The Friday Thing #689

It seems that many of you missed out on the final link in last week’s edition – you’re missing a treat with Drive and Listen. I am driving around London listening to Virgin Radio as I write this….

The Friday Thing #689 came to me last night as I saw a few posts on Instagram that caught my attention as they correlated with some of the mentoring conversations I have been having of late. I find myself spending an increasing amount of time mentoring colleagues at Microsoft and it’s something I really enjoy. I’ve gotten to the point where I give myself a number of ‘mentee slots’ each year and rotate every year or two with an intentional focus on diversity across my mentees. It feels trite to say it, but I genuinely think I learn as much as my mentees do.

In a mentoring conversation this week, I was asked for advice on things I have learned along the way at Microsoft that have helped me succeed. I gave a jumbled answer of things and have attempted to refine things a bit here in the hope that they’ll be helpful to others. Here they are in no specific order:

1. Don’t plan your career based on the path someone else took. It’s understandable to look for clues to what has made others successful and follow their career path but I have learned that it’s a bit of a mirage. All of the successful people I know charted their own path – and most admit when pushed that they really made it up as they went along. That can feel uncomfortable and perhaps the definition of imposter syndrome, but my advice is to embrace this. I’ve never formally applied for a job in the company (yet), preferring to focus on identifying where I think there are opportunities that I can uniquely fill and then pursuing them as a hobby (I believe this is called side hustle this millennia). Over time, these hobbies have become full time jobs. This practice holds true for the jobs themselves. Part of the job (to me) is to continually redefine the job you have, expand its boundaries, graduate things to the right place as they mature and hone the job so it fits you, not the opposite. As my friend Hugh Macleod would say, treat you career as a jungle gym more than a career ladder. It’s way more fun and fulfilling.?

2. Finding a niche and thriving in it (until it’s no longer a niche) is advice I remember giving a lot when I led our Partner Technical Specialist Team back in the UK. I learned early in my career at Microsoft that I could make myself indispensable (aka less ‘fireable’) if I had some unique skills/knowledge. Initially this was internet technologies (I worked on the launch if IE3 in the UK – that’s how long ago we’re talking here) and when our portfolio of Internet products became mainstream, I moved to Knowledge Management (working on the forerunners to SharePoint). Then I moved to mobile (pre-Windows Mobile) and then to Cloud strategy. Each time, I carefully considered when was the time to move to the next new thing and help graduate the current thing. That approach has continued to serve me well. I realize this advice may seem counter to #1 but the real trick is to add those niches to your current job and continue to shape that role the way a craftsperson shapes a piece of wood. Find the rough edges (niches), focus on them, smooth them out, move to the next one, rinse, repeat, etc.

?3. Being good at presenting is a valuable skill. This may not hold true for all jobs but early in my career at Microsoft, I realized I was going to have to get better at presenting to an audience or I was going to fail. I nearly did fail in week two on the job and after that near miss I resolved to get better. My mentor Mike Pegg told me to ‘study at the feet of the masters’ – and so I watched TED presentations over and over, looking for clues to the craft of presenting. I would now consider myself a decent presenter (not great, not awful) and thought it’s not crucial to my current role, I believe it’s the single skill that has helped advance my career more than any other because of this simple fact – most people hate presenting. Which means if you’re even half good at it, you’ll be kept busy for a while. People will seek you out, invite you to present and every time one of those doors opens, you find yourself in a room with 5 other doors of opportunity. Being a good presenter is like being able to hold kryptonite for a little while. Perhaps I’ll write a future post about what I have learned about presenting (and live demos). There is the beginning of this post over here.

4. Being aware of your personal brand is another lesson I learned when working in the UK. I forget who posed the question to me but when I was asked what I aspired to for the 3 words someone would use when describing my personal brand, one of them was ‘attention to detail’. I then asked some trusted colleagues what they would use to describe my brand. Given attention to detail did not come up in any of these conversations, I probed to find out why. What I learned is it was an unrealistic aspiration – I was chasing someone else’s version of what I thought I should be versus the best version of me. It turns out that attention to detail isn’t my forte – I can do it when required, but it’s not a superpower of mine. It’s not even a power. If it were a muscle it would be my smallest toe. That was a useful exercise in two ways; first, it helped me get clear on a realistic view of what my brand was and could be; second, as I started to lead teams it helped me realize what skills I needed to complement my own (hint, I hired people who were really good completer/finishers). It also helped me think about how we’re taught to measure success and how we really should measure success. Though I don’t agree with everything in the chart below from Liz and Mollie, the lower pie chart is definitely better than the upper one.?

5. Do what you love is perhaps the most important thing I have learned and something I wish I had learned earlier in my career. I talked about this in my TEDx talk in Liverpool a few years ago and it holds true. When I realized what I love is storytelling, it unlocked a whole new world for me. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy earlier jobs I have had, but when your hobby becomes your job, you’ll find yourself in a great spot where you wake up every day skipping through fields of daises (okay, most days). Dedication to your hobby pays off and Hugh’s Instagram post last night reminded me of this – as does the piece below, which hangs on the wall in my office. I worked for 4 years building a blog as a hobby, telling stories about Microsoft, doing it in the evening and on the weekends, honing the craft. Oh and #5 is very much connected to #1 above. That’s my for loop.?

That’s all for this week. I hope some of it makes sense. It feels good to write and not just send you off to a set of other places this week. I may write more of this because the list is definitely longer than 5 things.

?Thanks for reading and Happy Friday.

?-Steve