How to Network When You’re Not a Natural

Years ago when I was exploring setting up my own consultancy I sought advice from people who had been running their own businesses. One common message I heard was about the value and criticality of networking. Having worked in in the same company for so long, I never had to worry about networking. I was fortunate in that my next opportunities always came to me through mentors or those more senior to me in the organization. I never had to actually go through the process of networking. My network was built organically through work interactions.

When I left banking to start consulting, I was thrust into the realm of networking: trying to synthesize all the advice I’d gotten from master networkers about perfecting my pitch, being authentic, networking without expectation, etc., etc. and let me say, I was pretty bad at it. First, I’m in introvert…so there’s that. Second, I was raised in a “be seen, not heard” household so I was trained not to be a bother. Third, networking was no longer optional…it was a must putting added pressure on my interactions. With anything, practice and repetition helped build the muscle I needed to get comfortable with networking. Over time, I overcame the anxiety of networking using these principles as a guide:

Pick a Role Model – You probably have someone in your orbit who is great at networking. Find that person and emulate them. I know lots of people who can walk up to anyone in a room and start a conversation. These are the natural networkers! Observe how they do it and try it out. Someone else’s methods might not suit you 100% but chances are there’s something in their networking repertoire that can work for you.

Practice – There is no shortage of formal networking groups or panels and events with networking time built into their agendas. Most networking groups allow a few free visits up front, while panels can charge a small fee for attendance. These forums are great opportunities to force yourself to interact and talk about who you are and what you do. Added benefits of the formal networking group? You might find yourself a role model! And you’ll also get to hear different kinds of elevator pitches to find the one that suits you best.

Prepare to Fail – I’ve tried so many different ways to talk about what I do and at this point I can tell what goes over well and what doesn’t. Doing this repeatedly has helped me to not take the fails too personally. I’m disappointed, sure, but I don’t question my existence or my skills! Failure is a part of life and while it mostly sucks, it’s a sure way to improve.

Patience, Please! – It’s best to think about networking as an investment, not immediate gratification. Many networking conversations you have will lead to nothing, some will lead to another connection and conversation, a few may turn into a job offer or a project. Go into networking as an opportunity to learn, to build your community and gain insights.

Networking is an experience where you’ll get out of it what you put into it. You have to do the work. Lastly, don’t forget to use your networking as an opportunity to help other people out. To build meaningful connections, you have to be willing to give of yourself whether it’s your time, your knowledge or your own power to refer.

How to Dissect a Problem to Find Root Cause

I’m going to get personal for a sec. I was talking to my dad the other night. He mentioned that once his car lease was up he wouldn’t lease another car. He would give up driving all together. Through the course of our conversation he said over and over how he wasn’t sure what to do because without a car he’d never be able to run out for a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk. He’d go back and forth between the notion of finding an inexpensive car that he could use to do those kinds of errands and giving up driving completely. This debate was enhanced by an endless loop about bread and milk. Since Dad was on speakerphone, my husband was able to logically interject ideas about taking ride shares (which are in abundance and inexpensive where Dad lives) or tracking how often the spur of the moment milk or bread runs occur and figuring out the relative costs of ride shares versus a monthly car payment plus insurance. These were all very sound ideas, but as any expert problem solver and/or someone with aging parents knows, Dad’s concerns had zero to do with costs or supermarket runs…they had to do with loss of control and autonomy and what that means in the grand scheme of things.

I share this because my account above is a real-life example of how easily root cause can be hidden when you’re trying to solve a problem. What is being presented to us, whether it’s in work or in life, doesn’t always reveal what’s causing the issue in the first place. As a problem solver, I consider myself one-part detective, one-part analyst and one-part confidant. Whether I’m untangling a mess at work or for a friend, I’m taking this triple-pronged approach to finding root cause:

Detective: When presented with a problem to solve, the first step is to hunt for as much information as possible. I’ll do this in a variety of ways like conducting stakeholder interviews, gathering customer feedback, performing process time-studies, pulling reports, doing marketplace assessments. The tactics will all depend on which problem I’m trying to solve. The goal here is to gather data.

Analyst: Once I have the data, it’s time to dig into it to find trends, gaps, etc. to build the facts. I often find that when I’m gathering anecdotal information, it’s often skewed by the people suppling the information. I’ll get into that more deeply when I talk about the third prong. This is why the analysis stage is so essential, to gather hard facts that can support any ultimate solution I may come up with. Plus, it’s hard to refute facts when they are staring you in the face.

Confidant: When I’m working with a team or an individual, I always make a point of listening. And I don’t mean just listening to hear someone out. I mean listening to understand. To really get a sense on where the team is or where an individual is with a particular problem. Are they bringing fear into it? Job insecurity? Anger? There is an emotional component to work that is as real as any you find in a personal situation. Listening with an understanding ear helps me get a better read on root cause and preps me for building solutions that will work within a given environment. It also helps the people with whom I’m working feel more comfortable sharing what’s really troubling them. It’s a win-win for building trust and getting work across the finish line.

What other roles can a problem solver play when looking for root cause? Let’s discuss!

How to Stay Motivated When You’d Rather Stay in Bed

Have you ever found yourself with a mile-long to do list, deadlines looming, friends and family looking for your attention and all you want to do is curl up and hide? Is this a rhetorical question? Of course you have! We all have! Especially now with a global pandemic, a presidential election, social unrest, unemployment, layoffs, pay cuts, bonus checks evaporating. It’s enough to make you set the snooze button to the year 2021. It’s a nice thought, but we have to keep moving forward. But, how? It’s not easy, even for me who bills herself as a productivity expert! I do, however, have a few tricks up my sleeve for staying motivated.

The first step to building your motivation tactics is figuring out what motivates you. Is it money, power, recognition, helping others, giving back? When you understand which motivators resonate with you it’ll be easier to drum up ways to keep yourself motivated. Think about it, when you’re managing staff, Management Principles 101 will tell you to figure out what motivates each member of your team and lean into those things. We have to do that same exercise for ourselves.

Here are the ways that I stay motivated, hopefully they can help you too:

Music – Is there any easier way to get pumped up than by listening to your favorite song? The sports world has the use of music as a motivator down to a science. This is probably simplest trick and easiest to execute. Make a playlist of songs that make you feel good and dispense as needed!

Visual Prompts – I’m a big believer of visual cues as inspiration and, dare I say, vision. You don’t need to have a vision board but at least have a mental picture of people you admire, places you’d like to visit and things you’d like to achieve/buy/do.

Mandatory Downtime – Give yourself an hour, a day even, to be a slug. I know lots of business people who never seem to take a minute off. I admire their ability to always be moving, closing deals and growing their businesses. One thing they all have in common is they take time for their workouts or walks or meditation. They may always be physically moving, but mentally they’re giving themselves time to disconnect.

Objective Reviews – Feedback from others is a powerful motivator. We are all our own worst critics, so take some time to check in with a mentor or a friend and get their point of view on YOU. There have been many times when I thought I’ve sucked at something or I was failing miserably and then someone will tell me how I’ve helped them solve a problem or kept them calm during a chaotic work situation. These are powerful reminders that people see us in a way more positive light than we see ourselves.

Optimism – And speaking of positivity, skewing towards optimism is a surefire way to stay motivated. There are dozens of articles on how negative thinking affects the brain and how chronic negativity will ultimately reduce our ability to see things in a positive light. If optimism and positivity don’t come naturally for you, you must practice and make it a habit. Do those daily affirmations or write down one positive thing about your day. It’s impossible to completely banish negativity but these simple acts can shift you toward more positive thinking.

What tricks can you add to the list? Let’s discuss!

What I Learned from My Bad Bosses

Leadership has been on my mind lately. With all that’s going on in the world the question keeps coming up. Where is the leadership? Who is guiding us through our crises? It’s caused me to reflect on my own leadership skills and on the managers and leaders I’ve encountered throughout my career. I had 18 managers during my corporate career and only six of them would fall into the bad category. And bad is a scale. For me it ranges from bosses who I’d hide from to bosses who were completely harmless but totally ineffective. The rest were great or neutral in terms of their management skills, their ability to lead a team and their interactions with their peers or direct reports.

I've learned from everyone who has managed me. The bad ones, however, left an indelible mark.  Along with funny anecdotes I can tell or inside jokes I can share with my former colleagues, I took away tangible skills from those experiences. If it weren’t for these bad bosses, I wouldn’t have honed these essential skills:

Network Building: When you’re working for someone who won’t be your advocate or your coach, it’s important to make connections with other leaders inside or outside your organization. Bad bosses typically don’t leave so it’s up to you to make a move elsewhere. The best way to do that is through networking. I made a point of getting to know people outside of my department and built relationships with my manager’s peers. And I always got to know my boss’ boss. These are all no brainers. Letting others see your skills and get to know you for yourself will give you plenty of opportunity to eventually make a move. Having a network to leverage is important in any work situation, good or bad.

Feedback Seeking: A lot of my interactions with bad bosses were confidence killers. I remember one moment when a manager who’d known me for all of 30 days told me that I didn’t seemed stressed enough at work. To him, that was a bad thing! It meant I wasn’t working hard enough, which was not the case. I had another boss who "no-showed" every single one of our one-on-one meetings and never returned a message or an email from me. Confidence killed! Look for feedback from your bad boss and from others. Get a broad view of how you’re doing and take an introspective look at your own performance. When you’re working in a bad environment it’s easy to let the toxicity of that situation color your view of how you’re doing. Getting feedback and input can help give you a balanced view of how you’re doing and where you can make any necessary adjustments.

Career Management: One common thread I saw with all of my bad bosses is they were out to make their own career marks. They were ambitious and driven. They were all about them, which is an important lesson in work. There are some rare cases where a mentor or an advocate will help usher you along in your career. But most often, you’re on your own. Your boss, especially the bad one, is not going to help you get the next promotion/raise/big project. You have to be your own advocate, ask for what you want and make your own career moves. If you don’t know how to do it, there are so many resources available from blog posts to podcasts to career coaches that will offer practical advice for navigating the chess game that is your career.

Do you have bad boss stories to share? Let’s discuss!

Three Tips for Getting Unstuck

Most of us have found ourselves in the following situation: you’ve got tons to do, the pressure is on and you want to crawl into bed and hide. Whether it’s in your work life or personal life, it’s easy to get stuck and hard to get out of it.

 When I see clients or see myself, for that matter, stuck with something I go immediately into discovery mode to figure out how to get moving. What’s interesting with this type of problem solving is you already know what the problem is but the why and how are often unclear. And we like to keep it that way, because staying stuck can be comfortable!

 Sometimes, simply working through this mental routine will be enough to get unstuck, sometimes external resources are needed. In either case, these tips will help get you into the mode of forward momentum.

Seek to Understand: The key to getting unstuck is figuring out why you’re stuck in the first place. This is all about self-examination. Are you being lazy? Are you out of your depth? Are you afraid? The next dimension here is to ask yourself whether this is a recurring or one-time issue. The resolutions could be very different depending on that answer. For example, do you always have trouble building PowerPoint presentations, or are you struggling with a specific one? Understanding the why will propel you into figuring out how to get unstuck.

 One caution, self-examination can expand quickly, so be sure to stay focused on the immediate problem. If you suddenly find yourself questioning your career choices or your feelings for your boss, take a breath and refocus on the matter at hand. Those larger questions are probably best dealt with through a conversation with a mentor, trusted advisor or therapist.

Plot Your Course: Now that you know why you’re stuck, the solutioning can move very rapidly. You’ve figured out you don’t have PowerPoint skills? Take a class, delegate, or hire a freelancer! You need content for your specific presentation? Go to a subject matter expert for input! Unlocking the underlying concern – the why – will drive you toward the appropriate and tangible solutions. The answers can be very simple and obvious but action without understanding is a recipe for getting stuck again down the road.

 Be sure not to over-solution. Having too many fixes in front of you can be paralyzing. Find ones that are easily executable and aligned with your deadlines. The point is to move forward, not bombard yourself with so many options you wind up stuck for different reasons. If that does happen, keep running this routine with some refinement to your solutioning.

Celebrate Yourself: When we’re stuck getting through a problem or a task it’s easy to get down and be our own worst critics. It’s important to look back at past successes or past moments of forward progress to remind ourselves that we CAN get ourselves unstuck. We can do it! If you’ve gotten unstuck before, chances are you can and will do it again. The more we repeat the process the better we will be at it. The more we train ourselves to understand what’s holding us back there’s no telling how far we will go.

 Do you have another approach for getting unstuck? Let’s discuss!

The Simple Dos and Don’ts of Prioritization

In my last blog I wrote about the importance of prioritizing to help you maximize your time. We prioritize all day, every day without even knowing it. In business, more often than not, we’re asked to prioritize our work, our people, our spend…you name it. In my advisory work, I often help organizations and teams create their quarterly or yearly priorities. There are simple tricks to use and hang ups to avoid to help in the process whether you’re prioritizing professionally or personally.

Prioritization Dos

Tie your priorities to your goals – always ask yourself if your individual priority is helping you achieve one of your desired goals or objectives. If it doesn’t, it may still be a valid priority but it shouldn’t rank highly on your list.

Choose your levers – understand what you’re using to judge your priorities – is it time, money, resources, brand integrity, competition? Tuning in to these factors is integral to sorting through and ranking your work.  

Categorize your tasks – it’s always helpful to see if you’re prioritizing across a diverse set of To Dos or a or within a set that’s similar. For example, if you’re ranking a group of projects that need to be completed in order of priority it’s useful to prioritize them relative to one another, especially when you have finite resources as a lever.

Prioritization Don’ts

Overcomplicate your methodology – sometimes prioritization comes down to gut feel, sometimes you need a weighted matrix to score your priorities and rank them. Whichever route you take, keep it simple and easy to articulate or defend.

Get stuck – don’t get hung up prioritizing and re-prioritizing until you get your list absolutely perfect. The point is to give yourself, or your team, a guide for action and doing.

Make it all top priority – this almost goes without saying, but not everything can be number one on the list. If you believe in your prioritization methodology, trust the outcome.

Need help building your prioritization methodology or want to talk about how you prioritize? Contact me!

For Women, by Women: Influential Career Advice

Women in the workplace have been a recent focus in the media, bringing to light broadscale inequities and archaic (and often dangerous) practices and cultures that need to shift. 

Change hardly ever occurs without challenges—and women are facing them head-on in order to ensure progress. Given this, I felt it was important to connect with these events by sharing four influential contributions from women in leadership that have greatly impacted my life.

#1) “What Kind of Employee Do You Want to Be?”

In the early stages of my career, a female mentor asked me this question. More specifically, she asked me if I wanted to be the type of employee who:

•Goes with the flow;

•Challenges authority; or

•Is a combination of the two?

Understanding the answer dictates the way you interact, carry yourself, and lead. In thinking about her question, I decided then that I wanted to be the person who challenges, pushes, and creates change. Over time, I began to understand that the answer to this question is fluid and that positions may need to be tailored depending on a specific circumstance. 

And so, the usefulness of this question goes well beyond the immediate answer. It helps you choose your path while concurrently understanding its potential impact on your success and allowing you to stay true to yourself.

#2) “You Gotta Cop an Attitude”

I can remember instances at the beginning of my career in which I began to take on more responsibility by handling tasks that I wasn’t sure I was qualified for. A female manager of mine significantly shifted my viewpoint by sharing her version of ‘Fake it ‘till you make it.’ 

This simple trick allowed me to project confidence as I was growing the confidence I needed! I began to understand that if you want to be treated like a leader, you have to act like one (whether you initially believe you are one or not!).

#3) “You Don’t Owe Anyone an Explanation”

About 15 years into my career, an executive at my company reframed my apologetic tendencies. Many women tend to give excuses or reasons for the things that they do or need. For example, explaining why they need to leave early, etc.

Her point was that detail is not always necessary; and it is up to you whether certain information is important to articulate. When your team and colleagues trust you, the details won’t matter—all that matters is that you get the job done. 

#4) “When It’s a Choice Between Your Job and Your Family, There Is No Choice”

This piece of advice became especially relevant when I became a parent. You cannot drop the ball at home, with your kids, your spouse, or partner. The work will always be there tomorrow, and it’s important to use your judgment with this balance in mind.

 When my son was a baby, I would leave work at lunch to take him to a Mommy & Me class. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to organize my schedule in a way that allowed me to do this activity with him. He’s 10 years old now; and I am thankful I prioritized time with him.   

I hope these four tips will help you in your career, as they have helped me. I’d love to hear how your mentors have impacted you along the way. Contact me today to share your thoughts.