to your awesomeness. Divisions are always looking for volunteers to help internal projects, hop in there and let some different folks see you in action! That way, when calibration time comes, managers beyond your manager can advocate for you because they've seen your work product for themselves. If you do volunteer for a project in your division, treat it with the same professionalism that you treat your core work. Crappy volunteer work will have a negative impact on your reputation.

Figure out additional ways to demonstrate your value to your manager's peers. Contribute to the meetings you attend (if you were invited to the meeting, someone thought you would add your perspective, don't disappoint). Create ways for your part of the division to work more efficiently with other parts of the division.The way you talk to your peers is the same way your manager talks to their peers. Put in the work so that when your name comes up in conversation, people put some respect on it.

If you have done a good job demonstrating value to your manager and your manager's peers, they will be strong advocates for you during the calibration session. And although the official calibration session happens once a year, the calibration process is happening all year long. Follow the guidance above to enlist the masses to be advocates of you.

A Failed Search

I've participated in enough hiring processes to know that organizations sometimes settle for a less than ideal candidate. By the time we've gone through 90-120 days of a hiring process we just want it done. Ideally we have multiple strong candidates to choose from. More often than we would like to admit, we lose top candidates during the process, leaving us to choose from "okay" choices. We don't want the "okay" hire, we want the next superstar.

The Talent Acquisition definition of a "failed search" is a search that does not produce a hire. I understand that is standard terminology, but it has the wrong connotation. Deciding to not settle for a mediocre candidate is far from failure.

Every hiring manager faces the same conundrum: we want someone good, and we want to hire them quickly. Our current team is stretched thin doing the work this new hire will do in addition to their own workload. However, rushing into the hire without the right candidates is more damaging long-term, as it lands us with mediocre coworkers.

None of us want more mediocre coworkers. Mediocre coworkers do just enough to meet the requirements of the job description, but deliver nothing else. They will often hold the exact same position for years on end, touting the number of years they have been in the same role doing the same work. They don't have twenty years of experience, they have two years of experience that was repeated ten times. They enjoy exceptionally stable organizations that don't push them to change. We don't need to hire more of that.

We create the future of our organization with every hire. If we have to start a search over from the beginning, so be it. A few more "failed searches" will result in more successful hires.

Describe a Strong Manager

Your company will live or die based on the strength of your managers. Your people have to be at their best in order for your company to be at its best. Solid managers figure out the way each individual can contribute their unique maximum contribution to the organization.

Being a manager has the potential to abbreviate your lifespan. You have had directors and executives in one ear and you have individual contributors in your other ear. Individual contributors are saying that they do not feel heard or seen by organizational leadership and executives and directors are saying their messages do not cascade down to the individual contributors.  Given this landscape, it's no wonder that the managers that are most well regarded are the ones that do the best job with communicating messages both up-and-down within their organization. Strong managers are excellent communicators.

There is another component that allows managers to super charge their organizations. Managers that have solid project management skills are vital to our organization's success. Everyone that I talk to has more projects than they have time, and most of these projects are in some form of disarray. A manager that uses their project management skills to provide clarity within a within a project can be a hero.  But let's not kid ourselves, "just figure it out" project management skills will yield just will yield "just figure it out" results. The better way to go is to invest in learning some project management methodology. My personal favorite is scrum because it is a lightweight framework which is easy to adapt to whatever situation you find yourself in, but any framework is better than no framework.

Now that our manager has project management skills and communication skills, there is one more thing we need to make sure they have. It is a non starter for a human to manage other humans if they do not have emotional intelligence. We have all the situations where we had to deal with someone who does not have empathy or does not have self awareness. Managers that are devoid of emotional intelligence consistently damage the fabric of any organization where they are allowed to lead others.

Strong communication skills, strong project management skills, and good emotional intelligence define a strong manager for me. What defines a strong manager for you?

Brainstorming Gone Wild

My death is going to be in the middle of a meeting. Don't let the coroner try to tell you that I died because of a heart attack, or old age, or too much chocolate cake. The cause of death will be "brainstorming session gone bad."

The following three step process is an oversimplified version of how work happens. Step 1: somebody creates a broad vision of some goal or objective. Step 2: the team discusses possible plans for how that goal or objective can be achieved. Step 3: the team implements and executes the plan that the team decided upon.

I love Step 1. Plenty of energy and opportunity there. Endless potential to figure out how we're going to get our organization closer to realizing it's vision. I love Step 3. Action items, deliverables, and deadlines all make me warm and fuzzy.

As for Step 2.....good lord. Step 2 often turns into an unlabeled, unguided brainstorming session, and some people love to hear the sound of their own voice. This happens because once we agree what the goal is, we quickly realize there are plenty of good options for achieving the goal. Reasonable people can disagree about which way is the best way to go, and still agree there are various routes to success.

80% of the time I'm in meetings, we're stuck in Step 2. Sometimes I will step in to drive the conversation to some decisions, but there is plenty of push back for that, as "we want to be sure we have considered all of our options." Sometimes I let the idea parade waltz through the meeting until we get to the end of our time with no decisions made, and then have to schedule another meeting for follow up.

It's funny that as I write this, I realize that I have been defaulting to multitasking while allowing the idea parade to wander through the meetings I attend. While it's sometimes uncomfortable to drive the conversation forward to decision, it's necessary for somebody, anybody, to play that role. I'm going to get back to that role for my personal health, as I don't want to die from an overdose of brainstorming.

Curse of the Internal Candidate

Old and familiar versus new and exciting. That is the uphill battle many internal candidates face when they are applying for a position their company has made available to external candidates. Questions begin to linger in the mind of the internal candidate as they wonder "why didn't they just promote me?" The tacit assurance of "you're a strong candidate, we just want to see what's out there" provides no comfort. While some postings are an organizational formality to be endured by the successor in waiting, the bulk of these postings signal danger for the internal candidate. You don't want suspense, you want the promotion.

Put maximum effort into your resume. Yes, the internal employees interviewing you have a decent idea of what you do, but a strong, detailed resume can help open their eyes to the total value you are currently delivering to the organization. Your resume will also be judged against the external resumes, some of which have been professionally edited and formatted. If you deliver a weak sauce resume, you're opening the door for the external candidate to stroll in.

Some of the people in the candidate pool have been actively looking for work, so they will have recent experience interviewing. You need to simulate interviewing. Record yourself answering behavior based questions, if you have not done this yet you will be amazed to see how you look and sound. Once you're comfortable with how you respond on video, get a friend in human resources to practice with you.

Remember that you will be seen as old and familiar, while the external candidates will be seen as new and exciting. It's your job to get the internal folks to see you as new. A significant part of this is casting a vision for the role that amplifies the job description. You have to paint a picture in their mind of how you deliver the value requested in the job description, and how you leverage this role to help move the organization towards its long term vision. If you are successful in communicating this, you become new and exciting.

It's up to you to shake the curse of the internal candidate. Maybe they should have promoted you, but oh well, we're beyond that now. It's time to compete. Make yourself new and exciting. Take that which is yours.

Fake Employee Surveys

I have a friend who's workplace did a survey regarding a policy change that was recently rolled out. The majority of the respondents hate the new policy. The organization released the survey results, then basically said "we're not changing the policy, people just need more time to get used to it." I would prefer for someone to just tell me "we heard your input, but we don't care." But when you're telling me "these are not the droids you are looking for", I no longer trust your judgment.

There are many cases when those in charge would like input from the staff, but reserve the right to make their own final decision. That is a part of professional life I believe most of us can understand. There are cases when those in charge don't want any input from the staff before making their own final decision. That is a part of professional life I believe most of us can understand. Regrettably, there are cases where those in charge tell people they are making a decision based on their input, and that is obviously not true. That is a part of professional life I believe most of us despise.

No matter how effective, talented, or dedicated a person is, their level of output is impacted by how they are treated. This goes for your marginal employee all the way up to your superstar. They are all willing to tell you how they want to be treated if they feel you will listen. But if you don't have any intention of honestly considering their feedback, don't even ask.

Let’s Do Lunch

The phenomenon of lunch in Corporate America is an interesting one. 

Some folks eat lunch at their desk. The Eat Lunch At Their Desk army will usually do so while they work or cruise the internet. I can appreciate the utility of eating at the desk while doing work, as that extra hour of work time is sometimes essential. Eating while surfing the internet gives the person a little time for a mental health break.

Some folks rarely every eat lunch at their desk. Count me as a charter member of this group. I can claim a few areas of expertise, food preparation is not among them. The Out To Lunch clan are explorers on the level of Dora, always extolling the virtues of some fantastic new restaurant they've found that nobody else knows about (aside from fifty customers currently in the restaurant).

There is some magic that happens for the Out To Lunch crowd that serves a higher purpose than just hitting a calorie count. The relationship building that happens over meals is a critical lubricant for corporate success. I've heard plenty of people complain about the favoritism that others receive because they are friends with influential people in the organization. You would be surprised how quickly you can become friends with people if you start sharing appetizers.

Yep, going out to lunch is a career development strategy and team building tool. I've managed a number of teams over my career, I'm pretty sure my effectiveness as a manager was directly correlated to how frequently I took my team out to feed them.

I'm still out here exploring these restaurants, and I have a pretty stellar list. So, if you're feeling adventurous, let's do lunch. See you at noon!