Amp Up Your Career!

As grads flood the market, you may be wondering about your own career. Do you have room up? Could you go faster? Probably. Most people run their careers in highly opportunistic fashion. Being more purposeful about your career will amp things up.

As a CEO who hired thousands of people into two very successful companies in Silicon Valley, I saw plenty of careers take off, but also a fair number of them go sideways. We made many great hiring decisions, but we also had our share of misfires. The reasons for that can be instructive. There are things you can do that will impact your career trajectory.

What follows is my take on that. This is of course informed by my own journey, so try it on for size, see if it speaks to you. These are not lessons, or hard truths, just observations from the trenches.

You are a ‘product’

As professional people we are ‘products’ that are bought and sold like any other. We are a marketplace. So, product-manage yourself, develop your ‘product’ through education, training and experience. Your resume is your shingle. Buff and polish it. Make sure there is stuff on there that carries some punch.

You are not alone in the marketplace. It’s not just about being qualified, but about being better qualified. What makes for a desirable, compelling ‘product’? Better yet, what makes for a mind-blowing ‘product’? Also study successful ‘products’. Who is doing well, and why?

Education matters some….

A rigorous academic education is of course key to develop literacy, numeracy and general capacities to learn, observe and analyse. Employers need that foundation and typically mandate 4 year degrees. Hard to enter the professional workplace without it, although some have and do fine.

Education does not need to be from an elite, Ivy League or otherwise name brand school unless your industry is into that. Investment bankers, venture capitalists and consultants are enamored with big brand schools. Many employers don’t care that much about the ‘snob appeal’ of an education. The grads cost more, and they can do without the attitude that comes with it.

It’s popular to go back to get an MBA. Typically, folks are in the career doldrums, and they are looking to bust out, thinking a fancy degree might be the ticket. Schools would like for you to believe that. Sure looks good on a resume. But there is an opportunity cost, the time away from the job now puts you behind on experience relative to your peers.

The longer you are out of school, the more employers favor meaningful experience over more education. After 10+ years they hardly care at all. They want to know what you did with that education. Professional students are not attractive to employers. So, think twice before pulling that master’s degree trigger.

Experience matters more

As time unfolds, your record of accomplishment tells your tale, so build that record judiciously. Having a bunch of roles on your CV without compelling success creates headwinds. Consider that as you go about your daily business.

As you build your resume, avoid short tenures. It is hard to lay real tracks in 12-18 month stints. You may be unhappy and frustrated, but make something of it. Several short tenures in a row imply you had poor judgement in choosing these roles or some sort of falling out that caused you to abort mission. There may be other explanations, but it raises red flags you don’t need. The shortest tenure with an employer I ever had was three years. All my other tenures with companies were 5-7 years.

Experience can be a proxy for aptitude, but not a great one. People that have been with successful companies were often swept along in the vortex of the company’s momentum. The aura of the company rubbed off on the employees. It can be hard to separate the company’s success from the employee’s. We hired passengers this way, thinking they were drivers.

Conversely, we were intrigued by candidates who had crashed and burned with companies, and faced serious challenges. As people, we are forged in struggle. We learn more from our failures than our successes. Experience is only valuable to prospective employers for the learning as that is what we take into our next role. Speak credibly, in detail and insightfully about your experiences, no matter how disappointing they were, it sells.

Aptitude Matters Most

Aptitudes are your god-given talents, what you are innately good at. Employers can get you experience, but they can’t get you aptitude. Experience can help reveal your aptitudes. Hiring managers often don’t try hard enough to understand and discern aptitudes. It’s harder, and more uncertain than simply checking boxes. People literally never asked me in interviews what I thought I was good at. It was always one of my first and most interesting questions in interviews.

When you are light on experience for a role, redirect the conversation to aptitude. Why would you be great at this? Smart managers will bet on more aptitude and less experience any day.

The inverse of your strengths are your weaknesses. Are you self-aware enough to speak thoughtfully about your limitations? Everybody has them, so we might as well know now. People are naturally reticent to discuss weaknesses. They think it’s a trick or a trap. It is impressive when people are confident enough to do so thoughtfully. Self-awareness is compelling.

When talent is in short supply, as it is in Silicon Valley, betting on aptitude is a great recruiting strategy for employers, albeit a less certain one. You are hiring people ahead of their own curve.

Personality Plus

Personality is a factor in our popular culture. You don’t have to look far for personality to trump everything. In politics, credentials seem to be completely subordinated by personality.

An energetic, engaging personality goes a long way in the workplace. It can compensate sometimes for lesser credentials. Less so in fields like engineering and finance, but everybody works in teams to one extent or another, so the ability to collaborate, being a team player, is at a premium.

We interviewed a sales rep years ago for a territory we were not ready to open up. As we were about to tell the candidate that we probably did not have an opening any time soon, he said that he had to get the job now. He said his wife had told him not to come home without the job! How do you say no to that? We hired him anyway, and he became a resoundingly successful hire. Personality tips the scales.

A personality needs to fit the culture you are hiring into. What may be a good fit in one may not be in another. One of the best questions asked in interviews is what types of people succeed best in this company? And which ones do not? And why?

Many years ago my candidacy for a GM role was rejected by a large software company. My credentials for the role were, if I say so myself, quite compelling, but the company foresaw trouble with my intense, hard charging style. Fair enough.

What made my personality ill-suited for this company was also what made me a better fit for startups, turnarounds and socalled ‘scaleups’, or very high growth ventures.

Startups typically need hard drivers, passionate leadership, goal and achievement oriented personalities, people who would be easily frustrated in larger enterprises where things are rigid and slow. We often liked people with a chip on their shoulder, who had a lot to prove to themselves and others. But it is easy to see how others would be less enamored by such personalities.

In our hiring, we paid attention to a sense of entitlement, something our culture frowned upon, but which might be considered ‘normal’ in other cultures. We sought low maintenance and low drama personalities. We valued traits like strong task ownership, a sense of urgency, a ‘no excuses’, ‘get things done’ mentality.

We explicitly signaled that we wanted drivers, not passengers. Passengers go to the same place as drivers, but drivers do all the heavy lifting. Nobody wants to hire passengers, but every company has them, many in spades.

When people are light on experience, but show aptitude and potential, it’s the personality that sometimes breaks the tie. We found people that are hungry, humble and have a ‘cannot fail’ chip on their shoulder a good bet.

Hiring decisions are fraught with risk. There is no way to be certain. We have hired extremely well-credentialed people that crashed and burned in short order. So, why not go with your gut sometimes, and take a leap. The batting averages are no worse.

Be yourself, do not try to be somebody you are not. Being yourself may be easy in a social setting but in business it requires you speak intelligently about yourself, as if you were another person. That’s not something we normally do in the ordinary course of business. You are a ‘product’, and you need to position and articulate that product effectively. Authenticity and sincerity are highly compelling traits, they sell.

Develop your communication skills

One underrated skill set that can boost your career is your ability to communicate well, both in spoken and written words. How many rambling, poorly composed emails do you see these days? Writings that take you through the confusion and hell of somebody’s mind? How many announcements do you read where it takes the writer several paragraphs before he gets to the news?

An efficient, get-to-the-point, net-things-out writing style reflects extremely well. You can develop these skills. Books and classes exist for effective business writing. Not being a native English speaker, I worked on this for years.

The spoken word is a big deal for those on the management track. Management careers will stall if you are awkward speaking in front of groups large and small. Most people are terrified of public speaking. The only way to get over that is to do it a lot. By a lot I mean several times a week, not once a month. You will get over it. One day you will even relish it.

It helps a ton to be authoritative on the subject, know what message you are conveying and why. Then, develop a style that is authentic to you. A style that makes you feel comfortable, even powerful on stage. That can take years of experimentation to come to fruition, so start early.

My style evolved to a conversational mode, as if I was just chatting with the audience one-on-one, and I was a storyteller. I had messages to convey and my stories illustrated my assertions. Stories are easy to remember, fun to tell and listen to. I had new stories all the time. Stories can be little anecdotes, not more than that. It’s also a place to safely inject humor in your content. I spoke without text bullets on slides. Slides only served as visual aids for the audience, not a crutch for the presenter.

Have a sense of mission

Most people embark on a career with only the foggiest notion of what their end game is. What do you want to be when you grow up? Resumes often reflect job-to-job opportunism. Choices along the way can be hard to rationalize with hindsight. Resumes often look like random walks.

Having an endgame in mind lets you play a short and a long game. Study the bios of successful people you admire. What moves did they make along the way? Develop mentoring relationships with people that inspire you. They will tell you what they did and why. You can evaluate career opportunities in the context of both the short and long term objective. You will progress faster when you career moves accrue benefit to your long goals.

No need to obsess about it. I have met people who knew they wanted to be CEO when they were three years old! That’s over the top for most of us. You can still change your mind along the way, and many do.

It’s good to have some sort of long game, think about your career over the long haul. Make decisions support your long view. Sometimes, the thinking out there is so myopic, what city they want to be in right now, where their friends are and so on. Preoccupied with compensation and title. Clarity of purpose is a powerful thing.

Embrace the struggle

It is fashionable to follow your passion these days. But, it is borderline insane to think that everything will turn out fine as long as you do just that. People do not get what they wish for, they just may get what they strive and fight for. You don’t have to give up your passions. For most people, passions are hobbies. They cost money, they do not make money. Careers pay for your passions.

In your work life, think about embracing your struggles rather than avoid them. Yes, they may be hard, painful, even terrorizing. But, struggles are incredibly formative. It’s what careers are made of. We learn so much more from our hardships. Employers value your hard times. Try to be in roles and assignments where the rubber meets the road, where business gets done. Where hard problems have to be solved. Where dials get moved. The farther away you get from the action, the slower your career will progress. As time unfolds, you will also appreciate the hard times most. Time has a way of changing your perspective.

Do not unduly focus on title and pay

Do not obsess about title and pay early in your career, say the first ten years out of school. You want a strong foundation to launch and build your career from. Title and pay won’t help if the fundamentals are poor.

Make sure you are in the right geographical location for the type of career you are pursuing. I was in Michigan for ten years pursuing a career in tech. Obviously, that held me back enormously. Would have been fine for automotive, but not tech. I wish I could have those 10 years back.

Secondly, join good companies who have a decent, mature management infrastructure. I typically advise new grads to avoid startups because you may observe and learn the worst habits. Startups can be incredibly immature where nobody knows how to behave as professional business people. Lacking adult supervision. The focus is on learning and laying a career foundation. Don’t get enamored with the optics. In business, substance prevails.

You will have numerous jobs, titles and pay grades over your career, not just between companies but within companies. Be thoughtful and purposeful rather than opportunistic. You aim to optimize the outcome over the duration of your career. It sometimes seems the peer group is unduly influencing the orientation. Be your own person, steer your own ship. You don’t require popular consent.

It is not unheard of to sometimes take a step or two back in title and pay to have a better path forward than whence you came from. Be strategic in your thinking, not every job has to be an incremental step up in pay and title.

Do you reference well?

Nothing puts rocket fuel in your career tank as what other people say about you - those who worked with you: superiors, peers and subordinates. Some develop and cultivate good references but we can’t really control this. Exhaustive referencing builds an accurate portrait of a person. It is much more impactful than just letting your personality shine in interviews.

You can’t control what people say about you but when you get results, move the dial and are an impact player, eventually references will surface that. You cannot argue with results, they will prevail. Therefore, do not worry so much about your popularity, but focus on what you actually make happen on the job. That’s what careers are made of.

Career Doldrums

Sometimes careers are just not moving along. First, make sure this is objectively the case. We now live in a society and an industry where unreasonable expectations have set in. We can’t all be Mark Zuckerberg. Things were considerably different not that long ago. Most of us have to grind it out in our careers. The peer group often unduly influences perceptions.

For good people, career doldrums are mostly a function of not being in a good industry and/or a good company. Things are static and slow for a reason. In companies and industries that are dynamic and on the move, people of talent often get moved up well before they are quite ready. You may well have to do a reset to launch yourself on a different trajectory. I have done so myself on a few occasions.

Always have periodic career check-ins with your direct manager. Good companies and good managers proactively do this because they want to know what is on your mind and they want to hang on to you as an employee. In other words, expect to have substantive career communications from time to time. Not every week, but certainly on a quarterly basis in industries that move fast such as Silicon Valley. In traditional industries, this is usually a once a year affair.

In these conversations, reaffirm your commitment to the cause, do not be coy, and do not let everybody know how many calls you are getting from recruiters. We are all getting them. Be constructive, do not be entitled. You are not owed anything. This is a two way street.

There is a school of thought out there that you have to negotiate hard at every turn to get what you want. I personally never did that, and I clearly did not need to. I did not want to have a relationship with my employer that was purely transactional.

The people who get valued the most in companies are the ones who exhibit very strong commitment to the cause because they are the right leadership stock. You behave like a mercenary, employers will correctly surmise that you will be short lived for one reason or another.

Career killers

A word about what nukes careers. It’s not your experience and talent. Most people are by definition average in this regard. It’s your attitude and behavior. Behavior is a choice, not a skill set. If you don’t collaborate well, have poor task ownership, it won’t be long before you are more trouble than you are worth. Behavior obviously impacts performance. Lousy behavior is not just an irritant, it renders you ineffective. People avoid working with you altogether. The employer has no choice but to cut you loose.

Avoid being a passenger. Sooner or later passengers get in trouble. They can be cut without missing a beat. That is what happens in a RIF (Reduction In Force): they target the ‘passengers’ while cleaning house. It doesn’t matter how smart you talk, or how pretty your slides, it’s what you do and make happen that keeps you in the game. The world will eventually catch on to those who mostly manage appearances.