Read The Mobile MBA: 112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster (Richard Stout's Library) Online
Authors: Jo Owen
Don’t worry about the jargon: at least we all recognize it when we hear it. The really nasty language in business consists of normal words with abnormal meanings. Here are 12 which should put you on high alert
1. Just.
This is used to make a huge request or error seem trivial as in: “Could you just do this (500-page) document by Monday?,” a request best made late on a Friday afternoon.
2. But.
Remember, whatever is said before “but” is baloney, as in “That was a great presentation, but...,” or “I would like to help, but....”
3. From.
Much loved by advertisers, as in “Fly to Rome from $10” excluding $100 of taxes and other “optional” extras for a flight leaving at 4am, going to an airport about 100 miles away from Rome and the ticket has to be booked one year in advance.
4. Might
(and any other conditional verb). Might is used to achieve two things: first it sets up a negotiating position as in “I might be able to do that if....” Second, it lays the ground work for excusing failure later on: “I would have done it, if only....”
5. Only.
Closely related to “just”: it is an attempt to make a big request or problem seem small. “It was only a small error... we only dropped one nuclear bomb over London.”
6. Important
(and urgent). Used to puff up any presentation: “This important new product/initiative....” Important to whom? And why? Maybe it is important to the speaker, but why is it to me?
7. Strategic.
Important, with bells on. See strategic human capital division, formerly known as the personnel department. Also used to justify spending which has no financial payback.
8. Rightsize
(downsize, best shore, offshore, outsource, optimize, redeploy, downshift, reengineer). How many ways are there of avoiding saying straight up: we are going to lay off staff?
9. Thank you.
Normally “thank you” is good, except when used by automated voices at call centers saying, “Thank you for calling, we value your call... (and we have so much contempt for our customers that we cannot be bothered to answer your call promptly so we will put you on hold until you give up and try to use our impenetrable and useless online help instead).”
10. Interesting.
Fear this word. When your lawyer uses it, you are doomed. When your doctor uses it, check your will is up to date. The recession is certainly interesting. A slightly less interesting time would be preferable.
11. Opportunity.
Because the word “problem” has been banned in business speak, all problems have become opportunities. This means many opportunities are problems. There is a limit to how many opportunities I can solve.
12. Investment.
This normally means wild and uncontrolled spending on something for which there is no business case. Important and strategic investments are the high road to bankruptcy.
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Building your career skills
172
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How to acquire the skills of the leader
173
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How to get the right boss and the right assignment
174
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What your CV really says about you
180
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What it takes to be a leader
182
The main reason for doing an MBA is to enhance your career. But the one thing they do not teach you at business school is how to enhance your career. Every school has a placement office, which can guide you to the nearest bank or consulting firm. But that is hardly career management. So if you are going to make the most of your time and investment in an MBA, you need to know how to manage your career. A few people get it right. Many more are left making their excuses.
Every career is unique, but there are some consistent signposts to failure and success. This chapter shows what those signposts are and where they point.
Look around your firm and you can probably find lots of smart people with high IQs and plenty of nice people with high EQs (emotional quotients). Many of them may exist harmlessly in the side waters of the firm, while people who are not so smart and not so nice mysteriously rise to the top of the firm. So something is missing: high IQ and EQ are not enough to succeed. That “something missing” is called PQ: political quotient. As we’ve seen, PQ is the art of making things happen through other people who you do not control. PQ is vital not just as a career skill, but also as a management skill. PQ gives you the informal power to complement your formal power or authority. Standard operating procedure in most firms is that your responsibility will greatly exceed your authority; your political skills help you bridge the authority gap.
PQ is vital not just as a career skill, but also as a management skill
In career terms, PQ is about finding the route to power. Here are 10 principles to follow.
The 10 principles of PQ
1. Find the right role in the right firm.
It helps to be the right nationality. There are some foreign nationals running French, Japanese, and American firms. But the overwhelming majority of CEOs and top executives come from the home country of such multinational firms. And within each firm, there is usually a function that is the breeding ground of future talent. In P&G you can have a great career in finance, but the CEO is always a marketing person.
2. Have a sponsor
, who should be at least two levels above you and should keep on rising in the firm. Make yourself useful; provide information, volunteer some of your discretionary time, flatter the senior executive by asking their advice and treating them as your mentor. Your sponsor will not just coach you, but will guide you in the direction of good opportunities, help you spot landmines before you tread on them, and give you political air cover when you need it.
3. Build your network.
Remember, you do not need to be liked, but you must be trusted. The more people trust you, the more they will be happy to work with you. With trust, you can strike deals more easily and resolve tensions before full scale war breaks out.
4. Build your claim to fame, and stake your claim.
All of your peers are as smart and as hard working as you are, more or less. You need a stand-out achievement: perhaps you ran a small unit at an early age and turned it around, or you take on a project with very high visibility, or you take on an expatriate role. All of these are career accelerating moves: you succeed fast or fail fast. So be sure to set the opportunity up for success. And once you have succeeded, stake your claim: make sure that everyone knows that you led a great team to a great success.
5. Push your interests.
Your interests are not about improving this year’s bonus by 10%. Your interests are about increasing your salary tenfold in 10 years. That means you have to get the right assignment, right boss, right team, and right resources. These are the long-term indicators of success. Do not rely on the vagaries of the HR system and hope you get lucky with the assignment process. Luck is not a method and hope is not a strategy.
6. Manage your profile.
People will remember you as much for how you are as for what you do. So it pays to be relentlessly positive, and focused on action and outcomes. Leave the doubts, analysis, and process focus to others.
7. Over-invest in opportunities
to gain exposure to senior management. If you have a 10 minute slot to present to top management, make it a knockout 10 minutes. Hire a speech writer on your own budget, get any supporting material done professionally, get advice on what the top managers expect, want to hear and what they do not like. If it takes two weeks of late nights to prepare the 10 minutes, so be it. You will not be remembered for all the late nights you spent on your regular job: you will be remembered by the time you spend face to face with the top managers.
8. Flatter everyone.
Research shows that there is no point at which increasing flattery becomes counter-productive. People love to hear that they are great people doing a great job. They will love you for recognizing their innate genius, humanity, and hard work which has been sadly neglected in a cruel world by uncaring colleagues.
9. Be loyal.
Disloylaty is the ultimate sin in any firm. Bosses keep incompetent people far longer than they keep disloyal people, because at least they can trust the incompetent people and know what to expect from them.
10. Always deliver
, and that means hard work, long hours, and personal sacrifice (unless daddy owns the firm). If you can’t deliver you will be like a Rolls-Royce without any fuel. You will look impressive but you won’t be going anywhere.
Power and sausages are alike: the end product may be highly attractive, but the process of getting there is not for the squeamish. You decide if you are prepared to do what it takes to get there.
The skills you need to succeed at the start of your career are not the same as the skills you need to succeed later on. This simple fact causes many people to hit a career brick wall. They learn a set of skills that work well early in their careers: reasonably, they think that doing more of the same will lead to more success. It does not. It leads to failure.
The basic career trajectory is simple: you start by building strong technical skills, you finish by needing strong people, political, and strategic skills.
• At the start of your career you learn a craft skill: accounting, web design, law, teaching, as appropriate. And if you are good at that, you may get promoted. And that is where things go wrong. You run the risk of becoming the “leader in the locker room.” You become like the football player that is promoted to manager: you still want to play, but in reality your job is no longer about playing. It is about helping other people play well: selecting them, training them, directing them, and making them work together well. That is what a manager, not a player, has to do.
• In the middle of your career, people management becomes essential. And in the middle you find yourself surrounded by other managers you do not control. And the other managers are the real competition for you: they are
competing for the same pot of budget, promotions, and bonuses. And yet you are meant to work with them as a team. So the skills of influence and politics become very important.
• By the top level, strategic thinking becomes important. You have to know how to set a vision and communicate it; how to mobilize and direct limited resources and how to bind your teams together. And, of course, you still need all the people and political skills you learned in the middle of your career.
The good news is that technical skills can be readily learned. There is a body of knowledge that can be transferred from one generation to the next. Technical skills are “know-what” skills and there tends to be a clear right and wrong way of doing things. People and political skills are less clear-cut: you can be right or wrong in an infinite variety of ways. What works in one situation can fail in another. And yet you have to know how to learn these skills if you are to succeed.
Try this exercise, which I have tried with thousands of executives: “How have you learned how to succeed?” In particular, focus on the skills required of a successful leader, which are people and political skills, not technical skills.
To make the choice simpler, pick two out of the following six possible ways of learning to lead and succeed:
• Books
• Courses
• Bosses (good and bad experiences)
• Role models (inside and outside work)
• Peers
• Experience
Typically, less than 1% of people pick books or courses, which could be bad news for someone who writes books and leads courses. Most people choose bosses, role models, peers, and experience. In other words they choose personal experience or observed experience of people around them. This makes perfect sense: if you see someone do something well, try to copy it. If you see someone blow up, make a mental note not to step on the same landmine. Practice beats theory every time.
practice beats theory every time
The problem is that experience alone leads your career into a random walk. If you get good experiences, bosses, and roles models, you succeed. Get poor experiences, and you head to a career dead end. So you need some way of controlling your random walk and putting some structure into your experiences.
Books and courses can help you by putting structure into your experiences: you can judge whether your experiences are useful or dangerous and what best practice might look like. They give you an alternative perspective and a sanity check when the world seems to be going mad around you.
But most important is to take control of your career by making sure you get the right experiences: that means getting the right bosses and right assignments. If you do not do this, then you are simply hoping to get lucky with your career: that is not a good way to run a career. You must take control.
In any organization there are death star bosses and death star assignments. They represent career suicide. Your challenge is to avoid the death stars and attach yourself to the rising stars who can pull you up through the organization. You have to work the system. Here’s how: