August 12th, 2010 by Scott
It’s been said that, “a good manager is someone who isn’t worried about their own career but rather the careers of those who work for them.” Finding that quality in a prospective manager can be difficult. Ignoring it can resign you to unnecessarily slowing your career down and to having a frustrating experience. When a manager is not concerned about your career invariably developmental activity doesn’t follow either. They are unlikely to appropriately set your objectives, work with you to identify a good development plan or to tell other people in the organisation how good you are.
Two situations seem likely. Either you are looking for a new job in which case you can take this thinking to heart immediately. Or, you are in a job where your manager doesn’t care about your career and you need to find a way to manage them to get them concerned about where you are heading.
Many people tackle their job hunt looking for exactly the right role in the right type of organisation with the right kind of reputation. My experience is that having a fast track career is far more about linking together with the right person and building a great relationship. So how do you find out if they are the right person? There isn’t one right thing to do. The key during your search is to keep the idea of getting the right manager at the top of mind and to be really thorough in asking them questions. At interview find out about their management style and how they like to work with people. See if you can talk to people in their team and ask them questions. Get as much data as possible to make a judgement.
The tougher part is when you are already working for a manager who isn’t interested in helping your career. The thing to change is your mindset. I always have the mindset that my manager is my customer. I stop thinking about the service I want to provide and make sure that I find out what the customer needs or (more importantly with a manager) wants. How do they like things to be done, what are their areas of interest and what type of people do they like to work with? Armed with that information, how do I then adapt my style, work focus and effort to make sure that what they want as my customer is met.
Now, I know that some people will be unhappy with this approach. I hear people object: “I’m not losing my integrity”, “But I work for someone who is impossible” or “they always want to do the wrong thing”. And I agree. I’m not saying that when you are working with a manager who doesn’t care about your career that you are going to want to do this. Your views on them may be absolutely true. But (and please forgive me for saying this) so what? If your objective is to advance your career, you need to see the bigger picture. Showing that you can work with any difficult person, any demanding, even unresponsive customer so that they give you positive feedback will significantly advance your career. More senior people in your organisation will know your boss’s shortcomings and be impressed that you were able to successfully work with than them rather than getting bitter or giving up.
Tags: Adding Value, Career Strategies, Career Tips, Careers, Manager relationships, Self-direction
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May 14th, 2010 by Anne
Still thinking about my earlier blog, on focusing people on making their schemes profitable.
Someone asked me how a graduate on short placements can add value, if they are constantly learning the ropes. And it’s true that if they have 4 placements in a year they will probably be less than half as effective over the year as if they had a single day job.
I think there are 3 ways graduates should be challenged to add value in a placement.
Delivery
Getting stuck in and delivering. Or freeing up someone from boring chores like photocopying so that they can add more value with their time.
Innovation
Often there are things the team wants to push forward, but hasn’t the time – picking these up and delivering is something that challenges graduates problem-solving abilities. Also they may spot some quick wins – for example, a graduate who created an excel spreadsheet that shortened the time engineers spent on recalculating figures due to design changes.
Networking
Graduates can solve a lot of problems and source a lot of best practice just by using their network from previous placements and through their scheme. A blanket email of “Can anyone put me in touch with someone who knows about XYZ’ can be hugely helpful to a team.
There are other ways as well, like being a conduit to senior managers who can get grass roots feedback, but these are more politically sensitive.
It is perfectly possible, however, to ask graduates to review each placement in terms of the above three ways of adding value.
Tags: Adding Value, Careers, Graduates, Innovation, Learning, Networking, Placements, ROI
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April 28th, 2010 by Anne
Yesterday I was reading a discussion about ‘how to make graduate schemes profitable’. The main discussion was around firstly how this can work when graduates are being trained for a consultancy operation, and secondly how it can be done where this is not the case and graduates are joining a large organisation, as Leadership, HR, Finance, IT, logistics or other trainees.
The first is relatively easy, as the mechanisms of charging for time are already there, although there were some interesting thoughts on how to ensure graduates work is linked to their Directors’ KPIs. The second is much more difficult, and discussion was mainly around putting graduates on projects where they can deliver measurable benefits.
As always, my immediate reaction is to think about self-directed solutions. Why don’t graduates make their schemes profitable?
Well firstly because most graduates have no idea how much a scheme costs, or even how to calculate the true cost of 10 graduates meeting for a Learning Set day. When I’ve shown graduates how to work this out, they are mostly shocked – and immediately much more serious about making sure such days deliver value for money.
They also don’t know how to calculate the value they add. How do you measure the value of a community consultation, or helping managers with disciplinary processes, or completing a financial audit? Fact is, most professionals and managers don’t know how to do this either. Most never even think this way, so graduates will not absorb this by osmosis. These graduates (and professionals) are lacking a key skill; how to measure the impact of what they do.
If they can’t measure the impact of what they do, how likely are they to reach senior management levels? How likely are they to win awards for their ground-breaking work?
It’s a pretty critical career skill, too. People who can quantify the value they have added, are much more likely to be selected to higher responsibilities. This is true whether your organisation’s purpose is to make money, or to deliver the biggest result for taxpayers’ money.
The secret to creating a sustainably profitable graduate or high potential scheme that is never threatened by budget cuts is to equip people with the skills to measure added value, and reinforce the use of these skills regularly. This can be done easily by redesigning standard systems and processes (such as performance appraisal) to reinforce the message and collect data.
If you’re interested in talking about making your schemes profitable, talk to me!
Tags: Adding Value, Careers, Graduates, Learning, ROI, Self-direction, Value-for-money
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