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Looking Back: Reflections on 2008

December 25, 2008 | Author: Promise Phelon | Filed under: Career Change, Job Hunting, Moving Up, The Networking Habit

Tuesday evening I gave one of my newest engineers a ride to the airport. He was heading home to spend the holidays with his family in Arizona.

We’d had an important “check-in” meeting as a team earlier in the week; I used that drive through the crowded airport as an opportunity to get his perspective. We said our goodbyes and as I drove away I realized that, right now, I am doing what I’ve always wanted to professionally — solving tough problems that will help real people, leading a team of smart people and benefiting from a powerful network of investors and advisors. What’s even better is that we’re fulfilling a vision that we share collectively. Thanks to our investors, team and advisers, the passion for the product is deep and exciting.

But I can’t say CEO-dom is always rosy. I deal with the daily struggles most CEOs face:

  • Managing a performance-based organization.
  • Stressing about how much we’re paying for VOIP service and office supplies.
  • Working to influence and partner with a board, strategic advisers and investors.
  • Staying focused yet flexible.

It’s not easy and the struggles never happen sequentially, but in intense clusters, or all at once. Regardless, I’m excited when I wake up every morning. I anticipate what new feature Suraj will propose, what smart-ass remark Mike will make, what analogy Peter will come up with, or what we might hear from a user.

A Year in the Rear-view: Three Lessons Learned

After a year that included months of founding, funding, patenting and launching the industry’s first career navigational company, it’s a good time to reflect. A friend from a previous life recently asked me how I stay “upwardly mobile” and positive in a down economy. Three main ideas come to mind, based on my personal experience and on working with our UpModels.

1. To succeed, I must do my best work
2. To do my best work, I must harness my energy, strengths and my passion

This point is supported by a McKinsey Quarterly article titled Centered leadership: How talented women thrive. The article establishes several points that professionals should consider, regardless of gender. One that stands out is: Know yourself by watching your energy.

“People seeking to define what is meaningful can start, as one interviewee put it, by ‘being honest with yourself about what you’re good at and what you enjoy doing.’ Building these signature strengths into everyday activities at work makes you happier, in part by making these activities more meaningful. Although there is no simple formula for matching your strengths to any single industry or function, you can look for patterns in jobs that have and haven’t worked out and talk to others about your experiences.

The connection between signature strengths and work can change because priorities do; sometimes, for example, a job is better than a calling … Our interviews show that this ebb and flow is natural and that the key to success is being aware of the shifts — and making conscious choices about them — in the context of bigger goals, personal or professional.”

3. To fuel my work and produce results, I must be tied into an ecosystem of people: Enablers, co-conspirators, connectors, mavens, as well as mentors, advocates and guides and so on. To be honest, that is how we got here.

Here again, the Centered leadership article cements this point:

“People with strong networks and good mentors enjoy more promotions, higher pay, and greater career satisfaction. They feel a sense of belonging, which makes their lives meaningful. As Mark Hunter and Herminia Ibarra have noted in the Harvard Business Review, what differentiates a leader from a manager ‘is the ability to figure out where to go and to enlist the people and groups necessary to get there.’
Yet not all networks are equal.

“Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist who studies social belonging and rejection, believes that men tend to build broader, shallower networks than women do and that the networks of men give them a wider range of resources for gaining knowledge and professional opportunities. This theory is a matter of substantial debate among academics. Our experience with hundreds of women at McKinsey, however, offers additional evidence that women’s networks tend to be narrower but deeper than men’s.

Moving upward and taking career control, in what is an era of chaos, requires not only focusing on developing the unique talents you bring to a project, but ensuring that your network is broad enough to capture the expertise, influence, relationships and access you need to reach career and life objectives.

The McKinsey article shows that we should be thinking about where we excel, exploring a path of professional and personal growth, and building a network of relationships that helps us get to our desired destination and stay there.

Happy New Year!

Related resources:

The Best Gift: Knowing Your Strengths and How to Use Them

Tune Out New Year’s Networking Noise, Tune into Yourself

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 25th, 2008 and is filed under Career Change, Job Hunting, Moving Up, The Networking Habit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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