The Career You’ll Love

I was deeply affected many years ago by a workshop of Stephen R. Covey, when he explained that trust can be thought of as a bank account. Here’s the concept:

• You build up trust by your reliable and generous actions, those are the “deposits.”
• You lose trust when you make a mistake and damage someone, those are the “withdrawals.” It’s much easier to make a withdrawal than a deposit.
• When you damage someone more than you’ve benefited them, you’ve exhausted your bank account. They won’t want to trust you anymore, and it’s extremely hard to dig yourself out of that hole.
• Like bank accounts, deep trust is developed over the course of many years. It’s impossible to create deep trust in a short time.

This is a powerful idea, and explains a lot about how people work.

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You may have heard the advice that it’s good to have a coach or a mentor.  But beyond that, it can be confusing.  Why?  What should I expect?  Who should I approach?

To start with, let me explain the difference between a coaching and mentoring relationship.  With a mentor, you’re looking to follow the path that someone else has successfully navigated, perhaps who can even open doors for you.  A coach, on the other hand, focuses more on your specific goals, bringing out your best clarity and motivation from within yourself.  Sometimes the two roles are combined to various degrees.

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One of the most frustrating things about working for other people is figuring out why they do such dumb things. Incomprehensible decisions seem designed to make your life difficult and stop useful progress.

It might be something as large as relocation, reorganization, or laying people off – or as minor as requiring useless codes on your TPS reports.

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Let me have you ponder the difference between these two questions:

• “Why is this problem important?”
• “Why is that problem important?”

It’s a pretty subtle distinction, but potentially quite crucial. Perhaps I’m the boss and you work for me. When we talk about “this problem,” it’s quite close – something that is within our grasp. When we speak of “that problem,” it’s a little more distant, something which is perhaps out of reach. We both might have a little more ownership of “this problem”, but perhaps be more objective about “that problem” because it’s more distant.

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The word “visibility” has gotten a bit of a bad rap inside organizations. I’ve seen it associated with concepts of playing politics, whitewashing, and generally creating a false image.

If your great work speaks for itself, why worry about making yourself visible?

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There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the importance of creating a personal brand. I first came across the idea in an article by Tom Peters in Fast Company Magazine in 1997, but he didn’t originate it.

Here’s the concept: Any powerful brand (Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, iPhone, Facebook) stands for much more than the products that it names. McDonald’s stands for more than just a certain kind of food, it’s also about kid-friendliness, reliability, cleanliness, and value. These attributes are incredibly consistent over the long term, and drive much more visibility and loyalty than just the food they sell.

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Here’s the bonus category: Yourself. We’ve spent so much time thinking about other people, we might have forgotten that it’s important how we feel about our own work!

Looking at it this way, you realize that you are independent of your work. So how does the work help you to achieve your life and career goals? How would you LIKE to relate to your work?

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I’ve broken out partners as a distinct category of stakeholders, because the relationships are much different than the others in our diagram.

The simple definition of “partner” is someone who works with you to deliver value to their customers and your customers, and to their management and your management. In the case of your teammates, the customers and management might be the same. In fact, that makes decisions much easier, because you hopefully have an environment that’s aligned and supports you working together.

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