Dear Loyal Readers:

Thank you for reading Work to Career.

I have been revamping and moving my content to Simple Chief, www.SimpleChief.com, over the past few months.  My message and focus at Simple Chief is on Simple (not Simplistic) ways to Get Ahead and Earn More at your job.

I hope you will Subscribe to Simple Chief, visit often, and tell your friends!   Here are some of my recent postings, please check them out:

• Fix or Kill Lame Projects
  Symptom:  You feel trapped by a project from hell — it won’t die, yet it won’t succeed either.  It just plods along, slowly, inex…
• Give Effective PowerPoint Presentations With Clear Graphics and Legible Text
  Symptom:  You feel like you are good at your job specialty.  You want to do more for the company. But outside of a few people with…
• Become an Apprentice at Your Workplace to Land the Best Jobs
  Symptom:  You are wondering how to learn the things you need to know to advance your career.  Maybe you should go back to school?&…
• Explain What You’re Doing in Thirty Seconds
  Symptom:  When your boss asks you what you’re up to, she soon starts fidgeting, looking around, checking the time, looking around some …
• Go Above and Beyond — Do a Bit More than Asked
  Symptom:  You do the work you are assigned by your boss, and you do it well.  But you haven’t yet been promoted or gotten a big ra…
• Avoid Termination or Layoffs by Staying Valuable to your Employer
  Symptom:  You are feeling pretty satisfied with your workplace performance, and you feel like you are paid pretty well for the work you…
• Treat Your Company’s Money As Your Own
  Symptom:  You seek broader business responsibility within your organization, but can’t seem to get people to view you as someone with …
• Use Effective Business Email Formats to Drive Results at Work
  Symptom:  Your emails don’t seem to generate the immediate and decisive action you had hoped for, and you can’t understand why.  A…
• Take Control of a Messy Workplace Situation by Driving Change
  Symptom:  You are wondering how you will get ahead at your company, how you can distinguish yourself from the pack, how you can get not…
• “Projects” Without Specs are Mere Activities Doomed to Fail
  Symptom:  You find yourself very busy at work, with a lot of things to do and crises to manage, but you never quite seem to advance, an…

Thank you again, have a Great Career, and I hope to hear from you in the future!  –The Editor.

SimpleChief [at] SimpleChief [dot] com

If you can choose between talking to someone at work and writing an email to them, consider exercising your vocal chords instead, or in addition to, your fingertips.

Obviously email is an important part of the workplace.  It is fast, efficient, traceable, and easy.

It is also very impersonal.  And often it is not very effective at driving results.

Why does this matter to you, the up-and-comer seeking to advance your career? Consider the following:

• Written communication is inherently limited in the amount and type of information that can be conveyed.  Context, nuance, inflection, body language, and other such intangible forms of expression cannot be easily communicated with email.
• Email exchanges cannot form a meaningful bond between people.  Without a bond between people, you cannot find synergy, or common ground, or creative solutions to problems, and other things that can grow value for you and your company.
• People will generally say things to you that they would never write in an email (after all, email lives forever, but conversations can remain private).  If you want the “real” scoop on almost any subject, you need to talk with people.
• Email is easy to ignore.  A person standing in front of you is much harder to ignore.

Even if you need to write an email to convey information to people, it is always a good idea to follow up verbally to make sure the point sticks.  Similarly, after a personal conversation, you should follow up with a short email summarizing your discussion, and to make sure that you document what you have both agreed to.  In both cases you are using email in conjunction with verbal discussion to maximize your effectiveness at work.

Goodman Ager says: Long and complex email messages seldom get read, and are usually a sign that you could be using your time more effectively.  If you find that your email is getting longer than a couple paragraphs, stop and ask a few questions:  Why is this concept so hard to convey concisely?  Do I actually need a meeting or a presentation instead?  Or maybe I should just go talk to a few people and try to get a feel for the situation?  Get out and talk to people, and stop typing!  You’ll be more effective at work, and probably have more fun too!

Copyright 2010, Work to Career, All Rights Reserved.

You need to make sure that people outside your group know you, and have a generally favorable impression of you.

Of course you have to do a good job within your department, on the work and task that you have been assigned by your manager.  But this is a mere condition of continued employment.  It is necessary, but not sufficient, for you to advance your career.  To advance and succeed, you will need to get out and about.

In reality, your prospects for advancement will hinge on the extra 10% of effort you put in on things that are not part of your regular job.  (Of course this assumes that you are doing your regular job very, very well).  This extra 10% might include things like:

• Being on a cross-departmental quality audit team.
• Serving on a standards committee.
• Participating on a cost-saving task force.
• Going on customer visits to promote or support your company’s products.
• Any other similar “extracurricular” activities.

You need to be visible in order to be promoted, so finish your assigned work early so that you can be chosen for work outside your department!

Goodman Ager’s says: Every healthy and vibrant company is on a constant search for talent, and is always looking for it’s future leaders.  Most companies would prefer to hire the next generation of leaders from within.  One of the main filters that senior management will use is “can this person get along with her (potential future) peers from other departments?”  A “no” answer will dash your hopes of promotion, and a “not sure” will usually do the same.  So seek out the chance to interact outside your group.  It will help you advance your career!

Copyright 2010, Work to Career, All Rights Reserved.

Projects Without Specs are Mere Activities Doomed to Fail has moved to SimpleChief.com

Take Responsibility for a Messy Situation has moved to Simple Chief.

Staying Current in Your Job is Your Responsibility has moved to SimpleChief.com.

Fix or Kill Lame Projects has moved to SimpleChief.com.

The purpose of a presentation is NOT to impress the audience with how much you know.

The purpose of a presentation is to convey your message to the entire audience in the most effective and efficient manner possible.  Depending on the venue, your audience may feature people from different disciplines, backgrounds, and interest levels in what you have to say.  You are trying to influence their thoughts, opinions, and behavior to your point of view, right?  Otherwise everybody in the room is wasting their time at this meeting!  They should leave and get back to work if there is nothing to discuss!

You can only influence the audience if they can connect with your message.  And this is best done with pictures.

I am not talking about meaningless clip art and distracting decoration, animation, and fluff on your PowerPoint template.  I’m talking about showing graphs instead of data tables, flow diagrams instead of a list of bullet points, and so on.

And everything must be legible from the back of the room, to a person with 20/40 eyesight.  Because guess what — if your boss is 50-ish or older, chances are they don’t see as well as they used to.  Don’t aggravate them by putting up things they can’t read!

Goodman Ager Says: Nobody wants to hear you say “oh, well, this looked different on my screen” when you are presenting!  Preview your presentation in the room you will be using for the presentation.  Stand in the back of the room, with the lights on, and see if you can read and understand everything.  Make all text bold, and as big as possible.  Many projectors wash out or alter your carefully-chosen colors, so make adjustments.  Having a smooth presentation will make you look more polished and help you advance your career more quickly.

Copyright Work to Career, 2010, All Rights Reserved.

Not everything worth doing is worth doing well.  This is a quote you probably won’t hear from your teachers or professors.  But it’s true.  And you need to understand it if you are going to advance your career.

In school, there is a direct relationship to the effort you put in (studying, reading, taking good notes, attending class, etc.) and the outcome you get (good grades).  And every class you take contributes to your GPA — in other words, every class you take is equally important in terms of your GPA.  And your GPA is your primary performance metric at school.  So it follows that you should do everything as accurately and precisely as you can.

But this is not true in the world of work. In the workplace, the assignments are often vague, the success criteria are not precisely defined, and you are not going to be given a letter grade for your work.  All you can hope for is sporadic feedback from your boss and your peers, a performance review on a periodic basis, and (hopefully) nice raises along the way.

How to bridge this gap?  I suggest that you view all assignments at work as projects.  Every project has three competing factors — Spec, Budget, and Time.  For example:

• It might be more important to get the project done fast (an hour, a day, whatever) than to get it done cheaply or well, so that Time is the most important thing.
• Or maybe,  meeting the precise letter of the Spec is the most important thing.  This is most similar to the classroom environment.  But such situations are rare in the workplace — most specs have some room for negotiation, especially if a different spec can save money or time.
• Sometimes the Budget is the key thing, because if a budget is exceeded then a new round of approvals need to be asked for and granted, and nobody wants to ask for such approval.

Goodman Ager’s Says: Whenever you are given an assignment, you should always ask questions to clarify what  is being asked.  The first question you should ask is “When do you need it?”  Getting the time frame right makes it much easier to frame, negotiate, and document the rest of the assignment.  The next question is “Please rank these factors in order of importance — Spec, Budget, Time”.   This question will generate good discussion about what is really being asked, what else is going on with the project, any sensitive issues that might not have been mentioned before, and so on.

Both you and your boss will be much happier with the results of your efforts, and you will advance your career more quickly, if you take the time to get on the same page before you begin any new assignment.

Copyright Work to Career, 2010, All Rights Reserved.

If you think your job and position is secure, you really need to think again.  Those days are long gone.

The world of business is one where relatively long periods of stability are interrupted by short periods of upheaval.  The upheavals can come from many sources, often from forces external to your company, and beyond your direct control.

For example:

• Your business is acquired.
• Your company acquires another business.
• Your company goes public.
• The economy goes into recession.
• A new competitor comes in and takes away your market share.
• The market price for your product takes a nosedive due to foreign competition.
• And so on.

The point is that even if you don’t perceive your current situation as being risky and unsure — trust me, it is.  You really can’t afford to believe otherwise.  The river of business forces you to swim upstream just to stay stationary.

Goodman Ager Says: Whatever your current role or position is within the company, you can do more, learn more, cover more, and get more done for your company.  Every company is rife with inefficiency.  If you don’t think so, you are not looking hard enough.  Be the one to point it out and do something about it!  You will grow your skills, advance your career, and improve your company’s bottom line in the process!

Copyright Work to Career, 2010, All Rights Reserved.

Who are You Emulating at Work? has moved to SimpleChief.com.

Do a Bit More than Asked has moved to SimpleChief.com.

If you want to advance in your career, you cannot simply do what you are asked to do, or what your job description says.  You will need to take on more responsibility, seek leadership positions, and gain the experience of leading and managing others.

This sort of risk ought to take you out of your comfort zone, make you nervous about failing, cause you some concern about how your actions might impact the people around you, and so on.  It is natural to feel this way.  Indeed, it is healthy.

You can find such opportunities pretty easily.  Simply look around for a big, messy problem.  Every company has them.  Whoever can fix it will help the company, gain visibility, and advance their career.  Such situations will give you far more practical experience within your company than a half-dozen leadership seminars, I guarantee you.

The point is that you will need to step out of your comfort zone, take on new challenges, and fight the battles as they come if you want to advance your career.

Goodman Ager says: You need to find ways to get noticed by your boss (and your boss’s boss) if you want to advance in your career.  Although new strategic initiatives sound exciting, be careful — they can go wrong, get cancelled, run out of money, and so on.  Look for projects that will save money for the company, and you will be on safer ground.

Copyright WorkToCareer.com, 2009, All Rights Reserved.

Explain What You’re Doing in Thirty Seconds has moved to SimpleChief.com.

Treat Your Company’s Money as Your Own has moved to SimpleChief.com.