Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Announcing My New Book Collaboration: Mom.B.A.!

When I met Karyn Schoenbart in the summer of 2013, I never imagined that I'd embark upon a partnership and friendship that would be one of the most defining of my life.

Karyn's the CEO of global market research firm The NPD Group, and today we publish the book we've been working on together for two years, Mom.B.A.: Essential Business Advice from One Generation to the Next.

The book asks the reader to imagine life would be like if your mother was the CEO of a global company. She could provide the type advice that would propel a career and help them overcome the many stumbling blocks that keep people from fulfilling their full potential at work. That's the idea behind Mom.B.A. 

Mom.B.A. is based on Karyn's lessons to her daughter Danielle, now an established businesswoman in her own right. And in it, we include lessons on everything from effective first impressions and workplace politics to relationship development, skill building, and priority-setting. Alongside current employment research and trends, Karyn candidly shares funny anecdotes, triumphs, and missteps as she recalls her journey from an entry-level market research position to CEO. By the time you finish reading, you'll feel like you know her as well as I do. 

We've fortunately gotten a lot of support from senior leaders in the business community, and here's my personal favorite endorsement:

"Sometimes, matter-of-fact approaches to our biggest challenges are hiding in plain sight. Karyn Schoenbart blends the learnings of her life into a set of guidelines notable for their straight shooting, and credible because they ring with the truth of her own experience. Karyn s excellence as a business leader, as a mother, as a philanthropist, and as a friend are not separate achievements, but instead part of one storyline and approach that she has weaved together beautifully for us in this terrific book." --Oliver Libby, chair and co-founder, The Resolution Project.

I thank you in advance for your support of my latest endeavor and hope you learn as much from Karyn as I have!

 

Do You Encourage Citizen Development?

Many leaders today are missing an opportunity. Their teams spend all day catering to business needs when in fact the business managers can and should be empowered to solve problems themselves.

There is an old saying that goes: “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, but teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” IT leaders who facilitate low code rapid application development knowledge in employees outside IT greatly improve IT’s efficiency and productivity. Unfortunately, they don’t do it nearly enough and spend a great deal of their time rushing around putting out fires with the few resources they have leaving little time for more strategic initiatives.

According to Gartner’s IT Glossary, a citizen developer is a user who creates new business applications using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT.

Citizen development is possible because end users now have the ability to build a variety of enterprise applications through model-driven platforms and cloud computing services. As long as users understand the principles behind application design and development, they do not have to learn the programming languages that were necessary in the past.

Here are five reasons IT leaders may want to re-consider sanctioning and even encouraging citizen development.

IT Demands Have Gotten Out of Hand

Most enterprise IT departments do not have enough resources to handle every request that comes in and must therefore prioritize by value to the overall business. This means that often, individual groups like accounting and marketing will have important requests put on the back burner while a short-staffed and overwhelmed IT group struggles to keep up. In fact, though, IT might not even be essential in developing solutions for these requests and is simply acting as a bottleneck.

IT Might Not “Get It” Anyway

Even if IT was to take on the request, who’s to say that the IT professional who accepts the project fully understands the requirements necessary to develop the most appropriate technology solution? A citizen developer who has deep subject matter expertise could use a low code platform for rapid application development to more quickly arrive at a solution that meets the department’s needs.

For more where this came from, check out Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Bridge the Soft Skills Gap in Your Young Professionals

Why don’t young professionals today hold themselves to a higher standard when it comes to their attitude, work habits, and people skills? In his new book, Bridging the Soft Skills Gap, my friend and colleague Bruce Tulgan explores these five reasons:

Pretend Adulthood

Most entry-level professionals are coming to you straight from school. If they have the most in-demand technical skills, then they are probably coming from college or university; maybe graduate school. That means they’ve probably become quite accustomed to a very luxurious form of pretend adulthood. Of course, there is substantial coursework. Still, they have very little supervision and a great deal of latitude in all manner of their personal habits and conduct. They are accustomed to staying out late hanging with their friends and skipping morning meetings.

Helicopter Parents

Even after they arrive in the workplace, new college grads are still only a phone call or text away from their parents.  Even worse, maybe they are on their own now, for the first time, after being reared by parents who did all the work for them of closely scheduling, managing, and supporting their every move. With their parents doing so much of the work, many young professionals never mastered the basics of taking care of themselves.

High Expectations

The customization of everything has entrenched in young professionals a fundamental expectation that individual accommodation is the norm.  And surely too many people told them each and all, way too often, “You are a special case.” Their basic assumption is that they should be able to just “be themselves” and “express” their true identity at work, even if that might include stuff like failing to follow through on a day when they are “just not feeling it.”

Unpracticed Interpersonal Skills

Communication practices are habits, and most young professionals are in the habit of remote informal staccato and relatively low-stakes interpersonal communication because of their constant use of hand-held devices and social media and instant messaging. They stare at their devices too much, send too many texts, and are becoming increasingly less articulate because they have so little practice having real conversations.

Professionalism Vs Individualism

Much of what older, more experienced people might see as matters of professionalism—attitude, self-presentation, schedule, and interpersonal communication—new college grads are likely to consider highly personal matters of individual style or preference and really none of their employer’s business.

Want to learn how to cope with these young professional characteristics more effectively? Check out Bruce’s book for practical answers and advice for better preparing your young professionals for success.

Could Your Employee Be Uncoachable?

Executive coaching is professional intervention with a focus on developing the skills needed to drive change, manage complexity, build top performing teams, and maintain a strong personal foundation to thrive under challenging conditions. It can be worthwhile, but also very expensive and time-consuming.

The hard truth is, there are times when you should make the investment in an employee, and times when you should save your money. My friend Marshall Goldsmith wrote an article detailing some of these circumstances, and I’ve added a few of my own.

She doesn’t think she has a problem

Some successful adults, said Marshall, have no interest in changing because their behavior is working just fine. You could employ the best coach in the whole world, but if your employee doesn’t care to change, you’re wasting your time, the employee’s, and the coach’s.

He is pursuing the wrong strategy for the organization

Some employees have strong beliefs about the way the organization should operate, and those beliefs may be at odds with yours. If this guy is already going in the wrong direction, said Marshall, all your coaching will do is help him get there faster.

She’s in the wrong job

An employee might feel that she’s in the wrong job with the wrong company, that she’s supposed to be doing something else or that her skills aren’t being taken advantage of properly. To tell if you’re dealing with one of these people, Marshall recommended asking her: “If we shut down the company today, would you be relieved, surprised, or sad?” If you hear “relieved,” send her packing. Coaching will not make an unhappy person happy.

For more signs, see the full post on Intuit's Fast Track blog.

How Much Time Do You Actually Need with Your Boss?

According to a Leadership IQ study “Optimal Hours with the Boss,” most people spend only half the time they need with their boss. Employees who spend the optimal six hours interacting with their direct leader per week are 29 percent more inspired, 30 percent more engaged, 16 percent more innovative and 15 percent more intrinsically motivated than those who spend only one hour per week.

Believe it or not, though, more time is not necessarily better. When employees spend more than six hours per week interacting with their leaders, diminishing returns are seen in terms of building inspiration, engagement and motivation. The study showed that levels of inspiration or engagement remained the same or declined beyond six hours of interaction.

When I asked Leadership IQ CEO Mark Murphy about this curious finding, he said: “When you spend too much time with the boss, it starts to feel like micromanaging.  People want a certain amount of boss time to get aligned, share concerns, ask questions, etc., but then they want to actually go put all of that information into practice.”

Email Doesn’t Take the Place of Face-to-Face

Among people who only spend an hour per week interacting with their leader, 33 percent of that time is face-to-face interaction and 42 percent is via email.  By contrast, those who spend six hours per week interacting with their leader spend much more of their time (48 percent) in face-to-face interactions, and much less of their time (27 percent) interacting via email.  So, not only is the amount of time spent interacting with one’s leader important, but increasing the percentage of face-to-face interaction matters as well.

For the rest of the post, check out the SilkRoad blog.

Things I Wish I Knew about Business and Careers When I Was 22

This year, I released the 10^th Anniversary edition of my first book, the bestselling They Don’t Teach Corporate in College. I wrote the book when I was 26, and ever since then, I’ve learned a ton about what works and what doesn’t in the business world. Today, I’m sharing some of my recent insights.

No one cares as much about your career as you

While your organization and your manager probably do have your best interests at heart, no one will ever put as much time and energy into your professional development as you will because no one benefits from it as much as you. So don’t be passive. Advocate for the best learning opportunities and experiences, and be proactive about keeping your skills fresh.

Careers are peaks and valleys

Even if you were to stay on one career path, which is highly unusual these days, there’s no such thing as getting to the top of the ladder and staying there. Careers are very long, so you have to figure out a way to remain relevant and engaged over time. Occasional momentum loss is normal, but you need to be able to recover.

Plan now for what you want later

When choosing a career, it’s important to think through what you want for your life over the next several years. For instance, if you’re a married 25 year-old in law school and you know you want to be a hands-on mom or dad soon, it’s not the best idea to become an associate at a huge firm. A flexible career doesn’t happen overnight: the right steps must be taken early.

For more, please see the full post at Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Why New College Grads Shouldn't Work from Home

Telecommuting is the future.  The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that about a quarter of employed Americans work from home some hours each week.  In a recent study by the Families and Work Institute, 63 percent of employers said they allowed employees to work remotely in 2012, up from 34 percent in 2005.  Even Marissa Mayer, the new Yahoo! CEO who banished telecommuting from company policy last year, can’t stop this train.

Given the pervasiveness of the trend, in the new edition of my book for entry-level hires, They Don’t Teach Corporate in College, I added a section on telecommuting.  I recommend that twenty-something employees who want to telecommute talk with HR and/or read their orientation materials to understand how their organization’s flextime procedure works.  I give them some suggestions regarding how they can build a business case for telecommuting and how to trial the new arrangement successfully.

The downside of early-career telecommuting

There is something, however, I feel I need to add for any HR managers that may be reading this.  As a general rule, I don’t think professional entry-level hires should work from home more than one day a week.  Being able to telecommute effectively implies that you can do your job just as well remotely as you could in an office, and I don’t believe that’s the case with young twenty-somethings.  New college graduates haven’t worked long enough to have mastered critical soft skills such as in-person communication, conflict resolution, and emotional intelligence.  Their learning curve also includes cultural assimilation, or figuring out and then adhering to the spoken and unspoken rules of engagement within a particular organization.   If they don’t have the opportunity to master these things in the same building as colleagues and managers, they may never catch up.

For the rest of the post, check out the SilkRoad blog.

Millennials Aren’t Aimless Kids Anymore

Picturing millennials, we may think of late bloomers carrying huge debt and living in their parents’ basements.  For many millennials, however, those days are far in the past.  According to the results from a survey I conducted last year with Deloitte, 50 percent of currently employed millennials already meet our definition of a leader.  Forty-four percent of them have only three to five years of experience, yet 41 percent have four or more direct reports.  By contrast, at the same age, most baby boomers (born 1945-63) and Gen X-ers (born 1964-79) were still in junior-level positions.

New Leaders Sink or Swim

Organizations haven’t adequately prepared these young professionals to be managers, and it shows.  Of current millennials who are leaders, only 36 percent said they felt ready when entering the role, and 30 percent still do not feel ready today – citing managing difficult people or situations, lack of experience, and dealing with conflicts as their top concerns upon entering a leadership role.  Informed leaders agreed that millennials lack self-awareness and the ability to effectively manage others. 

Development Focus is Critical

This lack of preparedness echoes what has been reported in prior research.  A recent survey by the American Society for Training and Development reported that two-fifths of millennials don’t think their cohort is entering the workforce with sufficient skills to become future leaders, and Harvard Business Review claimed that the average age to receive leadership training is 42, or a decade away for the average millennial leader.  Over half of ASTD’s respondents felt that millennials require specialized leadership development programs, but only 15 percent said their organizations offer such programs – though the business case for them is clear.  For instance, higher-performing organizations are 57 percent more likely than those from low-performing organizations to have a millennial leadership development program in place.

For the complete post, head over to the SilkRoad blog.

Appearance Is Everything - But It Doesn't Have to Cost a Fortune!

A few years ago, I blogged about the appearance tax and the startling statistic that a negative physical impression can cost you a whopping $230K over the course of your working life.

Since I'm always talking about the necessity of dressing appropriately in a business setting, you might find it surprising that I never hired a stylist myself.  Even after I was told by a gender researcher that my short stature was counting against me appearance-wise, I maintained that I knew what I was doing with my clothing choices.  After all, nothing was too tight or too worn, and everything matched!

Then, a few months ago, the folks from Share Some Style got in touch with me.  Share Some Style is an online company that pairs customers with stylists and guides them through a process of identifying personal preferences, auditing their closets, and putting together outfits that play up customers' strenghs and personalities. 

When SSS offered me the chance to "get styled" in exchange for telling you about my experience, I was totally game.  I realized that an affordable resource like this could be exactly what some of you need to take your careers to the next level.  So after I selected several business-appropriate outfits I liked from an online catalogue, SSS paired me with Jenny Applegate, a Chicago stylist who has worked with Stacy London of What Not to Wear fame.

On Jenny's first visit to my house, she had me try on several items from my closet.  One pattern quickly emerged.  Much of my business wear was a size too big!  All my life I'd been harboring a complex that I looked fat, and so I routinely bought 8-10 sizes rather than 6-8 sizes, which is where Jenny said I belonged.  Also, despite the fact that many of my shirts had "lost their shape," I was holding on to them anyway.  With a tone that was honest without being offensive, Jenny quickly dispatched a third of my clothes into a Goodwill pile. 

Jenny returned to my house a few weeks later with a bag of clothing and accessories from Banana Republic.  She paired items from my closet with the new items to create outfits I never would have imagined on my own.  In particular, I was not accustomed to mixing colors and patterns, but Jenny showed me that this is how you make an outfit pop.  During a speaking engagement or an important client meeting, for example, I can overcome my height challenge with a vibrant, eye-catching ensemble that accentuates my small waist and lengthens my legline. 

The final stage of this process is personal shopping!  Although my current wardrobe has many of the basic components, Jenny and I will spend a few hours this spring selecting a few versatile pieces that can fill in the holes.  Meanwhile, I've already worn Jenny-inspired outfits twice and gotten some great compliments.  Maybe I'll become a fashionista after all.

 

Jenny going through my closet during the audit.

The bags that are going to Goodwill and Dress for Success after the closet audit.

New ensembles: Speaking engagement outfit and Summer conference outfit

New ensembles: Regular office day outfit and Evening networking outift. 

How to Cope with Clients Who Don't Listen

As a consultant, I’ve often made recommendations to my clients that were not acted upon. Sometimes the client simply pretended she didn’t hear my advice, and other times she disagreed with me overtly and did the exact opposite.

It’s frustrating to be hired as an expert in a particular area, only to learn that your clients feel they know better. It’s even worse when the client’s change in direction results in diminished business results that affect whether you get re-hired on another project.

We all have clients, whether we’re consultants or not. But whether our clients are official or unofficial, internal or external, it’s critical to our reputations and future success that we take the right actions when the people who depend on us seem to be losing faith.

Listen Without Getting Defensive

When a client ignores your guidance and a project starts to run amuck, it’s easy to feel angry and powerless. Instead, calmly ask your client why she is proceeding in this manner. Has she properly understood what you’re recommending? If so, why isn’t she implementing it? Is it a question of resources, finances, or time? Perhaps someone higher up the chain wants an alternative plan? This conversation is best had in person, but a phone chat is better than none at all.

For the rest of my tips, head over to the full post at Intuit's Fast Track blog.