Career Advice – MENG Posts before 120717

I was once heir to a chopped-liver dynasty. Really. When you get to the inevitable part of any team development activity where you are asked to go around the room and tell everyone something about you they may not already know, I say that. And there’s a good story behind it with some excellent career lessons. I’ll come back to that.

How I Got Here

When I turned 50, I had a good job with a large, fairly stable company. My career, up to that point, had been a series of similar jobs. Most were in marketing or related areas, and there was what HR folks call a good progression of responsibilities. I was not the most successful 50-year-old in the business, but I was happy with my progress to that point.

I also knew on the day I turned 50 that everything was about to change. I learned a lot along the way, about both my chosen profession and how I am happiest contributing. I also learned a bit about myself (see this piece I wrote for Psychology Today). All this led me to the conclusion that I did not want to go where my trajectory was taking me.

This, I soon discovered, is the hardest kind of change to make for oneself. It required not only stepping out of the traditional roles and work to which I’d become accustomed, but also two of the hardest personal projects I’ve undertaken: defining what the new trajectory of a career after 50 would look like and redirecting nearly 30 years of career momentum.

Defining a new trajectory sounds pretty simple: take those things you like to do and figure out how to get people to pay you to do them. But, most career coaches will tell you what I also learned: it’s much more than that. You have to find the way in which you like to contribute, then figure out what kind of work that means you have to do—which might also mean finding or creating work you have never seen—then figuring out how to get people to pay you to do that work. Plus, as a marketer, I had to explore in greater depth what value I would be bringing to the market and whom my customer would be.

I landed on a goal of building my own business: consulting, writing, and maybe speaking. That was just the way in which I wanted to contribute. If you’ve read my earlier posts, you know I talk largely about business relationships, specifically those between a company and its customers. This is the path I have chosen. After all those years in marketing—the past decade or so in businesses where customer relationships were the drivers of success—I realized this was not only something about which I cared deeply but also something that was incredibly valuable to many companies and where there was a substantial market needing help.

After four years of trying to make this a success, I have found a few things about building a career after 50:

It’s never linear. I have been lucky enough to have some interesting consulting engagements. Some of those are exactly what I expected. Others, not so much. The theme of customer relationships did run through everything I’ve done so far but hardly in the way I expected, in many cases.
It’s hard. There is such strong interest in this area and so many companies in need, I figured this would be just a matter of finding the right buyer for my services—and I’d be too busy for my own good. Not exactly. After three years of struggling with the fact that the industry didn’t even have the right buyer (which changed, thankfully), I now find myself doing what every one of you who runs a consulting firm is doing: selling hard and often and in ways I never expected.
It’s discouraging. I’m 54 now and am not the wildly successful, world-famous, notable consultant and author I expected to be. The reality does not yet match, but the expectation remains.

One way I keep myself going is to remember my own inspiration.

The Chopped-Liver Dynasty

I’ve studied business and marketing extensively and worked in the field for more than 30 years. Yet I attribute much of what I know, including my instincts, to my grandparents, who started and ran their own successful business.

They were immigrants from Eastern Europe. They came to the United States with very little. They worked and saved and got help from family and, eventually, started a luncheonette (today, we’d call it a diner). My grandmother made chopped liver from her own recipe for sandwiches (in the New York Jewish community of the 1930s to 1950s, this was very popular). Eventually, people started asking her to send them home with some extra chopped liver for their dinner, and she started selling it. It became popular enough that my grandparents eventually closed the luncheonette and opened a business making and selling chopped liver. By the early 1970s it had become the largest selling brand of kosher frozen chopped liver in the United States.

There were lots of lessons I learned as a kid and young adult listening to my grandmother telling me how they got the business started, how they sold the chopped liver, how they created distribution and sales channels, and so much more.

I’ve always admired the story, and by the time I was a teenager, I knew that my goal was —and still it today—to grow up to be just like my grandmother.

Am I There Yet?

A few weeks ago, I was considering how to adjust my own path to make my goal of consulting, writing, and speaking work better for me. I was starting to think about how I am getting older, how businesses are less and less likely to seek out older people to meet their needs (see this rather discouraging piece from CNN), and how I was starting to feel more and more rushed to reach some as-yet-undefined milestone of success for my own efforts.

Then I thought about my grandparents’ business and what I could learn from it, and I did some math. I realized my grandmother was in her mid-50s when they launched the chopped-liver business (my grandfather was about 60). When I was old enough to be aware of their success, it felt to me like they had been successful forever, but it had only been 10 or 15 years.

Here I am in my mid-50s, relaunching my own business effort, a career after 50. Suddenly, I know it’s not too late. I know this is a good time to be in my own business. I know I have just learned one more thing from my grandparents: it’s not too late to get started. But you do have to get started.

I’ll keep you posted on where this takes me. I hope my story will help if you’re feeling a bit washed up and unsure of your next step. Just go. And in fewer years than you imagine, you’ll have stories to tell and lessons to pass on, and everyone will just assume you’ve always been successful. At least I hope it works that way for me, too.

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Remote Work

If you’ve been paying attention to the news out of Silicon Valley recently, it would be hard to miss the uproar about Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s decree that Yahoo! would no longer allow its people to work from home.

I spent several years leading marketing and internal communications for the remote work program at Cisco Systems. During that time, our policies evolved and grew into a sophisticated program designed to create competitive advantage for Cisco in both its access to skilled workforce and in serving its customers.

I don’t want to jump into the debate about Yahoo!, nor do I want to discuss how organizations and employees benefit from remote work. My colleague Faith LeGendre has covered that very well.

I want to take a closer look at how to make remote work (which includes working from home, working in a remote location, or even just having a geographically diverse team) actually work well and benefit both the company and the employee.

First, let me debunk a few myths:

Working from home is not with young children.
Working remotely is not just about wanting schedule flexibility for personal needs.
Working remotely to achieve a flexible schedule does not reduce productivity.
When remote work programs fail, it’s generally because of poor technology planning or a lack of good management practices.
Collaboration and informal interaction do not require being in the same location.

Making a remote work program work for the benefit of everyone requires hard work and a shift in thinking on the part of both the employee and the company. The goal of a remote work program should be to make employees just productive from anywhere as they would be in an office.

For the company and the remote worker’s manager, these practices will help make you and your people successful and productive no matter where they are:

1. Shift your thinking from presence focused to results focused.

One of managers’ most common complaints about people who work remotely is that they can’t see whether they are working. I suggest that your inoffice workers are probably also pretty adept at making you think they are working even when they are not. But it just doesn’t matter.
Whether your people are in your office or somewhere else, remember that you hired them to produce results. It may require a bit more rigor on your part, but make sure both you and they understand what those results are and how you expect them to be achieved.
Be honest: if your people are producing great results, does it matter whether they did all the work between 9 and 5? Or is it OK with you if they did some of the work at 3 AM?
This also means you need to set expectations and have an explicit agreement on when the remote worker will be reachable for emergencies and other time critical matters. Make sure you know what you actually need and what is reasonable to expect.

2. Be reasonable and allow yourself a learning curve.

Managing remote workers is not easy. You will find that shifting your thinking, measuring results in a different way, and trusting your workers more completely than you likely have before is challenging and requires a learning curve.
Don’t expect more from your remote workers than from your inoffice workers (though you will probably get more) and watch yourself for inequities in your treatment of the two. This will get easier with time, and it will be much easier if your company’s HR team provides support and training.

3. Create formal agreements and stick to them.

Your remote workers should know what you expect from them, and you should know how they are meeting those expectations.
When you either hire a remote worker or change an inoffice worker into a remote worker, create a formal written agreement. Outline everything from objectives, expected results, response times, and availability to reporting and collaborating with colleagues across the company.

4. Get the technology right.

Don’t skimp. The technology available in today’s market for making remote workers effective is both very good and very affordable. Make sure you have the technology that allows your remote workers to get the job done as efficiently as your inoffice workers.
For the remote worker, make sure you work effectively and follow these ideas to help your management realize as much benefit as you do from your working remotely:

5. It’s not about your convenience; it’s about producing results.

As with so many communications you have with your management, explaining why you need this ”privilege” just doesn’t cut it. Explain how it will benefit your manager and the company. Show how you will make it work. Sell your manager on trusting you to make it work.

6. Take it slowly.

Don’t walk into your manager’s office and announce your plan to work remotely full-time starting Monday. Start with one or two days per week. Create milestones that show your part-time remote work plan works. Then go to three days per week. Then four.
When you are choosing which days to start with, intentionally choose days that will show that you can work effectively. For example, choose a day when a weekly team meeting occurs, then demonstrate your outstanding participation in that meeting while sitting in your living room.

7. Demonstrate results.

If there is one single key to success in remote work, this is it: create external objective evidence of your work. Your management will not see every bit of work you do remotely. But they can always see the outcome of your work.
For example, let’s say your job is to run email marketing campaigns. You and they both know lots of planning and collaboration go into creating those campaigns. But they may or may not see that. What they will see is that the campaign launched and produced results.

8. Learn to collaborate online.

Both structured and impromptu collaboration can easily happen from anywhere. But for most of us, it’s not natural to strike up informal conversations electronically.
I can’t put too fine a point on this: learn how. Getting good at making connections and developing relationships with people you can’t (and may never) see is critical to your success.

9. Overcoming resistance is about proving success.

This is generic but critical to making it work. Some managers will resist the idea of having someone work remotely. You can’t change the culture overnight, but you can create opportunities to prove success. Create trial remote work times. Develop result focused plans for making it succeed.
When the trial period ends, make sure you have lots of evidence of success to show your manager the benefits and start planning for a larger trial. Make your success available to others also: the more people who show and prove success, the faster the culture of resistance will change.

The list of benefits of remote work for both employees and employers is seemingly endless, so there’s no reason not to get started. Remember, if your people can’t work remotely for you, they might just work remotely for your competition.

Tag: Career Advice

Building a Career after 50: The Chopped-Liver Effect