Be Different or be dead

February 1, 2021

3 easy steps to build a successful career plan

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3 easy steps to build a successful career plan.

Everyone needs to do career planning; it’s not good enough to wander through your working life and take whatever comes your way.
Yes, there are random events that impact us, but we are in a better position to respond to them and carve out a rewarding outcome if we have an endgame in mind.

There are many suggestions offered by many experts on how to develop a career plan, but the secret is to come up with an approach that works for you; that fits your unique capabilities, perspective and outlook.

I developed my own career game plan method. I didn’t want a boilerplate; I wanted something different that would focus on the practical task of implementation as opposed to having a grand plan that was good in theory and nothing more.

What I didn’t want was a planning framework that everyone else used that merely focused on the completeness of the plan; making sure that all of the boilerplate topics were covered, and expecting that success would come from that.

The process that I created — and worked for me from an entry level analyst position to president — was to build a path to your destiny by answering three basic questions.

What job do you want?

This question addresses personal growth — what specific position do you want and when?

Most people are vague when asked about their career goals: ‘I would like a position managing people’ or ‘I want to lead a marketing or sales team’.
These aspirations don’t feed implementation very well; they don’t direct you to a specific action plan. And a game plan that can’t be executed isn’t worth much.

To ensure your career efforts are productive, define the specific position you intend to get and when you intend to get there

It makes a big difference to the actions you take, for example, if you are interested in a VP marketing position versus a Sales Account Manager position.

Source: Pexels

And be as clear as you can on the organization you are targeting. Your game plan tactics will be different if you are interested in BMW as opposed to Apple.
Each has a different business challenge and a different priority on the skills and competencies they require.

An amazing benefit of focussing on the specific organization you want to target is that you amass a detailed understanding of each of the potential organizations you could be interested in, which is invaluable not only in making a decision on the one to put in your crosshairs but also to enhance your knowledge and expertise in the organizations you studied.

Too many career hunters are unclear on where they want to land, which is a normal situation for most people. The problem is, as long as you are hovering over a number of possibilities you don’t act. You ponder and reflect. But you don’t do anything to move forward.

It’s better to declare what you think you want today based on the best information you have available and your particular interests. Go after it. You will learn soon enough if it is the right path and you can then adjust your game plan on the run based on what you learn.

And keep your target date close in rather than in the distant future in order to force yourself to take action. I always set my sights on a position that I wanted within 24-months which compelled me to act now. It’s too easy to not act today when your target is 5 years away; there are too many reasons why procrastinating makes good sense.

The answer to question #1 could be — ‘I intend to land a sales director position with BMW by March 19, 2022.’

Who can help you?

Who are the individuals — the foxes — within the organization you’re targeting who influence decisions on who gets selected for various positions in the organization?
And further, who are the individuals who know someone in that organization that could introduce you to the foxes?

The fox in any organization is the key manager or executive that has the greatest amount of influence on a particular decision to be made.
If you’re in sales and have a potential deal in front of a client, the fox would be the individual in the customer’s organization who would make the buying decision.
If you are to win the sale, you need to figure out a way to make it stand out above your competitor’s in the eyes of the fox.

It’s no different in your career. The challenge you have is to sell yourself as the best person for the job available in a crowd of others who are also interested in the position, and you need to find the fox in the organization who has the most influence on the hiring decision.

Career game plan success means engaging with the right people to spread your word and get attention so you get the invitation to make your pitch.
I have seen many talented people fail because they did not cultivate the right channels to express their skills and experience.

If you covet the VP marketing position for TELUS, for example, do your work to identify who can help you, and ‘mentor up’ with these high currency individuals both within and outside the organization.

This is an arduous process because when you start, you are unlikely to know the foxes in your target and with your 24-month implementation plan you don’t have a huge amount of time to graze the field of possibilities. So engage your mentor — I presume you have a stable of them, right? — in helping you by using who they know to get you going.
I’ve also found LinkedIn extremely useful to increase your forward momentum as well. Be creative and explore every possibility.

These covet-the-fox practices worked for me:

▪️ Identify the leaders in the organization who are making the key business and people decisions today and are likely to be doing so over the next year or so. Foxes need to be carefully identified and targeted just as you would any other customer group that held the potential for your success.

You will be allocating a significant amount of your time and energy on them and you need to be sure that they have the potential to deliver significant benefits to you. If you choose incorrectly you will not receive the expected return on your personal investment.

▪️ Discover their expectations and secrets. If you have a deep intimate understanding of the fox, you are in a position to impress them and gain their support in a way none other can do.

The information that would be invaluable on each fox would be things like: what attributes they typically look for when hiring people, the questions they ask, details on their career path, the positions they have held in the past, their personal brand in terms of what they are known for — their strengths and weaknesses, external hobbies and interests and details on their family.

▪️ Market yourself with a broad range of skills and expertise that the organization needs to successfully execute its long term strategy; don’t flog yourself as a person having a narrow set of competencies. Select the particular competencies you have that address the key issues facing the organization.

They could include: MBA in marketing and finance, demonstrated achievement in building business strategy, changing a marketing culture from a product focus to be more customer focussed, building market share in competitive markets, improving customer service 25% over a 12 month period, external speaking engagements on competitive strategy and marketing, building strong teams and consultative selling skills.

▪️ Be proactive in discovering the opportunities that will be coming up in the organization. If you have a good relationship with the foxes this will aid the process. In addition, stay tuned into the informal communications network in your organization as it is often very effective in knowing when change is in the wind.

With an informed outlook of the possibilities, you can take whatever action you feel appropriate to take advantage of them should they arise.

The answer to question #2 could be — ‘I will focus my efforts on connecting with TELUS managers who are on LinkedIn as well as who are members of local communications networking groups.’

How can you beat your competition?

In my experience, this is by far the most critical question to answer and few career explorers do it well if they do it at all.

The issue is this: since competition for career positions has never been greater; you need to be able to position yourself as the most logical choice for the position you are seeking; you need to separate yourself from the job-hunting herd in some meaningful way that the targeted organization seems relevant.

The killer questions you must have a believable and compelling answer to is: ‘There are many applicants for this position; why should I pick you?’ and ‘What makes you special compared to others?’.

If your pitch doesn’t crisply identify the experience and competencies you possess that are critical for the position and how you are different from others, you won’t likely get picked.

My eyes glaze over when I hear ‘I have great interpersonal skills’ or ‘I have 10 years sales experience’ or ‘My people skills are my strongest suit’ when I ask people why I should pick them for the job

How do you go about answering the question?

It’s not about what your strengths are and it’s definitely not about the academic qualifications you have because I’m looking at 49 other candidates for the position you want and they are all saying the same type of thing.
What I’m looking for is a creative expression of how you are different from the other 49 candidates in a way that’s important to my organization.

I created ‘the ONLY statement’ as the way of declaring how someone was not the same as everyone else, rather how they are unique, special and unmatched in the crowd of people all covering the same position

When I was fighting my way up the ladder in a large telecommunications firm the ONLY statement I came up with was:

‘I am the ONLY one with demonstrated marketing experience necessary to successfully move the organization from a regulated monopoly to a competitive enterprise requiring an obsessive focus on the customer and delivering highly differentiated value.’

This statement was incredibly useful in defining the action plan I needed to win the competition for the marketing, sales, service and operations roles in the organization leading eventually to president of the data and internet organization.

Remember, though, to test your ONLY statement with friends and colleagues and have proof points ready to defend your words. It’s important to have people who know you to nod when you declare how you’re special and not be laughing under their breath.

The answer to question #3 could be — ‘I intend to compete with other potential candidates — and win — by being the ONLY one who has the sales experience to deliver both double digit revenue growth from my high value clients AND growth in their loyalty.’

Answer 3 questions in your career planning work and you have a game plan to start your career journey.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 2.1.21 at 05:29 am by Roy Osing
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January 25, 2021

Why marketing needs to stop some old ways and start new astonishing ones

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Why marketing needs to stop some old ways and start new astonishing ones.

Success in today’s highly changing and unpredictable markets requires your marketing strategy to be more powerful; marketers to step up and leave their traditional tools behind in favor of new approaches made necessary by heightened competition and changing customer demands.


If your marketing strategy is to become a truly powerful and successful element of your business plan, certain practices need to stop; others need to start.

STOP!

— Stop the obsession with mass markets. Mass markets don’t exist because the underlying assumption is that people in the crowd all look the same.
There is no such thing as an average customer that looks the same as every other person in the crowd; there may be a ‘lowest common denominator’ but that’s about as far as it goes.

Every person is different in some way. The challenge for the marketer is to discover their differences and market to each one of them individually with unique solutions that meet their needs specifically.

— Stop using price as the main tactic to sell products and services.

It won’t; it’s lazy marketing and it’s not a viable long-term strategy. Price moves can and will be easily copied by the competition. Furthermore, price competition squeezes profit margins for every player and contributes nothing to building customer loyalty.


If you want to compete on price, you’d better have economies of scale and scope in your business where being the low cost supplier is critical.


— Stop benchmarking. Copying what the best in class marketing organization does is a catch-up tactic and does nothing to gain strategic advantage.
Again, it’s lazy marketing that sometimes gets referred to as innovation. It’s not. Being like someone else is merely an effective way to lose your identity.

Try coming up with an original (imperfect is ok) thought; you will be handsomely rewarded.


— Stop trying to be better; this incremental approach is neither effective nor appropriate. You can’t incrementalize your business to success. You need to make a move to stand out from everyone else — to be distinctive and unique from the competition.

Make competitive moves that create the ‘wow power’ to catapult the organization out of the herd.

— Stop trying to make small incremental changes to products to make them appeal to a broader market. So, the classic approach is to introduce a product intended to satisfy a specific need, and then to modify the product to try and give it a broader appeal.

The problem is that this ‘round-the-corners’ marketing dilutes the crisp value proposition that made it attractive in the first place and produces a boring solution that satisfies no one. Keep products edgy and vibrant.

Source: Pexels

START!

— Start looking for ‘stepping out’ opportunities that make the organization the ONLY one that does what it does in the markets it serves.

Rather than continually striving to improve your product and service portfolio exclusively, start spending time on answering the question, “Why should I do business with you and not your competitors?” as the way of creating a unique place in the marketplace.

My ONLY Statement has proven to be an extremely successful strategic tool for marketers to express an organization’s uniqueness: “We are the ONLY ones that…” is the elevator sound bite that cuts through the clutter and expresses how your organization stands apart from all others.

— Start asking the customer service team more for input on how offers are being accepted by customers, what the ‘pain points’ in operations are, and what the competition is doing.
Use customer service as a primary customer learning and market research source.

— Start focusing on creating experiences for your customers as opposed to flogging products and services at them.
Deliver happiness rather than push product features down their throat.
A product delivers happiness for a limited time only — a new SUV soon becomes a used car — a memorable experience stays with us forever.

Emotion marketing represents a huge opportunity so start delivering solutions that have emotional layers that surround your core offering. Make it more than just a product.

— Start discovering the ‘secrets’ and innermost desires of your target customers to unlock their marketing potential.
Needs-based marketing is passe because most everyone already has their needs satisfied.

Marketing to what people need (herd behaviour) is no longer sufficient to be noticed in the market and stand out from the aggressive competition.

— Start establishing customer learning as a core competency in your organization.
Be ‘always on’ to learn what customers desire every time they touch the organization, whether it’s a personal contact or a visit to a website.


AI isn’t the complete answer. Humans need to lead the way with customer engagement that probes what people covet.
Relying on technology to understand what customers want is an incomplete algorithm at best.

— Start developing packages — not bundles — for high-value customers rather than offer them individual products and services.

Learn their broad holistic desires; seamlessly integrate multiple products to yield a broad value proposition that is difficult for competitors to match.

— Start cutting the crap, the non-strategic and no-longer-relevant marketing programs that marketers are working on, in order to make room for new projects and programs aimed at creating long term value. Purge the old practices that have outlived their purpose.

Falling in the crap category could be: price promotions (produce no long-term competitive advantage), new customer acquisition programs (encourage churn and anger existing customers who are denied the same offers) and customer appreciation events (mostly satisfy looky loo’s who want deals rather than rewarding existing customers).



A powerful and successful marketing strategy is all about continually providing relevant and compelling value to people, and in order to do that, it must refresh itself, take on a new purpose and let go of traditional methods.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 1.25.21 at 06:29 am by Roy Osing
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January 21, 2021

Why fantastic leadership skills can be made in ‘the bear pit’

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Why fantastic leadership skills can be made in ‘the bear pit’.

Survival in The Bear Pit is a critical leadership skill; if you have the jam for it, this should be your happy place.

Amazing leaders have an uncanny ability to know what’s really going on in their organization. And one of the leadership skills they draw on from their toolkit is venturing into and surviving The Pit.

What’s ‘The Pit’?

It’s a people cluster where the leader invites people to provide their honest feedback and opinions on a variety of topics that matter to the leader. The Pit doesn’t have to be face-to-face meeting; it can be virtual and it works just as well.

The Pit consists of a group of individuals in the workplace who have a point of view on how things are going and are very willing to candidly share their feelings to the leader if asked.

The Pit is all about the leader subjecting themselves to the crowd in an effort to learn what will make things better for people. A leader who puts themselves at personal risk are endeared by all, and that’s what makes this skill so key in leadership development.

A bear pit session is managing by wandering around on steroids.

Venturing into The Pit is not for the faint of heart.

The Pit encounter is not a formal event, but a casual meeting between the leader and a group of up to 12 employees (larger meetings generally stifle the flow of conversation and the ability for everyone to be heard.

The leader enters The Pit solo; no accompanying entourage is allowed. He or she stands naked in the cluster to entertain their desire to want better things to do the organization’s business.

It’s a fundamental element of leadership by serving around where the leader seeks feedback on improvements required to increase organizational performance and make things easier for employees.

When the leader ventures into The Pit, it is a free-for-all, no-format session.

The Pit is an opportunity for people to tell it like it is to the leader without their immediate boss being in the room. When I started doing these sessions,

I had pushback from some of my direct reports who quite frankly were threatened by my being in front of their people without them being there as a filter. This spoke volumes about their worth as leaders. If they didn’t want their people to be able to speak freely to me, what did it say about how they were leading their team?

The type of issues I raised in The Pit for reaction, opinion and solutions included:

— What’s generally working in the organization and what’s not. What’s the number one thing people think i as the leader should be worrying about?

— How the business plan of the organization is being executed.

— How effective the leadership of the organization is at helping them do their jobs better.

— The barriers in the organization that prevent them from doing their jobs the way they want to.

— Customer service problems and opportunities to solve them and enhance customer experience.

— Ways to reduce costs without sacrificing service to customers.

— Information on what the competition is up to, and suggestions to counter their moves.

— The dumb rules in the organization that enrage customers and threaten customer loyalty.

I had a Bear Pit session organized every week on my calendar. It mattered to me and after I did a number of them, it mattered to the people in my organization. They came to expect the clusters and they looked forward to putting me on the spot.
They came to believe that their priorities and suggestions for improvement made a difference.

I made it a priority; it mattered.

It was one of the most important drivers of my effectiveness as a leader as long as the issues raised were followed up on and that the improvements people wanted were implemented.

Try it.

If you have honed your Pit leadership skills, you will stand out from others who will watch you with amazement.

The Pit isn’t for everyone, just those who want to pump up their career and leave others in their dust.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 1.21.21 at 06:23 am by Roy Osing
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January 18, 2021

Why is ‘line of sight’ a great leadership skill?

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Why is ‘line of sight’ a great leadership skill?

Having ‘line of sight’ is the leadership skill that will set you apart from every other leader.

A colleague of mine, Ron Cox, Founder and CEO of Tailwind Consulting in Tampa Florida says that “a staggering 95% of employees in a company are either unaware of or do not understand the strategy”.

No wonder execution fails!

One of the biggest issues in any organization is the lack of congruence between what the strategy says and what people do on a day-to-day basis.

The strategy says one thing and not only do people do another, they do different things out of sync with the strategy.

Massive inconsistency and dysfunction results.

This is a failure of leadership.

Leadership tends to place more focus on direction-setting rather than on determining how the strategy will be executed.
Precision is applied to getting the strategy exactly ‘right’ and less attention is given to how it will be implemented in the trenches where the real work gets done.

The gap between strategic intent and actual results is due to this skewed attention.
If only 20% of leadership’s attention is placed on the details of how the strategy will be implemented, the strategy will likely be hit and miss as employees find it necessary to execute the plan the way they believe it should.

Effective strategy execution occurs when there is clarity between the functional roles that employees play in the organization and its strategy.

It is about translating the strategy into what it means to each function involved in delivering it. What specifically should the call center rep do differently? The product analyst? The sales person? The internal audit manager?

If at the most granular level each employee in the firm doesn’t know how to behave and what results to produce within the context of the new direction change will simply not happen and improved results expected by the new business plan won’t be achieved.

Line of sight

Line of sight to the strategy means what it implies; each employee can ‘see’ the strategy from their position and they understand what they specifically need to do to contribute to the strategy.

If direct line of sight is defined for every role, flawless execution results whereas indirect line of sight results in people having a clouded understanding of what action the strategy demands.

Most leaders absolve themselves of ensuring activity and strategy are aligned. It generally gets delegated to functional heads to sort out by declaring their priorities that they contend are homeomorphic with strategic imperatives.

The problem with this process is that subjectivity is introduced at a very high level in the organization and is magnified again and again as teams are asked to do the same thing through middle and junior management levels.

And the tipping point, of course, is that leadership doesn’t approve detailed functional plans which would at least show whether they were bordering on out-of-alignment or not.

Any inconsistencies between activity and strategy at the highest level in an organization are multiplied by an order of magnitude factor before it reaches the frontline people.

Under these conditions it’s not difficult to see why strategy and organizational activity diverge and not converge.

What can leadership do about this problem?

First, ease the precision around the strategy creation and tighten it up around execution. Get comfortable with getting the plan just about right and applying rigour to implementation and adjusting the plan on the run.

Next, take ownership of aligning organizational activity to strategy.

Alignment Plans

Institutionalize ‘Alignment Plans’ with functional heads; ask for sufficient granularity to the determination of whether or not a team has direct line of sight to the strategy or not. Make them work at it until they get it right and your leadership team approves.

Alignment Plans submitted to the leader should:

▪️ Define the key elements of the strategy that everyone in the organization must align with.

There are many dimensions to any strategy but it is critical to prioritize and focus on the critical ones. Greater alignment success will occur by focusing on a handful of the critical strategic imperatives rather than trying to ‘herd the cats’ around a dozen.
                         
▪️ Define what needs to change in every functional team with an action plan to achieve it.

If the organization is pursuing a new or revised strategic direction, there will most certainly be projects, company values, people skills and technology that will have to be re-vectored to enable the execution of the new plan. Details of everything that needs to change must be defined in detail.

▪️ Identify activities, projects and behaviours that have to be dropped in order to take on new activities required for alignment.

Leadership is just as much about what has to be stopped as it is about what has to be started.

If out-of-alignment activity is not stopped, additional unnecessary resources will be most certainly requested. All non-strategic activity must be isolated and resources removed and redeployed to new challenges that must be undertaken.

Personal initiative

If you’re an employee in an organization that chooses not to impose a process to explicitly align activity to their strategy, take personal initiative to align your own work priorities to what the organization wants to achieve.

Successful careers are built on the backs of the organization’s strategy and those that execute more effectively than others are quicker to reach their personal goals.

These personal actions will propel you forward.

1. Translate for others

Help others translate what the strategy means to them in the organization.

Once you have determined your own line of sight, help others through the same process.

Everyone needs to understand the new things they will have to do and the CRAP they will have to dispose of. Unless this translation for all employees is done, the organization will be frozen in momentum management and no progress in the new direction will be achieved.

Get involved in organizing and leading workshops with various departments in the company and explore a new blueprint for each that represents the new course for them to follow. 

The role of translating the new strategy for various employee groups is one that rarely gets performed. It’s a difficult task as it requires an intimate level of understanding of the strategy.
You can’t drill a strategy down into individual action if you don’t truly understand it at a detailed level.

If you’re a leader, you must dedicate much more of your time seeing that people treat this as a priority and hold them accountable.
Wander through the workplace asking people to clarify the top three things they are going to do to help deliver the new strategy and what dozen-or-so things they are going to give up.

And get the expectations hard wired into the performance planning process. It is the difference between an effective one where everyone is working in parallel to support a common purpose, and a dysfunctional one where people are working at odds with one another to deliver some things that are on strategy and other things that are not.

Synchronized outcomes release the power of execution - and competitive advantage; inconsistent outcomes zap the energy of the organization, encumber execution and impair competitive success.

2. Set your calendar

Let the organization’s strategy guide your daily calendar. The ultimate manifestation of direct line of sight is a calendar composed only of activities relating to the outcomes you have deemed necessary for you to deliver the new strategy.
If you can’t strategically relate a particular activity you plan to do on a given day, question why it is occupying your time.

Zero base your calendar and build it through the weeks and months ahead in the image of your strategy.
If you are in a leadership position, ask to see the calendars of those reporting to you. Is each of them doing the things required of the new direction or are they continuing on as custodians of the past?

3. Communicate the strategy personally

Communicate face to face with others in your organization as the most effective way of injecting the emotional component necessary to get people to believe and act.
E-mail blasts to a broad distribution list, employee newsletters and other mass means of communication don’t work as effectively. Use technology like ZOOM if physical distancing is a challenge.
These mass communications vehicles preclude the ability for people to engage in a conversation to enhance their understanding of where the organization is going.

You need to press the flesh even if it’s virtual, and make it matter by showing up in person, explaining the strategy and answering the tough questions.

In non-pandemic times, I used ‘Infonet sessions’ to communicate the company’s strategy to all employees.

They required high levels of energy and were extremely time consuming, but what else could be more important?
People in the organization need to understand where it is going and they have a right to challenge it if they are not convinced it is appropriate. You can’t capture their hearts and minds if you’re a ‘no show’.

4. Use the strategy as the context for solving problems

When confronted by a business problem or issue, always assess it and talk about it with others from the perspective of your strategy.
Create the strategic context for the discussion and then assess your options. What does your strategy suggest is the appropriate action to take?

It’s an effective way to increase understanding and awareness of your strategy and establish you as a leader and the strategy hawk for your organization.

People suddenly forget that they have set a new course in motion for the organization and they look for solutions to problems in the old strategic context.

The opposite is also true; people often don’t relate the visible changes being made in their organization to the new strategic direction that has been put in motion. They don’t get that the cause of the changes they are witnessing is the new strategy.

Assume the role of connecting the dots for people in your organization. Reinforce that the changes that everyone is seeing are the result of your new strategy.

Line of sight leadership is necessary to build teamwork and commitment to the organization’s strategic intent. Take a personal role is making it an essential ingredient in your culture.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 1.18.21 at 05:58 am by Roy Osing
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