Month: March 2015

6 Steps to a Winning Career

Here are 6 steps to a winning career.

Arrive early.

“Better three hours too soon than five minutes late.”  William Shakespeare

If you cannot be at work on time, you are unemployable.  That idea seems simple enough.  The best way to be at work on time is to go to your work before your days starts.  Arrive early.  Relax.  Have a cup of coffee or bottle of water.  Read a newspaper.  Chat with your co-workers.  Do things that help you to relax.  Then when the moment arrives for you to start work, you can simply turn to your work in a focused and calm state of mind.

Do your work in order of its priority.

If you have ten things to do and your boss has set one urgent deadline for one of those things, then you have one thing to do and nine things that can wait.  What your boss has said is urgent is the only thing you have to do until you get it done.  Then you can rank the other nine things in the order of urgency.  You can only do one thing at time.  Therefore, finish the work done that your boss is expecting when he or she is expecting it.  Then go to the second thing on your priority list.

Focus on your work and not the personalities of people around you.

Judging other people is not the reason any of us goes to work.  None of us can do our work when our mind is someplace else.  It is especially difficult to do our work when someone or something is disturbing us.

Respect the space of other people.

A person’s space includes what the person sees and hears.  Don’t stand in front of people who are working and carry on a conversation with a coworker.  Don’t take phone calls during meetings.  You may be the most important person in the room, but if you constantly interrupt other people with your phone calls, you are cheating the other members of the team with your distractions.

Wear the uniform of the day.

In the Navy, we had days on which we would wear a working uniform.  On other days and in some duties, we would wear dress uniforms.  Dress and groom yourself in keeping with the expectations of your employer.

Honor your commitments.

When you say that you will do something, get it done.  You will have the commitment off your mind and the other person will have that commitment off their mind as well.

Focus on Work

Focus on Work:  this simple principle determines my work success.

Work Focus

When I am the most successful at work, I focus on the job.  I don’t focus on my issues with other people.  I don’t focus on my feelings of frustration with my job or my life.  I don’t focus on jobs that I will have to do later.  I don’t focus Internet surfing or social media mingling.

Failure to Focus on Work

I don’t always focus on my work.  I wish I could say that I did.  However, I am human.  I do have distractions.  I sometimes goof off.  Sometimes, I’d rather focus on anything but work.  To quote a former business partner, “There’s a reason they call it work.”  It is not always fun.  Work is a priority I set for the things I need to do to experience the rewards of my work.  Work is what I am supposed to do when I am at work.  Sometimes work is pure fun, and I am completely focused on my work.  I am completely engaged in my work.

Sometimes I have to put some effort into focusing on what I am doing at work.  I have to work at working.  When I don’t focus on work at work, my work suffers.  My productivity goes down.  Time flies by, the day ends, and I miss the rewards that I could have had from focusing on work.

Work Aperture

The aperture on a camera is the setting for how wide the shutter opens when a photographer takes a picture.  The width of the shutter opening determines the distance at which objects are in focus.  A wider opening will result in images at a distance being fuzzy or out of focus.  On cameras with a barrel that shows the view directly through the lens of the camera (Single Lens Reflex or SLR), the setting is the f-stop on the barrel of the camera.  A wider aperture setting puts the focus of a picture on things that are close to the camera.  I need to use a wide aperture setting so that the work right in front of me is in focus and so that the work at a distance is out of focus.

The Productive Aperture  

When I am working, I can’t allow myself to ruminate on what might happen.  I have had a lot of problems.  Most of them have never happened.

Therefore, when I am working on a long-term plan, I use a wide aperture setting to keep my work in front of me in focus.  At work, ruminating about the future as though I am gazing at a distant mountain range in a picture is a waste of work time.  To be productive, I have to focus at events in the future when I can put them down on paper or schedule them on my calendar.  At work, I keep an f-stop 2.8 setting (the widest possible setting) on my lens.  I only need to focus on the things on which I am taking action.

Words that Motivate

Words that motivate employees are words that create inclusiveness and extend recognition for the contribution of other people make.  They are also words that create a recognition of boundaries that each person feels about receiving help.

I read an article on HBR.org about the power in the word “we” and a second article on HBR.org about the power in the word “together.”  I have also read on several occasions that the word most people want to hear is their own name.

The attraction of all three of these words is that they create inclusiveness.  Picture a discussion about a team’s effort in front of the team members and other people in the company.  The discussion goes like this: “Bill and Sue are on our team.  Together we successfully create projects that exceed company expectations.  Without the great job that Bill and Sue have done, we would never have succeeded on any of these projects.  Together, we are a team of winners.”

“Thank you” is a phrase with two words that people appreciate in response to the things they say or do for someone.

“How might we?” are the three words that the company IDEO states as the basis for the beginning every one of their innovation projects.

“You did a good job” come up frequently as the five best words a person can say to another person.

Again, the phrases “Thank you,” “How might we,” “I regret my mistake,” and “You did a good job” all create inclusiveness by giving recognition for the work of other people and by presenting a willingness of to admit your mistakes.

“May I help you?” is another four-word phrase that helps to motivate people through inclusiveness and by recognizing the boundaries other people may be feeling at the time.

In closing, using words to motivate employees will create inclusiveness, extend recognition for the contribution that other people make, a allow people to relax and focus on the job without co-workers or supervisors intruding on their boundaries.

Authority, Responsibility, Accountability, and Leadership

Authority, Responsibility, Accountability, and Leadership: these are four of the most discussed subjects on business forums and articles.

Authority is the power to control the actions of people and the resources of an organization and comes from a person’s position.

Responsibility is the accountability that people have in relationship to their authority.  I often read articles and forum comments in which writers use the words authority and responsibility interchangeably.  People with authority are responsible for the results of their actions and for the actions of the people over whom they have authority.  President Harry Truman said, “The buck stops here.”  In making that statement, President Truman was stating that, in keeping with his absolute authority over the executive branch, he accepted absolute responsibility for the actions of the people in the executive branch of government.

Leadership is the power to guide, direct, or sway the actions of people.

Some leaders have authority.  Some leaders do not have authority.  Elected officials have the authority that the law assigns to their office.  Business leaders have the authority that the company guidelines assign to their function.

Writers, artists, designers, speakers, and others who have no authority often become leaders through their message, their works, or their methods.  These people found nations, lead movements, set trends, found religions, and establish schools of thought as the result of the actions they took to sway and guide other people.

Titles create confusion in the relationship of authority, responsibility, accountability, and leadership.

Does a manager have authority?  Is a manager responsible for performance?  Is a manager a leader?

The answer to all these questions is, “Maybe.”  A manager with no authority is not responsible for performance.  A manager with no authority or personal influence over a group is not a leader.  If a manager fails as the result of a person or group refusing to accept the manager’s authority, the manager is not accountable for the actions of the person or group.  The person or group that does not obey the authority of a manager is accountable for their actions.

The Real Jobs are on Google Page 2

Are you finding that searching for jobs with Google search is fruitless?  There is a reason for that.  The real jobs are on Google page 2.  Perhaps, it is better to say that the real jobs are on page 2 or greater.

Google ranks websites based on how many other sites link to those website not on the facts.  Therefore, the search results that you get when you are doing job searches on Google will show you the listings on the most popular job boards and job search engines first.

These jobs at the top of the listing are often not actual jobs. Rather, they link to pages don’t go to actual jobs listing.    Instead they go to The job listings you will see first are the jobs on Indeed, Monster, and other job listing websites.

The experience of trying to sort through job listings on the first page or even page or 2 of Google is that you keep finding the big job boards are just in the way of your search.

Google wants to rank pages based on the accuracy of the facts and has a process in development. (New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530102.600-google-wants-to-rank-websites-based-on-facts-not-links.html).

For now, job seekers will need to dig deeper into the back pages of search results to get the real job market and not just the bundle of highly linked websites that smother the top of the list.

As an illustration, I entered “product manager Houston TX” without the quotation marks.  I found ten job listings, none of which came from Indeed, Monsters, Career Builders, or Simply Hired.

As a matter of practice, try beginning your search on the back pages of the Google results.   You will be amazed at how many more jobs than what you have seen from continually conducting searches and reviewing what you find on page one of your Google returns.

For an in-depth look at conducting job searches on Google instead of going strictly to job boards, please visit an article I posted at this link: http://www.jaywren.com/google-job-searches/.

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