Strategize to Win

Key Concepts

People will have many segments of their careers

“The new, more sensible, strategy is to consider your career in six to eight modules of five years each.” (p. 5)

“It’s important to emphasize, particularly if you are just starting out, that there is no need to worry or feel pressured to make the exact right decision today about a career that could last thirty, forty, or even fifty years. It is pretty rare to stumble onto the job just out of school.” (p. 6)

The path to figuring out the right career path

“You will find the answers to your career questions not in knowing the job itself, but in defining the content of your job.” (p. 6)

“Consider your hobbies. What do you find interesting, intriguing, stimulating, or challenging? What are you doing when hours go by and you barely notice? What would you do even if you weren’t paid for it? Asking yourself these kinds of questions is the first career move I want you to make. It will help you determine the content of your career.” (p. 7)

“Start with three blank sheets of paper. At the top of page one write: If money were no object, how would I spend my days? What would my job look like? This is your content. On the top of the second sheet write: What jobs have this content? And, on the top of the third sheet of paper, write: What skills, experiences, or education do I need in order to be eligible for these types of positions?” (p. 8)

“The goal is to fill your Content Page with as many interests as possible. This will allow you to identify several jobs or careers that will position you to be successful. Your ultimate professional success is all about how you position yourself, and that starts with landing a position that engages you because you like doing it, are interested in it, and you want to learn it because you like the content”. (p. 13)

“Completing your Jobs Page also involves learning about jobs and careers that you currently know nothing about. This will require research. Choosing the right job or career means spending time talking to people and networking. People often miss opportunities that they might find professionally fulfilling simply because they don’t know they exist.” (p. 15)

“Begin by putting aside at least one week out of every month (or the equivalent of 100 hours), to do nothing but research and talking to people about what they do.” (p. 15)

“On your page three, your Skills, Experiences, Education Page, write down the credentials of people who currently have the jobs from page two that pique your interest.” (p. 22)

“If you don’t see a commonality among the people who have the positions you think you might want, then you have a good indication that your ability to land the position will be more dependent on how and with whom you network, and how well you sell your story.” (p. 22)

Nailing an interview is about how you tell your story

“The difficulty in successfully mastering an interview and landing the job you want is not a lack of experience, but rather your inability to recognize the skills you already have and craft a story around those experiences. Your story has to showcase your strengths and connect this portfolio of skills and experiences to what the interviewer is looking for—what the buyer is really buying.” (p. 36)

“Remember, in any interview, the company or the organization is assessing three important things: Your Can Do, Your Will Do, and Your Fit.” (p. 36)

“Your Can Do determines if you have the intelligence, credentials, and experience to do the job.” (p. 37)

“Your Will Do is about understanding what motivates you, your tenacity, and your willingness to persevere and be resourceful.” (p. 38)

“Your Fit is about understanding whether you will fit in at the company.” (p. 39)

Pay attention to the success profiles and tracks in a company; they rarely change

“All companies have a path that leads to the most senior-level positions in the organization. The path can be formal (e.g., all the leaders of a particular auto company come from the finance department, or every C-suite-level officer in a certain consumer products company has had responsibility for brand management of a revitalized brand). Or the path can be informal, where it is generally understood that people who rise to the top in an organization have had a particular experience set (for example, at least one international assignment).” (p. 57)

“If a company has a precedent for how people enter certain areas of the company, it will stand until a leader or other influential person in the company or department decides to break it or new leadership takes over.” (p. 62)

“This does not happen every day and you should not go into an organization thinking you will be able to have this happen to you.” (p. 63)

Performance Currency

“Performance Currency = (Intellect + Experience + Strong Execution) x Multiple Occurrences” (p. 92)

“One of the most important things that you can do to build performance currency is to start defining what success looks like before you start to execute. Begin by getting agreement from those who will be involved with evaluating your success.” (p. 95)

“The last thing you want to do is to begin working in a new environment without finding out what kind of work, behaviors, and assignments are valued in that organization, and how success is defined. If you don’t have a sound understanding of what is valued there, you could find yourself working very hard without maximizing your success because you are working in a way that is inconsistent with the organization’s definition of success.” (p. 95)

Relationship Currency

“Relationship currency is measured by the strength of the relationships you have developed and what leverage you have because of those associations. Building relationships in an organization is as important, if not more important, than your performance on the job.” (p. 113)

“As you get more and more senior in an organization or you aspire to acquire a senior-level position, more of the decisions about promotions are increasingly made based on judgment, and judgment is influenced by relationships. Everyone else who you are competing against is presumably good at their job. What will make the difference between choosing you over another candidate is the power of the relationships that you have.” (p. 114)

“The relationships within these networks are important because they can provide three things for you: 1) access to people you need to know; 2) information you need in order to successfully execute an assignment or move ahead; and 3) the assurance that you need when you are not sure how to read a particular situation.” (p. 115)

“I often hear people say, ‘My relationships are not very strong at work. I don’t have anything in common with the people who I work with.’ If you find yourself making this statement, I would argue that the issue is not that you don’t have anything in common with your coworkers, but rather that you have not invested any time toward building relationships with them.” (p. 116)

Effective communication is both about clarity and about listening

“Good communication has two components. The first is the ability to effectively communicate with colleagues—how well you articulate (verbally and in writing) who you are, what you can do, and what you want from your career. It includes your skill in asking questions and for help when you need it, as well as your ability to say “no” to someone more senior than you.” (p. 133)

“The second part of good communication involves listening, but not simply to what is being said verbally. How well do you understand and respond appropriately to what is not being said? Can you decipher signs being given by your organization or the implications made by your bosses in both informal and formal conversations (such as evaluation and feedback sessions)? The ability to listen and read the signs is a vital skill for success.” (p. 133)

It’s important to make sure your formal feedback is clear

“Unfortunately, the reality is that in many cases these messages are either not delivered effectively or they are not delivered at all. Information is conveyed to the employee in an unclear or unhelpful manner that doesn’t give them guidance on how to improve or doesn’t adequately communicate information about their career trajectory.” (p. 142)

“Most organizations have nonconfrontational cultures where human resources professionals counsel and train managers to avoid giving employees feedback in a way that might upset, disillusion, or worse, provoke an employee to pursue litigation against the company.” (p. 142)

“Never leave a feedback conversation feeling any ambiguity about the message you received.” (p. 145)

L-E-A-D-E-R

“When I think of the profile of a powerful, impactful, authentic leader, I think of characteristics that revolve around the letters in the word l-e-a-d-e-r.” (p. 171)

• L Is for Leverage (p. 171)

• E Is for Efficiency (p. 172)

• A Is for Action (p. 174)

• D Is for Diversity (p. 175)

• E Is for Engaged (p. 176)

• R Is for Responsible and Responsive (p. 177)

Quotables

“Even if your primary reason for accepting a position is the money it will pay you, there should be something else about the job that’s consistent with your aspirations or the skills that you’d like to acquire. No prospective employer likes to hear that you took a position for the money. Focus on content first and you will be much better off.” (p. 11)

“If you have basic professional skills—marketing, exposure to finance or financial principles, presentation skills, organizational and people management—from five or more years of experience in the working world, then you already have applicable, salable basic skills for almost any industry.” (p. 33)

“In my opinion, male professionals start to invest in relationships very early on in their careers, almost simultaneously as they are creating performance currency. Alternatively, I have observed that women professionals tend to focus more on performance currency sometimes to the exclusion of investing in relationship currency.” (p. 131)

“When you are not receiving challenging assignments that give you an opportunity to prove yourself in new ways, you should start to pay close attention to what messages your company or your manager may be sending.” (p. 145)

“A strong leader is a heavy user of the ‘we’ pronoun over the ‘I’ or the ‘you.’” (p. 172)

“Never leave an organization because of one person or let one person confound your efforts to move ahead in a company you would otherwise want to work for.” (p. 202)

“It is important that you recognize when you have outgrown a seat, because if you don’t make a change, you risk becoming complacent, capping out your earning or promotion power, or worse, you’ll start performing in a suboptimal way because you no longer have an interest in the job and aren’t challenged.” (p. 203)

“As you get more senior in your career, the content of what you do every day is not as important as who you are working for and who is sponsoring you.” (p. 210)

“Feeling insecure in their new position, they are focused on discovering “Who is on my team? Who is going to be essential in helping me quickly show progress? And who is going to be an impediment?” While it might be tempting to keep your head down, staying too quiet during a time of change is a mistake. The new management won’t know whether you are a plus or a minus to his or her efforts.” (p. 212)

“I bet you’ve heard the old saying, “life is a marathon, not a sprint,” and the same applies to your career. There will be opportunities that arise in five, seven, and ten years from now that you cannot anticipate and that you may not know today that you will be attracted to.” (p. 240)