Take the pressure off the process of choosing a career

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Most of us will change careers. Most young people will change careers at least three times — after they find one, when they are thirty. So work life is really about a series of careers, and we all need to get good at the process of choosing a new career. We all need to get comfortable with the inherent uncertainty during the process.

Here are nine ways you can make choosing a career less stressful:

1. Squash perfectionist tendencies and get comfortable in gray areas.
It’s fine to be lost and not sure what you’re doing, so don’t rush yourself to solve the problem. Maybe you can just look at the problem differently, and it won’t look so bad. And, don’t feel like you need to get the right answer in your hunt for the right career. Being right is not important. Just do your best and see what comes of it.

2. Don’t wait for a new career to start being creative.
Every job is creative. Every job presents problems that need solving, and problem solving is a creative act. If what you mean by creativity is that you want to paint with watercolors, then go home at night and do that. Why do you need to get paid to make art? It’s enjoyable and fulfilling and a fine thing to do in your free time, even if you have only fifteen minutes of free time a day. Raymond Carver is famous for writing short, short stories because he didn’t have enough time in the day to write long.

3. Stop looking for a career to save your life.
A job is not a life. A job is something to do with your time that is rewarding and fosters personal growth. A career can’t make you happy. Relationships will make you happy. Figure out what you can get from a career and what you can’t. Once you recognize that you will rescue you, not your career, there’s a lot less pressure in the career hunt realm.

4. Relax about the career choices you make.
Try something. If you don’t like it, try another thing. There are not rules that say you have to stay in the career you choose. In fact, moving from one career to another at a breakneck pace til you love something might be good for you, and taking ten years to figure something out is fine. The life or death decision is about living below your means. As long as you do this, you have lots of choices in life. If you don’t live below your means, you get stuck in a career.

5. Don’t wait until you know yourself.
You never really know yourself. It’s a process. If it’s a precondition for finding a career, then you could be learning about yourself forever and never feel ready to choose a career. Forget the soul-search and just try something. Ironically, the best way to learn about yourself is to do things and see if you like them, so the inactive, soul-searching time is, in some ways, counter-productive. Try testing the waters with a lot of lower risk moves, instead.

6. Stop choosing dead-end fields.
All things being equal, you’re better off choosing a career in a field that is growing, not shrinking. Once you identify your talents, focus them on a field that has a future. If you write well, go into interactive marketing — one of the fastest growing fields — and not print journalism, which is in trouble. If you like to help people, go into nursing —huge demand, and not centralized, slow-moving nonprofits, which are falling out of favor with donors.

7. Don’t overlook the good points of the job you have.
You can save the world from almost any job, you can shift from a dead end to a hot spot in almost any field, and you can learn and grow if you get good at managing your boss. These are all things you can control. You don’t need a specific career to accomplish these things. So maybe you don’t even need to pick a new career.

8. Make a lifestyle choice before you make a career choice.
Figure out what you want your life to look like, and then choose a career that will enable that life. If you don’t know what you want from life, how can you possibly know what you want from a career? What we want from life might change. That’s okay. You have to start somewhere. So figure out what you want, and an try out careers that might give you that. If you change what you want from life, you can change your career.

9. Talk about yourself the way you want to be.
To figure out what sort of career will suit you, try talking about yourself like you’re already there and see how it feels. We intuitively know what stories feel right, and we can make a career change more efficiently if we create stories about our process. You might actually surprise yourself by figuring out what you want to do by figuring out what story seems natural to tell.

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How to deal with a bad boss

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Here’s what a bad boss is: Someone who lies, cheats, steals, or touches you after you’ve told him, in writing, not to. If you have one of these bosses, quit complaining and start applying for other jobs.

All other bosses aren’t truly bad — you’re just bad at managing them.

A Boss-Management Decalogue

One of the most important parts of being competent at work is managing up: Making sure you give your boss what he or she needs, and then getting what you need in return. That’s no one’s responsibility but your own.

Here are 10 ways to manage your boss:

1. Understand the person you’re dealing with.

Is she detail-oriented? Give her detailed reports. Is she a big-picture thinker? Tell her your big ideas. Does he like voicemail? Then leave some, even if you hate using it.

Understand her personality strengths and weaknesses, because this is usually the path toward forging a relationship. If you know her weaknesses, you can have empathy for her shortcomings instead of impatience. And whatever you feel will show, so figure out how to feel compassion for your boss, or you’ll get nowhere with her.

2. Ask for your quarterly goals, in writing.

If you don’t have goals, how can you even know what your job is? And if you don’t know what your job is, you can be sure you won’t make your boss happy.

If your boss does not know your goals either, write your own. Create a fun job for yourself that will be an integral part of the company’s strategy. If your boss doesn’t like the goals you create, she’ll suddenly be able to come up with them herself.

3. Know your boss’s biggest worries, and help him address them.

Why are you working on projects your boss doesn’t care about? Your job is to make your boss love you so he helps you get the skills you need to grow in your career.

If you have stuff on your plate that doesn’t matter, do it fast, and don’t worry about being judged on the quality of this work because your boss doesn’t care. Focus on the stuff that matters to your boss, because that’s what will make your boss love you.

4. Look at your boss’s weaknesses as opportunities.

If your boss is great at project management, then surely she doesn’t need you to do that. Be great at the stuff your boss is terrible at — like people management, maybe — and help your boss rally her troops. If she’s great at sales but hates the detailed reporting, get great at the reporting and offer to do all the stuff she hates to do.

If your boss is terrible at managing meetings, instead of complaining about it, volunteer to do the brunt of the organizing for him. He’ll appreciate that way more than you helping with stuff he doesn’t worry about.

5. Focus on your own needs by focusing on your boss’s needs.

You and your boss are a team. You make your boss look great in the organization and in the world, and your boss will help you grow and meet your own goals.

To do this, you need to focus more on helping your boss and less on doing work you love. The first act begets the second: A boss who feels indebted to you will give you what you want.

6. See the good in people.

Don’t tell me your boss doesn’t care about you, or that he’s only concerned with the bottom line. It’s not humanly possible for your boss to not care about you if you understand him, are there for him, support him, and genuinely care.

You have to be authentic with your boss to develop a real relationship. Figure out how to care about him deeply — as a person whom you can help. If you can’t do this for your boss, how can you expect it from him?

7. Get a list of your boss’s priorities.

When you have too much work, this allows you to tell your boss that you can’t do x, y, and z because they’re not high enough priorities to him. In other words, you can say, “I could do x, but you said a, b, and c are very important to you, and I don’t want to compromise those.”

This is a great way of saying “no” to work in a way that makes your boss feel very respected, understood, and taken care of.

8. Prioritize your own work in terms of what matters to your boss.

Fit your high-priority items into a reasonable schedule, and don’t do low-priority items until the important stuff is done. This allows you to always deliver on what matters to your boss.

Keeping your boss happy means being a high performer. People don’t care if you perform well on stuff that doesn’t matter to them, so don’t.

9. Give weekly updates.

It doesn’t matter if your boss asks for them or not. This is a team report, for you and your boss; you’re the team, working on your boss’s priorities.

This is when you tell your boss how much you’ve accomplished that will help her. Tell her things you see that might be roadblocks for her, and how you can help her fix them in the next week. Also tell her what you’re planning to do that’s extremely important to her so she’s sure not to ask you to do unimportant work over the next week.

10. Don’t get stuck on personality types.

We each have preferences for the people we hang out with. But the most successful people can get along with anyone. If you can’t get along with the type of person your boss is, it’s your shortcoming, not his.

Read some psychology books about social monitors, and how we can teach ourselves to authentically connect with anyone by practicing empathy. And then do it. After all, why is it your boss’s job to adjust to you? You’re the one with the problem.

The Choice Is Yours

The bottom line: Take responsibility for yourself. No one forces you to have the job you have. You could leave anytime

If you’re not going to leave, then you’re choosing the boss you have. And since you chose your boss, start making her into a good one. Otherwise, why did you choose her?

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New video blogger for Brazen Careerist: Bruce Tulgan

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I know, I know, I spent a whole post ranting about how almost everyone should not be video blogging. So it’s surprising to hear that I’m launching Bruce’s video blog here, right?

The reason I love Bruce’s video blog is that he is a great speaker, and he has great ideas, and he gets them out really fast, which is important because I don’t have a lot of patience to watch video online.

The first time I heard of Bruce was when he published the book, Managing Generation X. He was the first person to say, Hey, we’re not like the baby boomers. We’re not going to be able to work with you if you don’t start treating us differently. I was so excited to buy his book. So excited that someone had identified what I was feeling.

Bruce still has a great sense about what is coming next in the work world, and his forthcoming book, It's Okay to Be the Boss, is about management. Specifically, how to be a competent manager in the new workplace. Bruce’s bottom line is that management isn’t just a title, it’s an obligation you have to the people who report to you.

He focuses on how to be a good manager when the most junior employee in the company has no problem asking for Thursdays off to go to karate class. He gives tips on what to do when you become the manager of your friend. And he shows everyone, even non-managers, how to tell your boss how to manage you more effectively.

So, here’s the first installment of what I expect will become a regular feature on Brazen Careerist. Let me know what you think:

[MEDIA=9]

(requires the Flash 9 Player)
iPod Video – Download

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Recognize when you’re being a nutcase

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One of my best friends, Sharon, is a hairdresser. She is not a normal hairdresser. She’s a big-shot hairdresser in Los Angeles. And one of the most important moments in my financial life was when I moved from client to friend — I started saving $100 on a haircut and $150 on color because she did it for free.

Sharon has two or three clients going at any one time, and it’s amazing to watch her make everyone feel like they are the only one. After all, that’s a lot of what they are paying for. To listen to their problems. Sharon says that everyone comes to her to solve a problem. They say they are coming for their hair, but it’s her job to figure out what their real problem is.

As the self-proclaimed queen of delegation, I sat down in Sharon’s chair for years and told her to do whatever she wanted. I always had the kind of hair people comment on. I figured that she’s the expert, not me, so why should I tell her what looks best?

Besides, she knew me well enough to know that the problem I always wanted to solve was how to be less boring. Left to my own devices, I would wear the same thing every day and never take my hair out of a pony tail.

Sharon specializes in the nutcase client, and people actually send theirs to her. Sharon tells great stories about the people who come back three days later and say, “I think you cut one of the hairs in my bangs too short. Can you fix it?”

Sharon is great at dealing with these clients because she knows it’s not the hair that’s the problem. It’s always that other thing.

This was always interesting to me until the day that I became the problem client. It was when I had just closed a round of funding from a prominent venture capital firm, and I had spent weeks being the youngest and the only woman in the room. I was feeling like maybe I was somewhere I shouldn’t be. Maybe they’d wake up and say, “What about her? What’s she doing here?”

So I told Sharon I didn’t like my hair and she had to do it over. “I need it to be more conservative,” I said.

She said, “You can make up for that with your fifteen pairs of black loafers.”

“No, really,” I said, “Can you take out the red highlights?” And then, it happened: I pulled out three hairs and told her, “If you could just fix these three hairs. That would be okay.”

So now I’m going to tell you about being a nut case. Watch yourself. Because some people get migraines when they are under too much pressure. And some people become other peoples’ migraines.

There is no point in being a pain just because you’re stressed and nervous. Recognize that you’re under pressure and misplacing your anxiety. Give the people around you a break. Anyone can be fun to work with when life is going along perfectly. The best people to work with are consistent, even when they are a wreck – that’s the real test of how well you manage your stress.

If you work with someone who is a terror under stress, pretend you’re a hairdresser, and look for the underlying cause. And remember that Sharon calms those nutcases down by being a good listener. Don’t underestimate listening as a tool for keeping the nuts in their shells.

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Be memorable by telling good stories about yourself

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When someone says, “So tell me about yourself,” a lot of people stumble. When you craft your answer, you have 10 million hours of information to choose from. Many people actually hate getting this question because it’s so hard to zero-in on an answer.

This is an honest question. Someone wants to know about you. You should learn to choose the right things to say, so you can answer the question in a way that allows people to connect with you and remember you.

“The villain of getting ideas across is the curse of knowledge,”says Chip Heath, Stanford business school professor. I interviewed him about his book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Heath says that when you know something really well, like every detail of your life, it’s difficult to figure out how to tell someone who doesn’t know.

Everyone has a complicated background. You need to pull that background together in a way that creates a single, memorable picture of yourself that is relevant to the person you’re talking to. In high school Ryan Patriquin focused on fine arts, but in college realized he really enjoyed computer-generated art, like “Toy Story.”

He spent a couple of years as a graphic designer. Then, while working at a large company that was going through transition, he got an opportunity to fill in as a product manager.

Now 28, Patriquin was recently interviewing at EBSCO Publishing, a provider of reference, subscription and other information services. In the interview, he said, “I’m a creative person who has product management experience.”

This is a way for him to convey to people that he has two skills without explaining every detail of his life.

When you hear a summary like this, and it sounds obvious, that’s because it is right. But most people cannot see their own history so clearly to convey a short, one-sentence summary of who they are. You have to find your one-sentence if you want people to remember it. Try it out whenever someone asks you, “What do you do?” or “Tell me about yourself.” The answer to this question is a work in progress, and you can judge how you’re doing by how engaged the person’s response to you is.

As for Patriquin, Brenda Kelley, a recruiter at EBSCO Publishing, says “He packaged himself in a way that helped me know he was the right person for the position. And we ended up hiring him.” Patriquin is now a user interface designer for the company.

Sometimes, you only have time for a one-sentence summary of your life – when you are introduced to someone in passing, for example. But sometimes, there is more time for an answer – in an interview, for example. When you have more time, tell a story.

The best way to have people connect with what you say about yourself, and remember what you say, is to tell a story. Most people instinctively list details about their life, “I did this, then this, then this.” It’s not very interesting. Stories are more engaging, so get used to talking about yourself in stories instead of in lists.

Telling stories about yourself takes practice. A lot of it is trial and error. As you’re telling the story out loud, you’ll instinctively feel if it’s a flop or not. When you find a good story, hone it until you’re conveying what you want people to know, in a way they’ll enjoy hearing.

A story I used to tell in interviews is how I made my career choice during an argument with my ex-boyfriend.

Heath says there are three different kinds of plots we can create about ourselves.

1. The challenge plot. You overcame an obstacle to get to where you are. Heath’s example is someone who says, “I’m really good at customer-focused service.” It’s not very persuasive if someone makes that declaration. But this challenge plot makes things more persuasive; “I learned customer service working at an ice cream stand. In the summer the line was twenty people deep and it was a challenge to keep the customers happy.” Now the listener has an image in their mind of you being good at customer service.

2. The creativity plot. In this plot, the turning point in the story is a eureka moment – when an idea comes to you and changes everything. You could say, “My business is about selling textbooks.” Or you could say, “I had an idea to sell textbooks, but I couldn’t figure out how to market them as interesting to the consumer. Then it hit me that no one has a favorite text book, but everyone has a favorite professor. So I needed to use the professors to hook in the customers.”

3. The connection plot. This plot comes in when you are telling a story about bringing a team together. For example, “our toy company merged with another toy company and people were duplicating each others’ efforts to create a new doll line. I convinced the teams to combine designs and work together. We created a doll that dominated the collectible doll market that Christmas.”

Once you’ve practiced a bit, you can relish the moment someone says, “So, what do you do?” If you understand how to talk about yourself, this is an opening to connect in a meaningful way and make a lasting impression.

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Pay attention to your critics — at least some of them

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Take a look at my Yahoo! Finance column for this week: 239 people rated it an average of two stars out of five. Which is an improvement, because yesterday the average was one star. Also, there are 94 comments, which can be fairly represented by the one that I copy and paste here:

“I think this writer will need to be looking for another job soon.”

This is what I do with negative comments like those. I look for someone who really understands what I’m doing and still doesn’t like it. Those people will give constructive criticism. I don’t always have to follow it, but it’s good to listen to, just to hear another perspective besides my own.

The trick to accepting criticism is to figure out who to listen to, by figuring out who is listening to you. Here’s an example of a guy who is listening:

I read your blog.
I found it a remarkable concentration of bad advice.
That’s ok, it was fun to read.
Have a good day
Continue blogging.

It’s really easy for you to decide that everyone doesn’t understand you. I do the opposite. I assume everyone does understand me, and I give them a chance. For example, I get a lot of long emails from human resources managers who are arguing with me. I read every word of those emails in case I can learn something.

If you can’t learn from people who think your work is crap, then you will get stuck. You need to know what you are doing well and what you’re not doing well, who you are reaching and who you aren’t. This will help you shape your career.

When I started writing career advice, i didn’t even understand that I was writing it for younger people until my editor told me that the oldest people at the office thought my advice was nuts. I thought really hard about why they thought I was nuts. And then I turned up the volume on what they hated — because their criticism made me understand what differentiated me in the career advice world.

Of course, some critics (like that voice inside you telling you to give up) are bad bad bad and you have to turn them off. But don’t turn off all criticism: Mine your critics for people who can help you understand what it is that you do well.

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How to ask good questions in an interview

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Here’s the structure of an interview: The interviewer asks you a lot of questions about you, figures out what you like, what you’re good at, and customizes as he pitches the company and the job to you.

This structure works fine if you are not all that interested in the job. But if you go into the interview knowing that you want the job, this structure will not benefit you. This is because if you really want the job, you will be trying very hard during the interview to convince the person that you’re a good match. But the structure of the interview doesn’t give you the chance to find out a lot about what they’re looking for in a match, until the very end.

You will get to the end of the interview, and the person will say, “Do you have any questions for me?” The questions that everyone recommends you ask are questions that would help you know what the company is looking for in a new hire: Questions about the goals and philosophies of the company, about the parameters of the position you’re interviewing for, about the expectations for the person they hire.

The answers to these questions would help you to explain why you are the ideal candidate for the job. So why ask these questions at the end? Ask them as close to the beginning as you can.

The first time I saw this in action was when I was interviewing a candidate. I started with, “So, why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself.”

She said, “Well, first why don’t you tell me a bit about the job so that I can tailor my answer to your particular needs right now?”

I was surprised, but it made a lot of sense to me. I told her about the job. And I ended up making her an offer.

So don’t hijack the interview, but try to ask a bit about the position at the begining of the inteview and then you, too, can tailor your answers to the requirements of the job. With this strategy, coming up with questions will be easy because you will naturally want to know what the hiring manager is looking for so you can be that person:

What would the first three goals be for the person who takes this job?

What are the biggest hurdles to overcome in this position?

What type of person do you think will be most successful in this position?

If you ask a variation of these questions toward the beginning of the interview — even if you ask only one or two — you’ll be in a much better position to ace the rest of the interview.

While it is bucking convention to ask questions toward the beginning and not the end, consider that you will look more authentic doing this. After spending the whole interview convincing the person that you are a good fit for the job, why would you ask questions about the job at the end? Presumably, you already talked about why you are a good fit.

So when you get to the end of the interview, and the person says, “Do you have an questions for me?” You can feel free to say, “No, I think I asked enough questions at the beginning of the interview to understand how I will fit in well in this position. I’m very excited about working with you. I think we’re a good match. Do you have any reservations?”

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The worst interview in the history of job interviews

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Business 2.0 reports in it’s best-of-the-year roundup: “Last May The BBC invited technology expert Guy Kewney to its studios for an interview about Apple’s iTunes Music Store. But when the cameras start rolling, the BBC correspondent found herself talking to the wrong Guy – Guy Goma, a computer technician who was waiting in the lobby for a job interview.”

Check out this hilarious video of the interview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG61JO6MoUk

(He did not get the job.)

Hat tip: James in London

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How to make ladder-climbing a positive experience

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The work world offers a continuum of means to stability. Huge risk takers might choose to pay off the Russian mob and try to corner to oil market in Siberia. If you’re looking for stability, you might try climbing a corporate ladder in a large, publicly traded company.

Climbing, of course, could lead to instability. The less valuable you are to the company, the more likely you are to be laid off, given mind-numbing work, or given positions that offer little flexibility. And those situations often lead to big instability.

But there are a few things you can do to make ladder-climbing easier. So here are three ideas, and one general tip: Pay attention to employment litigation – where the courts are systematically documenting what helps and hinders ladder-climbers as a way to protect minorities from discrimination.

1. Start somewhere good.
There are companies that are known for being respectful of employees and there are companies known for being embroiled in litigation from bitter employees.

Stay away from the latter. Daniel Gilbert shows that if the last girl liked the guy you’re dating than you’ll probably like him, too. It is not a big leap to apply this research to the workplace. If other people love working at the company, then you will too.

So talk to former employees and find out if they liked the company. (Current employees often have too much invested in their job to tell you the company stinks.) LinkedIn is actually a great way to find former employees of a given company. And most people will be happy to tell you if they loved their former match.

2. Get a sponsor.
In order to move up in a large company you need someone to guide you. A sponsor is someone who is a mentor, but it’s a specific type of mentor. This person is well-connected in the company, who will not only make you known to the right people, but will help you steer yourself within the company.

You find a sponsor the same way you would find a mentor. By networking, by approaching the person directly, or by asking your human resources department if there’s a company program you can join.

It is well documented that a sponsor works to get an employee up the ladder. And because of this, when a large company gets in trouble for not promoting enough minorities into senior management, one way they can remedy the problem (reg. req.) in a way that satisfies the courts is to establish a sponsor program for minorities.

This should be enough evidence for you to set up your own little program, for yourself.

3. Get into a line management position.
Corporations are set up to favor ladder climbing from line management rather than from support roles.

What does this mean? Line managers are directly responsible for generating money for the company (think product management or sales). Support staff, on the other hand, is responsible for making things run smoothly so the line managers can generate money (think human resources, public relations, or customer service).

Support managers generally do not have the profit-and-loss experience necessary for a top management position. Of all the CEOs who worked their way up the ladder, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with someone who made their mark on the company in a support role. And discrimination lawsuits have identified placing minorities in human resources and public relations departments as inherently career-limiting moves.

One of the most important pieces of climbing a ladder is creating a situation where you have enough clout to create a furtively flexible work life. (For example, a last-minute decision to go to a basketball game does not raise any eyebrows.) This is what will make ladder climbing palatable over an extended period of time.

Take a job that allows you to adding directly to the company’s bottom line, because if you can take responsibility for profits then you will get more leeway to create the kind of work life you want. And, that, after all, is the key to making a climb up the ladder a positive experience.

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How to sidestep office hierarchy to get the job you want

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A lot of you know you’d like to be doing something more significant for your company, but no one is giving you the chance. This is your wake up call. You don’t need to wait for someone to bestow a title on you — you can take on a bigger role right now.

The key to taking on a bigger role is to have your current job under control. If you can’t handle your current job and another one, then you have to wait until you can change jobs. But if you get great at time management then you can do your current job and start doing another one without waiting for an invitation to climb up a rung on the corporate ladder.

Once you’re ready to take on other, more interesting work, you can use this three-step process to sidestep hierarchy.

1. Find a problem area in the company that no one is dealing with.
When I was in charge of online marketing at a software company. I knew that I wanted broader, operational experience, but it wasn’t part of my job description. So I got my marketing workload under control and then looked around for a trouble spot in the organization that no one was paying attention to.

I found tech support. The people were poorly trained, it was a huge cost center, and the company was growing at a rate that meant this problem would increase by 300% over the next year.

2. Come up with a solution you think you can execute.
I wrote a report that showed the problem and I outlined a detailed solution, with a timeline. I had no idea how to manage tech support. I outlined the solution by listing best practices that I got out of a management textbook, and my schedule was as broad as possible.

My boss was happy to give me responsibility for tech support because no other managers wanted it and he didn’t have budget to hire a new manager. But he didn’t change my title. He just said, “Okay, you can do that. Thanks.” No formal announcement.

3. Convince a team to help you.
I gathered up the three tech support people and explained to them that I understood their problems – being overworked, having no supplies, having constantly breaking products to support, etc. I told them I would help them fix these problems. They liked that, so they got on board to help me.

Then, before they could start doubting my ability to manage tech support, I asked each of them what they wanted from their job. Each had different answers. One wanted more money to support his daughter, one wanted management experience, one wanted less stress on the job. I made a plan to show how each of them could meet those goals.

The outcome: By the end of six months, I had done such a good job turning around tech support, that my boss gave me seed money to start my own company.

This last part is very important. When you are looking around your company for something new to do, don’t look for the perfect, dream job. Look for a job that will let you grow and show people how talented you are. This is the kind of situation that leads to huge opportunity.

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