Here is this week’s interesting and thoughtful articles about working in cubicles…

My Nightmare Interviews with Google — Here on Cube Rules, we talk about how to answer the weakness interview question, all questions have three answers and others. Google interviews differently. Here’s a taste.

140 Google Interview Questions — Hey, if you are going to have an interview with Google, you might as well do your interview preparation from these. From the Seattle Interview Coach.

Performance Management And The New Consumer of Work — Brand for Talent talks through another indictment of performance reviews and possible ways to do raises without the reviews. A thoughtful article.

Top 10 Secrets of a Great Senior-Level Executive Resume — Meg Guiseppi knows her stuff. Cubicle Warriors can look hard at the ten secrets — then apply every single one of them to their own resume.

Job Search Tip: Think and Act Like a Gourmet Chef – When you are enjoying a great dining experience, see how your job seeking role compares to that of the Chef. But I’m a foodie, so maybe this meant more to me!

I hope you have a great upcoming week.

Morning over Lake of Ägeri by Tinos Augenblicke

Enjoy your weekend.

The job search is moving from art form to science. With the changes in the job market, plus how companies are posting for positions, what you did in 2001 to find a job won’t work in 2010. Or, at least, not work as well.

Cubicle Warriors know that when you have six people competing for every available position, the beginning of an inefficient job search begins when you start looking for a job without having a job search strategy for you. In the past, it was simple — check the newspaper, check a big job board, get the job.

That was then. This is now and the world changed.

Your job search strategy needs to focus on three different areas that will personalize your job search:

Job boards still work — if you use the right ones

If you want to get lost in Monster, be my guest. Far better to use job boards that are targeted to the types of jobs that you have skills and experience that you can use to focus your search.

While I don’t know the exact number, it is safe to say that many job postings on job boards are being used to see what type of talent responds to the posting with no job opening in sight. Companies and their recruiters do this to find talent, judge the level of competition for the job, to see the competitive salary requirements (read: lower) and to see what competitors employees might be looking for a change.

But you can still create employer and recruiter interest in your skills and work through job boards and using ones focused on your career is the better way to use them.

Plus, if your targeted searches on the job boards brings up hundreds of good jobs, it tells you one thing. If your targeted searches used to bring up hundreds of job openings and they now bring up one, that tells you something else.

And don’t overlook directly going to company web sites to see job openings and register with their site. It makes sense that companies will post their jobs there first since it costs them little and they can see the unfiltered responses for their effort. This is especially true of medium to small companies who want to minimize cash outlays for job boards.

Social networks are in the mix

Social networks are increasingly good ways to to know about and find potential openings. LinkedIn is probably the best known for jobs and they have their job postings.

But another way of using LinkedIn is targeting one of your linked associate’s connections as a gateway to a company. For example, if there is an opening at XYZ company, you can search your linked associates to see if they have any connections through LinkedIn with people that work for that company. A competent introduction is done and now you are talking to a real live person instead of trying to beat a computer at accepting your resume for a position you are qualified to do.

Twitter is trying to be a gateway into the job market as well. Searching for jobs or following recruiters in your area of expertise can provide leads that you might not see through the traditional job boards. And, through examining the posts on your type of job, you will get a sense of the market.

Now companies are starting to place positions on their own Fan pages on Facebook. This is yet another way of avoiding the fees for different job boards, advertising in other media or even using recruiters to fill positions. Although, in my opinion, a good recruiter is a great asset for a company to use to find good people for job openings.

And if you don’t know how to use these social media tips or wonder what all the fuss is about, it’s not 2001 anymore. Time to learn.

Networking still rocks

A good friend of mine just ended an eight-day job search by accepting an offer that was known to him by one of his former co-workers. The candidate walked into the door with a recommendation from that former co-worker as well.

Cubicle Warriors know they get an unfair advantage going into job interviews when the job opening is unadvertised and accompanied by a recommendation from someone in their network. Wouldn’t you like to have that advantage?

The key question is how to utilize your network so that you can help people as well as your network helping you. There are tools that can help you manage your network (and I don’t mean your LinkedIn network or your Facebook or your Twitter network — but your network…).

My favorite tool is Jibber Jobber. It is a tool that not only helps you do a job search, but also helps you manage your career. Networking and managing your network is part of this comprehensive tool. Remember, our job environment is one where people need to know when they think their job will end and will continuously need to know of open positions in their field. Jibber Jobber is a great tool to do just that.

Another good tool is UpMo, which stands for upward mobility. Basically, this tool is used to help you identify your network and then looks at your career goals. Based on how you do your work, UpMo then provides you a networking pattern that can be used to consistently communicate with your network and help you reach networking goals.

The point here is that ad hoc networking doesn’t cut it anymore. Cubicle Warriors know that constantly building, maintaining and communicating with their business network is one area where they have control over their career. Having a robust business network gets them into the know about positions, jobs and opportunities faster than those who simply think networking is where you hand out your business card at a meeting somewhere.

Using these networking tools gives Cubicle Warriors a big advantage over others who don’t.

You can’t job search like it was 2001 anymore

If you want to inefficiently use your time to find a job and have poor results, you can do what you did in 2001. People focused on their careers adapt to the changes in the job market as well as embrace the tools that support the job search.

Are you still doing a job search like it was 2001? Or have you ramped up your game so that you are ready for 2010?

Going through some comments on an article about the need to connect with your manager to learn about how they manage the work, you can get some great additional insight on a topic. Of course, you have to wade through the crap too. Here’s a choice for having the wrong attitude about connecting with your manager (names and links deliberately removed):

It’s not my job to connect to my boss

I’m a tech professional, renting my skills to my employer. It’s boss’s job to connect to me.

Do you expect your plumber to connect to you? No! You connect to him, and tell him to to fix your plumbing. Then you pay him, and that’s it.

As a manager of this person, you’d have a tough time getting any advocacy from me. And if I were a coworker of this person, I’d think you’d bring a big fat zero to contributing to the team.

Now, I can hear the whole thing about how “it’s always the employee’s responsibility to do everything and management’s job to do nothing” stuff. But that’s wrong too (besides, this site’s point of view is the person working in the cube, not the manager…).

Business is social and people need to connect to get things done. Whether your manager tries meshing their approach to the work with you first in a new job or reorganization or you do go first, the connecting needs to get done.

Here’s what’s going on:

Part of your hiring was connecting to your manager’s approach to work

The third question a hiring manager needs answering is determining if you will fit into the current team. Because bringing on a new team member disrupts the team and the work.

Now, I think we get that the manager that hires us won’t be our manager forever. Reorganizations and different jobs happen. But the need for having compatibility with your hiring manager doesn’t go away simply because you have a new manager. Your manager’s relationship with you is critical for getting the best work to fit your strengths, reducing your stress on the job (”hate my manager” adds stress…) and getting positioned for raises and promotions.

Whether you initiate that connection or your manager does is not relevant. It needs to happen.

You need to know your manager early on after starting

Whether you connect with your manager after the manager hires you or if you connect after a reorganization, it is important to go through the process early. Why?

Well, first, the earlier in the relationship you understand how your manager works, the better able you are to fit into that style. In addition, you have a far better chance of influencing how the manager should manage the work if you try and work through that early. You work what you can control and influence and you can influence a manager earlier in their time as your manager more than later.

How long will your job last?

Every job has a life span. It could be a 3-month project where you are on contract or it could be two years before the work is done. You should be deciding how long a position lasts so you can proactively look for a new job when the current one is ending according to your criteria.

Well, managers make a big difference in how long a position lasts. As in, I hate my manager so I’m done. Or, I hated my manager and now I have this new one — what should I do?

A change in managers is a big change in your outlook for how long a job lasts. The change can be the beginning of a wonderful time in your work or the worst stint in a job in a long time, all in the same job but by having different managers. By figuring out how your manager approaches work, you are that much closer to knowing, right now, how long your job will last, putting yourself in a position to do something about it.

Cubicle Warriors don’t give up their power in a job

To ignore trying to make a connection with a new manager because you are “rented skills” and the manager should go first is abdicating your power to decide much of your own fate on the job. Everyone has the ability to influence their manager, just as a manager has the ability to influence your work and job skills.

Unfortunately, in this work environment, it is sometimes easy to simply think of yourself as only “rented skills” to perform work. In fact, I think you should look at what you do as rented skills because it forces you to think through what work you like doing and knowing the work environment where you do your best work.

After a change in managers, if that work and the work environment change for the worse, you need to discern what has changed early on, figure out how long the job will last, and use your power to change the situation — or your job — for the better.

Managers have a formal way of evaluating an employee’s work — the performance review. Most people working in cubes don’t have the same formal option to evaluate their manager, but that doesn’t mean employees are not rating managers. Employees do that all the time.

You can have twenty-seven ways in an article like this one to evaluate a manager and some of that is good to do. But you can frame almost every managerial evaluation by people that work in cubes when they ask questions in just three ways:

All employees ask themselves three questions when starting a new job, says Joanie Ruge, senior vice president of Adecco Group North America: Is my boss competent? Can I trust them? And, do they care about me?

“Throughout a good economy, a bad economy, a new job and old job, they’re going to be asking those three things pretty consistently,” she says. “We need bosses to realize and leaders to realize that those are the traits [employees] are looking for and they need to demonstrate those traits. People that demonstrate those traits have the highest retention rates across the board.”

Not surprisingly, the article notes that most managers fail when these three questions get answered. Especially when managers have the opinion that people should be grateful just having a job — so they don’t need to worry about how they treat their people. It is this simple:

Sunny Claggett, corporate vice president of talent management and organizational development at Cleveland-based CBIZ, Inc., says that the solution to this attitude problem is simple: If managers want their people to think they’re honest, loyal and trustworthy, they’ve got to act honest, loyal and trustworthy.

What matters are business results. Plus a candid understanding how employees, who supply the work to serve the company’s customers, are treated counts just as much as results.

Part of being a great manager is working through problems, turning theory and ideas into practice and following methodologies to some great conclusion. Sometimes, though, we get lost in the weeds of Six Sigma, Lean, ISO standards and Utility Computing to the point where we think that business isn’t done through people anymore, only processes.

But business is social and it is all about accomplishing goals through people. So ask yourself the tough three questions: Are you a competent manager? Can your employees trust you? Do you genuinely care about your employees?

Then, if you ask the “why” part of each of those questions, you can discover what can make you better.

In a tough job market — and with employees doing more than ever on the job — getting your current job right with your manager is important. It is your manager, after all, that signs off on your review, helps or hurts your ability for promotions, and, in some cases, can decide to lay you off.

So how do you make your manager love your work? Own your results.

Sounds simple. It’s not. Here are five ways to help own your results.

Define the success criteria for the task or project

This is the most underrated step for getting the job right. If your manager can’t tell you what success looks like, you won’t either. And if you don’t understand what success looks like, but your manager does but does not tell you, there is an immediate disconnect with your results.

You have to ask, especially early in the relationship with a manager, what work would make this task completion a success. It feels dumb to do it. But without asking, you won’t know, your manager will assume and so will your coworkers and everyone will have a definition different from yours in their head. Cubicle Warriors can’t win without understanding the expectations.

Think of never asking what success looks like on your repetitive tasks. By never asking, you end up doing the task consistently, repetitively, wrong. If you did ask what success looks like the first five or so times on a repetitive task, you’d get closer and closer to the ideal. And you would do the task consistently, repetitively, right.

Which would you rather have on your performance review?

You need to prototype your work

Here’s the secret: even when your manager tells you the success criteria for the task or project, they often don’t understand that what they are asking for isn’t what they want.

Take you preparing a presentation, for example. The manager wants a presentation that shows how the department is meeting their goals. You know the goals; no problem. You get a week to do the work and at the end of the week you proudly walk into your manager’s office with your slick, bullet-point PowerPoint thinking you’ve nailed it. Then your manager tells you it’s all wrong.

You see, your manager didn’t really want it done in PowerPoint. It should have been in Word. And even though bullet points are nice, your manager wanted charts to show goal attainment. And not those ugly charts, but those new, slick 3-D bar charts because your manager knows his or her manager likes that kind of stuff.

So you failed. Even though you thought you succeeded.

Much better to have walked into your manager’s office one day after getting the task and show your manager your bullet-pointed PowerPoint with no charts for showing attainment on one complete goal – a prototype of the completed work. You graciously ask if this is really what the manager was looking for because it fit the “success” criteria. Now your manager sees something tangible and adds in all these other criteria for success, criteria in the manager’s head — or not — but not communicated to you.

And you have the time to change it while collaboratively working with your manager. Cubicle Warriors prototype their work so they don’t have a crisis that needs fixing when delivering critical work.

You need the maximum control over your work

It is tough to own your results when you don’t have control over your work. Is the work you deliver dependent on someone completing something for you before you can start? You need to ensure that the work happens on time for you to do your deliverable.

Rarely does anyone have 100% control over their work. But focusing on maximizing your control over your deliverable will give you a better chance of doing the work well.

You need to provide bad news early

If you don’t think you can complete the work on time, you need to tell your manager why. It could be priorities that conflict, the work being a bigger project than either you or your manager thought, or it could be that you are not getting the cooperation you need to do your part.

Good managers want to hear bad news early — because there is still time to turn the bad news into good news. Telling your manager you think you need three more days to get done with something allows you and the manager to collaboratively go over the work and see if tasks or resources can be rearranged if needed. But telling your manager you didn’t get done with your work the day it is due is just asking for trouble.

Now, there are some bad managers out there who just don’t want to hear your problems about getting stuff done; they just want you to do it no matter what. That kind of passive-aggressive behavior is out there and giving bad news early isn’t necessarily a good thing with those types of managers (yes, I’ve had managers just like this…). But then, they wouldn’t be managers that love your work no matter what you do, so these tips wouldn’t apply anyway.

You need good reporting systems to show progress

Cubicle Warriors know that the big difference between their performance and everyone else are their accomplishments. Accomplishments are shown through numbers and results. So reporting systems that show these numbers and results are critical to set up and use during the work process.

If the work is set up through success criteria, you need to use some measure as to meeting the success criteria as you go along doing the work or you won’t determine your progress. If you are working on goals, you need a method to determine your progress meeting your goals so you can tell if you are on track to meet them or if you should have a “bad news early” discussion with your manager.

Without good reporting systems, whether personal or corporate, to report progress on your work, you won’t know if you are on track or not.

Owning results takes work

Many people hear “owning your results” and think it is just stepping up and saying to themselves that “I did the work, so I own the results.”

You can do that — but it abdicates your role in affecting the results. Cubicle Warriors implement these five steps in their work to maximize their chance of producing the best results for their manager — and career.

How well do you own your results?

Each week, I call out good articles from my network and share them with you. Here’s this weeks entries:

Leadership Without a Secret Code: an interview with Drew Gilpin Faust, President of Harvard, on what it takes to be a leader. Leading universities is very different than leading a business or a team, of course. But the insistence on communication and knowing what people attribute to leaders make this an informative and interesting read.

Refuse to Lose: how executive pressure contributes to IT failure. A good look at the ways managerial pressure to complete IT projects results in failed cutovers. Been there, done that. There are good principles in here; in this job market, would anyone push back?

Using your network to find job opportunities. We don’t network enough. Including me. Plus, 21 tips for networking that Sital notes in the comments. For US readers, “redundancies” means “layoffs,” in case you have not seen the term.

Tweet your trysts, not your cysts. Eve takes a hard look a the growing practice of tweeting about medical conditions — giving health insurance companies a perfect gateway to turn you down for pre-existing conditions. Or hiring managers casually sticking your resume in the waste basket.

18 reasons to love lists. Proponents of Getting Things Done know that checklists are great for continually doing routine things right. But most of us don’t apply that to our job or career. Checklist for hosting a meeting. Checklist for determining if the job is still right for us. Checklist for what to have at home and not work for your career. Yes, I love lists…

Any to add? Pop them in the comments!

Blood Moon (November 2nd, 2009 – South America) by Kopfjäger

The Blood Moon looked good from North America, too.

Most people think that if the unthinkable happens — they get laid off or their company goes belly up — that they are immediately ready to look for another job. I know this because Robert Half published a survey that asked — and 82% of the respondents said they were ready right now.

Next, they asked this question: “When did you last update your resume?”

That’s when things got interesting:

…if they lost their jobs tomorrow, only 20 percent had updated their resumes in the last three months. Forty-four percent hadn’t revised their resumes in more than a year.

Ready to look for your next job — even in your own company? Not without a current resume.

The killer quote, spot on, is this one:

“Workers who are prepared in the event of a sudden job loss also are ready when new employment opportunities arise, including those within their own companies,” said Reesa Staten, senior vice president and director of workplace research for Robert Half International. “A current resume is an essential career tool — the longer it remains untouched, the harder it is to update, since specific achievements are not always easy to recall.

How do Cubicle Warriors beat out their coworkers on the resume front?

You need to know what you want in a job so you can put it on a resume

This is totally obvious, right? But many people are so into the weeds from their current position — or trapped — that they really haven’t thought through what type of work they like, the type of management that works best for their style of work and what kind of team they’d like to work with to produce their best work.

Once you have sat down and worked through your ideal working environment, you can focus your resume on showing your accomplishments in the areas of work you like best.

You need to track your accomplishments

I was asked for some resume advice this week and noted that this person needed to put the results of their work on the resume so recruiters and hiring managers would see their success.

And then came the story of throwing out all of the past performance reviews (”I thought I’d never need them…”) and all of the reports that showed the metrics necessary to show accomplishments.

Cubicle Warriors know their accomplishments are all that separate the great employee from the average and the good job candidate from the great job candidate. Tracking helps you write your performance review, too.

Review your job and resume once a month

Time flies. And conditions change. Your job that looked so safe last month all of a sudden looks like a risky proposition. I worked for the largest savings and loan in the country — what could go wrong? And then Washington Mutual went belly up…

Plus, that fabulous project you worked that provided so much growth in your old position no longer matters much when companies are desperately trying to cut costs. Yet, the resume shows the great growth project and casually gets set aside because what is important now is not what was important then.

Reviewing your work and resume monthly with a critical eye on conditions is almost the only way to ensure your resume is up to date.

Move your accomplishments off of company systems

When I was laid off from Washington Mutual, I walked out of my manager’s office, turned in my laptop, Blackberry, building pass and was out the door in fifteen minutes (my rule: one box, ten minutes and I can be gone — they took longer getting my company assets back!). Not that I was some sort of threat by staying; management simply decided all the people laid off were done being in the offices that day.

Now, think about that. If I had the current version of my resume only on my company laptop, I no longer have it. If my performance reviews were sitting in my desk drawer, I’d no longer have access to them. If all the reporting about my performance and work were sitting on corporate servers, I’d no longer have access to them.

Your career is far more important to you than anyone else. So why would you store all of your career information on corporate premises when a company can lay you off in a cold-blooded minute?

I’m not suggesting you break Code of Conduct stuff; but you have a responsibility to be responsible for having the information that supports you getting your next job. Your company won’t care. You need to.

Are you ready to find your next job? Really?

The November Cube Rules News is going out at 1 AM Eastern Time Friday morning. If you haven’t signed up for it, here’s what you’ll miss:

How to get ready for unexpected career changes

This article, for our free subscription holders, discusses the four major change areas in your career that can unexpectedly change. Plus, what to do to get ready in case that unexpected change comes.

3 answers to interview questions you need right now

This article, for our paid subscribers, examines the changing interview environment. While I talk about there being only three answers to every interview question here on the site, our paid subscribers find out that there are better answers to use in this job environment.

Plus, our paid subscribers have access to all of the previous free and paid content from the newsletters.

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