Twentysomething: How I’ve been finding my best mentors

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By Ryan Healy — Successful entrepreneurship usually includes a group of trusted mentors, according to Ben Casnocha, author of My Start up Life. But now that I’ve spent a few months in corporate life, it’s clear to me that having a group of mentors is important whether you work for yourself or for someone else.

However, the majority of people I know are not great at seeking out and developing these relationships. What I have learned in the past few months is that it’s easier than you think! Here are three things I have done that have helped me develop very rewarding relationships with mentors.

1. Find the right network
For twentysomethings, the easiest place to look is in your parent’s network. Take advantage of it because they’ve been developing these connections for years. Ask your parents if any of their friends or colleagues work in a field you are interested in.

If you are not lucky enough to have well connected parents, all is not lost. Networking groups are everywhere these days. MeetUp.com gives you a way to find people with similar interests. Or you can start a niche blog and comment on blog posts from field-related experts. Leave a few insightful comments and your foot is in the door to contacting them.

2. Reach out
Once you have made the first connection, the next step is simple. Reach out with a short email. Ask for a few pieces of advice. Assuming your contact replies, continue the conversation for a few days. Finally, ask if she is interested in meeting up for a quick lunch. Despite the ease of connecting online, face to face interaction can make a big difference in how quickly you make your mentor feel connected with you. At the very least, try to have a relatively long phone conversation to get to know each other.

3. Think in terms of frequency
After a face to face meeting and a few emails, you should be able to tell if your contact is a potential mentor or advisor. If she is, don’t be afraid to bug her! This is always the hardest part for me, but it’s the only way you can develop a good relationship. Send an occasional email or call with a casual, not extremely important, but honest question once in a while. If she is truly annoyed by this, then it’s probably time to seek advice elsewhere. But for the most part, I have found people genuinely like to help, especially older folks. The more contact you have, the stronger the relationship will be and the more interest your advisor will take in your career.

Finding a true mentor can take a long time, but almost everyone will offer advice and guidance if asked politely. Corporate cultures that encourage collaboration between young and old are absolutely necessary, but the responsibility of developing these relationships is in the hands of young workers. Reach out to someone. Take a chance. The details will work themselves out.

Ryan Healy’s blog is Employee Evolution.

Other Brazen Careerist posts on mentoring:

7 Steps to finding and keeping a mentor

How to ask for mentoring

You need a mentor now, here’s how to get one

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Career ideas for a warm summer day

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Here’s an idea: Instead of thinking of your summer vacation as something that detracts from your work, think of it as a way to boost your work performance — or even your business.

The weeklong getaways that run a day or two over, the hour-long siestas that turn into three hours, and the three-day weekends that go on for four can all help your career. You just have to use the time well to take care of your physical and mental health.

Why? A healthy body makes for a healthy, balanced mind, and that’s the chief asset of a truly good worker. It’s not about the hours you spend behind a desk — it’s about what’s going through your head while you’re there.

Here are four ways to ensure that your summer fun in the sun enhances your career success, whether you’re still on vacation or are back from one:

1. Go for a run in the park, or swim in a lake at sunset.
It used to be that working out was optional. Now we know that regular exercise makes you calmer, smarter, happier, and richer. So how can you possibly say that it’s not one of your highest priorities?

It makes sense that if you feel better about yourself and the world you’ll do better in business. Because business is about thinking clearly, acting with confidence, and making good connections.

But don’t work out just because people who work out make more money. Do it because it’ll change your outlook on life. Really. You’ll be less likely to be depressed and more likely to be optimistic.

If you’re younger, join an athletic team. People who play sports do better in their careers. This is true whether you’re on a small liberal arts college fencing team or a Big Ten football squad. The self-confidence, teamwork, and drive that athletes display makes them higher performers at work.

Sure, there are exceptions, but the advantage is so pronounced that some corporate recruiters at colleges ask to see only the athletes.

2. Mentor a summer intern.
Each of us needs mentors to guide us through our careers at different points in time. Sometimes we need help navigating office politics, sometimes we need advice on making a life change. At each point, knowing how to ask for help is essential, and the best way to learn how to ask for help is to give help.

If you mentor someone, you help yourself as well. You’ll find out what a mentoring relationship is like from the other side. For example, you’ll learn what feels useful to the mentor and what’s annoying. You’ll also discover why it’s important to ask good questions, because as a mentor you’re helpless if the person you’re trying to help doesn’t know what he wants.

Summer interns are ripe for this task. They’re there because they want to learn. You can teach them not only about the workplace but about themselves, and how to figure out where they fit. You can be an advisor and a coach and a friend. These are all great ways to mentor, and after the experience you’ll have more confidence in seeking a mentor of your own.

3. Curl up in the sun with a book.

Information overload comes from sifting through ideas all day. In a knowledge-worker environment, with the Internet constantly streaming new ideas, the most successful workers are those who can sort information most efficiently.

Learning top-flight productivity skills is essential in today’s workplace, but that can only get you so far. At some point, you’ll need to read 300 pages on the same topic. For most of you, this means turning off the computer, but luckily summer is a great time for curling up with a good book.

I don’t mean a Tom Clancy novel, either — I’m talking about big ideas. This means that instead of sticking with a subject for the time it takes to scroll down a page, you have to stick with it for an entire weeklong vacation. That might sound dire, but remember the thrill of the rigorous thinking you did in college, when there were no all-department meetings and no memos to read during lunchtime?

Big ideas take time to understand, and they need to grow in your brain so you can make them your own. Take the opportunity to do so this summer, when the world gives you more permission to take long breaks.

4. Differentiate yourself by lying quietly in the grass.

When was the last time you had a grand epiphany in an important company meeting? Probably never. If the meeting is important, then you prepare and you concentrate and you think about what everyone else is doing — all things that keep your mind from being open to something random and profound.

Grand thinking requires space, flexibility, and time. These things are hard to come by if you lead a life that doesn’t allow for stillness. We owe it to ourselves to take time to be alone and do nothing, or almost nothing. Even if no big ideas come to you at that moment, there’s a clear, still moment where your brain gets a rest. And lying in the grass lets your body rest, too.

Career coach Susan Bernstein says that success and fulfillment in a job come when you connect your body and your mind to your work. The first step in acquiring this balance, I believe, is quiet contemplation.

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How to ask for mentoring

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I get a lot of email from people who want advice. I usually reply. Sometimes I get an email from someone who is clearly a pain but I’m impressed that he or she asked for help, so I answer. Sometimes I get such a good question from someone that I actually give him or her a call.

I learn a lot from answering peoples’ questions. First, I learn about how to ask for advice because I can listen to how people do it to me. Second, the more I hear myself give the same advice over and over again, the harder it is for me to not take it myself.

Here is an example of someone asking for help in an effective way: She sent one of the thirty press releases in my in box that week. I was interested in a few of her assumptions in the press release, so I emailed her. She wrote back lame answers. I ignored her. Then she wrote an email asking me how she can do better at addressing the press. She asked three, very specific questions. I was impressed at how well she asked me to help her. I made a note to myself to ask such good questions. Then I called her to give some advice.

Here is an example of a different exchange, but one that I have all the time:

Me: “Did you know that outside of schooling, the quality of your network of mentors is the most important factor in how successful your career will be?”

Other person: “But how do I get a mentor?”

Me: “You read a lot and find people you want to be like and send them an email.”

Other person: “What do I ask?”

Me: “How that person overcame the specific hurdles you see yourself facing. And what advice they would give to you to get on a path to achieve what they have.”

But to be honest, it’s not like I do this all the time. So, like I said, the more I give advice the more likely I am to take it, and finally, I decided to try contacting someone I read about. She got a big columnist position that is not in my genre, but the person seemed like a real go-getter and I like her writing. So I emailed her to ask if she could give me some career advice. I sent her some sample columns and I made a little joke about how even the career columnist needs career advice. After all, humility and humor go a long way in getting someone to want to help.

She replied to my email ten minutes later. I couldn’t believe it. I rarely respond to my emails that fast. I decided she was very organized and on top of things and she would really have a lot to teach me. I got excited. And then I got nervous that I wouldn’t have good questions, or that I wouldn’t know how to steer the conversation. So I didn’t call her for three weeks.

Finally, I called. She was so incredibly useless that I can’t believe she writes an advice column. She said she had no career plan for herself. She said she just fell into everything. She said she just lives day to day. I don't believe any of that. She fought too hard to get where she is.

But you know what? I felt great after that call. I felt great that I took action to get a new mentor, even if it didn’t work. I felt great that I read about someone and talked to her. That’s what people should do, and I knew that after having done it once, I would do it again. It wasn’t difficult at all.

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Business Week features my blog, sparks contact from my secret mentor

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This week’s Business Week just hit the stands, and what do you know? My blog is featured.

Lindsey Gerdes wrote a great summary of my blog, proving to me that other people can write a better summary of our work than we can write ourselves. (Yes, this is why you should hire someone to write your resume.)

Anyway, for you Business Week readers who are stopping by to check things out, Gerdes highlighted these posts:

Navigating the quarterlife crisis

How to turn down a job offer

How to manage your image

The first person to congratulate me about the piece in Business Week was Joyce Lain Kennedy.

This was no small moment for me. She was my silent mentor for years. I say mentor in the loosest sense of the word because (violating one of my own pieces of advice) I never contacted her. I thought she was too big to pay attention to someone like me. (Note: Don’t ever do this. Try contacting everyone. Most people will give you advice if you ask a specific question.)

Joyce Lain Kennedy is the most widely syndicated career advice columnist in the country. Probably in the world. Newspaper syndication is very complicated. Not that you shouldn’t try it. You should. But beware, because people like Kennedy have been there forever and sit on small empires. I studied her patterns, trying to figure out syndication. And, to be honest, I studied her column topics trying to figure out what the heck a career advice columnist writes about.

The problem was that I started out writing about my own career. Sort of like a well written diary. But then my company went bankrupt in the dot-com crash. Business 2.0, the magazine that was running my column, told me I was no longer that impressive — unemployed and pregnant did not look good. So I took my editor’s advice and stopped writing about myself. (Well, I tried to. You can imagine how hard that must have been.) Instead, I started writing straight-up career advice, like how to write a resume.

But my ideas ran dry after two or three, so I started stealing Kennedy’s topics: How to interview, how to write a cover letter… They are all classics, all good. She is a pro. I would write them the way a non-pro would write them — adding, for example, references to sex at the office that my editor would delete.

So then, five years pass, blah blah, and here I am, receiving an email from Joyce Lain Kennedy herself. And she sent her book to me. Autographed. It’s Resumes for Dummies. And it’s on a special, sentimental spot in my bookshelf, next to this week’s edition of Business Week.

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Get good mentors by building relationships

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If you want to succeed in business you need a mentor. Getting one though, requires patience, a clear focus and the self-confidence to be a nudge.

The multigenerational workplace seems like it would be fertile ground for mentoring. “Generation Y grew up in an environment where parents, teachers and counselors were all about building the self-esteem of children,” says Bruce Tulgan, CEO of RainmakerThinking, “There was a lot of conditioning to engage in a mentoring type of relationship.”

Young people are great at asking for help – in fact renowned for doing things a boomer would never do, like approaching the CEO to ask for a meeting to share ideas, and networking relentlessly up and down the organization.

But older folks are not so keen on mentoring – even though it has been shown to improve the career of the mentor as well as the mentee.

“Baby boomers say, “?I went out into the world and I had my youthful rebellion. You should have seen me!'” Tulgan explains. “Then they get all wistful and say they, “But I went back to the real world and paid my dues and it was sink or swim and no one held my hand.'”

So while getting workplace mentors should be very easy, it’s not.

Here are some tips on how to get and keep a mentor.

1. Look for someone just two or three years ahead of you. Those people will remember what you’re going through, so they’ll give you good tactical advice. Also, young people are very team-oriented, and they grew up with social networking tools, so they are easier to rope into a mentoring relationship than someone older.

In April 2005, Zak Zielezinski, 22, and some friends started an entrepreneurship club at Clark University, and from that, they started a company. One of older students in the club directed Zielezinski to a professor who could help him, and from that interaction, Zielezinski’s company, Interactive Purchasing Solutions was born.

2. Do great work, because potential mentors want to help stars. Ian Ybarra is a good example of someone who does great work wherever he goes, so he attracts mentors who help his career.

Chris Resto hired Ybarra to help him with a consulting job. Ybarra, who was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was smart, organized, and motivated, and “the reward for good work is more work,” says Resto.

He gave Ybarra more challenging assignments, which Ybarra also did well, so when Resto became head of UPOP, an internship program at MIT, he hired Ybarra as his assistant. Ybarra quickly showed great talent for writing, so Resto gave him more work along those lines. “Finally we had to hire an office assistant because he became the writer,” says Resto.

Ybarra got an internship at Inc. magazine, and once again, did such a high level of work that he attracted a mentor who gave him the opportunity to write a bylined piece for the magazine.

“He probably wrote more of it than I did,” says Ybarra. But it gave Ybarra the opportunity impress Tahl Raz enough that he helped Ybarra get a writing and editing job with business consultant and author Keith Ferrazzi, who, fittingly, is the co-author with Raz of a popular book on relationship building, Never Eat Alone.

3. Figure out goals first, before hitting up a mentor. If you have no idea what questions to ask, it might be because you don’t know what you’re doing. This is career coach territory, not mentoring territory. “A mentor is someone who champions you, opens doors, exposes you to new opportunities. And external career coach cannot do that,” says Jo Miller, CEO of Women’s Leadership Coaching. “But a career coach is good at goal setting, putting plans into action and moving forward.”

Once your goals are established, then you can go to a mentor with a specific topic in mind, says Miller. “The mentee should drive the conversation,” she says. Importantly, ask for help determining the skills you need to get to where you want to go. Then get some tactical advice on how to develop them.

4. Build deep relationships that will help you on multiple levels. “There are two kinds of mentors. The instrumental mentors give practical help, and the socio-emotional mentors look to build your confidence and let you know they believe in you. A good mentor is like being a parent. They try to customize the experience of the protégés so the protégés gains new capabilities,” says Faye Crosby, professor of psychology at University of California at Santa Cruz.

You can build a great network of contacts, but when you have a crisis in confidence you need someone who is emotionally invested in you. To cultivate that emotional investment, keep in touch; a mentor follows your career over a long period of time. Send updates about what you’re doing, offer congratulations on the mentor’s big moves and be on the lookout for quick little ways to build a long, meaningful relationship.

Ybarra and Resto are a good example of how to keep a relationship strong over time. When Ybarra left MIT, he kept in touch with Resto, and now they are collaborating on a book about how companies can more effectively recruit young people.

Resto is the expert on recruiting and Ybarra, along with friend Ramit Sethi, provide expertise on what young people want. And this story illustrates perhaps the most important and most enticing aspect of mentoring: That the best relationships allow both people to grow.

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You are the sum of the people you play with

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Who you hang out with has so much to do with the quality of your life. I think about this all the time, so I was happy to see that the neurobiologists finally came up with some evidence that if you hang out with positive people, your brain actually starts thinking more positively (subscription soon).

I also think that friends who do cool things make your own life more exciting. My friend, Dennis, at Techdirt, sent the press releases to me about his company’s new product, and he was so excited that it made me excited, too. There is no neurobiology to support this — yet — but I am convinced that people who love their jobs give us more energy for our own.

When I played professional beach volleyball, everyone was always angling to be the worst on the court during practice, because that’s the fastest way to get better. This was no small feat when you’re at the top of a sport. But the day I had a match against Olympic gold medallists, I learned more about myself and my game than from 20 matches with people at my level.

A blogroll, to me, is a metaphor for all of these issues. If you are the sum of who you play with, then I want to choose my list of blog playmates carefully. When it comes to blogrolls, some people have very thorough lists of everyone in their field.

My list — which I’ve titled, What I’m Reading — is the blogs that make me excited and get my brain moving in new directions. The list changes all the time. A lot of the blogs aren’t career blogs. After all, I dream up ideas about careers all day. But you could say that your career is closely related to the people you play with, and in that sense, these are all people who have helped my career most recently.

(Hat tip: Willy in Wisconsin)

You need a mentor now; here’s how to get one

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This is a piece I wrote for the new leadership section at Forbes.com.

Of course a good education and talent are keys to building a successful career, but for most people, school is over and the parameters of their talent were set on the day they were born. So what can you do now to get ahead? Get a mentor. In fact, get a stable of mentors for guidance on multiple aspects of your career.

“Executives who have had mentors have earned more money at a younger age,” writes Gerard Roche, senior chairman at the recruiting firm Heidrick & Struggles. Additionally, his research shows “those who have had mentors are happier with their career progress and derive greater pleasure from their work.” The majority of executives had mentors in their first five years of their career.

But finding a mentor is not easy. For a lucky few, mentors can be found through a privileged network of relatives, family friends or your parents’ business associates. For everyone else, the search requires patience, a clear focus and the self-confidence to be a nudge. “Not everyone can depend on nepotism,” says Alisyn Camerota, New York-based correspondent for Fox News. “I got where I am by turning reluctant people into active mentors.”

The easiest way to create allies is to build a reputation as an overachiever. That’s what Camerota did during an internship early on in her career at a Washington, D.C. —based news bureau. After earning the respect of her boss throughout the summer, she came to rely on her for advice and support. Eventually Camerota felt empowered enough to walk into her office and say, “My internship ends in a week and I don’t have a job. Can I have all your contacts?” She said yes. Camerota copied the whole Rolodex onto a legal pad by hand and cold called the contacts until someone agreed to interview her. Those calls later led to a full-time job.

Mentors aren’t just important for those starting out. They’re essential to rising through the ranks, too. “Obtaining a mentor is an important career development experience for individuals. Research indicates that mentored individuals perform better on the job, advance more rapidly within the organization (i.e., get promoted more quickly and earn higher salaries), and report more job and career satisfaction,” says Lillian Eby, professor of applied psychology at the University of Georgia.

As Camerota’s career progressed, she realized her main goal was to be a broadcast journalist. More specifically, she wanted to be in front of the camera. But for two years, she was stuck behind the scenes for America’s Most Wanted. That changed when Lance Heflin, the shows executive producer, became her mentor.

Camerota’s tactic of working hard and asking specific questions made Heflin aware that she was coach-able and focused on her career, attributes that attract the best sort of mentor. So by the time Camerota asked Heflin to help her get on-camera, he told her that if she was willing to do the work, he would help.

Camerota spent the next six months making terrible tapes. Heflin’s coaching started with her appearance: “Do not wear green ever again. Do you ever see people wearing green on TV?” Then he moved to more nuanced tips: “Treat the camera like it’s your friend,” he told her. And he showed her a tape from a broadcaster he liked, walking through a house as he talked to the camera, making the audience feel like they were right there with him.

The duo went through countless such show and tell sessions. And every now and then, Heflin would say, “Stop. Rewind.” And he’d go back to where Camerota smiled at someone or looked at the camera and raised an eyebrow. “That’s where you threw a nickel through the screen,” Which was his way of saying, “Something came alive here.” You can’t ask for advice like that. You have to inspire it.

Camerota’s hard work and raw talent earned her an outstanding mentor who devoted a large amount of time and energy to showing her how to become a television reporter. Keep your eyes open for someone who loves to help people grow.

There are more of those people than you’d think and they may need you, too. “Both mentors and protégés report benefiting from mentoring relationships,” writes Eby. Make your move now. Test the waters with a few people who seem like they might be good mentors. Ask specific questions, and heed the advice. You might find you get more than you asked for.

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One example of why it’s great to be a mentor

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One of my best experiences as a mentor was when I inherited an IT department where the average age was 18. There were many men and one woman and no leaders. I sniffed around for who might be good at what in preparation for a departmental reorg. The woman, Sari, looked homeless at best, a drug addict at worst.

I started taking steps to fire her, but she kept turning in the best work each week. So when I met with her alone, I asked her a little bit about her situation — what does she want to do, what sort of experience does she have.

It took only a little prodding for her to tell me that she was 16 and a high school dropout and she ran away from home. I made it my mission to get her back into school. I gave her responsibilities that she would succeed at to show her that she was smart and capable. For months, I met with her each week: She told me that her family had drug and alcohol problems; I told her if she would look like she could command authority then I could make her a supervisor. Miraculously, almost overnight, she had a new haircut and a new wardrobe.

After two promotions, Sari gained enough self-confidence from work to apply to college two years later. I couldn't have been more proud writing a recommendation. Today Sari is a rising star in the software industry. And while she always thanks me for helping her to get back on solid footing, I am always thankful to her for teaching me how much we can do for each other, even in the workplace. Sari single-handedly gave my work meaning.

Status symbols for a new generation

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Hey all you women! Looking for a way to look good at a party? Forget bragging rights to house with a picket fence. Forget a plastic-surgeried body that defies gravity. Here are the status symbols for a new generation:

1. A flexible job. This is practically a pre-requisite for being able to successfully balance work and personal life. Ironically, most of these jobs come from years of conniving and strategizing under the guise of being a power-mongering ladder climber. After all, most companies do not capitulate to flexibility until they have fallen in love with you for your performance and ambition.

2. An awesome nanny. Everyone brags about their nanny because if you don't think your nanny is great then how can you leave her with your kids?

But most nannies are not that great. Here is what a status-symbol nanny looks like: She never calls in sick, she can plan and execute a dinner without your input, she doesn't berate you when your kid has a cut from falling off the bed under your care. And longevity counts — if you can keep a nanny for more than two years, the implication is that you are a great manager.

3. A competent husband. Household competence, that is. Delegate everything you can to your assistant. But there are some things that would be heartless to delegate, like choosing a birthday present for your nine-year-old son. This is where a husband comes in. What if your husband knows so much about your kids that he remembers the birthday and decides what to buy, but also makes time to forage for it in the stores? That is real competence.

When it comes to a status symbol husband, you do not delegate to him so much as confer, and you make a similar amount of time in your lives for taking care of your home life. If you find this kind of husband, women will drool over him as if he were the captain of the high school football team.

4. A caffeine-free life. Sure, a lot of women do this during pregnancy, but as soon as the baby pops out, the caffeine ramps up. I don't know any non-pregnant woman who works in business and has kids and abstains from caffeine. Except for Sallie Krawheck, chief financial officer of Citigroup. I don't know how she does it, but she seems so stable and organized to live without caffeine.

I tell this to myself every night at 9pm, which is when I have to get ready for bed in order to get eight hours of sleep and wake up with my son at 5:30 am. But there's always one more very important thing that I haven't done. Sallie must do her very important things first thing every day. Which is what we all should do.

5. A reputation for helping. The standards for women have changed. The status symbols have changed. But all that talk of women “playing like men” is nonsense to me. Women have been helping each other forever, and now is no exception. The women we look up to are those who have a track record for figuring out how to leverage their power and resources to help other women. Give advice freely, mentor someone, share your experience at the glass ceiling so another woman can go higher. A fulfilling career requires that you give as well as receive.

There's a good reason that women brag about the stuff on this list: It's the stuff that really does impact one's happiness. This is a list of things that will improve your life more than a raise or a top-tier vacation. These are things that will pave the way for you to have fun during the day and rest well at night.

4 worst mistakes of a first-time manager

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First-time managers are generally nightmares to work for. They are people who got promoted by doing a non-management job well, and in fact they probably have little experience in management. Here are four of the mistakes that will undermine a new manager the fastest.

1. Focusing on tasks instead of people.
Before you were a manager, your number one job was to accomplish tasks. You were someone with skills to get something done. Maybe media buying, or programming, or selling. Now your number one job is to help other people to accomplish the tasks in an outstanding way.

Sure, you’ll have tasks, too. As a manager you’ll have weekly reports, budgets, planning. But your tasks are secondary to helping other people to do their tasks. Your job as manager is to get the best work from the people you manage. The measure of how well you’re doing as a manager is how well each individual on your team performs.

Ideally, you should be able to show each person you manage how to see themselves differently so that they are able to produce at a higher level than they ever imagined. For one person this will mean you need to teach organization skills. For another person, you will help her discover what she loves to do and then set her up doing it for you. Each person wants something, and you need to find out what that is. Then help them get it.

In return, your employees will do great work for you. This level of management is superior to task-management; helping people perform at their best impacts the quality of your team’s work as opposed to just getting the work done.

2. Being slow to transition.
Moving into any new position requires that you get rid of the stuff from your old position. This means delegating. It means getting over the idea that you were indispensable on any of your old teams. You can’t do you new job well if you’re still doing your old job.

Delegating your old job should take three days. You find people who are taking a step up when they accept pieces of your old job so that they are excited. You give them an explanation of how to do it and tell them where to go when they have questions.

You are going to tell me that one day is not enough, that you have a very complicated job. But think of it this way: If you died today, your job would be delegated in a couple of days.

Delegating is not enough, though. You have to stop caring. If you are no longer on a project because you got a promotion, then you have to stop obsessing about how the project is doing.
Remember how quickly the girl who dumped you hooked up with her next-door neighbor? You need to move that fast, too.

3. Forgetting to manage up.
Managing up means steering your team to hit goals that the people above you care about. Figure out what matters to your boss, and your boss’s boss, and make that stuff matter to you, too, because you can only impress your boss with your management skill if you are accomplishing things she cares about.

And be loud about your accomplishments. Set measurable goals for yourself and let people above you know that you’re meeting them.

Do this it right off the bat. People’s perceptions of you as a manager will be made during your very first actions. That saying, “People judge you in the first two minutes they meet you,” is true for management, too. So give people reason right away to think you’re doing a good job.

4. Talking more than listening.
My sister-in-law, Rachel, has been a manager for a while. But she just accepted a position where she is managing three times the number of people she had been managing. Her first step was to go on a sort of listening tour of the organization. She had lunch with people to find out what matters to them, she sat in on groups and even visited some people at home, all in the name of figuring out what matters to whom, and how she should set up goals for herself.

Consider your own listening tour as soon as you start in a new position. After all, there’s no way to figure out what people want without getting them talking. And the most annoying thing about any manager — new or seasoned — is when they just won’t shut up.

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