Do You Know Your Next Career Move?

“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.” – Milton Berle

“If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on!” – Sheryl Sandberg

 

What are your options to grow and evolve, when you’re already at a senior level? Obviously, that depends on your organization, your industry and your interests.

 

Most people don’t reach a high level in their careers without opening some of their own doors and breaking a few glass ceilings. The point is that even when you’re happy with what you’re doing, it never hurts to look forward to the next step.

 

Many careers have an obvious path but that doesn’t mean that you have to follow it. You can go from an accountant to a department head to an AVP and ultimately CFO, on a financial track. Or you could go from department head to running your own company, developing apps for accountants. However you want to change, there are certain steps you should follow to gather your WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHY AND HOW. With these, you can be sure that your next move is the right one.

 

To reach your end goal, you need to know what it is

 

By end goals, I am referring to your WHERE and your WHAT. Where you want to be in five to seven years and WHAT success looks like to you. Ultimately, if you don’t know WHERE you’re going, you won’t be able to find the right path to get there.

 

Do you want:

  • More time for family or personal pursuits
  • Secure financial positioning
  • A more creative role
  • A challenging, ever-changing role
  • A whole different role from the current one

 

Ask yourself what a perfect day in your ideal next role would be? That should help you hone down what you see as priority end goals, and what you don’t. Factor in things about your current role that you DON’T like. They matter too, in terms of your overall role satisfaction.

 

In other words, WHAT does success look like to you? If you’ve already reached senior levels where you are now, odds are success looks different than it did when you were twenty and starting out. That’s okay. It’s not a fixed target!

 

Think about WHAT you want right now and for the next few years, not what you think is expected of you or what others want. It’s okay if you have several end goals since there is often a way to make them overlap. Prioritize your different end goals and focus in on the top two to help guide you.

 

Develop and research paths that will take you to role’s that include your end goals

 

Ask yourself WHY you want to reach certain goals. If you want to be CIO, why? Is it to run the whole show? Is it to have control? Is it because you have ideas that you think could take the company into the next generation of technology growth? Think about your WHY and then develop your HOW.

 

HOW are you going to get there? If financial stability is your goal, entrepreneurship might not be the right choice! If you’re bound and determined to become the CIO at the company you’re currently working for, what is going to take for you to get there? Figure out the path to what you want. Once you have the path worked out, you can easily determine if you can meet the steps required or not.

 

Assess your skills and possible sponsors

 

This is the WHO: Take a cold, hard look at what your skills are and factor in personality traits too. Do you have what it takes to take your career to the next level on a projected path? Do you need to enhance your skills or exposure in certain areas in order to achieve your goals?

 

If you want that CIO job, what is it that you will need as skills before you will be considered? Research other CIOs at other companies, get a mentor, improve your material skills (public speaking, organizational, etc…).

 

As to sponsors, is there someone WHO can help you get you where you want to go? Someone WHO will champion your career move, open a door or two or simply give you some solid advice? Work with them, network with them, find a way to open up a conversation and see if they are open to working with you.

 

Taking some time to reflect on the WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHY and HOW of your career path is like any business plan: it’s a guideline that can help you take the next step without falling into a hole!

talking discussing debating

How to Prepare Your Team for Fast Growth

Like the video that goes viral, fast growth can lead to some unintended consequences, both good and bad.

 

How your team reacts in moments of upheaval and change is entirely a reflection of the leadership. Fast growth can reveal tremendous opportunities and also major flaws. You and your team need to be ready for all eventualities, good and bad.

 

What does growth look like for your organization and your team?

 

The more you can plan for growth, even unexpected, overwhelming and unbelievable growth, the better you’ll be positioned to cope with it. Moreover, you will be in a far better position to help your team through it.

 

Part of that planning is about the collective vision for the team and the company. The organizational value system is the bottom line for any team: without a shared understanding of and belief in these core values, it’s difficult for a team to stay on the same page, in times of upheaval.

 

Another part of the planning is having an understanding of what the end game looks like and sharing that vision with the entire team. It’s not about random growth but rather having a target and finding the best way to achieve it, without throwing your team into chaos. That’s not to say that you will achieve your target, but if you assume you will, if you work towards it as if that is the planned end goal, you and your team will be better prepared.

 

Establish mission-critical processes

 

In the midst of change, it’s tempting to drop certain processes and cut corners, in the name of expediency. Just like the crew of Apollo 13, who had to ‘fire up the L.E.M.’ (lunar module) a lot faster than the checklist allowed for, your team might need to change directions mid-course. If they do, it helps if everyone has a strong understanding of what processes MUST be maintained and which can be pushed off or ignored, for the time being.

 

This is also a good time to focus on your core business and not get too distracted by thinking that adding more is better. In growth mode, more is already a given. Splitting your resources to go in new directions isn’t helpful at this stage.

 

Clarify potential issues

 

Understanding potential issues in provisioning your product/service, including customer relations and other supply chain processes, will help you and your team in dealing with them. In other words, expect the unexpected.

 

Coping with issues that could occur if you succeed in achieving fast growth only works if you can clearly communicate with your team what those issues might be. You also need to be able to communicate what your expectations are in dealing with the issues. Use ‘what if’ scenarios ahead of time and work through a problem, rather than attacking it without thought.

 

Put key staff in the right roles

 

This means reorganizing existing staff so that they can be most effective and also hiring staff based on future needs, not present status. The last thing you want to do when you get where you are going is having to replace staff who aren’t up to the task.

 

You’re looking for critical thinkers in all leadership roles, whether that’s sub-team or even sub-group levels. The ideal staff in key roles will be people who can be accountable to themselves and work independently.

 

Take care of your team

 

If you want your team to take care of your end customer, you need to take care of your team. Unplanned growth can lead to a lot of stress, overtime and people taking on more tasks than they ever expected. Loyalty isn’t automatic: it’s earned. Assuming people will ‘suck it up’ because they want to keep their jobs is the fast track to an empty team room!

 

Instead, make sure that your team has the tools and support that they need. This means looking at your key individuals from a professional and a personal point of view. Your team leader is going to burn out fast if they never make it home for dinner for weeks on end and their 4 year old starts calling the nanny ‘Mom’. Take stock, assess the workload accurately and recognize the efforts being made.

 

Ultimately, unplanned, explosive growth can be a gift, but mismanage it and it will become a drain. Set yourself and your team on the right path, with the end goal in mind, and you’ll be ready for when growth comes calling!

5 Common Mistakes People Make When Giving a Presentation

You’ve been working for days on a presentation for the C-Suite, or the shareholders. Or perhaps you’ve been honing the text of a speech you hope will result in a standing ovation.

 

Keep these words in mind, however: “The human brain is a wonderful organ. It starts to work as soon as you are born and doesn’t stop until you get up to deliver a speech.” ~ George Jessel, English Jurist.

 

No matter the audience, you can kill all the benefits of a good presentation in no time at all. How? By making one of these 5 mistakes:

 

1—Jargon, acronyms and filler words

 

Unless you know every single person in your audience and you know what they know, skip the jargon. What’s jargon? In your business domain, there might be terminology that is germane to what you’re trying to communicate. If there is, you should use it. But then there is ‘jargon’, which is meant to make you look smart but can have the opposite effect. For one thing, some of your audience might not understand what you mean. They might also have a different understanding of the words you’re using. Worse still is when you misuse or overuse jargon.

 

Acronyms are another great way to lose an audience. If there is a long string of a title that you’re going to repeat often in your speech, an acronym is a good idea. But dropping them in throughout your speech again assumes that the audience understands them. If they don’t, by the time they’ve worked it out, they’ve missed the rest of your message.

 

Pause words like ‘um’ and ‘uh’, if they can even be termed words, are distracting and don’t make you sound like you know your topic or even understand it. Practice your speech on a video: it’s the best way to nail down your pause words/sounds so you can consciously avoid them.

 

2—Hard to figure or pointless visual aids

 

If your visual aids, charts, or diagrams need their own chart to decipher them? They’re too complicated. You don’t want your audience spending all of their time working out what your picture is saying and not hearing any of your words.

 

Worse still, if they’re not coordinated with your speaking notes, they will prove to be a distraction. If you have to jump ahead or backward in your slides, you will look unprepared. Run through your presentation or speech WITH your visual aids, to be sure that it all works together.

 

Any visual aid has to enhance the presentation. Bad stock images or irrelevant graphs that just ‘look nice’ are a waste of time.

 

3—Reading your speech

 

There’s nothing more snore-inducing than a presenter who reads their notes, or worse, reads their slides. In the first case, they’re not engaging with the audience. In the second, the audience will be put off. They can likely read for themselves: they don’t need you to do it for them!

 

4—Too Much Information (or TMI, if you prefer acronyms!)

 

Personalizing your speech is a good thing. Making yourself relatable to your audience is a great idea. Sharing an anecdote about your kid’s diaper blow out over the weekend, all over the leather upholstery in your BMW? Not so much. In a business or academic setting, too much personal information is just too much.

 

Bad jokes are also a no-no. How do you know if your joke is bad? You don’t. But a C-Suite meeting is one of those times when it’s best to assume that any joke is a bad joke.

 

Another way you can lose your audience with TMI is by giving them irrelevant background information, either your own or the project’s. Even most professional adults have a limit on their attention spans. Don’t lose them from the get-go by giving them what they already know.

 

Yet another way to lose them is by giving them too much information. If your speech is meant to encourage the use of a new IT system, for example, the audience doesn’t need to know how it was developed, using what methodology and by whom.

 

5—No call to action or follow up information

 

If you promised handouts, have them ready at the end of your presentation. If you want your audience to do something when they get back to their desks, tell them. The best presentation in the world can fall flat if the audience doesn’t know what you expect of them in the days and weeks that follow it. If you don’t expect anything, well, that’s easy. But if you are hoping to motivate them to some sort of action, be clear on what it is that you expect.

 

Speaking of a call to action, this is a good time to remind you that Bridge Between can facilitate a workshop on presentation skills for any level of management or leadership. You can own the room: you just have to know how!

3 Ways to Create a Happy Team at Work

Workplace happiness has a valuable ROI

 

Asking your team to look for gratitude in their every day can feel a little forced at first, but encourage them to persist! You, and they, will find that it makes a difference! We all want to be helpful at work but sometimes it takes a conscious act to make us aware of how we can be and do more. The end result is a positive ROI for everyone.

 

Like what? Your return on investment in creating happiness with your team can lead to a generally happier environment, better employee retention, more engagement from your team, higher productivity and less absenteeism due to stress/healthcare issues.

 

Display the behavior you want your team to show too

 

If you want your staff/team to be happy and share their gratitude with others, you have to step up to the plate and show some yourself. Before your day gets bogged down with meetings, tasks and details, send out a message to a couple of team members, telling them that you appreciate their efforts. Point to specific examples that you’ve noticed.

 

In addition to showing your appreciation, you need to make sure that the work environment you are creating in is one in which mistakes are forgiven. If a team member feels like they won’t be thrown under the bus for an error, they’re more likely to be engaged and proactively take chances. That’s not to say that errors should be ignored, but if employees feel relatively safe, like you have their backs, they’ll be more productive.

 

Encourage gratitude behavior in your team

 

Not only does the leader need to be displaying the behavior they expect to see, but ALL team members should as well. At first, that could be something as simple as asking your team to add something they are grateful for on an online team forum, every single day. At first, you will encounter resistance to this idea. A lot of people are wary of showing any kind of vulnerability at work and personal feelings of gratitude are just that. Still others will resent what they see as yet another task in an already busy day.

 

Persist! Push them along a little, at first. As they get into the habit of focusing in on what was good about a day, rather than what went wrong, there is a downstream effect of positivity. Over time, your team will learn to distinguish between real issues in their day and things that simply don’t matter as much.

 

Make positivity part of the corporate culture

 

At the very highest levels of an organization, taking the time to make gratitude and positivity part of the company’s value statement sets the tone for everyone else to engage and support these ideas. Not in ‘all talk, no results’ kind of ways, but in real, concrete actions that bring gratitude and happiness to the forefront.

 

Even if all you do every day is express one piece of gratitude you will see a positive benefit.

 

Get a gratitude journal and start today. Write one thing down that you accomplished, that someone else accomplished or that you are grateful for. Even if that accomplishment seems mundane, you’ll be surprised how it can help you focus in on the positive.

 

 

 

 

If you’d like another resource for a happier workplace, here’s a great article with 37 effective ways to be happier at work. https://www.cleverism.com/37-ways-to-be-happier-at-work-asap/  

Managing Change in a Media Landscape That is Always Changing

Media companies are prime examples of organizations that need to focus on positive change management strategies.

Why? Because they are constantly evolving, more than any other industry. This is in part because of changes to technology that are creating new digital platforms. These platforms are fundamentally changing not only the ways in which we communicate but how we receive news and information. And this, in turn, is changing the business models on which media was originally built.

So the challenge in the media landscape is this: How can they manage this constant evolution effectively?

The first step is to have solid leadership

Without clear and targeted leadership, the rest of the organization cannot hope to manage change effectively. Those leaders need to have extensive experience in the digital landscape to have credibility.

They need to be more than good leaders: they need to be knowledge banks, too — with the ability to communicate the path clearly. Leaders who prefer status quo won’t be effective. Leaders who embrace what’s new — think Elon Musk — will flourish, as will their organizations.

Accepting changes that are untested is difficult for leaders, too, but it starts and ends with them. If they can do it, more of the team will follow.

A culture of change is essential

Most workplace cultures have to establish processes to help people within the organization to accept change. Media companies are almost born to change, out of necessity. But that’s not to say that everyone is always on board.

As with all change management, it starts with the top levels of the organization. Ultimately, however, the branches below have to be on the same page too. Evolution is too fast and changes in technology are too frequent to have naysayers along for the ride. Hiring needs must always consider change and the ability of a candidate to embrace it.

An open culture, where different ideas and out of the box thinking are not only accepted but expected, is ideal. A culture where management trusts in the team they have put together is also ideal. A team that can move fast and be allowed to think on their feet will be more successful than one that cannot improvise. Fast change can meet resistance, so a team that is motivated to accept the challenge is essential.

Talent counts when speed is of the essence

In an environment where change is almost the norm, talent counts. A team with a particular ability for morphing their skills to meet demands will be a positive influence. Those teams need to be highlighted as the standard. Other teams need to see what they are meant to be achieving themselves.

It’s not about fostering competition so much as setting a positive example. Fast changes in technology and business models means a lot of upheaval. Having a successful team that can share their abilities for others to copy creates more success all around.

The speed of change in media is much faster than with other industries but it’s a question of starting out on the right foot. If the organization is built for change, it will withstand and even embrace it. If not, it will fail. This begins and ends with the leadership of the organization. If they are ready for change, they can create the vision to bring their teams with them.