Aspiring Managers: Learn to Behave Like Adults
By Steve Tobak | September 11, 2009
It’s relatively easy to be a successful child. All you’ve got to do is learn how to be cute, get attention, and cry when you’re hurt or hungry. Learning how to be a teenager is much harder; I’m not sure anybody’s good at it. I certainly wasn’t. As for becoming an adult, I’ve been working on that for decades and making very, very slow progress.
Everything gets harder as you get older, and becoming a good manager is no exception.
In fact, becoming a good manager is harder than all of those other phases combined. Why? Because, it not only depends on how much of an adult you’ve become, but how adult your employees are. Not to mention all the management and leadership skills that so-called experts and gurus aren’t even sure about - they debate this stuff all the time.
So, for all you relatively new, aspiring managers, and for those supposedly seasoned veterans who are honest enough with themselves to admit that they’re still trying to figure it out, here are three relatively critical but not necessarily intuitive tips I’ve learned by trial and lots of error along the way.
Try to act like a mature adult. As I alluded to above, the best managers are those rare individuals who actually behave like mature adults. What does that mean? It means being as honest, comfortable, and empathetic with your own issues and shortcomings as you are with your strengths and skills. Only then can you do the same for others, and that’s what good managers do.
Do the work - hands on. Work your tail off learning the basics of your trade and industry, whatever that is, while you still can - before you get promoted and lose the opportunity. Why? No matter how smart you are, that’s the only way to get hands-on experience that will engender respect from employees and help you to make effective management decisions down the road.
Become adept at 5 things: finance, selling, presenting, negotiating, and business communications.
Finance. I don’t care if you manage engineering, HR, IT, sales, whatever, you need to learn about finance. Why? Because that’s how companies are run and how business works. Period.
Selling. To sell your own programs internally you have to learn how to open doors, help constituents and peers to make informed decisions, and close deals.
Presenting. It’s hard to imagine your career going anywhere unless you can deliver an effective presentation. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t born with the presentation gene.
Negotiating. Negotiation skills are critical to resolving conflicts, driving consensus among peers and other key constituents, and developing your own career.
Communicating. Great managers are also great communicators; it’s a critical success skill. Unfortunately, they don’t teach you about business communications in school.
MY THOUGHTS
finance and selling? 2 of my most disliked areas of management. i don;t mind selling ideas. and i don;t why i cringe at the thought of selling commodities. and finance? i just can't get my finger on all those figures. one would think after working for a financial and a retail company, i would be over this issue by now! the problem is me of course. i have to want to at least like finance and selling. and the best way for this is to educate myself. i promise to brush up on these before the year ends.
Showing posts with label Management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Management. Show all posts
Monday, December 20, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
3 Ways to Break Out of a Career Rut
3 Ways to Break Out of a Career Rut
By Jessica Stillman | September 23, 2010
Learning, like getting in shape, isn’t a comfortable process. If you’re not sweating and worrying about whether you’re adequate to the task, you’re probably not pushing yourself hard enough. And what’s true in the classroom and at the gym is also true at the office, according to an excellent guest post by Tara Mohr on blog Productive Flourishing.
Entrepreneur Mohr shares her own story about plateauing at a place where she was comfortable with her skills but not gaining many new ones, but her problem could be experienced just as easily by someone working at a large company. She relates that six months into starting her business,
Things started to settle. I had a regular group of clients. I had run a few workshops. I was guest posting regularly… That was April 2010. Now we’re in September. Here’s what I’ve noticed: I’ve gotten stuck in a business comfort zone.
So what is Mohr doing to break out of her rut? She has a three-step process to get fired up for new career challenges:
Get clear on the current state reality. Write down the list of business activities that are within your comfort zone and those things that are outside of it. In your second list, focus on the top five activities you believe would enrich your business but that you are avoiding, delaying, ignoring, because they are out of your comfort zone. How do you know if you are avoiding something because it’s outside of your comfort zone? These are some good indicators: Do you get anxious when you think about doing it? Does it involve risking rejection, “failure,” or taking messy, imperfect action? Do you get mentally foggy when thinking about it?
Clear your own BS. Using your list, review the items outside of your comfort zone one by one and deconstruct or disprove the BS that is stopping you from going after each one. Create new incentives. We all have a huge natural incentive to play it safe. We have to create an alternative incentive to leave the comfort zone. When my husband and I were working conventional jobs, we had a special agreement on salary negotiations. We agreed that the first one of us to ask for a raise that got turned down by the company would win a prize from the other. On the one hand, we both wanted to win. On the other hand, neither of us wanted to propose a raise so outlandish it would offend our bosses. That stretched us to ask for the most money we thought would be perceived as not-offensive. We gave ourselves an incentive to take a risk.
If you’re curious what sort of BS Mohr is talking about in her second point, she lists three types that often come up and ways to combat each:
Fears. Fear of rejection, failure and the unknown. Get down to that root of the fear. See it for what it is. Have compassion for yourself. Question whether the fear is realistic, and look at whether you are willing to move forward in spite of the fear.
Inner critic chatter. You might hear your inner critic saying you aren’t ready to do x, that you aren’t good enough. You might hear old stories that you picked up from your mean second grade teacher, about how you can’t write or aren’t good with people. It’s all BS. Notice how the inner critic is functioning to keep you in the comfort zone, and start separating your own best thinking from its voice. Create a character and a name for your inner critic and talk back to him or her.
Your crazy stories: “I need to get x number of blog subscribers before I reach out to so and so about a collaboration.” “I need to have a fancy website before I sell products.” We make up all kinds of false rules like these about how the world is. Check out your assumptions. Write them down, look at them in the plain light of day, and question them. Talk them over with a friend or adviser.
MY THOUGHTS
what this article is saying to me is i should feel lucky that my job hardly gives me the time to feel my comfort zones. i am not in a plateau. sometimes i feel i'm spiralling down. i tell my boss, "we make 1 step forward and then slide back 5 steps". and yet, in reality, these steps backwards are ways for us to get out of a career rut. i thought this article was about getting another job. silly me. for someone who runs the 7 habits, i should have known, that looking for another job is a cop out. God will not take us to a place where we cannot handle things. He will never take us even a step further. He wants us to take certain steps in faith, even when they seem too much for us. Then, He will put a stop if we can't wing it- and we won't have to make a single step.
By Jessica Stillman | September 23, 2010
Learning, like getting in shape, isn’t a comfortable process. If you’re not sweating and worrying about whether you’re adequate to the task, you’re probably not pushing yourself hard enough. And what’s true in the classroom and at the gym is also true at the office, according to an excellent guest post by Tara Mohr on blog Productive Flourishing.
Entrepreneur Mohr shares her own story about plateauing at a place where she was comfortable with her skills but not gaining many new ones, but her problem could be experienced just as easily by someone working at a large company. She relates that six months into starting her business,
Things started to settle. I had a regular group of clients. I had run a few workshops. I was guest posting regularly… That was April 2010. Now we’re in September. Here’s what I’ve noticed: I’ve gotten stuck in a business comfort zone.
So what is Mohr doing to break out of her rut? She has a three-step process to get fired up for new career challenges:
Get clear on the current state reality. Write down the list of business activities that are within your comfort zone and those things that are outside of it. In your second list, focus on the top five activities you believe would enrich your business but that you are avoiding, delaying, ignoring, because they are out of your comfort zone. How do you know if you are avoiding something because it’s outside of your comfort zone? These are some good indicators: Do you get anxious when you think about doing it? Does it involve risking rejection, “failure,” or taking messy, imperfect action? Do you get mentally foggy when thinking about it?
Clear your own BS. Using your list, review the items outside of your comfort zone one by one and deconstruct or disprove the BS that is stopping you from going after each one. Create new incentives. We all have a huge natural incentive to play it safe. We have to create an alternative incentive to leave the comfort zone. When my husband and I were working conventional jobs, we had a special agreement on salary negotiations. We agreed that the first one of us to ask for a raise that got turned down by the company would win a prize from the other. On the one hand, we both wanted to win. On the other hand, neither of us wanted to propose a raise so outlandish it would offend our bosses. That stretched us to ask for the most money we thought would be perceived as not-offensive. We gave ourselves an incentive to take a risk.
If you’re curious what sort of BS Mohr is talking about in her second point, she lists three types that often come up and ways to combat each:
Fears. Fear of rejection, failure and the unknown. Get down to that root of the fear. See it for what it is. Have compassion for yourself. Question whether the fear is realistic, and look at whether you are willing to move forward in spite of the fear.
Inner critic chatter. You might hear your inner critic saying you aren’t ready to do x, that you aren’t good enough. You might hear old stories that you picked up from your mean second grade teacher, about how you can’t write or aren’t good with people. It’s all BS. Notice how the inner critic is functioning to keep you in the comfort zone, and start separating your own best thinking from its voice. Create a character and a name for your inner critic and talk back to him or her.
Your crazy stories: “I need to get x number of blog subscribers before I reach out to so and so about a collaboration.” “I need to have a fancy website before I sell products.” We make up all kinds of false rules like these about how the world is. Check out your assumptions. Write them down, look at them in the plain light of day, and question them. Talk them over with a friend or adviser.
MY THOUGHTS
what this article is saying to me is i should feel lucky that my job hardly gives me the time to feel my comfort zones. i am not in a plateau. sometimes i feel i'm spiralling down. i tell my boss, "we make 1 step forward and then slide back 5 steps". and yet, in reality, these steps backwards are ways for us to get out of a career rut. i thought this article was about getting another job. silly me. for someone who runs the 7 habits, i should have known, that looking for another job is a cop out. God will not take us to a place where we cannot handle things. He will never take us even a step further. He wants us to take certain steps in faith, even when they seem too much for us. Then, He will put a stop if we can't wing it- and we won't have to make a single step.
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