Tony Pauley's Blog

Social Media 101

One of the least expensive ways to promote yourself or your brand is via social media. The biggest platforms in the social media arena are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. We will also assume that you want to create a blog for longer posts (like this one).

In order to make the best use of these platforms, you need to follow three major steps:

1. Design a professional on-line presence
2. Reach out to a focused target Market
3. Automate

Design a Professional On-Line Presence

The overall design that you will be building includes accounts for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as well as a blog via WordPress. All of these accounts will be cross linked such that if you post anything on one it will automatically feed to the others.

You need to make certain that everything about you on-line presence is aligned with the brand message that you are trying to deliver. You profile photograph should look as professional as possible. Spend the effort on profile text to ensure it portrays exactly the message you are trying for.

You should customize as much as you can to set your brand apart. Customize your Twitter page, build a Facebook fan page, consider your WordPress theme carefully and consider purchasing a premium theme.

Reach Out to a Focused Target Market

Be laser focused on who your target audience is and ensure that you are attracting followers in this target market. You can accomplish this in different ways with each platform.

The easiest method to use with Twitter is to follow people who follow your competition or other key personalities in your arena. If you follow them, they will often follow you back. Follow enough people and you list of followers will grow rapidly. You do however need to unfollow those who do not follow you back. Otherwise Twitter limits how many people that you can follow at any one time.

For LinkedIn, the strategy is two-fold. First, reach out to as many people as you can (within your target market) in order to build a base. Focus on leaders and industry experts. The next step is to create a curate a group focused on your target market. You want to drive as many people to this group as possible.

Facebook is a bit trickier. Consider driving traffic to your Facebook fan page via your Twitter and Blog posts. The most important thing is to get people to “like” you page.

Use your blog as the hook. Post interesting articles tailored for your target market. Make sure that snippets of these posts show in your Twitter and LinkedIn feeds with links back to the blog for the reader to get the full content. You need catchy titles and interesting first sentences. The first 140 characters really matter. When people click through from the various social platforms you then get them to your blog/website where you have more control. If your goal is to simply build brand then you are almost done. If you are trying to sell product, then you have gotten the prospect to your website. You then need to ensure it is optimized to sell.

Automate

In order for any social media campaign to be successful it must do a few very repetitive tasks:

1. Find followers
2. Post articles regularly
3. Keep the feed active with 5 or so interactions a day

Doing all of this manually every day can be a near full-time job. The good news is that there are a number of tools out there that can automate much of this for you.

Find Followers

The easiest platform to gain followers on is Twitter. Use Twitter to drive followers elsewhere. There are a number of tools that assist with finding Twitter followers. Two of the best are www.tweepi.com and www.tweetadder.com.

Post Articles Regularly

In order to build an engaged audience you do need content. I suggest writing blog articles in WordPress. The articles should be around 250-750 words each. Write them in batches and store them as draft. You can schedule their publishing using the WordPress dashboard.

The trick here is to be regular and predictable. You want the post to go out when your audience is most likely to be on their computer. Noon is often the best time as people are often web surfing on their lunch break. You also want your audience to know when to expect your posts. Ideally you post every day. Once a week can work, but you should always post on the same day of the week at the same time of day.

Keep the Feed Active

You really need to make sure that you are active in Twitter but not so active as to flood people’s feeds. Around 5 posts a day is ideal. Tools like www.tweetadder.com allow you to build long lists of posts that you can schedule to go out as you wish.

Using the formula outlined here you will have a world-class social media campaign up and running in no time. In future posts I will walk you through the details of how to set this up, step by step.

If You Don’t Cut Up Your Food, You Choke

Our little Max, THE Max, is about to turn 4. He is a strange eater. He won’t touch a lot of kid staples like mashed potatoes, but he loves some exotic foods including his favourite, Thai food.

Like most 4 year olds, Max is easily distracted. This can make for a very frustrating eating experience as he just won’t chew. When he realizes what is going on, he often tries to make up lost ground and will absolutely stuff his mouth. We have to watch him carefully as he will end up choking. He has yet to learn to go steady, cut up and chew his food.

In the world of business, I find that most people absolutely freeze when working on large complex tasks. Nearly all teams do the same when trying to deliver complex projects involving lots of ambiguity. In all cases, they have all forgotten to cut up their food and chew.

As a leader, one of the best things you can do for your team is to give them small, short, clearly deliverable assignments. The team will grab onto these, devour them and then come back for more.

On the other-hand, if you give teams huge, ambiguous assignments, without clear boundaries and without clear milestones, well, then, you are very likely going to watch them choke. This is bad business. Your project will likely fail, the team’s morale will be bruised and you will be left with a mess to clean up.

Be the caring parent and cut up their food.

One of my key skills is the ability to deliver huge projects, on time, on budget, in environments of extreme uncertainty. It is what I love to do. The secret sauce is making the uncertain certain. The main areas are:

1. Set achievable milestones
2. Focus on the knowns
3. Allow for re-work

Set Achievable Milestones

I am a firm believer in creating a team culture based on delivery. In order to build such a culture, you must make it unacceptable to be late, for anything. No one should arrive late to meetings, if you promise to follow-up by a date then you must hit the date, all deliverables must always be delivered on time.

This is doable. It just requires proper up front work, aka planning. Dates must be committed to by the team, not pushed on the team. You must plan for likely contingencies and build them into the dates. Above all else, the dates must be achievable but aggressive.

Once you get the team committed to delivering on dates that they helped pick then you must foster the “get it done at all costs” mentality. Upstream teams need to understand the downstream impact of missing the dates that they promised. If done well, you will find teams start to move mountains.

Be careful not to burn out the team. If the dates are constantly too aggressive then you need to add more contingency going forward. Hyper-productivity via long hours is generally not sustainable or healthy.

Focus on the Knowns

I have led projects with such degrees of unknown that most people would run away screaming. Why would you start such a project until you at least know what you are trying to deliver? Sometimes there are regulatory or other business drivers that force you to start making changes before the dust has settled. If you don’t start early enough, you will never finish by the time it is due. When the driver is regulation, the deadline is often fixed and out of your control.

In order to make progress and move towards the goal, you must take the huge project and break it up into bite-sized chunks. You must then sequence these chunks in the right order. This is the hard part. You have to worry about dependencies, as with any project. However, you also have to focus energy on the items that are the most certain. Delay starting on the most uncertain items as long as possible unless this will cripple the project due to downstream dependencies.

Don’t scare the team by constantly focusing on the unknowns. Instead emphasize the knowns. Allow the team to deliver.

Allow for Re-work

In order to keep the project moving you will invariably have to guess until the uncertainty settles. Don’t be afraid to guess. You will have to in order to keep the project from grinding to a halt due to dependencies. The trick is to guess smartly. If possible you should assume that your guess is wrong and design the solution in such a way as to allow you to change your mind later.

This will always have a cost. I have led large-scale projects with a re-work budget of greater than 50%. You want to avoid too much re-work, but it is often the only way forward. If your project requirements are uncertain, but the delivery date is fixed, then you must guess and chance the re-work. You must make certain that stakeholders understand this and understand the budget reality.

Delivering on time in such an environment is absolutely possible. It just costs money do to re-work. Some projects require more chewing than others.

Don’t be afraid of big ambiguous projects. Follow the advice here and you and your team will deliver more than anyone ever thought possible.

For the Foreign Portfolio, Cash Flow is King

In one of my previous posts I discussed the foreign portfolio career. This career is one where you earn you income outside of a single employer. This may mean self-employment in a single arena (the focused foreign portfolio) or many arenas (the diversified foreign portfolio).

As mentioned earlier, the most difficult part of pursuing the foreign strategy is often capital or, more importantly, a source of secure cash flow.

What may surprise you is just how little product you have to sell in order to replace your income. For simplicity of the math, let’s assume that we want to replace $100,000 in income.

Annuity Cash Flows

An annuity is another word for a cash flow that keeps repeating. The cash keeps coming month after month, year after year. This is just a fancy word for a subscription business. The wonderful thing about subscription businesses is that once you have a customer, you tend to keep the customer for a while. You want to do everything in your power to make the transaction “sticky”. This is precisely why companies ask you to sign up for auto renewal on your credit card or give big discounts for multi-year subscriptions.

Just how much subscription business would you have to sell to replace $100,000 in income? Well that depends on two things: how much you charge and your costs.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume no on-going costs for now. If we charge $10 per month and could sell just over 16 subscriptions per week then after one year we would earn $100,000 every year going forward.

If we assume this is a website that is already built, then we will just need to cover hosting costs of say $5,000 per year. We may also have some advertising or other costs of $10,000 per year. This may not be needed at all if we can sell direct to the customers. But to make the example realistic, let’s assume you need to make another $50,000 to cover other expenses. We need to sell 24 per week for one year to make $150,000 per year in revenue. You then really want to focus on keeping your customers and replacing lost customers.

The beauty of the subscription model is that your income just keeps growing. If you are able to keep your sales up at the same level and assuming you lose 25% of your customers after year one, your revenue at the end of year 2 would be $262,000. If your costs remained steady at $50,000 then you are now clearing $212,000 per year by selling your 24 per week. The income will go up every year if you can keep your costs in check and you are able to retain customers.

The problem with annuity cash flows is that you often have a service to build. This means that you have start-up costs (easily in the tens of thousands) and you need time to get the service built before you can launch.

Workshops

A much quicker way to get the cash flow going is to offer workshops. The topics for workshops are endless. If you have an interest then I am sure there is a workshop about it.

The nice thing about offering workshops is that the upfront development time can be very short and the costs are minimal.

Again, let’s assume we want to replace $100,000 in income and we have $50,000 in advertising and other costs.

Let’s assume we have a room seating 20 available for $500 per day with technology drinks and snacks included. Our only other big cost may be printing. Let’s assume $30 per attendee. If we offer a 2 day course at $250 per attendee then our profit per course comes to $3,400.

If we can offer the above course once per week for 44 weeks per year then we generate the magic $150,000 that we have been targeting.

Not a bad gig, $100,000 income for working 2 days a week with 8 weeks per year of vacation time.

If we are able to charge more, the situation can improve dramatically. For the sake of argument, let’s change the format to 3 days a week and charge $750 for an advanced topic. We now need to run the workshop just once per month to generate our magic $150,000 per year.

Obviously it is not that easy. You do need to have enough material to cover 2-3 days and cover a topic that people are willing to pay to learn. You also need to be able to pull in new students regularly.

The main job becomes marketing and advertising your workshop.

There are many other ways to make a buck. However, it should be evident that there are clear paths to regular cash flow allowing you to pursue the foreign portfolio career if you so desire.

Business Writing 101

One of the most important skills that you can possess is that of getting your point across effectively. I see so many great ideas get killed due to poor delivery of message.

I once took a business writing course while working on my Master’s degree. This was a great course as it really highlighted the importance of form over content. In essence, the key theme of the course was to assume that no one is going to read the entire page. Ever.

Most executives are very busy. When they read, they tend to skim. Most detail is lost. The worst thing that you can do is to load the page with paragraph after paragraph of dense material.

Instead, you want to help the reader to get the most out of their precious reading time by emphasizing those things that are important. Steve Jobs was perhaps the best presentation deliverer of our time. Take a look at any of his slides. There is rarely more than a sentence on each. Every word is very carefully selected for maximum impact.

Structure Your Text to Make It Easy to Read

There are a few key tricks here that are most important:

1. Always follow an outline. Provide a quick summary of the outline at the beginning and then follow the outline exactly.
2. Make certain that the executive summary covers all major points. You should assume that this is the only part of the document that will actually get read.
3. Move dense material to an appendix. Nothing can kill the effectiveness of a presentation or document more than dense technical material. As tempting as it is to prove your points, don’t. Instead make your points and let the proof reside elsewhere.
4. Provide sign posts. Assume that the reader will only remember the things that you make stand out. Use headings effectively. Use bold fonts judiciously.
5. Use bullets every time you create a list. Lists are very difficult for readers to take in. Bulleted lists greatly help by reminding the reader how the pieces all fit together. This is a simple but very effective tool.
6. Always end with a summary the key points and a reminder of desired action. Too often you see wonderful presentations delivered that make many individual points in a very clear way but never close the deal. The reader is left wondering “So what?”. You must tell them what you want them to do with the information that you just presented to them.

Know Your Audience

I know it may sound obvious to everyone, but I cannot stress enough how important it is for you to really know your audience. Keep in mind the following 3 rules:

1. You are trying to help them. Too many people forget this. You may be going to a decision maker trying to convince them to do something for you. It is critical that you remember that it is important for them to understand how your proposal helps them.
2. Executives are busy people, don’t waste their time. I hate to say it but most people appear to like hearing themselves speak. Every word that deviates from the objective is a distraction that endangers your likelihood of success.
3. Tailor your message for maximum impact. You really must know what it is that a decision maker needs to be successful. Often, the key factor is generating high returns. However, there are often other things going on that you must be aware of. Is the organization very risk averse? Is there major regulatory shifts happening? The best thing to know is how people are being rewarded. You must then craft your message to show how your proposal will enhance their likelihood of being rewarded.

Effective writing is not easy. However, it is very easy to get much better at it. You simply must practice. If you have an idea that would help your organization out, spend time writing out a proposal. I recommend slides over a document. This will force you to be more structured in your writing.

Develop your presentation by dropping in the key points in the executive summary. Then make a section out of each key point. Then simply go fill in the blank pages. Don’t forget the takeaway actions section at the back.

Now think about who you will be giving this presentation to. You must then refine the slides to suit your audience. Give it a few rounds of polishing. Now find a friend to give you an honest review. Repeat this cycle a few times until you are happy with the results.

This is difficult at first but you will find that with practice, it becomes much easier and that you become a much better writer and presenter. More importantly you should find more and more of your proposals being approved.

If You Don’t Like Your Job, Take on More

A long time ago, I found myself assigned a number of responsibilities that I just did not enjoy. I was stuck doing these tasks day in and day out because I had no authority to give these responsibilities to anyone else. I started to really dislike my job.

The good news is that I was young and ambitious. I was willing to work more hours in order to do the things that I wanted to do.

I proceeded to volunteer to work on every interesting and important project that I heard of. Once imbedded, I did everything that I could to make myself incredibly valuable to the success of these high-profile projects.

Eventually my plate became over full and it was clear to everyone that there was no way I could continue working on everything on my plate. Something was going to go wrong. I then approached the most senior person that I had access to in order to highlight the risk and suggest that I remove some of the unimportant, uninteresting tasks from my plate.

Problem solved. I a few short months I completely transformed my job from a mundane existence involving fairly uninteresting work to a very exciting job working on nothing but high-profile clients and projects.

This is a very effective strategy. However, it requires a number of prerequisites:

1. You have to find the capacity (short-term) to take on quite a lot additional work
2. You have to work in an environment where there is interesting work to be taken
3. There needs to be someone to pick up the work you want to unload

If all three of these conditions exist then this is a sure-fire way to completely change your day job.

Find Capacity
There are really two main ways to find capacity, delegate work or work more hours. If you are trying to use this technique, then you probably are not easily able to delegate. Your only real choice then is to work more hours.

You want to do this smartly. Don’t be reckless and take on more than you can handle. You also need to remember that this is temporary. The goal here is to deliberately overload for a short period of time.

Find Interesting Work
The existence of interesting work to be taken is often simply out of your control. You either work in the right kind of environment or you don’t.

If you do work in such an environment, it is important that you get to know the people in charge of interesting things. You need to get inside their circle so that you know when new things are coming down the pipe.  You can then position yourself to help by showing interest in the new project and showing how you will be very valuable to the team.

If there is not new work coming into your environment, then the alternative is to find roles or projects that you want to do and find a way to get involved. By far the easiest way to do this is to find holes in the organization that need to be filled. If you think there is work that should be getting done and no one is doing it, then by all means just go do it. If you can then prove that this work is more valuable than your day job, then you have succeeded.

Unloading Your Old Responsibilities
In order for this technique to be successful, there must be someone to pick up the work that you do not want to do.

Ideally, there are underutilized individuals who can just pick up the work if told to do so. If so, then you must convince the decision makers that it would be in the organization’s best interest to move your old work to someone else.

A sometimes better, but often more difficult approach is to retain ownership of the work you are trying to offload but convince the decision makers to allow you to train someone else that you can then delegate to. By doing this you are not just swapping responsibilities around, but instead you are growing your career by expanding your level of accountability.

This technique does not always work and if executed poorly you can find yourself burdened with lots of work and no one to offload to – you will be working long hours for quite a while. However, if you are willing to take the risk and the conditions are right, you should find that you are able to move out of a role that you do not want into the role of your choosing.

Finding Imbalances = Looking for Opportunities

I love watching thunderstorms at night. I find them incredibly beautiful. I lived in Florida for a number of years and I have to say that the lightning displays there often rival fireworks. The smell of the rain is wonderful. The combination is exhilarating.

Most people fear thunderstorms. The unexpected thunderclaps can be incredibly frightening. The uncertain possibility of tornadoes or flooding can really scare people. Power outages cause adults to fear the dark like children.

The differences in point of view here is very striking.

Most people hate change just as much if not more than they hate thunderstorms. No one knows for certain what change will mean to them. They may lose their jobs. All of the skills they have learned over the years might become redundant. Fear abounds.

However, when looking for career opportunities, change is the most important thing. It is very difficult to advance in most organizations when no one ever leaves. Those at the top stay there forever and there is never a hole to fill. Whenever someone does retire, you tend to find mass promotions as everyone then has the ability to move up to fill the gaps left above.

The easiest way to find opportunities for your career both internally and externally is to look for thunderstorms. Remember, you are looking for problems to solve. There are a few common themes:

1. Changes in leadership
2. Mergers and acquisitions
3. New competition

Changes in Leadership
As mentioned before, changes in leadership due to retirement creates holes that must be filled.

The more interesting and opportunity ridden change is one where leadership change is forced and whole levels of leadership are replaced en masse. It is very important to find the underlying reason for this change. What issue is the board trying to correct? What are the deficiencies in the organization that they are worried about?

In order to benefit from this change, you must position yourself as a solution to one of the big problems. Find an area that really interests you and work on your sales pitch.

Mergers and Acquisitions
Whenever two companies are combined there tends to be a shakeup in at least one of the companies. There is also often a large need to help integrate the two businesses. This is a huge departure from business as usual. Most people making the merger decisions forget that the staff on the ground continue to have their day jobs and will not have time to do the heavy lifting of integrating businesses.

Changes such as these offer great opportunities to insert yourself in positions of influence and of critical importance to the new combined organization. The trick here is to work out what skills that you can bring to the table to help with the problems at hand.

New Competition
Whenever a new competitor enters a market there is often a need to react. The competitor will often attack customer needs in different ways and will often change the rules of the game. The old guard then need to change their behavior quickly to respond to the changing marketplace. The changes can be in product features, target market, pricing, technology, or any number of other areas.

New competition creates an impetus for change that you can and should latch onto in order to create opportunities for yourself. The challenge here is to develop a way for the organization to respond and develop a convincing pitch.

There are any number of other situations that arise that can create opportunities. But the ones listed above are clear indicators that change is needed and therefore opportunities exist. The critical path is as follows:

1. Keep a list of companies that you would like to work for (only if you want to switch companies)
2. Stay informed so that you know if a big change is coming or has just occurred
3. Ensure you are connected with individuals in the organizations that can make hiring decisions
4. Make it a habit to develop “turnaround plan” pitches whenever you see opportunities, you need to have practice here as to have enough polish on yours when the time comes
5. Pitch your idea to a decision maker as soon as possible after an opportunity arises. These big chances don’t come around often and you need to be ready.

If this all seems a bit over the top for you, you may want to start smaller. Get in some practice by proposing small changes to the organization or proposing new products. It is important to get in the practice of networking, creating the proposal, and delivering the pitch. You should find that this gets much easier over time.

The Portfolio Career

Once that you have mastered the art of delegation you should find yourself free to take on more. If not, you need to delegate more.

You should find yourself picking up more and more areas of accountability. The danger here is that you start accumulating things that don’t go well together or worse, you have collected a number of accountabilities that you do not want.

You need to always have a vision of what you want your career to look like. What are the areas of accountability that you want? What do you want your sphere of influence to be? You should then attempt to collect accountabilities in these areas only. Try not to allow yourself to be diverted in too many areas outside of your focus. These are just distractions and do no help you get where you are trying to get.

In essence, you will start to find that your career has become a portfolio and should be managed like one. Similar to financial portfolios, career portfolios can be constructed in a number of ways: focused, diversified, domestic, and foreign.

The Focused Portfolio

Most traditional jobs fall into the realm of the focused portfolio. You have a narrow realm of expertise and you aspire to be the best in this area. Your name becomes synonymous with the field. You are an expert, no you are THE expert.

In order to build a successful focused portfolio, you must have laser focused goals and must be very selective in the accountabilities that you take on.

The Diversified Portfolio

Those who pursue a diversified portfolio tend to be “jacks of all trades”. They enjoy solving problems. They enjoy variety. They are very valuable resources as they can be deployed nearly anywhere an organization needs them at any time.

The beauty of possessing the diversified portfolio is that the opportunities are limitless. There are few if any boundaries. The downside however, is lack of focus. This lack of focus can be a liability if you ever need to switch companies. You will have a very “non-traditional” role. You will not fit in a box. If you understand this well and sell yourself the right way then this can be a huge plus. New jobs will only come through networking as you will get filtered out by gatekeepers if trying to go through normal channels.

The Domestic Portfolio

The domestic portfolio is one created solely within the confines of the organization that you work for. The most common jobs revolve around the focused domestic portfolios. These are the jobs we are all familiar with. These are the jobs that get posted.

Those focusing on the domestic portfolio want to grow in their organization. They often feel the need to separate work from home. To be good at the domestic portfolio often requires becoming adept at the politics of the organization in which you work. Navigate these politics well and you will do well with your career.

The Foreign Portfolio

The foreign portfolio is, well, foreign to most of us. The foreign portfolio involves collecting roles and accountabilities across organizations often across industries. The diversified foreign portfolio is by far the most difficult to assemble and manage well. If constructed the right way however, it can be the most interesting and believe it or not least risky type of portfolio.

The challenge when trying to build the foreign portfolio is that of getting started. Often this requires lots of after work activity unless you have enough funds set aside to simply “cut the cord”. The skills required are similar to those in Ferriss’ book The 4-Hour Work Week.

I am not going to minimize the difficulty of pursuing this kind of career. It can be a real mountain to climb. However, the rewards are many. If you enjoy diversity, then you are free to “dabble” in many different areas. This can be very intellectually stimulating. You are able to be exposed to a great number of very different experiences. The experienced gained can be a very valuable asset.

Another key benefit of the diversified foreign portfolio is that of diversification. You are much less exposed to any one company or industry’s ups and downs as someone in the focused domestic career. In today’s market, this can mean a large reduction in financial risk.

The main point here is to consciously select the type of career portfolio that you want to pursue. This should then shape your overall career strategy. You cannot get anywhere if you do not know where it is that you are going. Pick the career portfolio that suits you best. Do not allow yourself to get distracted by taking jobs or roles that are not aligned with your goals. Instead focus all of your energy on building up your desired portfolio. Your job will never look the same again.

In Order to Get Ahead, Delegate Yourself Out of a Job

Perhaps the best advice I ever received from a superior was that I needed to delegate myself out of a job in order to ever be able to do different things. At the time I was neck-deep in mundane technical work. I had become THE expert at a number of things and as a result had made myself somewhat irreplaceable in a number of areas. It is a mistake that I had repeated from my previous job. Once again I was stuck in a position with no easy way out and no immediate prospect of moving up. I had done too good a job at too low a level.

Once you get to this point you have few options. The company has no incentive whatsoever for you to move out of what you are doing and every incentive in the world to keep you doing exactly what you are doing forever. Often the only choice is to find a new job elsewhere. This is precisely what I proceeded to do. Only this time I was armed with a new “nugget”. I was determined to ensure that I never became stuck again.

There are a number of lessons here that I have grabbed onto.

1. Whenever you are asked to take on any long-term responsibility, take ownership and immediately give the doing work to someone else
2. Whenever you take on a new role or new job, ensure that you will have resources at your disposal to delegate to
3. Delegate everything, if that doesn’t go well take back some of the work, train your people more and then delegate it back again
4. Train others – up, down and sideways
5. Document everything

This is very transformational. Instead of being the go to person for a small number of detailed things, you now become an enabler. You enable the organization to solve many detailed tasks in a much less risky way. You enable those around you to grow and to learn so much more. Most importantly, you enable yourself to:

1. Have time to learn
2. Have time to teach
3. Have capacity to work on more interesting things should they arise
4. Easily move to other roles should they arise
5. Leave the job without guilt

The job at hand here is to delegate at all costs. You must take absolute ownership of the task at hand, but give the responsibility of execution to someone else.

This can be done in three ways:

1. Delegate to a report – easiest thing to do
2. Hire a contractor/consultant – expensive but easy
3. Give the work to another person at your level – often very tricky

You must position yourself as a leader and an enabler of others. When taking on a new role, you must make certain that this is the expectation. You will be much more valuable to an organization this way. You will find that you are much more able to take things on than ever before.

It is a strange feeling at first once you are doing this correctly. You may find yourself thinking that you don’t really DO anything. This is precisely the point. You enable lots of other people to do much more. Your primary job then becomes to help your reports do a good job. You must coach them and ensure they have all of the resources needed to do their job well. You also need to help them move up as well. You also need to keep close tabs on everything that you are accountable for to ensure that everything is being done correctly and to your standards. If not, then you need to do more coaching. If things go terribly wrong, you need to be able to step back in and take on the doer role again until either your report can take it back or you have time to replace them on this task.

You want everyone possible to know exactly how to do all of the detailed things that you are accountable for. You do not want to get stuck doing this detail yourself. Remember it is a one way trap. Instead you want to create organizational memory. You want to make sure others are trained, that there are backups galore, and that everything is as documented as possible. Anyone could theoretically then step into your shoes if needed or wanted.

When you get good at this you should find that taking on a big area of accountability involves a short-term build out project for you. Once this build out is complete, you are now free to take on another area of accountability. You are now able to grow your career any way that you want as quickly or as slowly as you are comfortable with.

I find this very empowering as it opens doors of possibility that are closed to many people. The possibilities for you are only limited by your ability to delegate effectively.

Finding the Dream Job

I hate to tell you this, but if you are waiting around to find your dream job in a job posting or hoping that a headhunter will come calling then you are going to be VERY disappointed.

The ugly truth is that it is just much more work than this. You can find A job this way, but you will not get your DREAM job.

I was fortunate enough a few years back to have an executive coach provided by my employer. We explored many facets of my personality in order to determine how to best position myself in the organization, and of course, play well with others.  The end result of several months of coaching was the conclusion that I just did not fit. Not in my role, not anywhere. This was not surprising if I were being honest with myself. The fact of the matter was that my style of working and the style of the company were quite different. I just did not fit in the organization in which I just desperately trying to fit.

I found a very interesting career coach to try to help me through this (yes at the time I had an executive coach and a career coach, as they say in London – “how posh”…).

The career coach had a completely new to me view on finding the perfect role.

First I had to do a self-assessment. This included all of the normal psychometric tests. This gave the coaches a lot of ammunition to use against me. That is right. My biggest enemy was myself. They used the results of these test to challenge me in ways I had never been challenged before. End result, they proved to me that I did not reach high enough. I had been convinced for years that I should stay in my box. This was very beneficial to my employer, but terrible for me.

Next up was coming up with my personal “brochure” aka resume aka CV. This involved a long process of pouring over psychometric scores and highlighting the skills and buzzwords that I felt adequately described what I wanted to bring to the table. In a nutshell, I had to come up with a marketing campaign that found the right key words to describe my strengths.

Next I had to find companies that 1) I wanted to work for and 2) had a big need that needed to be filled. Let me tell you, this is much more difficult than it sounds. It is very simple to find a company that you think you want to work for. It is much more difficult to find problems in the organization that you think you can solve. It was hard enough just to identify companies that had problems. I was scouring Hoovers, Google Finance, and the like. In the end these proved futile. The only thing that seemed to work was good old-fashioned networking. I needed enough inside scoop on enough organizations to find a big gap to fill.

Now came the hard part. I had found a few great companies with holes to fill. I now needed to come up with the sales pitch. How would I fix their problem? How could I convince them that they needed me to solve a problem that they were not even hiring for? Hell, they often did not even realize right away that they had a problem until I pointed it out for them.

This led to a focused piece of work on sales pitches. How could I sell myself as the solution to problems that buyers did not even know they had? I was nearly there. I started meeting with lots of companies big and small to pitch how I was the solution to all of their current problems.

This was all going very well…and…then…the bottom fell out of the employment market. I got cold feet in a big way. VERY BAD MISTAKE. I freaked out and decided to play it safe. My career coaches were put on hold, my executive coach sensed the struggle. I froze.

It took another couple of years for me to break free.

In the mean time I pushed the boundaries of my current employer. Taking on as much as I could justify, but realizing all along that I did not and would not fit.

Eventually it all paid off. An opportunity landed in my lap, born out of all of the networking I had done previously. I finally seized the day and spelled out exactly what I was going to bring to the table. After a long waiting period, I finally moved into a completely new role at a completely new company, where I had the freedom to define my position from scratch to be exactly as I wanted it to be.

I will never look back.

The key take-aways here are:

1. figure out what it is that you want to do
2. find a place that you want to work that needs your talent
3. develop a very good pitch
4. convince the decision maker to hire you (once you learn how to get to the decision maker)

It all sounds very simple until you try to do it in real life. To be honest, it takes a lot of practice and even more self-confidence. You will only get there by practicing.

Once you get good at this though, you may find that it becomes a way of life. I know that I have.

Master Your Career

In the great chess book “Reassess Your Chess”, author Jeremy Silman outlines his system for developing a plan. His 5 steps are:

1. Find the imbalances
2. Figure out where you want to play (there must be a favourable imbalance there)
3. Dream up a fantasy setup
4. Determine if the goal is possible, if not find another fantasy setup
5. Analyze possible moves and then pick the best

I could not have explained strategic thinking any better if I tried. The steps he describes apply to all aspects of strategy be it in chess or in business. These steps are as appropriate when looking at new product development as when looking at business process design and restructuring.

I’d like to focus the content of this blog on how to use this approach to do what you want to do in life. The ideas are the same whether you are trying to change roles in your current company, find a job with a new company, or start a new company altogether.

Let quickly go through the 5 steps.

Find the Imbalances
If you train yourself to look, you will find imbalances everywhere. Customers have needs which are not being met, executives have duties that they do not enjoy, processes cause work to be inefficient. The list goes on and on.

There are very few “well-oiled machines” out there. No matter what area of a company you want to work in you should easily be able to find areas for improvement.

Figure out Where to Play
Given your skill set and, more importantly, what you like to do, find enough related imbalances to warrant creating a role to look after them.

The scale here really depends on the magnitude of the imbalances. Heading up a large new product could take all of your time. In other scenarios, you may want to piece together a collection of smaller issues, like quality control, and solve them in a holistic manner across an organization.

Dream up a Fantasy Setup
Now that you have some responsibilities in mind and have made your case for aggregating them together, you need to determine how you will plug into the organizational hierarchy. Who should you report to? Who would you prefer to report to? Who will report to you? What is the mandate that you wish to have?

This is your chance to create your dream job. If you could change everything, how would your new role look? Think big. Again this is your fantasy job we are talking about.

Determine if the Goal is Possible
You must be able to articulate clearly:

1. What your new role will look like
2. Why you are the only person who can do this job
3. Why it is critical for the company, and
4. How everyone involved will be happier once the change occurs.

You have two primary tasks here: getting others to give up responsibilities and finding a way to take them on.

Where are you likely to find resistance? Is there any way to eliminate the cause of the resistance? If everyone stands against you, then the goal may not be possible and you will likely need to dream up a new role.

Once you determine that it is possible, then it is time to formulate the plan.

Analyze possible moves and then pick the best
Now that you know what you want to, how you want to do it, and that it is politically possible the hard part is finding the right way to make your dream a reality.

There are a number of strategies for getting from point A to point B. My favorite strategy is to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.

If you already work for an organization and there are areas that you think you can improve, then start doing so. Do some extra work every week to solve the issues that you see. Take on responsibilities without asking. If you do this the right way then you will typically find that everyone involved is happy that someone is looking after the problem.

Take on one responsibility at a time and earn your mandate in each area slowly. If done well you will quickly find that you now have taken on all of the areas that you were interested in without making a huge deal about it. The dilemma with this approach is that you may now find that you have two jobs. You then need to determine if you want both or not.

In the coming month we will dive into each of these area in detail. Please follow along and try out the suggestions. It could change the way your career.