Try being a dilettante before changing careers

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Did you ever notice that in most Starbucks there is art on the wall? In hyperly competitive New York City, where I used to live, the waiting list for putting art on the wall at Starbucks was two years. Really. But I signed up.

I know, you’re thinking, Penelope was an artist? The answer is, sort of: paint and collage. And every once in a while, someone would say, “Do you sell those?” and I’d say, “Okay, yeah, I’ll sell one.” And then I’d think, Well, in that case, then I’m an artist.

So I did what other artists do when they are beginning. I put my name on the list to put my art on the walls at Starbucks. And a long time later, there was a message on my voicemail from the manager of Starbucks asking when I would hang my art.

The answer was — never.

There are two ways to do art: by yourself, in your home, for no one but yourself, or in public, to be a rip-roaring success. Of course, I wanted the second. I tried to want the first, but I keep wondering how well I could do if I tried really hard with the art. And then I thought, if you’re going to be a critical success, you probably don’t want to be known as the person hanging her stuff in Starbucks. Starbucks is for dilettantes.

I think I was a dilettante five years ago, when I put my name on the list. But during the two years it took to get my name to the top of the list, I decided I wanted to be more serious. I had started calling my art collage, and I glued stuff back on when it fell off instead of just throwing it out. I recognized that people who are serious do not let high school kids pick at their paintings in the back corner of a coffee shop.

When you’re on the cusp of dilettantism, but you want to be taken seriously, it’s embarrassing. Because you still look like a joker, but you look like an extreme joker because you’re a joker who no longer wants to admit to being a joker.

I remember the point when I decided that I was a serious writer: I reorganized the folders on my desktop so that the Writing folder was inside my Work folder instead of below it. But I didn’t do that until I had been supporting myself writing for more than a year. It’s a big step to take yourself seriously. The move away from dilettantism is slow, and nervous. Today all I can muster in the art department is to tell Starbucks no.

But I know it’s a step in the right direction because research conducted by Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, in France, shows that the most effective way make a serious move in your life is to do it in a not-so-serious way. It’s more effective to try something out for a few hours a week. That way if you don’t like your new self, you can go back to your old self. And if you like the two hours, try two more. Or maybe use your vacation time to test out your new self.

I did that. I told myself I was an artist and I set aside a week to pretend I was a full-time Very Serious Artist. And this is what happened: I wrote. Because I’m a writer, not a visual artist. But still, I like the idea of doing art. I just have to figure out how it fits into my life. So I’m taking the advice of Ibarra and imagining myself in different situations until I find one that fits.

Change in one’s life does not require a career change. In fact, a career change should be last. After lots of experimenting with small steps in an effort to find out who you really are. That’s how I found out, again, that I’m a writer.

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Video blog: Solve small problems before they become big

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By Bruce Tulgan – Instead of avoiding small problems and hoping they’ll go away, solve them as they come up. You’ll avoid disaster and you and your employees will get good at dealing with conflict.

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(requires the Flash 9 Player)
iPod Video – Download

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Google Guy: 5 ways to build a network outside your company

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By Jason Warner – One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is that they get caught up in the tactics of their job at a particular company, and they then don’t do anything to advance their career beyond their current employer. This is a significant error in life strategy.

I see people all the time, maneuvering inside a corporation to reach their goals. In the old talent economy, it was sufficient to network inside the company, and work on extra projects outside your department in order to be well positioned to earn the much coveted “consistently exceeds” on your annual review. In the new talent economy you have to take that one step further, and make yourself valuable outside your company as well.

Here are five ways to advance your career beyond your current employer:

1. Set aside a significant amount of time each week.
It’s important to realize that in a corporate environment, there will almost always be more work than time and resources allow. In fact, many companies manage expenses by employing an N-1 strategy to control costs. If the company needs N resources, they’ll only resource to N-1 (or N-10 sometimes). For a variety of reasons, this tactic controls costs, creates flexibility in managing expenses, and forces some degree of prioritization.

If you are the one willing to make up for the lack of resources, knock yourself out. I’m not suggesting that you do the bare minimum at your job, but I am suggesting that you spend a little of your weekly efforts towards advancing your career beyond your current employer.

2. Network for the sole purpose of building relationships.
Building a network has to be an ongoing, authentic pursuit. I recommend at least an hour a week of tactical, outbound, relationship-building efforts. Focus on trying to find ways to help other people. But make smart choices about who you network with.

Also, if you wait until you need a job, networking is largely ineffective. Nobody wants to hear from you only when you need something. I’m always trying to network, not because I’m looking for the next great job, but because it’s part of my overall life strategy.

3. Be online.
I recommend that everyone have a blog, and I predict that for top talent, blogs will become more important than resumes. (In some ways this may already be true.) If you’re going to blog, I recommend writing at least one or two posts week, and more if you can swing it. (Admittedly this is hard to do unless you are exceptionally talented or have no life.)

If a blog isn’t for you, at least become active online, either by participating in discussion forums, writing on distribution lists, or commenting on influential people’s blogs. You never know what connections will develop that might lead to career opportunity (or maybe you’ll even meet your mate).

Overall, online pursuits should be at least one hour a week. I probably do four hours a week, which consists mostly of writing for my blog and commenting on other blogs.

4. Understand the space you’re in.
Get to know whatever segment in whatever industry you are choosing to exist in. You need to know who the players are in the space you want to play. This understanding will help augment and align your networking efforts.

Some people actively make lists of the people they want to meet in their industry, and then start a targeted connection campaign. I prefer a more organic approach, and I simply try to authentically make human connections when there seems to be a reasonable opportunity to do so. You should spend an hour a week reading and exploring the industry you work in.

5. Give back.
Find ways to give back to the industry in which you work, for at least an hour a week. This can comprise many different efforts, from speaking at conferences, writing for journals, or simply attending industry events. Get involved in an industry-related non-profit organization. If there isn’t one in your area, start one, and it will give you an excuse to meet lots of people. Giving back to your industry is a way to further your career, and also to make yourself feel good.

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Wanna be quoted in the Boston Globe?

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The topic of my column in the Boston Globe this week is management issues. If you want to talk with me about how you manage, or how you like to be managed, and you are not older than twenty-seven, I’d love to hear from you. Today. By 3pm eastern time.

Big caveat: You need to be in New England on Tuesday or Wednesday so that a Globe photographer can take your picture.

If you’re interested, please send an email to me with Boston Globe in the subject line. Please write three sentences about yourself, and include a phone number where I can call you.

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CEOs can learn from job hoppers about personal responsibility

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Climbing to the top of corporate America requires near complete abnegation of one’s personal life, not in a sacrificial way, but in a child-like way. In most cases, when there are children, there is a wife at home taking care of the executive’s life in the same way she takes care of the children’s lives.

This is not a judgment on whether people should have kids. It’s fine to choose not to have kids. This is a judgment on whether people with kids should be CEOs of large companies.

I have already laid out the argument that Fortune 500 CEOs, like Howard Stringer, who work 100-hour weeks and have kids at home, are neglecting their kids. Not neglecting them like, that’s too bad. But neglecting them like, it’s totally irresponsible to have kids if you don’t want to spend any time with them.

I have also laid out the argument that men who have these top jobs can get there because they have a wife at home, running their personal life. Women get stuck in their ascent up the corporate ladder on the day their first child is born. Because women end up taking care of the kids. Women do not choose to compartmentalize kids and work the way men at the top of the ladder do.

Eve Tahmincioglu recently published a book based on interviews with CEOs: From the Sandbox to the Corner Office. She says that usually, “the wife is handling the marriage and the family. She is the one who keeps it all together.” Most of the female CEOs that Tahmincioglu interviewed did not have kids, and Tahmincioglu says they attributed their success to their lack of children because the demands of a CEO are not compatible with taking care of kids.

Meanwhile, let’s take the job hopper. The job hopper does not stay at the same company forever. So while the climber gets his identity from a corporation, the job hopper takes full responsibility for forging his own identity. The job hopper focuses on the time in between jobs to gain increased flexibility. He can make himself available to take care of a sick relative, to fly overseas to adopt a baby, and to travel when a spouse is relocated. A job hopper can take on loads of responsibility to create family stability because a job hopper is flexible.

Additionally, a job hopper can find passion in work more easily, because job hopping keeps ideas fresh and learning curves high. So whereas many ladder climbers work more than sixty hours a week to get that workplace adrenaline rush. Job hoppers can get the rush by starting something new. No need to give up family in order to get a rush from work.

This means that a job hopper can have fulfilling work and take a hefty load of responsibility for adult life. There will be time to buy birthday presents for nieces. There will be time to plan surprise parties instead of delegating it to an assistant or a spouse. There will be time to worry about household issues and marital issues and all the things someone who works 100 hours a week has no time to be responsible for.

The corporate climber, meanwhile, is isolated from the complications of real life. For example, business is full of measurable goals, acknowledgements for success, teambuilding, constant ranking, and societal pats on the back with big paychecks.

Home life has none of this. We still do not know what really makes a good parent. There are no measurable goals for getting through a day with the in-laws so there is no reward system for it either. There is no way to measure who is a good family member. There is no definition of successful spouse. Home life is murky and difficult. Work life is structured and predictable.

People who create careers that allow them to assume large levels of authority in their personal life are living as responsible adults. People who concentrate on work and delegate maintenance of all other aspects of their personal life are not truly living as adults.

Adult life is difficult, challenging and full of ways to actively give our hearts to others. The world will be a better place when careers do not shield people from taking responsibility, but instead, facilitate it.

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Coachology: See yourself clearly and put it on paper

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The reason I spend so much time telling you to have someone else write your resume is that I have done it before, and it worked out really well for me.

I thought of myself differently after getting help with the resume. This is because a good resume is not a list or a work history, but rather, a story. And the way we tell stories about ourselves really reveals who we are, but it’s very hard to craft a story about our work when we are so close to the details day in and day out.

Stories are powerful. If you have a coherent story of yourself, then your resume reads like an organized plan. If you have no idea what your story is, your resume reads like a disjointed list. The most effective resumes show a timeline of progression in your life in a way that creates a story that will stick in the reader’s mind.

It’s hard to sift through all the resume writers and figure out who is good. So people ask me all the time for the name of the company I used. The problem is, that company is no longer in business.

However a bunch of the people from that company continue to do the resume work as freelancers. And one of them, Elaine Basham will rewrite two peoples’ resumes for free this week.

If you want to have Elaine take a crack at your resume, send a three-sentence email to me by March 25 that says what is wrong with your resume now, and what you want to accomplish with a new resume. Elaine will pick the two people who are most able to benefit from her service.

For those of you who don’t end up working with Elaine, you might end up having to write your resume yourself, so here are some of the most common mistakes.

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Networking for people who hate it

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Today’s careers are made and broken by one’s ability to network.

Please don’t post comments about how unfair this is — I know that people who are bad at networking think it’s not fair that the world rewards networking so much. But that’s the way the world is. You’re not going to change it by whining.

Instead, be giddy: Networking is actually a lot easier than you think. Here are five reasons why:

1. You don’t have to be a manipulator.
Networking is about being nice. It’s about figuring out what someone needs, and determining how to help him get it. Be aware of what people are trying to accomplish in their lives so that you can help them reach their goals — either by helping them yourself or putting them in touch with someone who can help them.

People who are ineffective at networking think you have to manipulate people to get what you want. These are the same people who fail at office politics because they don’t understand that office politics is about being nice. Networking is what you do when you’re doing office politics well.

Networking is about adding value to peoples’ lives. If you do that as much as you can, people will be happy to help you. Be generous with your time and energy as well as your contacts.

You should understand what you have to give, and then look for people who need it. Not only is that the place where you can add a lot of value, but those are also the people who likely have skills and connections that you don’t have, so they’ll be able to help you. The more diverse a group of people you can help, the more diverse the type of help you can get.

2. You don’t have to be funny and clever.
The people who are most afraid of networking think they have to open up a conversation with something really smart or witty. You don’t have to be either of those. The best way to start a conversation is by being nice.

If you pontificate on your brilliant ideas you’ll seem smart, but you won’t necessarily connect with people. And if you tell a lot of jokes you’ll seem funny, but that, also, is not necessarily inviting more conversation. Being nice, though, makes people want to talk. By being nice, you’re saying, “I’m safe to talk to. I’ll listen.”

People want to be listened to, and they want to feel interesting. So you can be good at networking by caring about other people. And you can’t fake being interested — it’s almost impossible. That means you have to genuinely care about other people.

The best networkers understand that everyone is interesting if you ask the right questions. So ask someone an open-ended question, figure out what they’re interested in, and ask them about that.

Your job is to discover what you can learn from people, and you can learn something from everyone. If you really try, you’ll be genuinely interested in what they have to say.

3. You don’t have to network when you’re job-hunting.
Don’t talk to me about job hunters who are networking. Let’s be real: When you need a job, you’re not networking, you’re calling in favors. You’re asking people for jobs.

Networking is something you do when you’re feeling great about your work. After all, who wants to network with someone who either hates her job or doesn’t have one?

This is how networking works to get a job — you make friends. Real friends. Not like the 46,000 “friends” Barack Obama has on MySpace, but the kind of friends to whom you’ve revealed something significant about yourself, and who have revealed something significant about themselves to you.

If you have 30 such people in your life who have diverse networks of their own, you’ll be able to get a job when you need one. So focus on making real connections with people instead of trolling the Internet for jobs. It’s not only a more effective use of your time, it’s a more fulfilling one.

(Wondering if you’re good at it this kind of job hunt? Test yourself.)

4. You don’t have to be agreeable.
Connecting with people doesn’t mean agreeing with them, it means growing with them. Personal growth is one of the best things you can get from a relationship. So it’s fine to disagree with someone you’re getting to know. You send the signal that you’re the type of person who challenges friends to think more clearly. Just be sure to disagree in a non-confrontational way.

A couple of weeks ago I met Annalee Newitz, editor of the book “She’s Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff.” In the short amount of time we spent together, we managed to disagree on a lot. For example, on the question of whether little girls’ affinity for pink is an issue of nature or nurture (I say nature).

But I liked Annalee. She was easy to talk to and full of energy. That we could disagree on a wide range of topics means that we both think about the same wide range of topics.

So don’t assume that networking requires you to agree with everything someone says. It just requires you to care about what the person says. Caring is how you make a connection.

5. You don’t have to get off the sofa.
Here’s a big secret about the blogosphere: The people who are blogging seriously aren’t college kids writing about beer parties. In fact, college kids are generally mystified as to why someone would spend four hours a day writing a blog entry.

That’s because the serious bloggers are professionals, and they’re investing four hours a day on their blog because it’s an incredibly effective and efficient networking tool.

If you want to start a blog, here are some quick and easy steps to get started. But most of you won’t click that link, because blogging is, after all, a big commitment.

Nevertheless, most of you can leverage the blogosphere to do your networking in a way that never requires you to leave your computer. Instead, you can comment on other peoples’ blogs.

This is a very effective way to meet people who wouldn’t normally give you the time of day. For example, companies like Yahoo! and Sun have thousands of blogging employees, and CEOs of small startups often blog as well.

Liz Strauss explains on The Blog Herald that many bloggers focus primarily on building relationships. So find people you admire who blog, and start reading their blog every day. Leave intelligent comments. Most bloggers know the people who leave thoughtful comments on a regular basis. And bloggers like to help people in their blog community.

So you can sit on your sofa and surf all night, typing your opinion on your favorite topics. And after that, you can call yourself a great networker.

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Do you need a career coach or a shrink?

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I had a career coach. I got the coach the day after a meeting where I was the only woman and the only person under thirty. My boss said, “You need more polish. You need a career coach.” I thought, “Great, my boss is going to pay to help me to fit in with the 50-year-old men at the top of my corporate ladder.”

The coach asked me a slew of seemingly innocuous questions about myself, and then she trailed me at the office for a few days. Her conclusion: I needed to act more professionally. I was surprised — I had read every book I could find on managing one's image at work. I wore earrings because all the women in Fortune magazine's 50-most-powerful-women list wear earrings. I kept my hands folded on the table in the same way that experts on news television do. I was surprised that I had missed something.

The coach gave me a list of things to change. When I walked, for example, I walked “high”, with a bounce, and didn't give off a sense of being grounded. She told me to look at the CEO: “He has a deliberate, grounded walk — no bounce. It instills confidence.” She told me I smiled too much. “It's a common problem for women,” she told me. “Women want to establish rapport by smiling, but men interpret a lot of smiles as either nervous or giddy.”

Lest she say that I also needed to work on accepting criticism, I thanked her for her help. After weeks of practice — and her trailing me the whole way — I made the changes. The coach collected her thousands of dollars in fees and left with a feeling of accomplishment.

But she left me feeling like a fake. I wanted to go back to regular me, but my boss kept telling me how much more professional I was, and I didn't want to disappoint the guy who was responsible for my next raise.

I started losing sleep, falling victim to my overactive imagination where my direct reports go out to lunch and talk about how fake I am, then they stop listening to me, and my office becomes Mutiny on the Bounty with an ending where I walk the plank to unemployment.

So I did what most people do when they can't sleep for months: I went to a psychologist. And it took the psychologist about twenty minutes to help me realize that I was uncomfortable with the level of authority I held. I had moved up the ladder very fast. I was managing a team of people much older than I was. My smiles and my bounce belied my discomfort.

I worked with the psychologist to feel more comfortable with my own authority, and after a few months, the solid gait and serious face came naturally to me. I didn't have to project a fake image because the image I was supposed to project — authority — felt right to me.

My psychologist helped a lot, but a psychologist is likely to miss the quirks of corporate life (after all, she has built a career by avoiding the corporate ladder). And the career coach is likely to miss the psychology driving you to do what you do. So if you find that your career coach makes recommendations that are hard to handle, hire a psychologist. After all, the more people who are helping you to get what you want in your career, the more likely you are to get it. And your money spent will come back to you later, as you gain more self-knowlege in and out of the workplace.

 

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Video Blog: There’s an undermanagement epidemic

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By Bruce Tulgan — Forget the idea of being a hands-off manager. That doesn’t help anyone. In the early 90s it became popular for managers to not manage. Today’s mangers need to reverse the trend.

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(requires the Flash 9 Player)
iPod Video – Download

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Take an inventory of your friends, and act on it

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Today people talk very loudly about how they want a job that lets them have a life outside of work. That’s smart, of course, because there’s a long list of scientifically proven benefits to your health and happiness that friendship brings. And this includes the findings of Gallup pollster Tim Rath that you are almost guaranteed to like your job if you have a real friend at work.

But part of the idea of having a full, well-rounded life, is that you have close friends who are not family or a significant other. That’s right. The family and signifcant others don’t count when we talk about the benefits of friendship, even if you are really close to those people.

But making close friends is hard. We are meeting more people online, and we’re meeting a lot of people through travel, but we are more frenetic than ever in how we live our lives. Time magazine reports (under the heading “Loneliness”) that, “The number we count among our closest friends — the ones with whom we discuss important matters — shrank over the past 20 years, from three friends to two. At the same time, the number of Americans who have no one at all to confide in more than doubled, to 1 in 4.”

So let’s agree on what friends are, because I have a feeling that a lot of people don’t have them. Here is what I think is the minimum for a close friend is:
1. You have been friends with the person when you were not professionally involved with the person.
2. The person knows the part of yourself you dislike the most.
3. The person returns your calls in 48 hours.

If you don’t have friends, but you think you have a good job, you probably have one or all of these problems:
1. You have a job that doesn’t allow you enough time to have friends.
2. You are mistaking work associates for friends.
3. You have no idea how to manage your time.

If your wife or girlfriend picks all your friends, they are not your friends. They are hers and she lets you tag along. If you talk about your husband’s job or your boyfriends dissertation with all your friends, you can bet that your so-called friends are not particularly interested in your life. Or you’re not. Either way, such talk is a barrier to friendship. I use gender here loosely — it could be reversed. Relationship incompetence is not gender specific.

And one more thing, you cannot be true friends with someone who you have power or authority over. If you only hang around people who you have some sort of authority over then you have a problem relating to people as equals.

Maybe you are saying to yourself that it’s a time issue. First of all. I don’t believe you. It’s a priority issue. Because you have time to watch TV. Time to work overtime. Time to hang out with people who are not friends. But, even if it is a time issue, there is very little you can do with two hours once a month that will have so much impact on your well being as talking to a friend.

So what can you do to get a close friend? Here are three things:

1. Look at the friends you have.
Concentrate less on developing new friends and more on improving the quality of the friendships you already have. This suggesetion is based on research by University of California psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, who says the quality of relationships has more to do with your happiness than anything else.

2. Go visit someone.
Have a face-to-face meeting with one of those friends you IM all the time but have never met. Visiting them just once can increase the value of the friendship significantly. The nonverbal information you get about a person from talking with them face to face can make you feel much closer, after just one time, according to reaserach by psychologist Edward Hallowell.

3. Change your personal patterns.
After a big life change, like graduating from college, getting a divorce or moving across country, how you make and grow friends will change. You can rely on the tried-and-true techniques of your old life, you need to figure out what will work now – who to target, when to talk, what technology is appropriate. If you are having trouble making friends, try new ways of doing it.

And that, actually, is a great way to solve most of your problems: Try a new way of doing it. Not suprisingly, it’s something that’s easier to do with input from a friend.

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