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#YourCareer : Quit Your Job? Change Careers? This New Book Can Help You Make Better Decisions. GReat REad!

August 29, 2022/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

Laurence Alison is a professor of psychology at the University of Liverpool and the Director of Ground Truth. Dr. Neil Shortland is a world expert on military decision making, who has worked with The Ministry of Defense (MoD), the United States Department for Defense and National Institute for Justice. Their new book, Decision Time: How to Make the Choices Your Life Depends On, includes some high-stakes examples from military campaigns, terrorist situations and natural disasters, but offers valuable information for everyday life decisions, including career moves.

If you’re debating whether to take a new job, weighing a change of career or thinking of starting a new business, Decision Time offers specific advice and general frameworks to break down complex, sometimes amorphous decisions into actionable steps. Here are five favorite takeaways from the book that are particularly relevant to career decisions:

“When faced with what seems like a decision, your initial task is to work out whether there is, in fact, a decision to be made at all….We often find ourselves falling into this pattern of agonizing of decisions that are not available to us, or that we do not have the power to make” – Laurence Alison and Dr. Neil Shortland in Decision Time: How to Make the Choices Your Life Depends On

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What Skill Sets Do You have to be ‘Sharpened’ ?

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Article continued …

Too many unhappy people stay at their jobs because they think the first decision is “Should I take a new job?” or “Should I start that new business?” They fritter away their scarce free time and energy belaboring over how difficult it would be to make such a transition or how much salary they might have to give up or how hard it would be to find something new, rather than actually starting the process. As Alison and Shortland point out, you need to make sure there is a decision to make, and in the very beginning of career exploration, you don’t have an offer to respond to or a new business to launch. Your immediate decision is to get started with something. Quitting your job or putting up funds for a new venture comes much further down the road, but it paralyzes people unnecessarily.

“Five frogs are sitting on a log. Four decide to jump off. How many are left? Answer: Five. Why? Because there’s a world of difference between ‘deciding’ and ‘doing’.” – Laurence Alison and Dr. Neil Shortland in Decision Time: How to Make the Choices Your Life Depends On

With complex decisions like a next career move, there are lots of smaller decisions that need to be made first and acted upon before getting to the dramatic crossroads of stopping whatever you’re doing to take up something new. In the case of a new job, this includes figuring out what you might want to do next, researching other companies, looking at job postings, updating your marketing material, refining your interview technique and more. This is where deciding meets doing and what drives a job search forward.

“Many people assume that the biggest ‘mistake’ you can make when making a decision is to choose the ‘wrong’ thing. But our experience and research has led us to believe something very different: the biggest ‘mistake’ you can make is to do nothing.” – Laurence Alison and Dr. Neil Shortland in Decision Time: How to Make the Choices Your Life Depends On

When changing careers – to a new industry, new role, or from employee to entrepreneur (or vice versa) – the potential regret of making a wrong pivot keeps some people stuck where they are. But this just trades the potential of being unhappy for the certainty of staying unhappy! If quitting your job turns out to be a mistake, you can go back – there have been enough people who have done that that the Great Resignation has been met by the Great Return. If you pivot to a new industry or role and prefer your original one, you can rebrand the pivot into a learning experience. If you launch a business and it fails, as long as you avoid financial ruin, you can make back the costs. Jeff Bezos has a useful decision framework about making decisions quickly when they can be reverted and taking extra time and care only when they cannot. With careers, few decisions cannot be unwound.

“Decisions are just as much about when you do something as they are about what you actually do.” – Laurence Alison and Dr. Neil Shortland in Decision Time: How to Make the Choices Your Life Depends On

Alison and Shortland emphasize the importance of timing in decision-making – the “when” and not just the “what”. Timing is critical in many career decisions. When you lobby for a promotion, the right time is when you have had a big win. It is also before decisions have been finalized so you can make your case while budget and titles can still be allocated. When you make a big transition (e.g., to a new job, to a different career, to launch a business), the better time is when there aren’t other momentous events happening in the household. If your significant other just started a big new job, they won’t be able to provide extra support during your transition. If your child is just entering school or you’re moving residences or a family member needs medical care, you will be pulled in too many directions.

“Ignore the choice and you’re giving up the chance to influence future events – and that’s one of the greatest chances life offers any of us, and never one to turn down.” – Laurence Alison and Dr. Neil Shortland in Decision Time: How to Make the Choices Your Life Depends On

While Alison and Shortland remind the reader that sometimes there isn’t a decision to be made or, due to timing, it’s best to wait and take more time, they also talk about when to be decisive and make that choice. The book outlines different types of decision-makers so that readers can see what their tendencies are, the advantages these tendencies might convey and the disadvantages to watch out for. The book also offers different models for making decisions so that readers have frameworks to follow when a choice can be made. Because career moves have so many moving parts, the insights and information in Decision Time create a scaffold to help readers think through the different moving parts more carefully and objectively.

Make more informed choices. Neither rush, nor delay, but show impeccable timing. Recognize that no choice is actually a choice and likely a mistake. Take action once a decision is made. Only decide when you actually have something to decide. These are all excellent tips for making smart career moves and are covered exhaustively and engagingly in this highly recommended book.

Forbes.com | August 29, 2022 | Caroline Ceniza-Levine

#YourCareer : Arguing with the Boss: A Winning Career Strategy. “How Come I Didn’t Figure this Out Before?” MUst REad!

July 30, 2021/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

Knowing how to disagree agreeably with higher-ups increases your chances for advancement, career coaches, management consultants and recruiters say.

“It takes courage and emotional intelligence to stand up to your boss,” observes Kenton R. Hill, an executive coach in Portland, Ore., who wrote “Smart Isn’t Enough,” a 2010 book. “You’re more likely to land a bigger role if you help your boss be successful,” he adds.

Executive recruiters “question your integrity” if you’re a candidate who claims that you’ve never clashed with your supervisor, writes Russell S. Reynolds, Jr. , founder of an eponymous big search firm, in his new memoir, “Heads.” Tales of seamless harmony suggest “you lack the power of your own convictions,” he says in an interview.

John Stroup, CEO of Belden Inc., a maker of electrical cables, says he’s more apt to promote managers who are savvy about challenging him.

AGREEABLE DISAGREEMENTS

More ways to turn dissent into a career-enhancing move:

•Practice what you intend to say, and be concise.

•Use “I” statements to describe the problem. For example, “I feel like this project is not going as well as it could,” instead of “You aren’t doing this right.”

•No name-calling or disparagement.

•Give your supervisor time to explain his or her rationale.

•If your third try fails, don’t circumvent the boss to plead your case with others.

Source: WSJ reporting

However, he cautions that it’s not a good move right off the bat. At his previous employer, Danaher Corp. , he saw some newly recruited senior managers wash out because they urged him to adopt approaches used by their old company without first establishing their credibility, he recalls.

Mr. Stroup prevailed in a disagreement with his Danaher supervisor about a risky strategic shift because they had developed a strong rapport. That man, an executive vice president, “recognized my strengths,” Mr. Stroup recollects. “I felt comfortable enough to push my point of view.”

The skeptical boss let him offer certain customers complete solutions for their specific needs—a departure from standard operating procedure. The idea was a success, and Mr. Stroup, a division president, was appointed a group executive not long after.

Even recently hired executives can benefit from locking horns with the boss, provided they choose battles wisely, keep their cool and build a compelling case that boosts their superior’s reputation, leadership experts say.

“Disagreement is great as long as it’s fact-based,” says one senior executive, who was hired to run a key unit for a big retailer in 2009. (He asked to remain anonymous so as not to embarrass his onetime employer.)

The executive, who reported to the CEO, did not agree with his boss, who long believed that small-business owners patronizing his business unit were shopping to supply their firms. Rather than airing his disagreement, he first spent 90 days analyzing purchase data and found that those customers mainly bought goods for their families.

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Article continued …

When he presented the data to the CEO, the executive cast his research as fresh insights—and not the boss’s bad call.

“How come we didn’t figure this out before?” the surprised chief asked, and later endorsed the lieutenant’s plan for revamping the company’s marketing appeals to small-business owners. In early 2012, the executive landed a more powerful post at a major packaged-goods concern.

Tyco International Ltd. assesses managers’ leadership behaviors twice annually, including whether they feel comfortable “saying the emperor has no clothes” during meetings, says Laurie Siegel, its senior vice president of human resources. “The only real career-ending move here is to not bring bad news forward.”

That said, smart Tyco managers also know when and where to air those disagreements.

Ms. Siegel says she and CEO Edward Breen often disagree on an employee’s advancement potential. But she voices her objections to him one-on-one before alerting the full board. “He’s comfortable that I will challenge him” in front of fellow directors, so long as there are no surprises, she says. Mr. Breen couldn’t be reached for comment.

Bosses and boards both prefer leaders with the gumption to articulate strong views, provided that dissenters are “genuinely trying to advance the enterprise” rather than themselves during clashes with their supervisor, notes Douglas R. Conant, a retired chief executive of Campbell Soup Co. and a director of Avon Products Inc.

Several years ago, an executive vice president of a cell-phone refurbishment firm rejected a department manager’s request for an executive post because he doubted her claim that the promotion would benefit the business. “She equated the proposed title with being able to tell people what to do,” recalls Susan Heathfield, a human-resources consultant in Williamston, Mich., who coached the EVP.

The middle manager’s authoritarian style “was seriously at odds with a company that was striving to empower people,” and made her employees feel she only cared about herself, Ms. Heathfield adds. The woman repeated her request for weeks. Unpromoted, she quit months later.

At other times, patient persistence is key for winning an argument with the boss – as Barrett Stephens discovered. He’s second-in-command at RSR Partners, the mid-sized search firm that Mr. Reynolds started in 1993 after leaving Russell Reynolds Associates Inc.

A year ago, a three-man marketing committee created by Mr. Stephens suggested picking a consultant to craft its first strategic marketing plan. Mr. Reynolds nixed the proposal for being too costly.

Mr. Stephens says he spent months cajoling his boss to reconsider marketing ideas from colleagues “who know more about the subject than he did.” The constructive feedback impressed Mr. Reynolds. In July, he approved a revised marketing plan even though “this is not something I would have chosen to do,” he admits.

WSJ Author: Joann S. Lublin at joann.lublin@wsj.com

WSJ.com | August 9, 2012