One of the weirder experiences most of us can relate to is being in a meeting where nearly all of the participants disagree with the decision being made, but the power dynamics keep anyone in the room from objecting. It’s never a great feeling, and it seems to happen for a few different reasons
I'm not one to extol the virtues of failure. I get annoyed whenever people talk about “celebrating failure.” That said, there are some benefits to getting your ass handed to you every once in a blue moon.
Investing time, money and energy into a strategy, only to have the market not respond is like taking a punch. You might not get knocked out, but the effect of multiple blows can take a toll on your confidence and enthusiasm.
I nearly scrapped this column, because they’re not bad ideas per se. Both are still in fashion today, especially in the startup-o-sphere, and like many popular ideas there's more than a grain of truth to them. But these two ideas have run themselves ragged, and I see them doing more harm than good when I encounter them.
There are several benefits to focusing on smaller-scale problems challenges that you can get your arms around. First, there are bound to be many smaller-scale yet still important problems crying out for attention that you can make actually progress against on your own. It’s helpful to not need to rely on too many other people for your pet projects that you might be working on at irregular intervals. Such projects are great for racking up wins and building career momentum early...
A real thought leader is recognized as an authority in their field on the basis of their powerful, original ideas and ability to drive adoption of them by the mainstream. The three key words to pay attention to in that statement are recognized, original, and adoption. Thought leadership means more than just having ideas: you have to effect real change...
Something about spending so much of our adolescence preparing for the college application process has conditioned our generation not to question the value of education (full disclosure, I don’t have a postgrad degree). Our cohort has taken out hundreds of billions of dollars in loans to get MBAs, law degrees, and other postgrad credentials, trusting that education is always a good investment even when the experiences of our peers should at least make us think twice...
Good news first for a change: I am pleased to be in the final stages of editing my first book, due out hopefully by late September. The book revisits in greater depth several of the topics we've covered in the blog this summer, with a little more room to explore. I am really excited to finally see the finish line and will keep you posted on developments on that front.
Success can become the enemy in your career if chasing promotions crowds out your other career goals. The prospect of recognition and promotions may motivate you to work hard and develop skills, but it can also distort your vision. This is especially true if you are wired to crave tangible progress and constantly need to feel like you’re “winning” at your job.
The great paradox of learning is that diverse expertise gives you freedom to try more new things, but gaining expertise in one area always means ignoring others, reducing your freedom. Developing expertise in anything worthwhile takes time, and your time is limited. And while it’s not every day that you embark on a new career path, you will regularly make choices about where to develop skills. Whenever you engage in additional training, take a class, jump into a new project, or even choose a book to read, you build knowledge in some areas rather than others...
Something about the networking event image causes many young professionals to confuse networking with just plain old conversation. When you meet anyone whom you think will somehow be a valuable person to know down the road, don’t settle for small talk. Try to instead approach meeting someone as an opportunity to find a way to help them with something...
A real mentor is invested in your professional development because they genuinely care, not because they are assigned to you. Mentors tend to see bits of themselves in the junior colleagues in whom they take an interest. How can someone be assigned to believe in your potential? Remember that an arranged marriage only guarantees the arrangement - not the attraction.
It may as well be a natural law that leadership teams always want to do more things than the organization actually can at any given time. That perpetual gap between the company’s ambition and its capacity might seem like a frustration, and it can be, but it also turns out to be the source of numerous opportunities to own something valuable early on. All it takes is identifying things that your company, division, or team want to try but don’t have time to spin up...
You would think finding the biggest problems facing an organization should be easy because of their importance. But in practice, new hires usually don’t get the full story about what’s going on at the companies where they work. People who have been at the company for a while can be reluctant to discuss the big, scary problems with outsiders and recent hires. I can attest to not divulging “the dirt” to new hires about shortcomings or difficulties at the places I’ve worked...
The challenges you’ll find in any organization come in two flavors:
Type 1 Challenges often sound like restatements of the organization’s overall mission, and employees will openly acknowledge them often. For example, a software company trying to build a better web browser may cite technology barriers as a major challenge. These are obvious, and you may be working on some of these challenges as part of your core responsibilities. Don’t stop digging here.
Type 2 Challenges are the real deal, and you won’t hear about them during the interview process. A Type 2 Challenge for the software company above might be, “We have zero brand recognition and don’t know how to market our products.” That’s a much scarier problem for the future of the business than some technological hurdle. These are the kinds of things you need to be on the lookout for...
Generating real momentum for yourself doesn’t happen overnight, but you have the tools you need accelerate this process right now. Rather than hoping to someday be in the right place at the right time, there are a few things you can do to find what the right place is and just go there already.
Three Steps to Career Momentum
If you are one of these hardworking people who mostly aced their academic career, seeing someone in your peer group advance ahead of you can be unnerving. Even if you’re happy for the other person, it still feels like losing, and losing sucks at any age. About a year into my first job out of college at a consulting firm with a couple of thousand employees, I thought I was doing great. My manager thought my work was good, I was getting the hang of our business, and in my head I was at the top of my group. Then one day I found out that “Michael” (not his real name), another analyst in the group I started with, had been promoted.
Many of us pride ourselves on our work ethic, but in the professional world outworking everyone isn’t a sufficient strategy for getting ahead. Hard work is the basic ingredient of career advancement. Not much will happen for you if you’re not willing to put in some serious effort. But it also probably won’t set you apart from your peers as much as you might think. One of the quirks of working life is that we usually sabotage our ability to differentiate ourselves on the basis of how much effort we put into our jobs.
There are a few things you should understand that you almost certainly won’t hear when your career path and performance review criteria are first explained to you:
