3qtr2005 - Feature Article - How Well-Positioned ARE You?

Before becoming a business/personal life coach, I was offered a wonderful chance to create - and teach - a Computer Sciences class at Northwestern University. The decision to recruit me was based on my direct and varied experiences in the Information Technology sector, having successfully run a private telecommunications company for a large financial institution for many years. Yet my interests were already drifting away from IT and moving more toward becoming a coach mentor, and leadership consultant. (It had become increasingly obvious to me that it was not so much the technology, but the people behind the technology that truly made the difference in the products and services my organization offered.) So I seized the opportunity to develop a class that blended where I had come from, and where I was heading toward.

Titled, Managing (the Human Side of) Mission Critical Systems, I would begin each semester by asking my students to define what made a system mission critical. My favorite answer was this one: "A Mission Critical System is a system that MUST work because if it doesn't, then your ability to do business is significantly jeopardized. And WHEN it doesn't, it's OUR job to get it working again ... F-A-S-T." So when I suggested that our careers are Mission Critical systems - and they're our most important Mission Critical system, at that - they stared at me in disbelief. Yet what I believed back then, I believe even more today.

To present my case, I made a special point of stressing a career-related aspect of the materials we were covering in each class. So when we talked about crisis management, I invited someone who was laid off to be a guest speaker. That enabled us to see the similarities between a temporary systems outage ... and a career outage. As an add-on to the module on new system procurement practices, I brought in an executive recruiter for a lively and interactive session about personnel interviewing and selection. And when talking about system/software upgrades, I asked the question:

What new features and functionality do you want to be able to put on the next release of your resume ... without having to lie about it?

Now that we're more than halfway through 2005, that's a question that YOU might want to seriously consider. After all, whether you plan to look for a new job or not, you want to be able to add something new to your resume every single year - to show you're growing, and to keep your edge. So what ARE you interested in?

• If it's project management, ask for a juicy project to spearhead, preferably outside of your area of expertise.
• If it's leadership experience, go look for opportunities to practice your informal influencing skills.
• If it's visibility, ask to be added to an inter-departmental work team.
• If it's collaboration, find ways to meaningfully interact more with the key players in your organization.
• If it's having a greater impact, ask to be held accountable for delivering some new specific and measurable business results.

The point here is that the best opportunities for you may not be obvious to those who have the authority to assign you those opportunities. It's therefore up to YOU to make your wishes known. Does it always work out? No. But it NEVER works out if you don't ever try.

Case in point: As head of telecommunications, I wasn't even being considered as an interim leader of a management coaching pilot program that was aimlessly drifting after the head of human resources left the company. But I knew it was exactly what I wanted to do. So I talked with my boss - and his boss - and got the okay I was looking for. (Working this project helped me confirm that I really wanted to start my own coaching company some day. And on July 4, 2000 - Independence Day - GottaGettaCoach! opened its doors ... that is, its phone lines.)

Now in order to get the necessary approvals to run the pilot, I had to already have good relations up-the-chain. Otherwise, I know I would never have been given consideration. But I did my prep-work, got my audience, made my pitch, and the rest rolled out from there. Inherent in this is another important aspect to answering the "What new features and functionality?" question, and that is:

How well-positioned are you to make your request?

Spend some time with this question because its answer will do more to determine the possibilities of your future than any other. Improving your relations up-the-chain is an excellent new feature and functionality for 2005, as well.

So do you now see how your career really IS a Mission Critical system? And that it's your most important one at that? It's a system that MUST work because if it doesn't, then your ability to do business is significantly jeopardized. And WHEN it doesn't, it's YOUR job to get it working again ... F-A-S-T.