Career Turbo Charger: Read. A lot.

Yesterday, I shared my list of 8 Secrets to Career Success from a presentation I prepared for a young professinoals group at the bank.  At the end of the presentation, I offer one more recommendation, a "bonus secret" of sorts.  I call it the Turbo Charger because it will take everything you are doing in your career and make you better, faster, and stronger.  The Turbo Charger is reading.

As I spent time preparing this presentation, I thought a lot about my own learnings and mistakes.  I also thought about those people who I admired for what they had accomplished in their career.  The one thing that every one of those people has in common (to my knowledge at least) is that they are all avid readers.  Over the years, when I've met people who really impressed me, eventually our conversations nearly always turn to books.  So, there certainly seems to be something very significant about reading as it relates to success in your career.

Not only do I suggest reading as the turbo charger for success, I provide a list of books that I think form a tremendous foundation of information for anyone who's itching for a breakthrough in their career.  Here's the list:

• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie 
• Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott 
• Boom! 7 Choices for Blowing the Doors off Business as Usual by K. and J. Freiberg 
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell 
• Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner 
• The Halo Effect: and the Eight Other Business Delusions the Deceive Managers by Phil Rosenzweig

Happy reading!

8 Secrets to Early Career Success

About a year ago, a young professionals group within my organization asked if I would come and speak to their group about the key lessons I've learned through my career to this point.  In particular, they were interested in the kind of tips or rules of thumb that a person early in their career could follow to accelerate their success.  This sounded like a fun request, so I sat down and made a list of the things I felt I had learned through trial and error in my career.  Ultimately, that list was far too long to share, so I narrowed it down to a list of eight things.  I called the list the "8 secrets to career success that they didn't teach you in college."

Apparently, these lessons resonate with young professionals because over the past year, I've been asked to present these secrets nearly 20 times to different groups both within my organization and in the local community.  It seems that something in this list is helpful to people, so I decided to share it with you here as well.

The 8 Secrets to Career Success (that they forgot to teach you in college)

1. Invest in yourself.  Particularly early in your career, you should be greedy about your experiences and any opportunity to learn.  Every thing you learn or are exposed to early in your career builds part of the foundation that helps you perform in your current and future jobs.  So, put down the Xbox controller and volunteer for a big project at work (or read a business book).  
2. Get self-aware.  Knowing your own strengths and weaknesses, passions and frustrations is critical to being able to build a great career.  This awareness provides the framework to be a leader.  It also empowers you to make intentional career decisions to find work that you love.  Use assessments like Myers Briggs, Strengthsfinder, Keirsey Temperament and Leadergrade.com to get objective feedback.  Also, for the bold, send out an email request to those who know you best, asking them to give you feedback on your strengths and weaknesses.  Great exercise to do for anyone.  However, if you ask for feedback, don't punish someone for giving it to you by arguing with anything they tell you.  Just say thank you, then give yourself the time to absorb the feedback they gave you.  Chances are, it's more true than you think.
3. Have a plan.  When most of us take the time to think about it, we spend more energy planning our vacations or even our weekends than we do our careers.  And yet, we spend the majority of our days and our lives working.  It's critical to sit down and give some serious thought to what kind of job you want in the future and how you are going to get there.  The simple act of making these decisions makes it more likely that you will succeed in making them happen.  
4. Find some guts.  Those who get ahead the fastest take the most risks.  There's no way around this.  There isn't a safe way to the top.  For young professionals, even having a thought out opinion on key business issues can be courageous if you are asked to share it by leaders within your organization.  The key here is to step into situations professionally that feel like a stretch and where you feel like you might not be up to it.  That's where your breakthroughs will happen.
5. Deliver the goods.  Low performers don't get promoted.  Even if your boss is a moron, you hate your coworkers, you work is boring, and you don't have the resources you need to get the job done.  Get it done anyways.  The most successful people find a way to make things happen in spite of their situation.
6. Look the part.  It's easy to say that your appearance shouldn't matter when it comes to getting ahead in your career, particularly if you perform, but it does.  Early in my career, I was in a phone sales job where I was crushing the numbers.  We never saw a client face to face, but were required to wear ties to work.  I thought that was stupid, so I intentionally dressed down out of protest.  Since I produced big numbers, I didn't think it should matter.  One day, the owner of the company took me to lunch and told me that he'd like to promote me to management, but he couldn't because I dressed like a slob.  To be a manager, I had to look like management material.  Learned an important lesson that day.  Appearance matters.  
7. Build your network.  The better your network, the more valuable you are to your organization.  Your network is like your entourage, where you go, they go.  Having a broad, powerful network of connections with people helps make up for your weak spots.  If you don't have a particular expertise, but you know someone who you can call and who will help you, the fact that you lack in that area won't be an issue.  
8. Lead in the community.  Leadership and management experience is hard to come by until you get promoted and some times you need it before you can get into the jobs where you will learn it.  The best way to close this gap is to find community organizations involved in causes you care about and volunteer for leadership roles at the organization.  There's four benefits to doing this.  First, it feels good to volunteer and you are giving back.  Second, if you can learn to lead volunteers, you can easily lead people who are paid to follow you at work.  Third, volunteers are much more forgiving when you make mistakes as a leader and they will give you feedback.  Finally, by leading successfully in the community, you will build your network and increase your visibility within your community--both good for your career.

These are the eight secrets.  I'm not sure how secret they are, but they seem to have worked for me.  I'd love to hear your feedback on these.   If you want more information about any of them, leave me a comment or drop me a note and I'll be happy to share more. 

Reality Check for Human Resources

This past week, we hosted an event called The HR Reinvention Experiment in Omaha.  It was a group of HR leaders from around the state of Nebraska who came together to talk about the current and future of HR.  The topics and discussions were very rich and I came away with a notebook of ideas for blog posts at the end of the day. 

One of the conversations that really stuck with me was one on why HR still seems to crave and grab onto any opportunity we have to enforce the law (employment law, safety, etc.).  The question was posed by Paul Hebert as he led one of the sessions, "Should HR be responsible for enforcing the law?"  His underlying point is that HR doesn't necessarily need to be the cop, but could/should instead be more focused on educating managers on the law as it relates to managing and letting them be individually accountable for upholding the law.  His point is a really good one to wrestle with. 

But, we still seem to like to grab onto issues of law in HR.  My belief is that we do this because the "law" represents the one place were we feel we can grab power.  When it's the law, we feel confident to say no and mean it.  That feels powerful.  It also pisses other people off and it's a lot of what makes the rest of the world hate HR.  So, this discussion led into a bigger discussion about the nature of HR and why we haven't made more progress within organizations being recognized as leaders--why are we still sitting around talking about being at "the table" after all of this time.  What's gone wrong?

Through this discussion and my own experience in HR, I've come to some conclusions about why I think HR still sits on the outside looking in when it comes to the most important discussions happening within our organizations.  

1. In HR , we have a crippling desire to be acknowledge and validated.  For whatever reason, we haven't figured out that the merits of good work stand on their own.  As a profession, HR lacks self-confidence.  It seems that we keep running around yelling "Notice me, notice me" when we should be focusing on just getting things done.  Our desire to be "invited" to the executive table is our problem.  We need to stop worrying so much about being loved and valued by our organizations and more time making things happen that create value. 
2. Great HR is invisible.  Zappos was discussed as an example.  Most people in our business hold Zappos up as the pinnacle of a great organization built on a great culture.  The only name we seem to hear is that of Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, but they are doing great HR at Zappos.  The fact that no one talks about HR at Zappos is a sign that they have some great HR going on.  If you are going to work in HR, you have to come to the realization that our work is about helping others be successful.  When we do that well, the organization is successful and they don't even notice HR was there.  If you desire to be recognized for every good thing you do, go into sales or product development.  HR gets the most attention when it's broken.  That's just how it is. 
3. Human Resources has a brand problem.  There is a lot of baggage that goes along with being labeled HR in most organizations.  The discussion on this topic quickly turned to the idea that we need to change our name to resolve this problem.  However, a crappy product with a different name is still a crappy product..  Think about Hyundai cars.  Ten years ago, Hyundai had a terrible reputation for making cheap, unreliable cars.  In the past decade, they re-engineered the product and thus, recreated their brand.  Today, they have a totally different and more positive brand.  In HR, if we want to fix our brand, we have to fix our product.  It's not about a name.  It's about a fundamental re-engineering of what we deliver to our organizations.   
4. HR is in the influence business whether you like it or not.  Rather than trying to grab power by grabbing onto legal considerations that give us the ability to say yes or no, we need to permanently let go of the need for yes/no power.  Instead, we have to embrace that we can't and don't want to make anyone do anything.  Our objective should instead be to influence others to do the things that will help them to be most successful.  Influence works optimally when the person you are influencing makes the decision to do what's right AND they look back thinking it was their own choice to do so.  Influence is tough work.  It's much harder than being the traffic cop in your organization.  HR leaders` of the future will be masters of the tools of influence.  

This how I see HR.  I would welcome your thoughts and challenges to my thinking.  HR of the future must look very different than HR of today.  But, this transition first requires a major shift in how we think about, define, and then execute the role of Human Resources.