How To Pick A Job

I regularly get asked to give career advice, often by folks right out of graduate/business school and by individuals who are contemplating a mid-career change of direction. Most often they just need someone as a sounding board to provide external confirmation of what they already want to do, or need help to seed ideas for possible next steps.   I always enjoy those discussions and share my experiences, but I thought I would my outline my strategy about making such choices here.

When faced with a career crossroads, it has been my experience that one must understand four sets of facts about the opportunity and four dimensions of motivation to make an informed decision.

When weighing whether to take on an new career opportunity, consider “The 8 ‘R’s”:  Role, Responsibilities, Routine, Remuneration, Respect, Risk, Runway, and Reward. 

All eight trigger a set of questions that one should ask as they deliberate about whether this career move is a good one.  The first four are more about the position itself whereas the latter four require greater subjective introspection from the person considering the opportunity:

Role

Simply put the role is the functional title of the job opportunity; it’s where you sit in relation to others in the organizational chart (if any) of an entity.  For some, that’s an important factor for a sense of status or accomplishment.   If you are moving from a direct contributing role to a role managing others doing work, the new position is will require understanding the need for and developing new skills to manage others doing work you used to do. Are you ready to let go and help others do what you did? Will you be a micro-manager or will you empower and mentor others to grow potentially filling your new role in the future?  Picking an opportunity simply because of a title is a disaster waiting to happen unless you are clear on why that matters for you to be successful in the organization.  One shouldn’t have to flaunt their role to influence others but rather behave in a way that sets the tone for others in the role in the future.

Whether the title prefix is “Lead”, “Manager”, “Director”, or “Vice-President”, understand what it means in that organization’s culture.

Responsibilities

Sometimes one will consider a job opportunity not based on where they will be in the organizational chart, but because they will be given more responsibilities.  A strong shared and distributed sense of responsibility could and should exist throughout a healthy organization. It promotes a shared sense of urgency and ownership to collectively succeed. Is the attraction to this opportunity because you get to have some specific power and control over a sphere of activity?  Is it because of the responsibility that you will have more accountability and derive satisfaction knowing you are making things happen?  Having responsibilities for the blind sake of having power can be very surprising and disappointing if you don’t have a full picture of all the responsibilities involved and how they might evolve over time. Employers do not always have a clear sense of what are the job responsibilities, particularly if it’s for a new job type.

Make sure you get clear on what would be directly in your domain to run, where you can only influence, and where you’ll just have to accept what’s dictated by others.

Routine

Everyone is attracted to something because of the immediate shine an opportunity may exhibit.  But like all jobs, there’s a fun part and the not-so-fun part.  What will be the mix for this opportunity?   Will your predominant daily routine involve a satisfying balance of activities? What will you really be doing day-to-day? Week-to-week?  Will you really like doing it? Will your routine involve directly contributing or managing an activity? Will you be closer or further from the consumers of your work? Do your interests lie strongly with 20% of the job, but you view the remaining 80% as drudgery? Will the routine involve working independently or as part of a team, and which do you prefer? Does the majority of the role involve synchronizing, synthesizing, or socializing activities (see my “Musings on Meetings” blog post) ?  Will you be able to affect or change the routine?

Get to the all facts about the routine nature of the opportunity.

Remuneration

Not everything is about money, but it no doubt plays a factor in deciding whether an opportunity is a fit.  Will the base compensation be commensurate with the role, responsibilities, and expected routine you’ll have to undertake?  How negotiable is the base compensation model?  Will you be happy with the role, responsibilities, and routine but just cannot afford to do it?  The preceding above facts about an opportunity may all be perfect, but if in the end the remuneration cannot help you make ends meet, you need to be clear on what you might be sacrificing for what otherwise seems like a perfect fit.

Not getting paid or not getting paid enough shouldn’t outright deter you from a job, but make that choice consciously.

The previous four factors tend to straightforwardly apply to objective facts of the opportunity: what’s the role/title, what am I responsible for achieving, what’s my daily work life like, and what do I get paid.  We generally get focused on those four questions when evaluating a potential job opportunity. These next four factors are more subjective, but notice that they mirror each of the previous more factual considerations.  People often leave a job because is dissatisfaction with these next issues:

Respect

More than anything else, people want to be treated with respect and often confuse this as the natural consequence of taking a specific role:  “If I were just the <insert role here>, people would listen to me”.  The reality is that people are respected (or not) independent of their role.  You are either seen as someone who creates necessary value or not. If you are selecting an opportunity because of the role with respect as the principal motivator, ask yourself what and how you’ll earn that respect versus demand it.  Likewise, if you are picking a role because you get to work with other people you deeply respect, it is likely to be a good fit because you’re already approaching the opportunity with a positive attitude and alignment toward your new colleagues. Maintaining a strong sense of respect for oneself and others is critical to building a healthy, learning work environment. A sense of respect may come not from the job itself, but from earning the respect of others outside the organization who value what you do. This is particularly true of public service roles, government employment, the armed services, humanitarian organizations, and various patient-facing healthcare roles.

Respect could involve support for a healthy work-life balance, knowing that your new work colleagues also share a passion for their job, but not at the expense of their families. If the roles, responsibilities, and routine of a new job will force you to marginalize your family or cherished personal time, or worse yet, your new colleagues will lose respect for you because of that, the new job is something to be avoided.

If you come to find that respect is a key personal motivator, be sure to interview people with whom you’d be working with to gauge compatibility. In the end, respect promotes a strong shared sense of pride and fun in the job.

Risk

Having responsibilities may be attractive, but if you are neither used to dealing with a new expected level of accountability nor with shouldering the associated risks of failure, then you need to re-assess whether the job is a good fit.  Some jobs have highly-satisfying responsibilities that are low-risk, whereas others are significantly more entrepreneurial. 

Dealing with risk is distinct from being able to work hard.  Risk is being able to execute your responsibilities in an appropriately deliberative manner often with insufficient initial information and accept greater uncertainty about the outcome.

What level of risk can you tolerate?  If any opportunity involves a lot of risk and you know yourself to be a risk-averse person, then no matter what the responsibilities you might find the job exceedingly stressful.  Conversely, if high-risk opportunities regardless of the responsibilities taps into an inner energy that drives you to give it your all and excel then weigh this dimension accordingly.  Being comfortable with high-risk is an essential ingredient to being a successful entrepreneur.  If you do not take risks, you inherently set limits on your ability to grow, innovate, or compete.

Be aware of your risk tolerance and how it will relate to your desired ability to perform.

Runway

Aside from the opportunity that lies before you, what’s next?  Does this option lead to something worthwhile and meaningful downstream?  If you have a longer-term career plan, how does taking this opportunity fit in toward fulfilling your vision?  Routine and runway go hand-in-hand. If the opportunity has routines that do not build the necessary skills nor positions you where you want to be in the future, then the runway may be too short — you’ll likely be unable to make the next transition as you hoped.

Some people often feel “trapped” in a job. This is an indication that the criteria and questions above didn’t meet expectations and now they don’t see the “lift” they hoped to get to their next career destination.

Sometimes runway feels irrelevant since you just want a change or cannot stand your current job. When you experience emotional, physical, psychological, and/or financial exhaustion with current job, a change sounds prudent.  But whatever the source of your current job fatigue or need to escape, make sure this new job makes logical sense in the your career path.

Reward

Distinct from remuneration and respect above, reward is about a perceived sense of upside.  How do I get recognized for my contribution?  If being rewarded for your efforts, energy, and inventiveness matters, then find out if the new job’s culture provides that kind of feedback.  Rewards can be anything from a regular pat on the back from your daily work colleagues or upper-management, some official non-monetary award extolling your accomplishments, or all the way up to a highly-structured incentive bonus or profit sharing plan.  If your total earnings is a mix of base compensation and some variable financial reward structure, be sure that you understand what factors are within your power to generate results you desire. Otherwise, the lure of rewards that ultimately are not achievable can lead to serious disappointment.

Understand your mindset regarding the base four job factors and your four personal considerations and you’ll make a more informed decision about your future. What’s the job, what am I responsible for achieving, what’s the day-to-day like, what will I get paid, is this the kind of respectful culture that I need, are the risks acceptable, does it makes sense with my longer term plan to take this job, and will my creativity and performance be individually acknowledged and rewarded?   Whether or not you have a “10 year” career plan or more modest ambitions, looking at opportunities through these lenses can provide clarity about whether you’ll be satisfied. Do what you love and love what you do.

Copyright © 2005-2011, Yonald Chery. All rights reserved.

 

Musings on Meetings

Several months back, a good friend asked for feedback on a chapter for a book they were writing regarding management best-practices. We got on the subject of meetings and I thought I’d share my views here.

I’m sure many of you have been in meetings where you wonder “Why am I sitting here?” and “Where is this all going?”… There may have been an agenda, or even none at all. Either way you leave feeling unclear on why you were there to begin with and become disillusioned with participating in future ones. But at least you have your smartphone; you start texting, reading email, or playing AngryBirds because you’re ‘checked out’ of the meeting.

Meetings should occur only if you need to synchronize, synthesize, or socialize either information or decisions.

Meetings can include one or more of these elements above. Meetings without this construct generally do not contribute to a larger objective, which leads to the existential angst of “Why am I sitting here?”.

‘Synchronize’ Meetings

The result of a synchronize type meeting (or just ‘sync meeting’) is alignment. For this kind of meeting, there is an explicit need to checkpoint the arrival of multiple sources of previous task information or decision results. It is a meeting driven by checklists and questions of the form: “Has ‘X’ occurred yet?”, or “Are we on the same page regarding the needs for ‘Y’ ?”.

These sync meetings are important to provide concurrent visibility regarding a lot of moving parts. Attendees should be limited to the smallest set of required producers and consumers of task or decision information. In short, only the smallest set of those that have a stake in  a successful sync should be involved.

Sync meetings can be short in time, highly structured around expectations, and ultimately used to highlight future actions items to either grow the checklist or highlight potential problems in the flow of expected information or decisions.

Information technology can play a role in eliminating many face-to-face sync meetings through the use of collaborative on-line checklists or web-based dashboards. Using such tools can alleviate the need to physically meet, but still have alignment on when a necessary condition has been satisfied in order to move forward.

‘Synthesize’ Meetings

The synthesize (or synthensis) type meeting is about execution. A synthesis meeting has the explicit focus of working collaboratively to create new value or to make a decision. A synthesis meeting likely had a sync meeting as a prerequisite, perhaps with a different set of people, to assure the synthesis meeting participants had what they needed to proceed forward with their creative task. Synthesis meetings generally involve having all parties participate concurrently in time, though they could be split into multiple on-line and off-line collaboration sub-phases.  Either way, it is a meeting type driven by the need to create certain deliverables and concludes with statements such as “We have newly produced  ’X'” or “We have made the decision to do ‘Y’”.

How you synthesize is as important as what you synthesize, since this builds the entity’s intellectual capital.  Information technology has a role here as well. Not only must we facilitate and capture the synthesis results, but equally important is to record the deliberations during synthesis as part of building a knowledge base for future decision making best-practices.

‘Socialize’ Meetings

Lastly, comes the socialize type meeting whose twin goals are awareness and clarity. Socialize meetings are about sharing information or decisions.  The goal of a socialize meeting is to push information or decisions made to those that need it, often to enable the audience to engage in their own downstream synchronize or synthesis activities.

A socialize meeting mode could be broadcast or interactive in nature.  The medium could to be physically assemble an audience for disseminating information or a decision, or via some digital means (e.g. email, message of the day, social media posting, etc).

Often such meetings require sharing not just the content to be socialized. but also provide context as a means for the consuming audience to ask questions and better understand the intent.  This is where the documenting of the how of a previous synthesis meeting can be helpful to drawn upon.

Five Fundamental Common Meeting Pitfalls

Not all meetings we participate in fit neatly into one of the bins above.   Many of us attend compound meetings, where two or more of the meeting types are combined.

But there are five common meeting pitfalls, namely:

1. Why am I here? (e.g. not understanding the type of meeting you’re in)
2. Skipping the synchronize meeting
3. Jumping from synchronize to socialize (e.g. skipping synthesis)
4. Forgetting to socialize
5. Avoiding necessary re-work

Why Am I here?

Understanding the type of meeting you are in helps the participants frame their expectations, focuses the time, and provides a crisp understanding of what is to be accomplished.  Every meeting leader should articulate the type(s) of the meeting and its purpose.

Skipping the Synchronize Meeting

A common pitfall is to fail to understand what information or decisions needs to be occur before moving on to a synthesis meeting.  Because an opportunity to answer questions like “Are we all on the same page?” or “Do we have what we need to proceed?” get skipped, the scope of the synthesis meeting could be missing critical knowledge and go off to do the wrong thing.  This is most commonly manifest as not understanding the customer or various stakeholder needs and then end up delivering disappointing results.

Jumping from Synchronize to Socialize (e.g. skipping Synthesis)

Often there is a tendency to jump from synchronize to socialize meeting types; that is, to go from collecting information or previous decisions without a deliberative intermediate synthesis step.   If this is happening then it could be you are having too many meetings or throttling organizational effectiveness by delaying communication. The synchronize activity may have been unnecessary and the work product or decision should have been going directly to some part of the socialize audience to begin with.

It is fine to go socialize synchronized information; that assumes there was some thinking about how to do that first. But if you skip that synthesis, you will socialize that no value-add or decision was made to audience; they’ve be reluctant to attend future meetings. A rush to socialize what’s been gathered can become a free-for-all, where the audience turns the gathering into an one-the-spot synthesis meeting without the all the facts, charter, or authority to do so. Either way, it’s a mess.  At minimum, go through the step of thinking who and why someone would have a stake in you’re going to go from synchronize to socialize.

Forgetting to Socialize

Particularly in fast paced work environments, where there is a need to sync and synth rapidly and iteratively, we can forget to socialize intermediate information and decisions, particularly external to the team.  For small entities, this can be managed informally, but when there are known inter-dependencies between projects, forgetting to socialize means there is limited external access and visibility into potentially important work products or decisions.

This becomes critical as an organization grows because local work progress is being optimized at the expense of global understanding. Socializing is a critical organizational social function: to push information forward to known necessary consumers, rather than inadvertently fostering an organizational culture where information becomes protected or requires inefficient or repeated polling to find out what’s going on.

Avoiding Necessary Re-work

Whenever any of the previous four pitfalls occur, it is critical to identify them and do re-work as soon as possible.  Instead, because of schedule or other related constraints, there is a tendency to plow ahead anyway. Common harbingers of a potential need to do re-work now is when you hear: “We’ll fix this later” or “We need to keep moving forward”.

Depending on the scale and scope of the effort, that might be an acceptable and well calculated risk management decision. Many management and engineering practices encourage working toward “good enough” and quickly iterate with the stakeholder or customer to get feedback. In such cases, rapid re-work is already a part of their methodology.

But proceeding forward knowing that re-work is necessary on larger-scale efforts often means committing more resources toward a goal with a growing accumulation of often uncommunicated flaws and assumptions.  Re-work becomes increasingly more complex and expensive downstream, triggering a cascade of additional re-work avoidance decisions, and commits the process to releasing unsatisfactory deliverables.

Making Meetings Work

A meeting can be anything from a one-on-one hallway conversation, an email thread between two or more people, a traditional physical or virtual on-line collaborative meeting, all the way up to broadcasting information or decisions to an audience of millions.

Bottom line: understand what type of meeting you are holding or attending, synchronize for alignment, capture synthesis processes and results, and communicate content & context to your audience.

You will set a cultural tone where all meetings are productive and people look forward to them because there’s a sense that things are well-run and they are a part of making that happen.

Copyright © 2011, Yonald Chery. All rights reserved.

 

Chess vs. Poker

It occurred to me recently that our current economic meltdown is the result of an on-going business culture war. Simply put: it’s chess versus poker.

In chess, nothing is hidden from either player during the game, except for the strategy and experience they each bring to the table. Both players try to simultaneously out maneuver their opponent while the other is watching.  When a game is decisively won, both players learn from the experience; the victor in applying a winning strategy and the vanquished in learning to see it coming the next time. To win or lose in the face of such transparency breeds respect for the game and good sportsmanship.

In poker, success depends on deception.  Regardless of the quality of your hand, your entire strategy is around maintaining an informational asymmetry to succeed in the face of chance against your opponents. The critical difference between victory and defeat depends on your talent at reading your opponent’s behaviors while masking your own intentions — regardless of whether or not your hand is worthy.

You can recognize the “chess players” in business. These are the folks you typically enjoy doing business with. You have an open bilateral conversation about goals and objectives, both short- and long-term.  You willingly share information about the state of your business and vice-versa recognizing that the more your vendor/partner/investor/customer knows without being surprised, the greater the trust and commitment especially during hard times. With chess player competitors, you’re forced to up your game by improving your product/service features, quality, performance, and support — and you garner a healthy respect for their agility and presence in the marketplace.

And I’m sure you’ve all dealt with a “poker player” at some point. Someone from the moment you encounter them, you keep one hand on your wallet and rush to wash the other one after shaking hands.  The type of business person that makes you wonder whether you were treated fairly or with whom you are hesitant to share too much with for fear of losing more ground.  The type of vendor/partner/investor/customer that treats you transactionally and who values little else about you.

Wall Street always struck me as a “poker culture”: how much can we get away with, whether or not what we have is really valuable. The dot-Com bubble, MBSs, CDS, and the likes of Bernard Madoff – are all examples of business professionals pushing a system to win the current hand knowing full well the house of cards will come crashing down at the end of the game.

Perhaps as a result of this financial crisis, we’ll see a new breed of entrepreneurs who will learn to play “chess” again.  Entrepreneurs who will be forced to return to solid business practices and product development priorities that serve to elevate industry and commerce as a whole. There will be winners and losers, but the latter will get better and get back in the game to succeed in the future and mentor the next generation.

So, what do you play? Chess or poker?