The Career You’ll Love

Sponsored by Carl Dierschow’s career blog at www.Dierschow.com

How often are you actually productive?

Here’s a secret that many don’t want to admit:  At work, most of the time is spent not being productive.  In the worst case, there are many activities which are actually counter-productive – they’re taking you further away from the goal.

When so many people are worried about losing their jobs, they’re scared to raise attention to this not-so-useful work.  After all, maybe if you look busy, they’re going to assume that you must be necessary.

Ultimately, though, this destroys your heart and soul.  But what do you do?

First, it’s important to expand your view to the larger context.  Your boss requires you to fill out those annoying forms which seem to have no value.  But why?  Are they for compliance with government regulations?  Do they help make the manager’s job more efficient?

Second, look for ways to make the busy-work more efficient.  Perhaps you don’t need to attend every meeting, unless that helps to make others more efficient.  Maybe those reports can be made more automatic.

Third, enlist the help of your boss.  Presumably she would appreciate you having more time to work on the important stuff, so maybe there are ways to adjust the requirements.

But don’t let the unimportant trivia keep you from doing important work.  That’s a horrible way to sacrifice your career.

An important resource

Have you looked at your local colleges lately?  If you’ve been out of school for a number of years, you might not realize that there’s been a lot of creativity in recent years.  Many workers are in career transition, and this is an increasingly important market for funding-strapped schools.  They’ve adjusted to people who are learning in addition to full-time jobs, offered teleclasses, and on-demand learning.

You don’t necessarily have to make the choice to leave your job to “go back to school.”  There’s lots of neat alternative learning models.

If you are interested in individual career coaching, group coaching, or other resources which might help you with difficult choices, please contact Carl at carl@dierschow.com.

Connect with Carl on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to get timely updates and connections to a broader range of professionals.

© 2011 Possibilities Partnership LLC

As a champion of human development for your organization, these principles will also help you to develop future leaders who are expert at aligning people to create a future they never thought possible.  We’ll have a chance to practice new skills with dynamic exercises, and build powerful intentions for change in our key work relationships.

Carl Dierschow is a Certified Small Fish Business Coach located in Fort Collins.  He has over ten years experience in organizational coaching, having created and led the internal community of practice for coaching in Hewlett-Packard.  Small Fish Business Coaching provides assessment and business management coaching for owners of small businesses who want to rapidly accelerate achievement of key business goals.

Date: Thursday, January 20, 2011 11:30 am – 1:30 pm
The Moot House on South College, Fort Collins, CO
$15 NRC Members and Partners/ $25 Nonmember
Register Here

The Career You’ll Love

Sponsored by Carl Dierschow’s career blog at www.Dierschow.com

Where do you find Influencers?

Whether you’re looking for a job, or to advance your career, one of the key needs is to find the decision makers who could help you achieve your goals.  These are often highly placed managers who are given formal authority by the organization.

They’re pretty easy to find, but often hard to connect with. That’s where the Influencers come in.  In many ways, these people are perhaps even more important, because:

• They usually influence multiple decision makers.
• They are expected to make value judgments.
• They’re often more accessible.

Decision makers will use their trusted advisors to bounce ideas off, to get more honest feedback, and to discover something closer to the “real story” about important issues.  When they are working on solving a problem, they’ll look to a small circle of friends and colleagues who might have ideas and wisdom.

These advisors, for you, are the Influencers.  When you are perceived as valuable by the Influencers, they are more likely to recommend you positively to those key decision makers.

But here’s the challenge:  They’re hard to find.

In theory, the staff that works directly for a manager would be the best advisors.  The problem they have, though, is that they’re biased by the fact that the manager has strong impact on their personal career and job role, and they can often be too “close” to a particular issue to see the big picture.  Paradoxically, the manager may see them as less trustable than someone else who is less visible, even outside their particular organization.

Influencers can often be found:

• In a planning, organizing, or strategy role
• In a partner organization that has an informal but important relationship with the decision maker
• In semi-professional relationships outside the workplace

Ideally, you would have access to find out where the decision maker is getting information and support:

• Who does she talk to right before or after group meetings? Who does he have lunch or coffee with?
• What semi-professional organizations is she connected with?
• Who does he connect with during more informal times, like at the beginning or end of the day?

Admittedly, it might be a bit creepy to watch someone that closely – not a good move for your career.  So the challenge is to put yourself in situations where you can increase contact with people who you suspect might be Influencers, and get a sense of how broad their impact might be.  And remember, you’ll have to give value in return in order to cultivate a healthy relationship.

An important resource

I’ve been using Google Alerts for several years now, and it sure saves me a lot of time.  You take any Google search that you’ve found to be valuable, and can set it up to repeat on a periodic basis and e-mail you the results.  I’ve found it valuable for monitoring competitors, industry trends, and even what other people are saying about me.

Since I have a unique name, when I type “carl dierschow” and “dierschow carl” into Google, I get a pretty complete listing of all references to my name.  But more important, I’d like to know when something new crops up – a review of my book, a pointer to my blog, whatever.  So I set up a Google Alert to send me a message whenever something crops up, and then I have a chance to see if it’s something I’m interested in.  I never have to go out looking, instead it comes to me.

Is there something you’re interested in monitoring on the web?  This is a must-have tool.

If you are interested in individual career coaching, group coaching, or other resources which might help you with difficult choices, please contact Carl at carl@dierschow.com.

Connect with Carl on Facebook and LinkedIn to get timely updates and connections to a broader range of professionals.

© 2010 Possibilities Partnership LLC

The Career You’ll Love

Sponsored by Carl Dierschow’s career blog at www.Dierschow.com

Your choices when a company is shaken

As many of you know, I had a long career with Hewlett-Packard.  On Friday, I was surprised to hear that the CEO resigned amidst murky circumstances.  Perhaps we’re hearing the real story, perhaps we aren’t, but it doesn’t really matter that much.  HP is starting another change of leadership.

As an employee, I lived through CEO changeovers three times before, and I realize that there are some important choices that you need to make – as an employee, as a customer, or as a shareholder.  But they’re not what you might think.

Recognize that a company of this size ($115B in revenue, 300,000 employees) never changes rapidly.  The company for the next year will pretty much continue to do what it planned.  Product line changes will continue, hiring or firing plans will continue, and the financial profile of the company will look the same as it would have without this event.

Yes, HP stock took a dive Friday and is only gradually recovering.  The press is having a field day with the news, jockeying to get readers by uncovering (or perhaps trying to create) a compelling story.  This is what they do, in an attempt to capture eyeballs for their advertisers.

As an observer of this event, you have some choices to make.  The first is what rumors and speculation you choose to listen to, and propagate to others around you.  You can have a surprisingly large effect just by the conversations you have with your colleagues and friends, especially if they might view you as someone with an interesting opinion or some kind of inside track.

It’s important for how you help others feel, as well as yourself.  Do you want to spend your day frustrated, gloating, confused, or demotivated?  Simply listen to the rumors that support those points of view – there will be many – and repeat them to others.  For some reason people love to get caught up in emotional drama, so you’ll find ready ears.

Another big choice, one which may take many months to develop, will be how this changes your views of what the company stands for.  Will you trust future decisions more or less than the past?  Will this event, and the subsequent replacement of the CEO and others, make it more or less likely that you would want to be an employee or customer?  Don’t base your shift just on the initial announcement; instead, monitor how the company goes through the coming months of uncertainty and key decisions.

Finally, this particular event, like others which touch your life, might propel you to look at larger decisions in your life.  Perhaps this could end up changing how you look at your investment philosophy, or the companies from which you purchase products.  It might get you thinking about career choices, and whether you’re more or less likely to want to work for a large company in the future.

These are the key choices which may be useful for you.  But it’s not going to be anything that makes the popular press.  This is internal work.

An important resource

I’ve been reading a great book from Johnna Bavoso entitled From Laid Off to Living.  It’s primarily focused on helping people who have been laid off and want help navigating the tough emotions which result.  Step by step, she leads you through the thought process, ending up with a revitalized focus and energy which will help you in your career and life.

Johnna is local here in Fort Collins, so I had the good fortune of meeting her in person.  She’s also giving workshops on this topic through the local community workforce center, if you happen to be in the region.

If you are interested in individual career coaching, group coaching, or other resources which might help you with difficult choices, please contact Carl at carl@dierschow.com.

Connect with Carl on Facebook and LinkedIn to get timely updates and connections to a broader range of professionals.

© 2010 Possibilities Partnership LLC