StandOut (6 page)

• “I love solutions . . . and always feel I can come up with them, no matter how much of a mess we are in. I can always find a practical way forward.”

How to Make an Immediate Impact

• You are the rare person who is energized by other people’s problems. So, to make an immediate impact,
seek out some of the toughest problems that either your team or your client is facing and set about tackling them
. Problem solving is draining for most people, but not you. This sets you apart.

• The thornier and more complicated the problem, the better. One of your best qualities is your ability to break a complex problem down into its component parts. So ask lots of practical questions, push aside people’s generalizations, and get to the facts.
Show your colleagues how to “unpack” a complex problem and solve each part separately
. They’ll be grateful. And you’ll be at your best.

• Put yourself in the middle of pivotal, intense moments
. When other people are stumped and at their wits’ end, you are at your best. You think more clearly, project more confidence, act with more certainty. Whether your colleagues let on or not, they crave—and need—your confidence in high-pressure situations.

• Seize any chance you get to explain how things work
— with a customer, at a staff meeting, or at a company gathering. You are at your most powerful and charismatic when breaking a process or situation down so that other people can see what is really going on.

• Every team leader has a couple of processes he knows aren’t good but which are “good enough.” They annoy him, but he tolerates them because the team is busy—“good enough” will have to do for right now. You can help him.
Take one of these “good enoughs” as a side project and come up with a practical solution for making it work right
. He may not understand exactly how you did it, but he will see this as “initiative.”

• Since you feel truly alive only when you are tackling a difficult challenge, you can find yourself becoming bored when things are ticking along nicely. You may wish you weren’t this way—“Why can’t I be happy with business-as-usual?”—but you are. To avoid boredom either
carve your role into one where you are being paid to react and respond to problems
or, failing that, embrace the concept of
kaizen
—“continuous improvement”—and focus on those parts of your world that are not yet as effective as they could be.

How to Take Your Performance to the Next Level

• An Advisor always needs people to advise. Analysis is fine, and can be fun, but the day you discover that you have no direct audience for your conclusions—sitting by yourself, analyzing for the sake of it—will be a very bad day for you.
Make sure you are always being paid to offer your conclusions to someone
. You need this “someone,” this “someone with a dilemma,” to prove to yourself that you are valuable. And smart.

• You are the kind of person who respects experts. Why? Because experts have studied their subjects deeply and can pinpoint which details make the difference, which distinctions really matter. You are wired to appreciate this kind of inquiry.
So ally yourself with a couple of carefully chosen experts in your field
. Hang out with them. Read their articles or books. Volunteer to support them in their next big project. Their practical wisdom will intrigue and inspire you.

• Become a credentialed expert yourself
. Choose your discipline and then build your career around deepening your expertise in this discipline. Pursue all the professional and academic qualifications available within this discipline. Your long-term career success hinges on your credibility and, like it or not—actually, you do like it— these sorts of qualifications, publicly displayed, give you an extra boost of credibility.

• These qualifications will also give you detail and, as an Advisor,
you do wonders with detail
. With some people detail disappears inside their heads into ever more convoluted theories and concepts. Not so with you. Your command of detail gets displayed for us all to see. The deeper you investigate a subject, the more fine-tuned and subtle your distinctions become. Since your mind instinctively uses distinctions to clarify other people’s problems—“What’s unique about your situation is X, and that’s precisely why you should do Y, and not Z”—your deepening expertise makes your advice so much more insightful and effective.

• You are at your best when you can see the people on the receiving end of your strength as an Advisor. So, as your career progresses
seek out more demanding audiences
. “More demanding” might mean “wider”—can you publish your insights in blogs, articles, or even books? It might mean a more discriminating audience—a group of your peers, perhaps, or your most valuable customers. It might mean a higher profile audience—the “C” suite or the highest levels of government. Or it might mean a higher stakes audience—the launching of a business, children at risk, or national security.

• You will always be at your best when the route ahead is unclear and someone needs to come in, assess all the facts available, and make a decision.
Start-ups fit this description nicely
. Your career could very well be a series of startups that require your particular gift for pragmatic decision making.

What to Watch Out For

• Don’t come across as a know-it-all. Some Advisors fall prey to this caricature because they not only seem to have all the answers, they also appear so certain of their answers. To avoid this, before you launch into what you know is the right answer,
discipline yourself to ask plenty of questions
. Even if after asking your very first question, you think that you know the best course of action, keep asking questions two through ten. For the other person to accept your advice, she will need to feel that you have truly heard all there is to hear about her situation.

• You are not at your best running existing operations. It bores you. You are a turnaround person, a start-up person.
You are not a builder
. So don’t allow yourself to be cast as one.

• Don’t let yourself get promoted too far away from the action
. And for you action means the drama, the variety, and the urgent need of other people’s challenges. Responding to these challenges is the stuff of life. No matter how much money is being offered to you, no matter how enticing your new title will be, never convince yourself that it can be delegated. With you, it can’t.

• Don’t become a shoeless cobbler. If you’re not careful you’ll get so drawn to the challenge of solving other people’s problems you will neglect your own and allow them to pile up. You may not notice this happening— other people’s predicaments can be so intriguing—but gradually the pressure will build, until one day you wake up and realize that you are bent double beneath the weight of your own unresolved issues. At that point your knee-jerk reaction will be resentment (“Why do you guys demand so much of my time?”) or self-criticism (“I’m so stupid. Why do I let people eat up all of my time?”) or both. To prevent this sort of explosion,
set aside an hour each month to target one of your most pressing problems, and then make sure to invite to the discussion at least one other person whom this problem affects
. Why? Because you’ll take yourself seriously only when you see that someone else is relying on you to be smart.

How to Win As a Leader

Advisor
: Your strength is your confidence. You seem to us a supremely capable leader: intuitive, opinionated, assured. And so we find ourselves turning to you to solve our problems.

• We like it that you lead by example. No job is too small for you to tackle. No problem is unworthy of your attention. You show us all that a great team is built out of lots of small, smart, detailed decisions.

• Remind us that our clients want us to have anticipated their practical needs. We know our product or service better than our clients do. We know when it works best and what to watch out for. The power of your team lies in us knowing which client might want this information and then sharing it with them before they’ve even asked for it.

• Ensure we understand why we are changing something, and work hard to help us believe it is a good idea to change. Sometimes it feels as if you want change for the sake of change. You’ll get the best out of us only if you’ve taken the time to show us that the “platform” is indeed burning.

• Resist the temptation to solve all our problems. We know you can do it, but if you always step in to help us, we’ll never learn to solve them ourselves. Though it gives us confidence knowing you can, there are times we’d just like the freedom to find our own way.

• When the way is unclear, we rely on you to provide specificity—specificity of purpose, of steps to take, of what we will find when we get there. This is invaluable to us. Keep communicating the way. All the time.

• Of course, you will never need to fake your self-assurance, but now and then, temper it with a little self-deprecation. It makes us feel closer to you. It humanizes you.

How to Win As a Manager

Advisor
: Your strength is your common sense. I come to you to play out real-world “what-ifs.” You are my most practical resource.

• I trust your recommendations because in most matters you are an expert. I know that you’ve done your research or are speaking from experience. This gives me great confidence. Invite me to share my own ideas or insights. I need to know that my unique experience is also of value.

• Encourage me to take some industry-specific courses that can deepen my own expertise. Then talk to me about how what I have learned can help my coworkers or clients.

• I love how practical you are when it comes to rewarding me. When I win an award, you don’t just give me something generic, such as a gift certificate. Instead you’ll offer something useful to me, such as working my shift or buying me the new program I’ve been clamoring for. This tells me that you understand what my life is like.

• You are decisive. This keeps the wheels turning. I could benefit from slowing down at certain points to evaluate progress and ensure I’m still aiming in the right direction.

• I trust you with my problems. I feel safe bringing them to you. You provide excellent advice. Encourage me to bring solutions with my problems. Ask me, “What have you already considered?” or “What do you think you should do?”

• You are practical, pragmatic, and decisive. Which is great; things get done. But now and then leave me space for some “what if” thinking. Allow me to tap into my own creativity.

How to Win in Sales

Advisor
: Your strength is your ability to explain precisely why your product or solution is unique. You draw such clear and vivid distinctions.

• Become an expert in your competitors’ products or services. Help me, your potential client, see and understand the critical differences between your offering and that of others. You will excel at drawing these distinctions.

• Give me a logical process to help me consider my options as I work through a problem. I will always appreciate how carefully and rationally you review with me the details that matter.

• Come armed to all meetings with more than one approach to the challenge I’m facing. You are at your most persuasive when you are showing me how you weigh one choice against the other. I won’t always agree with you, but watching you think things through will help me think things through.

• Over time I will come to lean on you for input during times of uncertainty. During these times, intentionally offer yourself as a resource within your area of greatest expertise. (However, take care not to guide decisions where you aren’t qualified.)