The hard part

Long term goals are hard to achieve for 2 main reasons where our human nature betrays us.

1. At any moment, when we feel something is important, we want to do it right now. But you can’t accomplish a long term goal in a day.

2. It’s almost impossible to accomplish long term goals without some checkpoints and measures along the way. And checkpoints and measures are not a natural way of living. It’s an additional effort that many people don’t believe they have time for and are not practiced at. So it’s hard.

Your Career Year of Action

In this month’s webinar we talked about long term career goals. We used my Career Year of Action Guide as the basis for the conversation.

Download the Webinar Podcast Here

In the Career Year of Action Guide I have quantified how you can make progress on different aspects of your career over a one year period. The guide also helps maintain your motivation and focus by creating monthly measures and checkpoints for yourself.

Get the Career Year of Action Guide Here
(FREE TO MEMBERS)

Your Desired Outcome

It all starts with your desired outcome. Step back. Pause. Think.

What do you want all this work to amount to? What is the ultimate job you want? If you don’t have a specific goal, think about what your desired job would be like. Start to define what you want in your work and life long term.

Having a desired outcome defined gives you an abiity to ask yourself at any point in time, is what I am doing now helping me get to, or taking me away from my goal?

The hard part – the Middle

All strategic, long term goals share this problem, whether they are individual, personal goals or a strategic business initiatives.

Human nature gets us very excited about defining the problem up front, and then describing the end goal a year out.

But what happens in the middle? How do you specifically, get there?

When I work with teams or individuals to define that hard part in the middle, this is where the magic happens.

By defining concrete, intermediate, outcomes and measures to support your long term goal – things that you can achieve each month or quarter – you are way more likely to get there.

In the webinar, we talked about how to do this for your career and gave some examples.

4 areas of effort to think about

The Career Year of Action Guide is sorted into the following 4 categories to ensure that you make progress in your career, not just work yourself to death.

Test yourself. In a given month, how much do you think about the ideas covered in these 4 areas of effort? Careers get stuck when you let a year (or more) go by and only focus on the work.

1. Business Leadership & Strategy:
How to make sure your work delivers enough business impact and you are not just being busy. Topics are: Ruthless Priorities, Team Assessment, Delegation, Performance Management, Tuning your Job to have more impact

2. Career Development:
How to manage your workload so that your work is serving your career as well as your business. It covers topics like high-impact annual objectives, building on strengths, creating value specifically for your boss, and using mentors.

3. Personal Strategies:
How to incease your personal effectiveness and use your time better. This category covers things like Making Room, Managing Time & Energy, Building Trust, and Personal Brand

4. Steady Effort Communications:
How to build work habits to make sure you are not invisible and that you regularly share information. It includes topics like Stakeholders, Team Communications, and Networking

4 Specific Ideas

Because we couldn’t cover the whole Career Year of Action Guide in the webinar, we discussed one key idea in each category.

1. Ruthless Priorities

Business Leadership and Strategy: Decide what the business values and map your work to that. Create your annual objectives to make sure you are doing things that create real business value. We talked about how to negotiate specific, concrete outcomes and measures with your boss. Do not put your ruthless priorities at risk. Get them done. Develop a reputation for finishing important things. Set monthly and quartly goals for yourself to ensure progress.

2. Make Time and Energy

Personal Effectiveness: Remember, your job is to do your job AND keep yourself OK. If you lack energy you will not be good at your job. Think about what renews and give you energy and schedule time to make sure you are building and maintaining your energy. You need to think strategically, be creative, and overcome challenges. You can’t do that if you are burned out.

3. Mentors

Career Development: Do an assessment of your mentors. Add one this year. Think about your desired outcome. Figure out what type of person can help you, and start looking for them. Ask your boss, ask your neighbors, ask you accountant. We talked about how to find people who can help you, how to meet them, and how to create mentoring relationships.

4. Stakeholders

Steady Effort Communications: Remember, invisible doesn’t work. Know who your stakeholders are, and communicate with them regularly. Know who can influence your plans, resources, projects and compensation plan. Know all their names and make sure they know yours. Know what they care about and communicate with them, on purpose, in a way that is useful and relevant to them.

Your Stories

One other key thought we covered is to record your best stories so you remember them later.

At a minimum, update your resume each year. But when you accomplish things that you are proud of, or that others think are great, make a note of them. You will forget otherwise. And these stories are a powerful tool as you meet people, interview, or negotiate things moving forward in your career.

We also talked about how to proactively create headlines for the coming year as a motivator to make them come true.

Your next year

What do you want to be different this time next year? What are one or two goals that you want to commit to take action on this year? Decide, write it down, and create monthly or quarterly measures for yourself. Find a partner or a coach. Good Luck!

Want more?

Download the webinar podcast here

Get the Career Year of Action Guide Here
(FREE TO MEMBERS)

Become a Member
and get this Webinar, the Career Year of Action Guide, and free access to all the other webinars in the Member Library for one year.

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About Patty
Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)

You can find Patty at www.AzzarelloGroup.com, and follow her on Facebook and  twitter.

Special January Membership Offer – 3 Months Free

Get your career goals on track. Now is a great time to join.

 
Membership Benefits:

Members get free access to everything in the Member Library and…

• You can download the webinars and listen at your own convenience
• You get all the worksheets and templates from the webinars to put your career plan into action
• You get access to Personal Coaching from me in the Monthly Coaching Hour
• You get the Career Year of Action Guide (an additional $39 value) which provides step by step, month-by-month guidance to ensure you make progress in your career

Surprisingly low cost

For just $179 for a whole year, you get access to a quality of information that is not out there at any price. And you get access to me.

If you join now, you’ll get 3 months free (15 months for the price of 12) AND you can get started with the Career Year of Action guide in January.

If you decide to join, I promise you are making a good decision. And if you don’t find it useful, you’ll get your money back.

Managers: Give membership to your team

Companies find this to be a highly practical, effective, and low cost option to provide meaningful development to their employees.

Contact me for Group or Corporate pricing.

Do you have the data?

People often ask me if they should keep a work journal of some kind.

I was encouraged to do this early in my career — I did it for awhile.

Was it worthwhile? I wasn’t sure.

But then something happened…

A manager who worked for me was really annoying me. It got to the point where I decided the organization would be better off without him.

When I talked to my boss about it he said, “Oh, I don’t know… he’s been in place for a long time, and I’m not sure you’ll have the support to make that move.”

But then he said, “Can you give me an example of what you mean?”

So, I went back to my journal, and in a moment I was able produce a list of about 20 transgressions which occurred over the last 6 months.

It included things like failing to communicate important information to his team, speaking badly of employees with his peers, not delivering on commitments then blaming it on others, taking credit for other’s work, being out of touch then miscommunicating things that led to confusion and re-work, undermining management decisions… And every entry had a date stamp.

There were two big aha’s for me in this moment.

1. I would not have had support to take action on this without all this data
2. I would never have been able to produce this data after the fact

So the lesson that I learned is this:

Keep a record of things that annoy you

I have given up on general journaling, but now if there is anything that I am struggling with, or that is annoying me, I create page where I note everything that occurs with regard to that irritant.

I note the date and specifically what happened — Not how I felt about it, just the facts.

I still do this in a physical notebook. If you use technology for your notes, you can make a file for things that annoy you, with a page or record for each violator. This can be a person, a task, a process — whatever is annoying you. Then make a note each time something happens.

Why this works

The big benefit of having the actual record in front of you, is that you can clearly see if this is a real problem or not. And if it is, you’ve already got it fully documented. And it makes you feel better.

There are three useful outcomes I have found from keeping a record of what is annoying.

Outcome #1 – This is a real problem and I will act on this

If you look at the data you collected, as I did in my case with this manager, you can clearly see, yes it is a real problem. And the list gives you both the appetite and the support to act on it.

It is almost impossible to re-create data after the fact.

But if you have maintained a list of dates and specifics about what happened, you have a lot of power to act on it.

This approach works for other annoying things too.

A Bad Process

If there is a process (or lack of one) that feels frustrating, feels like it’s wasting your time, make a note of the date and how much time you spent on it when it annoys you.

After a couple of months you can make a judgment if it’s worth addressing. If it is, your notes are automatically a great specification of what the solution needs to look like. You are not starting with a blank page.

An Over-demanding Colleague

If there are colleagues that seem to be complaining about something you’re not sure is important, or too-frequently involving you on things you shouldn’t be involved in, or making too many requests of your team’s time, make a record each time it happens.

You’ll see if there is a trend or not, and if there is, it will become clear what to do about it. And you’ll have the data to support making a change right at your fingertips.

A Bully

If there is someone who is bullying you, or putting you down, make a note each time it happens. I’ve also found that writing it down takes some of the immediate sting out of the situation.

Then you can read over the record to build your confidence that you are not imagining it. It gives you a clear, factual, non-emotional point of view to decide if and how you want to change the dynamic.

If you don’t write it down, you carry the bad feelings longer each time, and when you try to explain to yourself or someone else how bad it is, you lack specifics. So it’s hard to make a clear case that you are being abused. You’ll stay stuck longer.

Outcome #2. This is real problem, but it’s my problem

I was working with an executive who was being driven crazy by a micro-managing boss. He started noting the date and issue of each offense, and after a couple of months he realized that the problem was his own emotional response. He hated being micromanaged so much that when it occasionally happened, he was blowing it out of proportion.

When something really bugs you, it can become a trigger and feel like a bigger deal than it is.

The notes helped him see that the specific behavior from his boss was not that frequent — it’s just that if it happened at all, it made him angry and miserable. The data allowed him to put it in perspective and not get as upset about it.

Outcome #3 – This is a real problem, but I can live with it

One last insight that I found surprising was when I was in a really hard job for about 2 years. During about a year in the middle, I didn’t think I was going to make it. I was miserable. It was a combination of things: my boss, the business challenge, other organizations attacking….

When I read over my journal during this period, I noticed a pattern… There would be about 2 weeks of entries that said things like, “I can’t stand this anymore, I have to get out. I can not take another week”, but then there would be 3-4 weeks of things like, “we won product of the year”, or “I got a nice thank you from my boss’s boss.”

Seeing this pattern helped me realize that I could survive this. It wasn’t a matter of needing to gut it out for years, the pattern was that I needed to survive for a week or two, and then it would get OK for awhile.

This particular job was giving me great experience to put me on a path to becoming a CEO, so I decided to stick it out. I was able to stick it out because I had my own words proving to me that I could survive.

Make your case stronger

Many times over the years, by using this approach, I have been successfully able to drive change, negotiate something, fix bad processes, win-over adversaries, and just generally get the over-processing of annoying things out of my head.

Having a record of the things that bug you puts you in a very powerful position to change them.

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About Patty
Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)

You can find Patty at www.AzzarelloGroup.com, follow her on twitter or facebook, or read her book RISE…3 Practical Steps for Advancing Your Career, Standing Out as a Leader, AND Liking Your Life.

Free eBook Download

Special January Membership Offer – 3 Months Free

If you have been thinking about joining now is a great time to do it.

How the Membership Program works:

Each month I do a webinar on a topic of Business Leadership and Career Success where you get insights and tools to advance your career.

Also you get me as a mentor in monthly Coaching Hour conference calls. You get to ask me your own questions directly.

Members get access to everything in the Member Library and…

• You can download the webinars and listen at your own convenience
• You get all the worksheets and templates from the webinars to put your career plan into action
• You get access to Personal Coaching from me in the Monthly Coaching Hour
• You get the Career Year of Action Guide (an additional $39 value) which provides step by step, month-by-month guidance to ensure you make progress in your career

Surprisingly low cost

For just $179 for a whole year, you get access to a quality of information that is not out there at any price. And you get access to me.

If you join now, you’ll get 3 months free (15 months for the price of 12) AND you can get started with the Career Year of Action guide in January.

Managers: Give membership to your team

Companies find this to be a highly practical, effective, and low cost option to provide meaningful development to their employees.

Contact me for Group or Corporate pricing.

More Work Satisfaction

Sometimes work can pressure you into being less than you can be.

As we begin 2011,
I encourage you to take back your career.

Succeed More. Like your Life.

I created my membership program to give people the tools, support and confidence they need to create a permanent improvement in their career.

You can thrive more at work

I was lucky to have a lot of help in my own career.
I built this program to help others.
Help works.

People love this program.

If you enjoy reading this blog, you’ll benefit from membership.

Membership gives you specific, practical and actions you take take right way, to improve your business and career.

And it serves as a monthly reminder not to forget about yourself when you get too busy in your job.

Join Now (in January) and Get 3 months free.

That means you’ll get 15 months for the price of 12, and your membership won’t expire until April 2013!

Here are some of the topics we’ll cover in the program in 2012.

• Ruthless Priorities (and Guilt)
• Influence and Matrix Management
• Maximizing Personal & Team Brand
• Improving Business Strategy
• Communicating for Greater Impact
• Increasing Team Performance
• Executive Presence & Standing Out
• Authentic Networking
• Social Media for Career & Business
• Making More Time & Energy

How the Membership Program works:

Each month I do a webinar on a topic of Business Leadership and Career Success.
Also, each month, members get to call into a monthly Coaching Hour conference call with me to get personalized coaching.

Members get access to everything in the Member Library and…

• You can download the webinars and listen at your own convenience
• You get all the worksheets and templates from the webinars to put your career plan into action
• You get access to Personal Coaching from me in the Monthly Coaching Hour
• You get the Career Year of Action Guide (an additional $39 value) which provides step by step, month-by-month guidance to ensure you make progress in your career

Surprisingly low cost

For just $179 for a whole year, you get access to a quality of information that is not out there at any price. And you get access to me.

If you have been thinking about joining now is a great time to do it.

You’ll get 3 months free AND you’ll get started with the Career Year of Action guide in January.

Managers: Give membership to your team

• Several companies have created a corporate membership for their employees.
• Many mangers have provided membership to their team as a development program.

.
Companies find this to be a highly practical, effective, and low cost option to provide meaningful development to their employees.

Your team wants career development. And it’s often hard to provide.

This program is a win-win.
Because my approach to career advancement is to add more value to the business, your team will add more value to your business and develop themselves in the process. And they will thank you for it.

Contact me for group or corporate pricing.

Steps to Effective Performance Objectives

Thank you for reading this far.

I’ll leave you with a practical way to establish your performance objectives for this year:

• Know what your business values in general, and this year in particular
• Establish your Ruthless Priories to deliver value to the business
• Create specific performance objectives to support the Ruthless Priorities
• Make sure you can connect the dots between your performance objectives and business value
• Tune your performance objectives to better suit your natural strengths and give you more energy
• Provide specific, concrete descriptions of outcomes and measures
• Provide a timeline for their delivery
• Document for your manager, a recommendation for how to measure you on your objectives
• Proactively negotiate the finer points of all of this with your manager, and get buy in.

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About Patty
Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)

You can find Patty at www.AzzarelloGroup.com, follow her on twitter or facebook, or read her book RISE…How to Be Really Successful at Work AND Like Your Life.

Free eBook Download

Subscribe for free
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Happy New Year!

I want to kick off 2012 with some big (maybe controversial) ideas about how you can genuinely like your job more.

1. Don’t try to LOVE your work

This may sound heretical, but I just don’t believe in trying to LOVE your work.

I know I am going against people like Oprah and the late Steve Jobs who keep telling us that the only path to true success and happiness is to find what you love and do that for work, and the money will follow.

But “You must love your work” is just BAD ADVICE.

Here is a picture that shows how we are told to think about this.

Obviously you want to avoid the lower right, “Hate your work” and “Don’t make enough money”. But the problem is that upper left is unrealistic for the rest of us.

Almost no one achieves it. So why torture yourself?

Setting the goal as “Do what you love”, and then trying to make enough money at it, makes otherwise competent, successful people feel like they are failing when they don’t achieve it.

Here’s what breaks down for most people in the pursuit of the upper left quadrant:

1. In the upper right: Make a lot of money, but don’t love your work. This makes people feel like they are selling out and doing something wrong. It leaves them feeling guilty and unsatisfied.

2. In the lower left: People who pursue things they truly love but fail to make enough money at it, also feel like they are failing. And they have also ruined their hobby by turning it into a bad job.

I want to redefine how we think about this to be more positive and achievable:

Try these labels instead.

Instead of setting the goal as “Love Your Work”, set a new goal so you can actually get into the upper left quadrant without needing to be a rare, mutant, superstar. I say, “Like Your Work” and “Make Enough money.” We can all achieve this.

I love my family and friends. I love scuba diving. I love art.
I work for other reasons than love. I make enough money. I spend the money on enjoying the things I love.

This is the first step in liking your job: Give yourself a break and don’t feel like you are failing if you don’t LOVE your work.

Now, to get to the second step of actually really liking the job you do…

2. Follow Your Energy

The trick is to to figure out what gives you energy (vs. love) and do more of that.

If you follow what gives you energy and avoid what drains your energy (certain types of work and people you can’t stand), you will find yourself liking your job.

Here is picture for how to think about this.

Advance your career and feel satisfied in your work…

The trick is to find the intersection of the three things in this picture.

1. Your Values: Who you really are when you tell the truth to yourself. What is really important to you in life? What is OK and not OK? You will not like your work (and your energy will be drained) if your values are compromised.

2. Your Strengths and Skills: Where you get energy. You will thrive the most when you get to use your natural strengths at work. When you are using your strengths, you build energy and feel great about what you are doing. If you are in a job where you don’t get to use your strengths, it will drain your energy and you will feel unhappy.

3. Your Actions & Behaviors: Learn what your company truly values. Tune your job description to do more of the things your company values, but make sure you find the places where those things intersect with your personal Strengths and Values.

Find this intersection for YOU, and you will like your job.

You can choose the kind of work you want to do, and re-negotiate your job description over time so you put yourself in a position to thrive most of the time. This is the what the most successful people have figured out and do.

When I finally figured this out in my own career, my family started saying to me things like, “Am I imagining this, or do you actually like your work now?”

It makes a huge difference. And it’s achievable.

I hope you can take these ideas and create an improvement in your career.
Best wishes and much success for 2012!

Want some help with all this?

A webinar

In last month’s webinar, we discussed how to find this intersection for yourself in your own career. We also talked about the steps to tune your job to add more business value and be more satisfying.

Members can download this Build Career Value webinar for free.

Non-members can purchase this individual webinar or become a member, and get this webinar and all the other webinars in the Member Library for free.

Special Membership Offer – Get 3 Free Months

SInce it’s the new year, and it’s a great time to focus on doing things on purpose for your career, I want to remind you of the Membership program, as a great resource.

If you are interested in becoming a member, here is how it works:

Each month I do a webinar on a topic of Business Leadership and Career Success.
Also, each month, members get to call into a monthly Coaching Hour conference call with me to get personalized coaching.

For just $179 for a whole year, you get access to a quality of information that is not out there at any price. And you get access to me.

What you get

Members get access to everything in the Member Library and…

* You can download the webinars and listen at your own convenience
* You get all the worksheets and templates from the webinars to put your career plan into action
* You get access to Personal Coaching from me in the Monthly Coaching Hour
* You get the Career Year of Action Guide (a $39 value).

Join Now (in January) and get 3 months for FREE.

If you have been thinking about joining now is a great time to do it.

You’ll get 3 months free AND you’ll get started with the Career Year of Action guide in January.

Members report that they are able to create a permanent improvement in their career (and life) with the tools and confidence they gain from their participation in the program.

Managers: Be a Hero – Offer Membership to your team.

Membership is a highly practical, effective, and low cost option for you to provide meaningful development to your team. It’s a win-win. They learn how to add more value to your business and develop themselves in the process.

Contact me for group or corporate pricing.

Was this useful?

If you found this article useful, please help me share it (share button below) with others and encourage them to subscribe for free.

About Patty
Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)

You can find Patty at www.AzzarelloGroup.com, follow her on twitter or facebook, or read her book RISE…How to Be Really Successful at Work AND Like Your Life.

Free eBook Download

Subscribe for free
If you found this article useful, you can subscribe to this blog for free and get updates in your email or RSS reader.

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Click “Like” to get more great business leadership updates on Facebook

Success and Satisfaction

In this month’s webinar we talked about how to maximize your success and get more personal satisfaction from your work.

BUILD CAREER VALUE

Listen or download the webinar to learn more.

The Magic Intersection

• Your Strengths
• Where you Get Energy
• What the Business Values

.
Satisfaction does not come from loving your work. It comes from working at this intersection where you get energy, you are using your greatest strengths, and you are doing things the business values — so you’re good at your job, you get the recognition and rewards you deserve, and you enjoy doing the work.

Strengths

Use your strengths
It is very painful be in a job where you have key strengths that don’t get used or appreciated. The most successful people know their strengths and make sure to use them. They renegotiate their job over time to put themselves in the position to use their strengths most of the time — that’s why they’re so successful.

Know your strengths
As humans we tend to take our natural strengths for granted. Our own strengths don’t feel impressive to us so we tend to overlook them. We talked about the problems this causes and how to discover and use your natural strengths.

Stretch
We also talked about the importance of getting out of your comfort zone, the difference between strengths and skills, and how to use your strengths to make successful leaps into new and bigger roles.

Energy

Satisfaction
When you get energy from your work, you feel more satisfied and have more fun doing it. We talked about how to learn to follow your energy and make job choices that will maximize it.

Build energy
The more energy you have, the more value you will create. Think about the things in your work that give you the most energy and the ones that drain your energy. We talked about how to tune your work so you are building energy, not having the life drained out of you.

Business Value

Negotiate
Don’t treat your job description as a life sentence. Your job is a contract with your company. We talked about how to renegotiate your job over time to suit you better. Don’t wait for someone else to figure this out or do this for you. It’s up to you.

Make a business case
You can’t just say, “I want my job to be different so I’ll enjoy it more”. You have to make a business case for the change. We talked about how to build that business case, and show your boss that your desired way of working is better for the business.

Visible, But not Annoying

Communicate
Share your value. Deliver high value outcomes and then communicate about them. As long as you are communicating based on excellent results, it is not annoying. People like to know about good results. They like to feel in the loop.

Less Chaos

Value not activity
Working frantically does not mean you are more committed. Think about outcomes not output. Make sure you are adding value. Don’t compete on being the most chaotic! We talked about the risks of being over-busy and how to compete on value instead (and how to deal with a boss that demands long hours).

Want more?

Downloads are free to members
Listen or download the podcast – Build Career Value
Download the complete webinar – Build Career Value
(includes the presentation and the worksheets from the webinar)

Become a Member

• Get yourself a membership.
• Get a membership for someone whose career you care about.
• Provide membership to your team as a practical and useful development program. (Contact me for group rates)

.
Become a member

• Get this webinar and all the other Webinars in the Member Library
• Get personal access to Patty in monthly member-only Coaching Hour conference calls
• Get a personal career advantage

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About Patty
Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)

You can find Patty at www.AzzarelloGroup.com, follow her on twitter or facebook, or read her book RISE…How to Be Really Successful at Work AND Like Your Life.

Free eBook Download

Subscribe for free
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New Random House Edition

I’m excited to share the news with you that my book RISE has been picked up by a large commercial publisher.

Here is a sneak peak at the new cover. It’s also been updated with additional examples, and re-organized a bit, but the content and the tone remain the same.

If you loved the original, all the stuff you liked is still there.

Get RISE now, or wait till May

I wanted to let you know that RISE will be unavailable for a few months as we switch over to the new version.

So if you want to get a copy as a holiday gift, or for your team or book club, you’ll need to order now. Otherwise you’ll need to wait till May 2012.

Here is all the information on availability.

Dec 31, 2011
The last day to buy the original version.

Jan 1, 2012
You can pre-order the new version.

May 1, 2012
The new version will be shipping.

Get your copies now

Buy on Amazon

Buy on Barnes & Noble

CLICK HERE FOR
VOLUME DISCOUNTS

Increased Distribution & Audio Version!

RISE will be published May 1, 2012 by Ten Speed Press, an Imprint of Crown Books, a division of Random House.

Starting in May 2012:

• RISE will be in book stores and in major airports nationally
• We will also finally have distribution in India which many of you have been asking for
• There will be an audio version (with my voice…James Earl Jones was busy).

Thank You

Thank you for all your support, interest and feedback on RISE. I really appreciate all the reviews, and how many of you have passed it on and are buying it as a gift for others. That is such an honor!

Thanks again.

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About Patty

Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)

You can find Patty at www.AzzarelloGroup.com, follow her on twitter or facebook, or read her book RISE…How to Be Really Successful at Work AND Like Your Life.

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What do YOU do?

On one of my recent coaching hour conference calls with Azzarello Group members, someone asked me,

“What things do you when you start a job so you make sure to get off on the best possible footing?”

I gave an answer along the lines of my DO Better, LOOK Better, Connect Better model about building credibility and getting an action plan in place, but the person said, “No, I meant, what do YOU do?

“Is there something you did the same way each time you started
a new executive job?”

So I thought about it and in fact there was one thing that was part of my playbook pretty much every time I started a new job. And it worked really well.

After we discussed it, someone on the call said, “you should write a blog about this”. So here you have it…

Getting Started Strong

This approach is not only useful for when you are new to a role or a company, but you can use this technique to give yourself a boost in effectiveness and credibility within your current job as well.

Create two lists.

Desired Outcomes
Recommended Actions

Get feedback on both lists from pretty much everyone.

1. Desired Outcomes

On this list I would write a list of what the world would look like after a year of my making it better. Here is where I would bring to bear my external or fresh perspective and big picture thinking.

For example it would have things on it like:

• Perception of our products goes from unknown to desirable and credible
• We are spending money more effectively and can see budget tied to specific business outcomes
• Morale and motivation of sales team is greatly improved
• Industry analysts will reinforce our strategy
• We will have reference customers that support our new strategy in each super region

2. Recommended Actions

I would then create a list of actions that I believed would drive progress to achieve these outcomes.

On this list I would have things like:

• Resolve internal competing efforts on products and clarify product and service roadmap
• Improve our sales enablement function (list top 3 ideas…)
• Work with services organization to identify, secure and create reference customers in each region
• Orchestrate interaction with analysts and reference customers to prove our strategy

Get Feedback

Then what I would do is I would walk around and talk to everyone about these 2 lists.

I would present these two lists at management meetings for each function, team meetings, and 1-1 meetings with peers and executives and get their feedback.

I would ask, do you agree that these are the right outcomes to be targeting?
Do you agree that these are the right initiatives to achieve these outcomes?

Thinking back on it, this approach quickly let me establish myself in a very productive and credible way.

On the DO Better front:

It allowed me to zero in on the most important business outcomes. It helped me both create and prioritize the action plan to get there.

On the LOOK Better front:

It helped me build credibility quickly because I was “out there”.

I was having conversations with business stakeholders far and wide. I was establishing my presence. It gave me a chance to establish myself as a strategic leader that could see beyond the current situation.

Outcome focus

Hint: driving an outcome-focused conversation always makes you appear more credible, than talking about things that are happening today.

On the CONNECT Better front:

Having these conversation based on these two lists gave me a reason to connect with people.

The outcome-focused perspective put people in the mood to help me.

Because I was getting their feedback, they felt like they had a stake in what I was doing and because it was a motivating outcome we were both now heading for, they would offer to help me.

I was able to build up an extra team of connections very quickly by sharing my thoughts on these two lists of outcomes and actions, and asking people far and wide for their inputs and ultimately their help.

By the time I got 30 days in, I had a very solid plan that I put into action. It let me start putting points on the board to maintain the credibility I built initially with this approach.

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About Patty
Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)

You can find Patty at www.AzzarelloGroup.com, follow her on twitter or facebook, or read her book RISE…How to Be Really Successful at Work AND Like Your Life.

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Take more control of how you work

In this month’s webinar we talked about how the most successful people rise above the work and add more value to the business.

WORK MORE STRATEGICALLY

Listen or download the webinar to learn more.

Here’s what we talked about:

Re-define your work

Add more value. Adding value = doing what the business values. We talked about how to map your work to key business initiatives, then tune how you work to have more impact. Don’t wait for your boss to do this for you.

Ruthless Priorities. Decide which things you will finish first and best. Map them to business value. Refuse to put them at risk.

Do less stupid stuff. We talked about a number of time wasters and how to eliminate them such as: The “don’t do” list, improving poor communications, and leaving certain things unresolved.

Negotiate your workload

Don’t do everything. Your company can absorb an unlimited amount of work from you and not really care. You be the one to make sure you get to focus on important things.

Educate your executive. Push back. We talked about how to build credibility by catching all the work, but then analyzing it and making recommendations back to your boss about how to prioritize it.

Responsive or Reactive. We talked about the difference between being known for being responsive on the most important things vs. reacting to everything.

Own the outcome

Situation + Response = Outcome. We talked about how teams get stuck endlessly talking about the situation (admiring the problem), and how to break through this by focusing on the outcome and action plan (response).

Don’t add weight. Get known as someone who “takes weight away”. Always move the business forward. Defining and owning outcomes is one great way do this.

Recognition and Satisfaction

Stand out: Get known for driving important outcomes, not just doing work. Upgrading your work to be more strategic will build upon itself and you will find yourself being engaged in even more strategic work over time.

Increase YOUR value: By tuning your work to have greater value to the business, you will find yourself more valued, and your work will feel more satisfying.

Want more?

Listen or download the podcast – Work More Strategically
Download the complete webinar – Work More Strategically
(includes the presentation and the worksheets from the webinar)

Become a member – Get this webinar and all the other Webinars

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About Patty
Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)

You can find Patty at www.AzzarelloGroup.com, follow her on twitter or facebook, or read her book RISE…How to Be Really Successful at Work AND Like Your Life.

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Time to be strategic

Pretty much everyone I talk to says they would be better at their job if they had more time to think.

Also, when I ask, “What are your biggest time sinks?”, the vast majority of people say “email”.

But almost no one says that email is the most important thing they do.

The need to be responsive

The reason so many people remain a slave to email is because they are afraid to be seen as unresponsive in today’s, always-on world.

You are putting this pressure on yourself.

I had a fascinating discussion with a group of peers, about half of whom worked at home. They communicated on instant messaging as well as email.

One woman was literally afraid to go to the bathroom when she was working at home, because she thought that if she did not respond instantly, her colleagues would think she was goofing off.

I asked her in-office colleagues, “What would you think if you sent an instant message to someone on the team working at home and you didn’t hear back for an hour?”

The resounding reply was, “that they were working on something important”.

Responding instantly doesn’t add value

Taking the time to think through your work strategically, and focus time an energy on the things that have the biggest impact on the business adds value. Improving the way you do your work to be more effective or efficient adds value.

I have talked to managers who say that people who always respond instantly to email seem less effective because they never seem to be working on anything. Ouch!

Free yourself to work more strategically and not let email take over your life.

Here some of the best practices I have collected to spend less time on email, and build your credibility along the way.

7 Ideas to make email less painful

I encourage you to add your ideas and best practices in the comment box below as well.

Spend less time

1. Make the container smaller.
Email will fill any amount of time you give it. If you are doing email every night for hours after dinner you are doing something wrong.  How much time in your day is email actually worth? 

Set a time limit based on what email deserves compared to other things.

Think about budgeting only one hour per day for email.  How would you make sure you got to the most critical stuff?

2. Get the Time of Day Right
We all have a part of the day when we are most brilliant and focused. If you are at your best first thing in the morning, or right after you take a walk at lunch, do your most thinking-intensive, hard, strategic work then.

Don’t waste your best brain on email.

3. Turn off the temptation
Turn off the beeps, the alerts, and the pop-up windows. Don’t keep checking your email all day.

Give your boss a heads up, then set up an auto-responder that lets people know that you answer email at noon and 5pm. That way you are giving an immediate response and you are also signaling that you are working on something important.

Do Less

4. Don’t read all your email
Know your Ruthless Priorities. Keep a list of them with you at all times. Then deal first with the email that impacts your ruthless priorities. You will be seen as highly responsive on the most important things. Everything else does not need the same level of care and responsiveness.

The phone will ring if you miss something really important.

Getting your Ruthless Priorities done will always add more value than doing all of your email.

5. Catch what’s most important
Use filters to find the emails coming from your boss, board members, top clients, etc. to make sure you don’t miss those.  Only read things you are in the “TO” list not just “CC’d”.

Respond differently

6. File instead of read
One woman I met had a goal for email that was simply to never lose an email from a key client.  When she got emails she didn’t read them as she got several hundred a day.  She would just file them in a folder for that client, and if something ever came up that was in an email, she would search for it in the moment.

7. Quick reply
When you get an email from someone who wants to give you input or get your opinion, sometimes “got it, thanks” is all you ever need to do.  You will be seen as being very responsive without spending lots of time responding to everything.  Always acknowledge input from people.

Zero-inbox

Zero inbox is not for everyone, but when I stepped back to think about my own time-wasters, I realized that I personally wasted a lot of time searching for messages I sent, received, deleted…(where was that message?).

Or I would waste time just mindlessly poking around the 1200-2500 messages in my inbox at any point in time to see what I might need to act on.

I now have had zero messages in my inbox for the past 3 years. This saves about 2-4 hours in my week, and a lot of frustration.

Here is how I do it:

Act on any message you can in the moment.  Deal with it or delete it. For the others:

File them. You need two types of categories: Action and Save.

My Action categories are:

DO: I need to do something, call someone, do research, write something, etc.
REPLY:  I need to send an email reply but can’t do it at the moment
FOLLOW UP: date stamp it for follow-up and get it out of the inbox.

My Save Categories are:

CLIENTS OR PROJECTS: one folder for each
TRAVEL: Itineraries & Travel Logistics
LOGINS & ACCOUNTS:  login and account info for various online systems
RESOURCES:  pointers to vendors, services, utilities, websites and other resources
GOOD STUFF: miscellaneous things worth saving
WAITING:  information I will need to act on later but not now

The Dramatic Improvement:

It took me about 6 hours one day to re-classify or delete everything in my inbox.
But now it takes me about 1-10 minutes each day to clear my inbox.
I do not search for “lost” messages any more.
I do not poke around in my inbox any more.

I schedule working time to take action on email.

Then I get right to the DO and to the Reply folders without needing to look for anything.  I’m more productive.

What things have you done to keep email from taking over your life?  Please share what works best for you.

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About Patty
Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)

You can find Patty at www.AzzarelloGroup.com, follow her on twitter or facebook, or read her book RISE…How to Be Really Successful at Work AND Like Your Life.

Free eBook Download

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Difficult People are Everywhere

In this month’s Business Leadership Webinar
we talked about how to deal with difficult people, stack the deck in your favor, and get your way more of the time!

INFLUENCE DIFFICULT PEOPLE

Listen or download the webinar to learn more.

Here are some of the things we covered:

Influence, not Defense

Don’t get stalled. You WILL get bullied, blocked and let down. If you view this as an inconvenient nuisance that interferes with your real job, ignore it, or expect someone else to fix it for you, you will get stuck.

It’s part of the Job. Accept that dealing with difficult people proactively, and clearing the obstacles they create, is an official part of your job. We talked about how you can make more progress, and get less personally damaged by.

Defensive doesn’t work. You are never in a stronger position by getting defensive. Create a positive way forward. Fight personal attacks with forward progress.

Outcome vs. Emotion.

Don’t get drawn in…
One of my favorite quotes is: “If you get drawn into an argument with a stupid person, he will drag you down to his level, then beat you with experience”.
–unknown.

Whether it is a stupid person or an evil genius, you are better off to stick to the high ground and stick to the non-emotional facts. Keep it simple. Don’t react to emotional attacks, it only gives them more hooks to drag you down.

Focus on the Desired Outcome. We talked about how to defined a clear desired outcome — and how this shifts the focus to a less controversial, less emotional point in the future. What to do next is way more contentious than “What are we trying to accomplish big picture, long term?”

Outcome vs. Opinion. Remember, your opinion is not more valid in an argument. We talked about how to shift the discussion from conflicting opinions to desired outcomes, so you can get to work on achieving a useful outcome.

Get the Data

The Voice of the data. When you collect the data you can speak with the voice of the customer or the voice of the market, not your voice. You are not smarter than your adversary, but 100 customers are.

The Value of the data. When someone is attacking you, blocking you, or not performing, keep a log of it. What are the specifics? When? What? What was the impact? This helps you assess if it indeed is a big deal, or if you are overreacting because it bugs you. If it is a real issue, then you will already have the data record to address it objectively.

Be super-specific. We talked about how to define a very specific outcome. Make sure you spell out how it will be measured, by who? Have a check list for what completeness and quality look like. Allow no wiggle room. That way if you are not satisfied with the outcome, you have a super-clear, completely objective way for communicating the gap.

There are ideas for doing this in the webinar worksheets.

Don’t give away power. When you are fuzzy in defining the outcome and the measures, you give away power. You’re left saying, “That’s not good enough”, but by not having a super-clear way to say why, you risk sliding back into a disagreement with the person, not the outcome.

Sell the Outcome

Recruit Support. You need to build your power relative to your adversary. You need to actively sell the business value of the outcome you are proposing. We talked about how to recruit support so that you are favored in a stand-off.

Credibility. You will find occasions when you and your adversary have an equally strong case. There are two factors that tip the scales in your favor.
1. Which proposal is more likely/trusted to be executed?
2. Who has more personal Credibility

Short and Long Term View. I can say that in my career, the times I got my way against adversaries included both using these desired outcome, facts-oriented techniques in the moment, AND as a result of having taken care to build my credibility over the long term.

Build a Relationship

We are all people. Even though your adversary is probably the last person that you would want to have lunch with, do it anyway. Try to find some reason to respect them. Try to find a common interest outside of work. Even a small human connection will make work negotiations easier and reduce back-stabbing.

Want more?

Listen or download the podcast – Influence Difficult People
Download the complete webinar – Influence Difficult People
(includes the presentation and the worksheets from the webinar)

THINGS YOU CAN DO NOW

1. Subscribe.
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3. Check out  my new book
RISE…How to Be Really Successful at Work AND Like Your Life.
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