Managing Up

I gave a short talk a few weeks ago on some of my thoughts on being effective at managing up.

 Managing up is critical.  Bosses want to be assured that you care, that you're getting results and that you're contributing to moving the business forward.  With that in mind, here are the three tips I gave on managing up:

1.  Have a Point of View.  That is, have an opinion, hopefully a strong one, on how you should grow your business, both for your group and the company as as whole.  You may not get your way, that's life, but you should always have a point of view.  Be interested and passionate and opinionated.  Don't be annoying and try to push all of your ideas through but have an opinion and advocate for it.

2.  Drip Your Insights.  I like to say that "insights are just as important as results".  Obviously results are what everyone wants and they should be the primary tool for measuring success or failure.  But when you get results, you should be able to tell your boss exactly how you did it.  You should have insights that are repeatable and scalable.  Of course, the opposite is also true.  When you're not getting results, you should be able to tell your boss exactly why.  It's ok to not get results in the short term if you're showing that you're making massive gains and getting smarter every day and closer to success.  As you gain these insights, be sure to "drip" them to your team, your clients, your boss.  Send emails, share them in meetings, write them on a whiteboard.  Sharing your development and how you're getting smarter is critical to managing up.  Show that you're obsessing over figuring out how to hit your goals.  And that you're getting smarter everyday -- when you're getting results and when you're not.

3.  Build Trust.  This one is the hardest and I'm reluctant to give too much advice on how to build trust.  People do it in their own way and you should build trust with your boss in a way that works for you.  But one thing that's clear is that you're never going to be the lynchpin in your organization if you aren't trusted.  One way I've built trust in the past is to effectively walk the fine line between being a complainer and being a trusted advisor that speaks up when it's needed.  In short, you have to learn to not sweat the small stuff.  Your boss has a lot to worry about -- likely a lot more than you.  Taking problems on yourself and not complaining upstream makes your boss's life easier.  But, when a problem is important enough, raising it up the ladder is also critical.  When you've proven you can balance what's important and what's not your boss will be inclined to shift the more important projects in your direction.

Answer to My Favorite Interview Question

Several weeks ago I posted my favorite question to ask a job candidate.  This is the question:

How do you see yourself adding value to a company?  That is, when you get a job, a company is going to invest in you and pay you (hopefully a lot), so, ideally, what would you like to be doing on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis to ensure a high return on that investment? 

I thought I'd post my own answer to this question here.  For me, the answer to this question is always evolving.  But there are three critical pieces to the answer that must always be there for me.  What I want to do has to be something that 1.) I really enjoy doing 2.) I'm pretty good at and 3.) is something people will pay for now and into the future.

With that in mind, here's my answer:

I'd like to take innovative products that solve important problems and shape them and the stories around them to get them adopted into the market well before the market is ready.

Success at Work

On Friday I was asked to walk a small team through some of my thoughts on what makes individuals successful at work.  After the session the team was asked to send me their key takeaways.  There were some interesting trends in what they sent back.  I'm posting their takeaways here – in their own words.

• real failure is highly valuable
• strive to be the lynchpin
• make boss’s job easier
• always bring energy and positivity
• insights are just as valuable as results
• consistent habits are important (going to the gym at the same time everyday)
• always add insight, value, be interesting
• biggest takeaway – the importance of becoming a “lynchpin” for the company, and for your boss.
• results and insights are equally important; always search for insights on how to improve next time, even if the results aren’t really there this time
• in conversation, try to make the majority of it insights; always aim to add helpful/interesting things to increase value
• simplify the goal; break it down into more achievable parts
• 3 things that ensure added value: be good at what you’re doing, like what you’re doing, and make it worth paying for
• become the lynchpin – work towards becoming indispensable to my boss
• reflect on the work that I have done and think about whether or not someone/something else can do the same or better at a lower cost
• simplify the goal – this will allow me to focus and create a clear path towards actually achieving it
• communicate with insights not empty words – always think about how I can add value to a conversation rather than just fill in space
• key to career growth isn’t necessarily being the smartest/ most intelligent person. Core values such as Trust, Collaboration, and willingness to work towards manager’s goals are some of the key attributes that help in career growth.
• always remind yourself to be on the learning curve – to better yourself + add value to the company
• always ask yourself – Why am I best suited to do the job that I am supposed to do? What can I do to better myself in order to do that job better?  If you don’t know the answer to both these questions your career path is probably not on the right track

My Favorite Interview Question

This changes over time, but here’s my favorite question to ask a job candidate:

How do you see yourself adding value to a company?  That is, when you get a job, a company is going to invest in you and pay you (hopefully a lot), so, ideally, what would you like to be doing on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis to ensure a high return on that investment? 

Typically, you can learn several things from their answer:

1. What they like to do
2. What they’re passionate about
3. What they’re good at
4. What differentiates them
5. How they see themselves fitting into an organization 

Of course I would never qualify or disqualify a candidate based on the answer to one question, but the answer to this question usually tells me a lot.

Employee Promotions & The Peter Principle

Recently I made the following comment on a blog post:

I recall watching an interview with Bill Gates.  The interviewer asked him what was the biggest mistake he made when he was building Microsoft. Because I admire Bill Gates enormously, I was on the edge of my seat to hear his answer...

His answer: the biggest mistake he made was assuming that their best engineers would also make good managers.

Of course it's intuitive to promote the best tactical performers but given how often this fails I'm amazed at how companies -- big and small -- continue to use this approach.

A few days later, I came across a theory known as the "Peter Principle":

The "Peter Principle" states that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his or her level of incompetence, meaning that employees tend to be promoted until they reach a position at which they cannot work competently.

It's easy to see how management allows this to happen in their organizations.  If someone performs well it's only logical that they go onto the next step in their career path.  But of course it's extremely dangerous for companies to operate with a bunch of employees that can't do their job well, much less competently.

The solution to this, I believe, it to shake up the old fashioned "career path culture" and build a culture that values the "do'er" and not the manager.  To promote this type of culture, companies should setup formal incentive systems that reward the employee without promoting them into management.  Incentives can include:

• Salary, bonus, equity increases
• Allow them to work on the coolest projects or largest accounts
• Allow them to work on exploratory or strategic projects
• Let them work side by side with senior management and/or the CEO
• Give them the best mentorship and training

Most cultures, especially in large companies, value the managers -- employees want to be "in management".  It's critical to setup values and formal systems that disrupt this type of culture to avoid mediocrity and the dangers of the Peter Principle.

Managing Email

I posted my approach to managing email in the comments of A VC the other day, thought I'd post it here as well.  I'd love to make the switch over to Gmail at some point, but right now it doesn't jibe well with my approach to emailing.

• using Outlook
• setup as many junk mail filters as possible so most email doesn't make it to my inbox in the first place
• go through my inbox every night and either delete, respond and delete or file it in a folder or leave it in the inbox to do later (often I don't get to every night but I do it at least a few times a week)
• this leaves me with an inbox full of important emails that I need to address at some point
• many of my colleagues keep thousands of emails in their inbox (important and unimportant), I don't know how people can manage it this way
• my strategy centers around good spam management and the "delete" button, I spend a lot of time deleting
• Gmail doesn't make sorting or deleting emails easy, you either have to check a small box with your mouse or use an awkward keyboard shortcut that is slow and unreliable
• in Outlook it's easy to sort emails by sender or subject line and it's easy select multiple emails to delete, and you can just hit your keyboard's "delete" button and they're gone 

Emailing is a pain but it's the best system we have, for now.  I've read that several companies have committed to phasing it out over the next few years.  That should drive some much needed innovation in the way we communicate at work.

Evil Plans

I've always believed that most business books never should have been written.  Instead, the ideas in the book could have been summed up in a couple of blog posts or a long-form article.  I prefer to digest business content in the form of a blog rather than a book.  Too often business books are stuffed with superfluous examples and repetitive fluff in an effort to turn a somewhat simple concept into a 300 page, $14.99 book.  Like most people that are apt to read a business book, I don't have the time or the desire to read a lot of fluff.

Hugh Macleod, the blogger, artist, and writer must share this opinion.  He's an excellent business writer.  He writes a bit like he's paranoid that the reader is going to get bored.  He knows how to write books for people that are busy.  He makes short and simple points (often with a real life example) and moves onto the next thing.  He almost forces you to read faster than you normally would.  He did this extremely well in his first book, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity.  Ignore Everybody was one of the best business books I've ever read.  It's full of insightful ideas that are communicated concisely, without the fluff.  I wrote a post on Ignore Everybody a while back where I called out some of the best tidbits.  I highly recommend reading Ignore Everybody.

Over the weekend, I finished reading Hugh's latest book, Evil Plans: Having Fun on the way to World Domination.  While not as insightful as his first, it's just as inspiring.  In short, Hugh asks his readers to develop and act on an Evil Plan.  What's an Evil Plan?  Hugh sums it up well in this line from the book:

"It has never been easier to make a great living doing what you love. But to make it happen, first you need an EVIL PLAN. Everybody needs to get away from lousy bosses, from boring, dead-end jobs that they hate, and ACTUALLY start doing something they love, something that matters. Life is short."

The book is written with a sense of urgency that suggests that the writer has some personal interest in getting you to move on your plan.  Now.

The book is a great reminder that with nothing but a laptop and an internet connection, we all have the power to shape our lives and careers and link up what we do each day with what we love and are passionate about.

If you're looking for a bit of inspiration to get off your butt and start moving on what you love, I'd recommend picking up a copy of Evil Plans.  It won't be a waste of time and I guarantee that it'll at least make you challenge whether or not you should be working on what you're working on.

5 Ways to Grow Your Business

Here are 5 rules that I try to follow each day to help me stay focused on growth:

1. Train yourself to never blame your team, your boss, your product, your customers, your competitors or the market; this kind of perspective forces you to innovate.
2. If you're answering emails and returning phone calls all day you're not initiating.  Don't be satisfied for one second with an empty inbox.  Set aside time to initiate and create, on your own, every single day.
3. Always be a few steps ahead of your customers; satisfy them with the product they've bought, but spend most of your time leading them towards Version X.
4. The balance of getting results today but also building for the future is one of the biggest challenges you'll face.  Get comfortable with it, this never gets easy.
5. Separate what you do each day into two buckets: business as usual (BAU) and incremental growth (i.e. growth that comes from incremental work that you haven't done yet).  Focus 80% of your time on the latter.

Jobs and Young People

I was talking to  a friend the other day about the value of children starting to work at an early age.  I think it’s a critical part of building and shaping a young person’s work ethic and eventual ability to create value.  As a young person working, you get to see the correlation between effort and return, understand the spectrum of hardworking people that produce and lazy people that don’t.  You build relationships, learn how to manage up, learn how to add value and how to get what you want from work relationships. Personally, my parents strongly encouraged me to work and work hard at a very early age.  While I’m sure I didn’t like it at the time, I know I can thank those experiences for the work ethic and ability to produce results I have today.

For fun, I took a couple of minutes to jot down some of the jobs I’ve had over the years (I tried to put them in somewhat of a chronological order).  I'm sure I forgot some so I'll add them as I think of them.  Regardless, I can't even begin to count the number of important lessons I've taken from each of the jobs on this list.

1. Newspaper Deliverer
2. Playground Supervisor
3. Altar Boy
4. Camp Counselor at a Baseball Camp
5. Dishwasher at a Private School
6. Babysitter
7. Dogsitter
8. Basketball Referee
9. Baseball Umpire
10. Landscaper
11. Mover
12. Snowplower/Shoveler
13. Waiter at a Nursing Home
14. Golf Accessories Salesperson
15. Dishwasher at a Seafood Restaurant
16. Lifeguard at a Lake
17. Parking Attendant
18. Swimming Instructor
19. Lifeguard at a Pool
20. Lifeguard at the Ocean
21. Fitness Center Supervisor
22. Certified Personal Trainer
23. Entrepreneur – Accounting/Bookkeeping Business
24. Office Manager
25. Advertising Salesperson
26. Marketing Director
27. Business Manager
28. Nonprofit Co-Founder
29. Director – Business Development
30. Senior Director – Business Development

Career Insights

Picked up a couple career insights that I thought were worth posting here:

The first comes from a study from the Gamut News via Penelope Trunk's blog.

The study looks at what they call "Career Limiting Habits" or (CLHs) -- habits that prevent professionals from being successful. They surveyed 972 people and found that these CLHs were the most common:

1. Unreliability
2. “It’s not my job”
3. Procrastination
4. Resistance to change
5. Negative attitude

I think this list is spot on.  And it's especially true for startups.  It's almost the exact opposite of a list of habits required to work at a startup.  A top 5 list of positive work habits required to work at a startup would look a lot like this:

1. Accountable for individual and company results
2. Willing to do anything to get the job done; gets hands dirty
3. Starts fast, iterates like crazy
4. Embraces change
5. Positive, must-win attitude

Even at a larger, more established company, if you're practicing any of these CLHs you're making your manager's job harder and if you're making your manager's job harder, you're not going to go very far.  

The second couple of insights involve working with headhunters and come from a guest post on Dan Schawbel's blog about personal branding. Dan is a fellow Bentley alum.

Two pretty straightforward insights that might be useful to know:

1. A headhunter will not find you a job if you are not currently employed
2. A headhunter will not find you a job if you're not working in their area of focus; e.g. if you work in pharmaceutical sales and the headhunter is looking for a candidate for an advertising sales job, the headhunter will not work with you

This isn't to say you can't get a job in ad sales if you're working in pharma sales.  But a company isn't going to pay a headhunter 30% of a first year salary for a candidate that isn't currently employed and working in their defined area of expertise.  They don't need a headhunter to land that person. 

If you find yourself looking to make a career change, your best bet is to work through a more traditional staffing agency, go to companies through your network, or reach out directly.

What We Don't Know

Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, said this back in 2002 when responding a to a reporter’s question about links between Saddam Hussein and terrorists seeking weapons of mass destruction.  It came up again Monday in a column in the Wall Street Journal. “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult one."

I’ve always loved this quote; it’s very humbling and so true in business and life (and of course politics and war).

In short, there are things we don’t know that we don’t know we don’t know.

Seth's Best Blog Post

Seth Godin has countless awesome blog posts but to me this might be his best and most most inspiring ever. Even when you have a job I think it's great to maintain a list like this that takes you to the next level and changes your success run rate. Read it here.