Paul Eckert Career Blog

 Career Management - Are You an Effective Leader?

By Rebecca Metschke

Article brought to you by Paul Eckert

How do you think you’d fare if your employees were asked to rate you as their boss? Becoming a strong, effective manager doesn’t happen overnight, and often it’s a role for which people are inadequately trained.

Of course you’re expected to lead and show direction, you’re responsible for the development of your employees, and it’s up to you to ensure that the team’s performance meets or exceeds budgeted objectives.

How you go about these tasks in large part determines how effective you will be. If your team doesn’t perform well, neither do you.

Your job isn’t to be everyone’s buddy (nor should you be); however, some common mistakes can mean the difference between whether you’re good or not-so-great. Fortunately, they can be corrected.

Communicate

Establish clear lines of communication with each of your direct reports. Within the first week that a person comes on board, you should meet with her to outline objectives, establish goals, make sure she’s being trained, and to make clear how you’d like her to keep you in the loop. For example: do you want her to submit a status report? How frequently? In what format? What information should she include?

Trust Your Employees

Let them do their work. If you’ve established solid two-way communications and have been clear about goals and objectives, then they should have what they need to perform. Trust them, and they will be more likely to trust you.

Never Reprimand an Employee in Front of Others

True story: picture a staff meeting at which all the members of the senior management team are in attendance. The CEO lashes out at the head of sales for a mistake and spends the next 15 minutes berating him, throwing in colorful language for good measure. Not only did the employee in question come close to quitting, but everyone in the room who had to witness the outburst was extremely uncomfortable. That meeting was still being talked about more than a year later. Morale booster? Not so much.

Give Credit

When you’re consumed with deadlines, aggressive revenue goals, pressure from your boss, and all the other demands of the job on a day to day basis, it can be easy to let this slip. Supervisors are pretty good about telling subordinates what they need to do better or pointing out mistakes (which is well and good - and necessary), but they sometimes forget to acknowledge a job well done. And unlike the reprimands, which should always be private, it’s nice to pat people on the back publicly.

Do people feel comfortable asking questions?

It’s frustrating for a person to work in an environment where he feels asking a question brands him as a substandard employee. It’s okay not to know everything.

Do people feel free to give an honest opinion?

Fostering an environment where you can count on team members to volunteer honest assessments is important. If you routinely overrule, discount or shoot down ideas, employees won’t be as open.

Don’t Micromanage

This tendency can come from a perfectly normal desire to ensure that everything is being taken care of. Still, it will only make the team less productive. If every move a person makes is questioned and every decision is overruled, you will have created what you’re most afraid of….people who will not think for themselves.

Don’t Constantly Switch Gears

You’ve got a complicated piece of hardware in development. The delivery date is extremely aggressive and the staff is working feverishly to meet deadlines along the way. Yet, you’ve changed everything from the paint color to the size of the screws holding the logo plate - each modification seemingly coming at the 11th hour. Don’t make it impossible for people to do their jobs.

Be Honest

If things need improving, be open about it. If a mistake was made, acknowledge it - and help the employee do what she must to correct it.

Likewise, if your operating division is in trouble and it’s obvious that your team is fully aware of the gravity of the situation and preoccupied about job security, it’s better to face the situation head on than pretending it doesn’t exist. While you may not want to disclose a great deal of information (and you be not be at liberty to do so), take control and tell them what you can.

Care About Your Employees

Get to know them; identify their key talents; develop their skills; motivate them; support them. They will benefit - and so will you.

 The Four Pillars of Career Management

By Richard Yadon

Are you managing your career or is someone else? Most professionals don’t have a proactive plan to take their career to the next level or even higher. Career plans are nothing new, in fact you have one right now. If your plan is passively driven, however, you’re not likely to hit your career goals. A career plan doesn’t require fancy charts, statistics, pie-in-the-sky goals and income expectations. It should simply be a clear and thoughtful plan to drive your career to the ultimate position you want to achieve. After all, you will spend most of your life engaged in this pursuit. Doesn’t it deserve a little planning?

Career plans are highly individualized. I’ll not try to pin you down to a 7-step program or slick template. What I can give you are the pillars you need to support your plan. Like the pillars that allow modern skyscrapers to soar higher and higher, these are the pillars that will lift your career to the heights you strive to achieve. Once these pillars are firmly established your career plan will be robust and effective.

Networking Its no longer about who you know. Today it’s about who knows you! Careers can’t be confused with jobs. Most successful careers are the sum of several jobs in different companies. Your talents and skills are an asset. Employers want that asset to create greater value in their organization. But how valuable is that asset if nobody knows it exists? A recent study revealed that as much as 70% of jobs are found via networking. This means that short of an aggressive search you’ll never know those positions were open. Being highly networked means people you don’t know can find you through others.

“Wait a minute.” you say, “I don’t have the time or the inclination to go glad-handing around cocktail parties or Chamber functions.” The personal touch is extremely powerful, but it’s not the only tool you have today. With professional networking websites like LinkedIn you can join an electronic network, maintain your privacy, and still let hundreds of thousands know who you are and what you can bring to an organization. (If you’d like to see what I mean, go to my LinkedIn profile and you’ll see that I’m networked with over 1,000,000 other professionals.). Sites like LinkedIn have the potential to give you global exposure.

Goal Setting You knew this was going be one of the Four Pillars. You can’t achieve career goals if you don’t set them. Here’s a hint…write them down and review them at least once a month. Goal setting, writing, and regular visualization have an uncanny way of actually working! If this is unfamiliar territory to you, start small. Let’s say you’ve just started working with your new team. Setting a goal to become company CEO by next year might be a bit too aggressive (depending on the type of team). Something more realistic might be to learn about another key system or procedure, one that will help you advance, within the next 90 days.

Goals are vital of any career plan. They are the measuring stick of your plan’s effectiveness. They help you frame your next career move, your next job, or your next academic achievement. Set a goal for the next 90 days, then the next six months, then the next year or even the next five years. You can’t tell if have arrived if you don’t know what your destination looks like.

Marry Change Yes, that’s correct - marry it. Until death do you part. Change is just that important to your career plan. It must be your lifelong companion. As lasting as Adam and Eve, change and your career will always be together.

If you fear change then you’ll need to throttle back your career plan - and dreams. The 21st century professional not only thrives on change, he or she must also learn to drive it. In the late 1990’s I was working for a large corporation going through another reengineering program. Someone remarked that they would be happy when things got “back to normal”. Incredulously our CEO told him “this (an environment of change) is the new normal”. How much more is that true of today? The height of your career advancement is directly related to the strength of your Marriage to change. Whether it is a new job, a new company, a new education, or a new location, career plans must be married to change.

Knowing Yourself You know what you are good at doing. Your career has grown based on the skills and talents in which you excel. Those attributes have taken you through glowing performance appraisal after performance appraisal. Others know you by your strengths; they’ve even told you how good you are at those things. Watch out! You might start believing your own publicity.

You should capitalize on your career strengths. Leverage them, cultivate and develop them, let them drive your career forward. Just don’t lose sight of that hidden part of your resume. It’s the part that all of us has, but don’t want to admit or even acknowledge it to ourselves. It is our skills and talents that are underdeveloped.

Article reviewed by Paul Eckert