Positive and Negative Blind Spots, Can You See Them?

It has been a long time since I have posted anything, over a year. Since I posted over a year ago, I have changed jobs and seen a big shift in my thinking about work/career and development.  More on that in future posts.

As part of my new role as an Organizational Capability Manager, I recently had to get certified to be a 360 Feedback Facilitator. In order to be a facilitator, you need to receive your own feedback first. The best counselor, is a good counselee. I went through the process and received my results, really not knowing what it would say about me or my ability to manage or where I needed to see things more clearly.

After reading it, all in all it seemed favorable but I have areas that they call Positive and Negative Blind Spots. I don't think I am as good at Growing Capabilities as other people think I am, this is a Positive Blind Spot. I think I am better at Delivering Results than other people think I am, this is a Negative Blind Spot. I won't go on and on about the whole process but it made me think of Career Development and the importance of having people point those Blind Spots out to us, either anonymously or face to face.

Ken Blanchard says that "Feedback is the breakfast of champions." I can understand his point but my question is how much is enough feedback for me to be able to do something with it? At what point do I stop asking and receiving feedback and now have to go out and do something with the feedback?

Here are the implications that I took related to Career Development...

1. Besides your boss or supervisor or spouse who gives you feedback and points out your negative and positive blind spots, especially the positive ones? If you don't have someone, who can you ask that will be even handed?
2. If I want to work on these areas, and they do take work, who can I enlist to help me see myself more objectively about my technical or soft skills? When will you document these and hold yourself accountable to change?
3. How can I take the Positive Blind Spots and use them to close my Negative Blind Spots? Is that even possible? Can clarifying a Positive Blind Spot help you on your current or next Job Assignment?
4. Are there any of my positive blind spots rewarded in my company and I am just not saying something about a strength I have? Let me explain by example. If I am good at building relationships but I don't think I am very good at it or I am self-deprecating about my ability, so when someone asks me if I am strong at networking and I undersell my ability, am I depriving that person asking me to help them do further networking or building important relationships? Who is losing out? Me? The person asking? The company?

Until Next Time...

Things to Remember During Transition

What is it like to switch jobs and move to a new organization?

After 3 years I changed jobs and am now working in a different organization, yet in the same company. You would assume that there would be some things that are different, but on the whole, you are working for the same company, right? After switching from the services side to the business and then back to the services I have come up with a few common experiences.

1. No matter how much you knew at your previous job, the new position has a different culture that requires assimilation into. Learning the new culture requires you to be very observant. Attending your first meeting will tell you a lot about the culture.

2. Write out your observations about the new group in your first month or else you may lose the fresh perspective you bring to the group.

3. Be humble and deferential to leadership, they are going to help your ideas gain traction if you are in a leadership role or if you need their help in making changes.

4. Don't be afraid to ask questions about how things get done. This is especially if you are experienced and they expect you to get busy. You want to get productive as quickly as possible, that is one of the reasons they hired you above others.

5. Leave your old position well. You want your successor in your previous role to be more successful than you were.

6. Ask your new supervisor how you can help them be successful. Get to know them. Is there something that keeps them up at night you can help with?

7. Do you have a competency map you can share with your new supervisor? Or your Career Development Plan? I would recommend you share the Competency Map first and the Development Plan after 90 days.

8. Study the organizational structure and get to know what the name of the influencers are. You also want to find out the undocumented org structure. Who has the ear of the leaders? This is especially important in a networking based organizational culture.

9. At times, it may feel like you are walking through a mud field, especially when you are trying to get something done. Things are going to take more time until you know the decision makers or get savvy about the new processes.

10. Ask the obvious questions. This is your time to preface all your questions with, "I know I am new here..."

11. Listen first before telling them the way your previous organization accomplished something similar.

12. Get to know the people in your new organization, you need their understanding of the 'tribal knowledge' that is undocumented and sometimes unsaid.

13. Acknowledge and thank your previous supervisor for letting you go to the next assignment. Supervisors are the ones that bear the brunt of training the new you. Your replacement may not know as much as you did. Whoever replaces you will require some time to get up to speed. It is your previous supervisor that remains accountable for projects you left behind.

Until next time...

25 Years to Overnight Success

It has been about a year and a half since my company reorganized and some people are beginning to post for other positions within the company, sometimes even outside. So, I too have been thinking and posting lately myself. Aside from that, for my own development, I have been reading about ambition and I wanted to share a couple of quotes that I have found interesting. 

The first is this, “How we live when ambitions are delayed significantly shape who we become.” The other relates to the outworking of ambition. From a CEO of a large construction firm, “It took me twenty-five years to become an overnight success.”

So let me briefly write about the first quote and how I think about it. I have a certain ambition to change roles or to get a promotion and I try to post out or up and it doesn’t happen. What do I do with that? What do I do with the unrequited ambition?

This is where I have gone to…

·         What is it about my current role that I still could learn or need to learn before I move to my next assignment?

·         How can I rethink what I currently do to prepare myself for that next role?

·         If I am the best, in my mind, at my current role, how can I get even better?

·         What does my response say about me and how I need to change to meet conditions as they are?

Let me share why I have gone there. I am thinking long term career development. I am thinking 10-20 years. I am thinking about finding my career best in each new job. If I am unable to change roles there has to be something that I can learn where I currently am that will help me years down the road. A very wise man one time suggested, when I was complaining about my situation, to blossom where I was planted. I think that advice is appropriate here too.

So what about the other quote? I heard this quote from a man that had worked very diligently on a vision that he had of being the head of a large construction company. By the time that he was selected to do a very visible project, he had been at honing his craft for over 25 years. Many people came up to him and asked him questions as if he had come from out of nowhere. His response was the quote. If you know anything about Jeremy Lin, he is another example of this phenomenon. Cinderella stories have a history.

So how does this all fit into Career Development? This is where I see it headed. I have my development goals and what I see as a successful career. My day to day experience is going to shape me and refine me until my goal is reached or until my career aspirations change. So if my ambitions are delayed so that I can learn something more, all the better for my long-term growth.

 If I am looking at my career goals from the long term I need to be in the upper loop of the victim-accountability loop and learn something and have it shape me and how I see things. When I have learned all that I need to learn and my role is visible to a broad audience or gets noticed in some way I will have walked through many hours of diligence and hard work to arrive at my career goal.

Is Incredibly "Busy" an excuse for not developing?

After the market crash in late 2008 a normal workday, workweek or month seems to be at a pace that is unreal or unsustainable. Are you experiencing the same thing? I do expect people to be busy, I am not talking about not being busy, I think a better descriptor would be deluged or inundated. The reason why I bring this up is because I have been thinking about ways to work more efficiently when things are busy or frantic. I also want to tie this to Career Development as well because I think development time is lost or excused in the rush to get things done that are not necessarily development.

Let’s think this through, you work hard and you have deadlines and you have due dates. You may even have more work than you can possibly manage in a year and it doesn’t seem to be going away, there is no getting the work out. You have had your opening performance discussion and you and your supervisor have agreed to a development objective that you feel you can reasonably accomplish. It is going to take some effort on your part, it may even take some time outside of the office, but it is really where you have a passionate interest. So after agreeing to this, you get to your mid-year performance review and prepare for the discussion and try to figure out what happened to your work on your development agreement? Where did the time go, you ask yourself.  In the mad rush to accomplish the urgent and important, the not urgent and important is left in the pile of things left undone. Does this sound familiar? Are you hearing the same thing from others?

Another five months goes by and what happens at the end of  the year? Your supervisor nods in agreement that there was no way you were able to finish your development agreements and writes in the justification for why you didn’t increase in your ability to…fill in the blank. Who excused whom for not completing your development agreements?

I have seen it excused for business needs, but how long should it or can it go on where we are excusing development for urgent business needs? My concern with pushing off development is that it has unintended consequences for engagement and retention and an elusive work-family life balance.

I honestly don’t know the answer but I have some questions that help me figure just how much I want to develop that I want to share with you. I know I am responsible for my development and I personally agreed to those areas that I need to develop in February of 2012. With that in mind, here is my personal self-examination that I would challenge you with.

• What am I doing that can be delegated or not done at all? If you only have 80-90 hours in a work week, what is important?
• Can I change my development goal to something that is a part of my regular work or a new project I’ve been assigned?
• Of the really value added work that is asked of me, what is busy work? Can I eliminate any of the busy work?
• Can I streamline any of my other work?
• Can I learn to be more efficient by multi-tasking less? Hat-tip to any lean-sigma folks out there.
• What is going to have the biggest impact on my long-term career goals?
• Is no, or not now, an option?
• If I set aside time for my development as agreed upon, would it make me more efficient?

I would be interested if you have any more ideas on how you think through ways to reduce the busy or frantic pace and allow you margin to continue to develop.

Who is your Sponsor?

In many contexts and in many businesses, we need someone who believes in us that is in a position of decision making authority. We need someone who knows how we think and likes it or appreciates it. They may even like us so much they would advocate for us to participate in something we have never done before. We need a Sponsor.  We need a Sponsor that thinks of us when new roles are discussed or in discussion about potential candidates. In the ideal world, it is those very Sponsors that put their good name on the line to put our name on the line.


Recently, I have wondered why I have seem to hit a period in my career growth where alot doesn't seem to be changing. I feel like I am trying new things but not a lot appears to be moving on the surface. Admittedly, this may be just perception and I won't attempt any glacier analogies because honestly I don't know or think that it really fits. The place I work has many slow moving aspects and the people that are moving and changing are the ones to watch, I am not one of those people. I recognized my own stagnation in my current role and it was becoming a real challenge to be motivated at work.

Feeling a little bit of a temporary malaise, I went to lunch with a colleague of mine and at the end of my discussion with him he said very matter of factly, "You are a high-potential for two years in a row and you haven't received a promotion or a different job because you don't have anyone that is willing to take a risk on you. Or they like what you are doing so much they can't risk anyone else doing it. Matt, you don't have a Sponsor."

I will take up his second comment/question later but did you notice the repeating words? It was about risk. It was the very definition of what it means to have a Sponsor. Someone that is willing to take a risk on you because of what they have seen, experienced or know is possible in your performance.

So what would you do if you are in this situation? You are working hard and may be even be an up and comer but nothing has changed, you don't even know if you are being talked about behind closed doors.

Here are the thoughts that I have come to:

• Continue to do what you are doing, you have something left to learn
• Ponder this...would you continue doing what you were doing if you weren't paid at all?
• Be bold, call up would-be Sponsors and see if they could give you any advice
• Look to other industries for how you could solve your biggest difficulty at work
• Get interested in how you could be a Sponsor for someone else
• This is the opportunity for character building, it may take everything you have to go to work with a good attitude and a willingness to give it your best
• For the praying people, ask God to make it absolutely clear what your next step is to be

Before I finish for the night, I want to take up this idea that if you are so good at doing what you are doing they can't risk anyone else doing it. This is a nice salve to the ego but I don't think we should rest on it, to mix all of my metaphors. Think about it, how did you get to learn what you know, the company took a risk on you when you took the job, they will have to do the same thing with someone else. If this is really the case and you are the single point of failure and there is no one else, put in your 2012 plans to train a replacement or at least someone that could do what you do when and if your future Sponsor suggests you for your next role.

Until next time...

The Common Denominator

This week I wanted to think through a comment that I hear often when coaching or mentoring individuals.

Here is the toned down comment, "My Supervisor is so unthinking! You would not believe what they did!"

Have you ever wondered why it is that the Supervisor of every employee is at the center of the problem? Ask someone about their Supervisor and they have all kinds of things that their Supervisor is doing wrong or that they could do better. Why does the Supervisor take the hit?
Think back to when you were a teenager, how could your parents be so unthinking in their decisions? How could they be such an...?

It stands to reason that the person that directs us in our daily work would be on the receiving end of our frustration and resentment, if prolonged. I have coached and mentored many individuals that it is almost comical how it is that the Supervisor of every one that is employed by someone else can point their finger at their boss and state how, why, and when their boss did something wrong.

Full disclosure...I write this blog from personal experience. From being the Supervisor and from being the person pointing my bony finger at my Supervisor or my Manager and thinking that I know what they should be doing.

Here is what I have come to. I don't really think that my Supervisor wakes up each morning and thinks about how they could do something irrational or stupid to make me look like a fool? As a Supervisor in the past, I know I haven't done that. I will grant you the Peter Principle, that people are promoted to the highest level of incompetence and some Supervisors can be malicious and just as, if not more selfish than us. But I am referring to the good natured individual that we have at work that is really trying to do their best but just can't measure up to our level of perfection.

In all of this, what is the Character Matter?
As an employee or a recipient of work direction, I should have some understanding and compassion for the difficulty that it may be to carry the responsibility of Supervisor or to have to please their boss. I should learn to be understanding and gracious, knowing they are trying their best. How would I want to be viewed if I was the Supervisor?

If you are a Supervisor, guess what? Your direct reports have many ideas on what you can do differently and what you are doing wrong. The Character Matter to work is to ask them on a regular basis how you can improve and for their perspective on the situation. They will be engaged because you asked them and you may be surprised that they may have a good idea.

Where does Character Matter?
Character Matters when a Supervisor does something that is logically inconsistent but I am able to adapt or help them see the impact of their decision by providing pinpointed feedback. Character Matters when my colleagues are complaining at the coffee area and I can try to share an alternate viewpoint that helps them understand the difficulty of supervising. Character Matters when I want to complain about my supervisor and don't because I have blind spots in my life too.

Until next time...

Is the High-Potential Label Overrated?

Have you been identified as an up and comer? Are you the next "it" girl? Does your place of employment think you are the next leader of the company or work group?  Are you being groomed for something bigger? Are you being sought out for a leadership role?

 

This post is for those that cannot answer those questions in the affirmative. This is for the rest of us that may have had an average year and met and exceeded some expectations. Due to certain things we were not identified as "star performers" in our last performance assessment, but aspire to be, whether we are acknowledged or not. We are the folks that produce results similarly to the 80% of the rest of the employees and at times we exceed those expectations.

 

At the company I work for, they usually limit the number people in this "walk on water" group to a maximum of 15%. As you can imagine, that is a small group. We call that group, "high-potentials", or "hi-pos." If there are high-potentials, by logic there must be a medium or moderate potential or no-potential. I have been in this high potential group a time or two but what about the medium or "Mo-pos"? Those of us with modest or moderate potential? What could we do to develop? Is it just a matter of timing or circumstances that we would be a "high-po"? Are we limited in any way to the things available only to the high potentials? Is the label that significant?

 

This may not be the case where you work but I see that opportunity to work on more high profile projects or perception may be the sole differentiation between high and moderate potentials. In 2011, I was a high potential and that was very nice of them to say so and be acknowledged in that way but beyond that acknowledgement there wasn't anything different in terms of my day to day role and projects.

My next review will indicate if I am deemed a high-potential again but aside from the designation, does it change how you work? Or how you should work? I think the label is rather fickle and not deserving of the weight it is given. Is that true for your company?  Unless the company you work for actually does something different with those identified in that class, it is just a label. The label or title doesn't motivate me to work like a high-potential, my personal work ethic should dictate how I work not a "1" on my performance report.


If you are not classified as a "high-po" or the next "golden child" but want to know how to perform like one whether you are labeled one in the eyes of your boss or not, here are a few things to do:

• Examine your daily routine and find ways to deliver results that standout from the rest. Notice that I wrote "standout" not "stand-on." If you ever are to become a high potential you need to excel in what you are working on right now. You will not be given more responsibility or higher profile projects if you cannot show results in the here and now without stepping all over others or taking credit for work others did.
• Work on your character, examine yourself for weaknesses in your level of honesty, integrity and consistency, and desire to mentor others.
• Emotional intelligence is a critical soft-skill now and in the future, how do you increase your emotional intelligence level? What inter-personal skill do you need to work on? If you relate better to an LCD screen or television than to an individual, you have some work to do if you want to lead in the future.
• Study the people that determine who is a high-potential and figure out whether you can, with a clear conscience, actually or if you want to deliver on their expectations to be considered one? Consider the cost.

Until next time...