Avoid Career-Damaging Job Transitions - Part 1: Seeing with 20-20 Vision

A High-Risk Career Move

Colin was 2^nd in command on the high-powered marketing team of a hot, market-disrupting high-tech software company that was about to eclipse the $1B revenue mark. He had started as a Director and over the course of 4 years, established a solid track record and gained the trust of the CEO. His personal “stock” was at a career high, but he wanted more. He wanted to be the CMO, but knew that would not happen in the near term so he decided to pack up his talents and take them elsewhere. 

He joined an up-and-coming startup and got the CMO title and “executive staff” prestige he was looking for. However, within 5 months, he unceremoniously left the company after never really getting traction or having an impact at the new company.

How can a smart, experienced, successful executive put his career at risk by making such a bad decision? Interestingly enough, this is an all-too-common occurrence in Silicon Valley.

In Search of “Fame and Glory”

Let’s take a close look at some of the factors that cloud the vision of high-tech rock stars. Being heavily recruited can certainly boost your ego and fuel emotional-based decision making. Here are the “blind spots” to look out for so you are sure you make the best and most informed decision for your career based on a thorough assessment.

• The “Big Pay Day”– It’s easy to get caught up in all the hype about your own success and role you played in your current company’s success – anxious to “monetize” your growing skill-set and contribution quickly. More money, more options, more responsibility and a bigger title at a new employer are hard to turn away from.
• Just give me the ball! – The thrill of making game-changing decisions that dramatically impact the business gets your endorphins surging. However, the intense desire to finally be the “big cheese” and to “do it your way” can be a seed of impatience and even impulsiveness.
•  The grass is greener on the other side – Working at your current company for any period of time provides you with first-hand knowledge of all the warts and wrinkles. There are likely varying degrees of frustration on things you feel should be done faster or in a different way.  As frustrations reach intolerable levels, you’re ready to make a move - perhaps prematurely.
• Follow the Leader – Having a great manager is one of the most important factors in your success and job satisfaction. So it’s natural to want to follow that manager to her next role. The danger here is that you are easily swayed to join the company based on your manager’s reasons, not yours.

Look Before You Leap

In the fast paced high-tech industry, you are usually reacting to new opportunities that come onto your radar. This reactive, reflexive approach makes you a slave to the process that is being dictated by recruiters or the companies that are courting you.  Here are some keys to help you take a proactive approach to your career management.

• Money Doesn’t Buy Success – Financial success is a big motivator in high-tech. But don’t just compare your last paystub with what’s in your new offer letter. Think about your finances over a 3-4 year horizon. Guaranteed cash comp, incentive comp, and options create complex earning potential scenarios. What’s your compensation growth potential in each role? What about things like employee stock purchase plan? Matching 401(k) programs? What are the growth prospects for each company and how will that affect each company's valuation? However, while figuring out which role and company puts you in the best position to make more money is an important task,  it doesn’t really matter if you don’t survive through your vesting schedule i.e. like Colin.
• Don’t believe your own press  – It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement and ego gratification of being pursued by a new potential employer, but their enthusiasm to recruit you doesn’t mean that it’s the right move. Get objective counsel. Use a trusted resource who doesn’t have any strong connections to your current or prospective employer. Everyone could benefit from getting a unique perspective to evaluate high-tech companies in the Valley and relate that to your goals and skill-set. Let them ask you tough questions to help clarify your thinking and get you away from the emotion and excitement frenzy.
• Patience is a virtue – Recruiters and potential employers will push you hard to make a decision quickly, maybe even with an “exploding” (expiring) offer letter. Those timelines are usually artificial so you should negotiate the decision timeframe that works for you and set expectations up front when you know the offer is coming. Switching companies is a huge decision and you should take the appropriate time you need to consider your options. You will have a different perspective when you have enough time to think it through “away from work.” You should assess whether a few changes in your current workplace would make you want to stay. In other words, if you could outlive the situation that is frustrating you (e.g. a bad manager, difficult co-workers, less than exciting work, etc.), being patient would pay off.
• Know what you “don’t know” – You know all of the unattractive things about your current workplace. Challenging personalities, bad decisions that have been made, frustrating processes and norms. You don’t know any of those things about the prospective employer, but you should know that they exist. Their special warts and wrinkles will inevitably surface as soon as your “honeymoon period” in the new role is over. Even if you’re the one calling the shots, “wiping the slate clean” in a new company doesn’t guarantee that everything will go your way, so be careful that you remain objective about the new opportunity in front of you. Moreover, investigate. Reach out to your LinkedIn network to see who’s worked there, can give you direct feedback, political insights, and if you are replacing someone, why did that person fail?

Throughout the interview process, both sides are “showing their best.” In fact, you’re likely “playing the part” so well that you’ve convinced yourself that it’s the perfect match. Force yourself to challenge everything at face value and to probe deeper to see if it still holds true. Unbalanced optimism tilts the scale toward unrealistic expectations that could lead to an abrupt, premature exit similar to Colin’s.  There is no perfect job so having more of a “critical eye” will give you the 20-20 vision to clearly assess the pros and cons of each scenario.

In next week’s blog post we will explore the potholes and stumbling blocks associated with on-boarding into a new company and role and how to avoid them so that you get traction quickly. Download our High-Tech Job Search Advantage Program brochure to see more client service benefits.

What other insights can you share on career-damaging job transitions? All comments are welcomed.

Interviewing: Fill in Your “Gaps” with Indirect Experience - Part 2

In last week’s blog post, I featured a successful enterprise Account Manager, William, trying to move into Marketing by leveraging his indirect experience. 

I focused on becoming fluent in the “head knowledge” of the role you’re targeting. This post picks up from there to review specific techniques to use to secure the opportunity.

Making it Happen

One of the great things about high-tech is that the door is wide open with plenty of opportunities to successfully make these kinds of moves - if you understand how to sell yourself throughout the interview process. Here are some strategies to complement the “head knowledge” so you can make your move:

• Be a good storyteller – Story-telling is one of the most powerful communication tools that you can use. One of our partners, The Henderson Group, helps people master story-telling as part of their Complete Communicator class, which I attended recently and strongly recommend to anyone who wants to go from being a good communicator to being a great communicator. People relate to stories and remember them, and if you’ve been paying attention to people in the kind of role that you’re targeting, you should have some powerful stories to tell your interviewer. Focus on the positive, show empathy for the challenges of the position, and “name names,” especially if there are rock stars or role models in your company performing in your target role. In the example of William, he could mention his conversation with Nancy (a rock-star product marketer) about the highlights from the analyst tour as part of the last product launch. This would show that he’s already learning from people in the department i.e.that he’s “paying attention,” and getting exposure to aspects of Marketing that typical Sales people don’t often care to understand.
• Market Your Uniqueness – If you focus on positioning your uniqueness, you can turn a perceived weakness (no experience in Marketing) into a strength (with great experience in Marketing’s biggest “internal customer,” which is Sales). William did a great job in his process talking about how as a salesperson, he used Marketing’s materials, training, product roadmaps and more.  He showed how his “internal customer” perspective would make him a better marketer because he had a unique understanding of the needs and challenges of a front-line salesperson. Now instead of his interviewer telling her colleagues “William has no Marketing experience,” she told people “William will bring much-needed front line Sales perspective to our content and processes.” Huge home-run for William!
• Use the Team, and Use Your Manager – In the absence of direct experience, there will still be some doubts about your ability to perform in the target role, so be proactive and talk about what you’ll need from the team and from your boss to get off to a fast start and be successful. Be careful here. Do not send the wrong message that “I’ll need a lot of help to pull this off,” but instead, show that you can own the game plan for your own success. In William’s example, he said “I know Mark has a lot of experience creating sales tools, so when I have to create one, I’ll draft an outline and get Mark’s feedback before I start writing.” This also tells your potential boss that he won’t have to “spoon feed” you in order to quickly ramp up. You can do this even if you’re moving into a new company and don’t know the new team members well. Talk about the different experiences and expertise that you’ll want to draw on from the team, and give examples of when and how you would efficiently leverage them for your ramp up.
• Find a friend on the “inside” – Do you know people in the team or department that you’re targeting? Get their feedback before starting any formal processes. Find out what concerns they or the hiring manager might have in considering you for the position. Let them know that you want to make a change, and why you’re excited about the role (and don’t complain about your current role). Find out what the big upcoming projects are, and what adjustments the organization has been making so that you’ll be well-prepared for your interview. If you can build a good relationship and get a supporter “on the inside,” they will advocate for you whenever anyone on the team asks whether you’d be a good fit for the job.

William executed all of these strategies with great effectiveness. He made the transition into Product Marketing, and only 18 months later he was promoted and was running the largest product launch in the company’s history. He’s had a very successful and rewarding career in Marketing since then, and it all started with his ability to make a major career move based on leveraging his indirect experience.

This is all part of what we teach in our High-Tech Job Search Advantage Program for our clients.

We appreciate your thoughts, so please weigh in with your comments.

Interviewing: Fill in Your “Gaps” with Indirect Experience – Part 1

A Gutsy Lateral Move

William had been a successful Enterprise Account Manager for 4 years. He was one of the young rising stars on the Sales team at the enterprise software company where we worked at the time. He had consistently made his quota in the challenging Central region, heavily concentrated with manufacturers whose businesses were in turmoil due to the growth of overseas manufacturing. I wasn’t the only person who thought that William was crazy to move from Sales into Product Marketing. He was making great money, had very strong account relationships, and had all of the skills for a very successful long-term run in Sales.

However, William was thinking about his career. He liked selling and was good at it, but had a strong desire to be in a very strategic executive role. He believed that Marketing was a better path to that goal than Sales management. Nevertheless, he couldn’t afford to come in at an entry-level Marketing position because he would lose too much income at a time when his family was growing (note that Salary.com estimates an approximate $30K reduction in salary moving from a Sr. Technology Sales role at $100K to a Product Marketing Analyst role at $69K in the Bay Area). William had to figure out how to make a lateral move, preserving as much of his compensation and seniority as possible. Given that he didn’t have any hands-on, direct experience in Marketing, what would he say in the interview when asked “What qualifications do you have to be a Senior Product Marketing Manager?”

Many high-tech professionals who are a few years along in their career path face this same challenge: How do you get the job that you’ve never done before? They get enough exposure to another job function or role know that they want it, but they have to try to make a lateral move with little or no direct experience to lean on. If you prepare properly and understand how your interviewer will make the decision, you can take yourself from dreading the “experience” question to anticipating and even embracing it.

Positioning Indirect Experience

The answer for William was that he had to effectively position his indirect experience. Yes, he had never held a Marketing role, but he had worked closely with Marketing for years as part of the Sales team – through product launches, development of customer references in his accounts, sharing sales tools with his prospects, and even using competitive intelligence from Marketing to win deals. One key to success in any role is having the “head knowledge” to successfully execute that role. To convince your interviewer that you intellectually understand the role, do your homework on the target role in these key areas: 

• Understand the Key  Metrics – How is the position measured, and how do those metrics fit into the way that the overall organization is measured? For example, if you are interviewing for a field marketing role, talk about “Cost per lead,” “Campaign response rates” or “Percentage of leads accepted by Sales.” This will leave a much stronger impression than talking about how you think field marketing looks fun and challenging. You don’t need to know every single possible metric but knowing the top 3-5 will go a long way in building your credibility and giving your interviewer a strong impression that you could “hit the ground running.” Essentially, you are painting a picture of what success looks like.
• Be "Process-Literate" – What are the most important processes that your target role manages or participates in? For example, if you want to become a product manager, be prepared to talk about how a Product Requirements Document gets created. Where does the input come from, who reviews the document, who signs off, and what role does it play in the development of the product? Showing process knowledge will demonstrate to your interviewer that you understand how things get done and can positively impact the business.
• Show Political Savvy – This is closely related to process. Who are your “internal customers,” and what will they expect from you? What other functions or roles will you depend on, and for what? Sticking with the Product Marketing example, your primary “customer” in most organizations will be Sales who may look to you for tools, pricing and packaging, or support for specific sales cycles. Corporate Communications will depend on you for messaging and support as a spokesperson with press and analysts. Engineering and Product Management will likely want market analysis and product requirements input from you. Knowing how the role interconnects to other roles and teams will give your interviewer confidence that you understand more of “the big picture."

We used the Marketing example for continuity, but this approach can be adapted to any lateral move. This is all part of what we review in our High-Tech Job Search Advantage Program for our clients (click here to learn more about it).

Next week, we’ll build on this “head knowledge” and review some specific activities and techniques to position your indirect experience and make your desired role-change a reality.

As always, we welcome your thoughts and perspectives so please share your experience and feedback.

Get "Offensive" In Your Interview

I Thought I Had the Job “In the Bag”

Justin was heading into final round of interviews for a VP of Services role at a hot Silicon Valley startup. He was very confident since his future boss-to-be, the General Manager, had indicated to Justin that he was her first choice. You see, Justin had worked with both the GM and CEO of this new company at Hyperion Solutions before it was acquired by Oracle. He approached the interview thinking that it was his to lose. It sure was.

The CEO greeted him. “Hey Justin, it’s great to see you again!” After they finished getting reacquainted, the CEO proceeded with “I knew you at Hyperion as a Marketing guy, and never thought of you as a ‘VP of Services,’ so what do you do you really want to do?” Without a hitch, Justin responded “Yes, my early career was well grounded in technical services and the latter part of my career in marketing.” Delivering what he thought was his power position, Justin completed his response with “so as you can see I have a wealth of experience across different business functions and therefore can do anything you or the business needs me to do!” Justin didn’t get the job.

Offense vs. Defense

Most people are familiar with the phrase “bring your A-game.” However, in the competitive job search game and interviewing, that A-game needs to be offense-minded. You’ve got to compete for the job with the perspective of the interviewer - what are her top pain points and what needs to get done? Instead, Justin made the common mistake of playing defense. He told them what he thought they wanted to hear and delivered a generic response to a pointed question and by doing so, closed the door of opportunity. The company was hiring for a very specific role, VP of Services. However, Justin presented himself as a “Jack of all trades.” He assumed that his broad “wealth of business experience” would be viewed as a valuable asset but instead he was viewed by the CEO as someone who was “confused” and uncertain about his career path, and not committed to the VP of Services role. Offense employs deliberate action of attack with the intent of scoring (i.e. competing for a job on your own terms). Defense, on the other hand, involves tactics that prevent scoring (i.e. reacting to the questions and going along with the interview process “not to lose the job”). The difference, while subtle, will make all the difference in whether you will impress the prospective employer and get the offer or not.

3 Keys to Execute Your Offensive Attack

The longer you go without having a job, the more emotional and financial stress can undermine your confidence. The pressure of landing a job together with one rejection after another can erode your poise and positive attitude. And before you know it, you’ve slipped into “desperation mode” without even realizing it. This is the root of becoming “defensive” in your job search and interviews. It’s crucial for you to turn this around because these signs are more obvious to the interviewer than they are to you! Remember, they’re not evaluating whether you can competently perform the job, they’re evaluating whether you’re the best among the many candidates they’re interviewing. So “not blowing it” in the interview is a losing strategy. Here are some points to consider that can make you much more effective in your interviews:

1. “Need a job” vs. “Want that job” – When you act like you “need a job,” any job, it’s impossible not to project negative attributes like anxiety, fear, and self-doubt. Justin had been out of work for over 6 months. His previous job was VP of Marketing at a well-established SaaS leader. At this point, he was willing to take any job so he opened up his job search to Services roles, falling back on his experience and professional track record from 10 years earlier. Justin needed a job and he unintentionally projected that very clearly to the CEO. However, Justin didn’t really want to go back to Services, he wanted to pursue his career in Marketing. Once he changed his mind set to “want that job” (i.e. Marketing), he was able to focus on what made him an excellent marketer, what kinds of companies and environments he’d thrive in, and he pursued those marketing roles with new-found confidence (which he leveraged to effectively negotiate his next role). Put another way, interviewing for a job you don’t really want makes you far less likely to get it.
2. Reactive vs. Proactive – Another symptom of being defensive is not wanting to “rock the boat.” When an interviewer takes you through an endless list of questions, it’s hard for you to do anything else but to fire back with your answers.  The best interviews are when 2 people are having a dialog, not a one-way “interrogation.” Interview dynamics are very tricky and the worst thing you can do is to be reactive and just respond to questions that are thrown at you. This is even more true when interviewing for senior roles. How can someone hire you to manage a team, a project, or a product line if you can’t “manage” an interview? So when you find yourself in this situation, take control. Be proactive by asking questions to disrupt the Q&A pattern. Find a way to up-level the discussion with an insightful question that will get the interviewer to share more about his pain or needs. Then you’ll have an opportunity to promote your experience and skills in context, directly mapped to the interviewer’s needs. Otherwise, you’re just guessing and hoping that something in one of your answers resonates and “sticks” with your interviewer. Speaking as an experienced hiring manager, I appreciate when candidates ask smart questions and turn the interaction into a dialog. I dislike interviews where I’m pulling reactive answers out of a candidate one-at-a-time.
3. Eliminate the Guessing Game – All too often, people tell me that they think the interview went fine and are later surprised to find out that they were not selected to go further in the interview process. Before you end any interview, you should ask the interviewer “How do I fit with your expectations for the role?” or “Do you have any concerns about my ability to perform well in this role?” Not only will you find out exactly where you stand, but most importantly, in the event that there are any reservations about your qualifications then you’ll still have a chance to address those concerns and to convince them that you can do the job better than any other candidate.

Having the discipline to stop looking for the “wrong job” and start focusing all of your efforts on getting your “ideal job” will pay off by giving you self-assurance and poise that are contagious. You may surprise yourself in how direct and bold you can actually be, and better yet, those traits will be viewed as valuable leadership attributes. In fact, once Justin made the shift from defense to offense he got his swagger back landed his VP of Marketing role within one month.

We appreciate your thoughts, so please weigh in with comments.

For more information on leadership development and career management, please visit ExecCatalyst.

How to Nail Your Interview

No Trophy for 2^nd Place

I was leading our monthly Job Search Advantage workshop and most of the attendees voiced frustration and discouragement that they made it all the way to the final rounds of interviews numerous times but always got beat out. They came to the realization that being “good” or even “very good” was just not enough in this job market. Those of us who’ve punched our career ticket with a couple decades worth of rides on the up-and-down high-tech rollercoaster know that the laundry list of “experience” on our resumes alone are not enough. Interviewing, or better yet, selling-yourself skills make all the difference from being “The Chosen One” vs. the proverbial “runner up.”

Surely, if you knew what you were “missing” then you’d have a great chance at making the necessary course-corrections for the next job interview. Ah, if it were only that easy. One of my clients (we’ll call him Steven) made it to the “final presentation” stage twice, at both a disruptive startup and a SaaS giant. He didn’t get an offer from either. And as it typically goes, he never got the crucial feedback telling him why they didn’t feel he was the right fit. Unfortunately, the cold hard truth is that hiring managers are way too busy with their day jobs and working through the interviewing process with numerous candidates that they don’t have time to provide people like Steven with the simple courtesy of feedback. So left to his own devices, Steven’s best guess was that he needed to get coaching on his “interview and presentation” skills to ensure that he didn’t flame out again.

It’s an Employer’s Market

Although unemployment is improving slightly, 1 in 10 people in Silicon Valley are out of work and still looking. Just last week Oracle’s fiscal year earnings failed to impress and its stock price paid dearly the day after. Earlier this year, Cisco announced major restructuring, which resulted in killing off the Flip camera business (500 jobs lost instantly) and forecasted additional job cuts of around 4,000. My friends who’ve been at Cisco for 10+ years are still “waiting for the other shoe to drop” as the management restructuring works itself through and while HR tallies up how many people take the early retirement package. Even though these two Silicon Valley tech giants are showing signs of weakness, there are indications that hiring is picking up. That means more interviewing opportunities but still too many candidates for too few jobs - giving hiring managers and their companies the upper hand with interviews and candidate selections, offer terms, and more.

While Silicon Valley appears to be leading the comeback in California, the job market in the Valley has never been more competitive. So how do you make certain that you stand out from the crowd of hundreds if not thousands of other professionals who seemingly have the same experience that you have? But that’s really the point isn’t it? Those who are able to find key areas of uniqueness and to present and sell themselves in a way that distances them from everyone else will be viewed as the most valuable asset i.e. The Chosen One.

On face value, people really aren’t that different in the things that headline their resumes. If yours is anything like the thousands of resumes I’ve reviewed as a hiring manager, you’re putting a lot of focus on things that may not make you as unique and special as you might think. For example:

• You’ve worked at Oracle? Good for you. LinkedIn shows nearly 12,000 former Oracle employees in the Bay Area.
• Maybe you think Oracle is “old school” – you’re a Salesforce.com Alumni. Congratulations to you and the other 1,200 of you living in the Bay Area.
• What if you worked at Google, the one company known as a major internet innovator who generally hires only top-quality talent? Well, there are more than 5,000 ex-Googlers in the Bay Area job market.
• But you’ve got a degree from Stanford, one of the elite universities in the world? You and the other 45,000 Stanford grads in the Bay Area would more than fill the seats at AT&T Park in San Francisco!

So the question is: what really makes you unique? What can you bring to a potential employer that no one else can? The examples above are all things to be proud of, but those alone aren’t enough to make you truly stand out from the crowd.

The answer comes in how you tell “your story." Does your resume read like a laundry-list of roles and responsibilities? No one has the same combination of skills, experience, and accomplishments that you have so you must position your unique professional assets as your competitive advantage. Construct key messaging points to explain how you are different. Formulate well thought out themes together with your "career lessons" that are essential in shaping your story and explaining your career trajectory.

“I Nailed it!”

One of my prior clients (I’ll call him David) was in the “job search” stage. David has a stellar track record as VP of Engineering for over 15 years at large as well as startup software companies. In the first week of our engagement, we focused on preparing him for CEO and founder interviews with startups. But the following week he had an interview with the EVP of one of the largest companies in the Valley. As you can imagine, those company environments are totally different which required us to tune his “story” in ways that were very targeted and relevant to those business scenarios. As a simple example, consider how managing a team of 20-30 developers trying to get its first product to market is worlds apart from managing an army of 200+ developers that are releasing the next version of a mature product to an installed base of 10,000 production customers.

Well, David and I spent 2 hours preparing for the EVP interview. Fast-forwarding, David called me hours after the interview and his 3 words made my day: “I nailed it!”

Which “Nail” Are You Going to Use?

So how do you “nail it?” Preparing for an interview requires much more than reading up on the company, its website and competitors. You need to have a very clear understanding of problems that need to be solved and what challenges still exist that others have not been able to figure out. In other words, your unique skills and experiences are the “nails”. You need to pick the right nail according to the situation, and aim it squarely at that organization’s need.

The very first thing David and I did was to understand and categorize the business scenario with respect to the company and department he’d be managing i.e. Startup, Turnaround, Realignment, or Sustaining Success. For a deeper understanding of these stages, I’d recommend Michael D. Watkins book “The First 90 Days.”

The business stage dictates the internal and external drivers of what needs to get done and what specific tactics (drawing from your experience) you must use. We also made sure that he used the right business language associated with the business scenario.

Here’s a series of questions that you should be asking yourself:

• What are the hiring manager’s business pain points? There are some hidden pains that may not be readily disclosed. Try to find people in your network on LinkedIn who are willing to give you the inside scoop.
• Where, when, and how did you solve those similar problems? Get your success stories ready and make sure they are convincing and relevant.
• What makes you uniquely qualified and different from anyone else who has the same “on-paper” experience you have? You’d better make sure this passes the “me too” test! If anyone else could say “me too” to your story, it fails the test and needs more work.
• What insightful questions can you ask to elevate the conversation? You need to get out of the “defensive Q&A” death trap ASAP. Asking thoughtful questions about business challenges will get you off the hot seat, let you gain insight that you can use in the next interview, and make for a lively, strategic business discussion.

Answering questions like these force you to dig much deeper and below the surface. It gets to the core of your skills, experience, and abilities.

Whip out your hammer and take a good firm whack:

Once you know which nail to use (i.e. what you want to say), you need to get ready to drive that nail in. Making little taps won’t get you very far. In every interview, you only have 3-5 minutes to make a great impression. And remember, you only get one shot at a first impression. You need to come in and make a strong impact and a strong connection, or you’ll be spending the rest of the interview trying to recover.

Here are the keys to make sure you “hit the nail on the head”:

• Match your energy to the company culture and management style – The question that every interviewer asks without asking is “Is he a fit for this environment?” If the environment is intense and internally competitive, they’re not going to like a laid-back, measured, collaborative style. If the environment is entrepreneurial and non-conformist, they’re going to screen out anyone who seems like a “pattern-matcher” or a big company political gamesman. Also, what is the personality of the interviewer? Matching or complementing his ego is key for good communication. Again, use LinkedIn to find people in your network who know your interviewer and can give you clues about what makes him tick.
• Describe how you operate vs. how you think – too many people approach an interview with an intellectual and philosophical mindset. Give concrete examples of tough decisions you had to make instead of starting off with “I think…” For example, saying “I once allocated my entire bonus pool to only three of my six employees” (i.e. making a tough decision to only reward my top performers) sends a lot stronger message than “I think it’s important to reward top performers.”
• Project confidence with an edge – The higher you go, the bigger the stakes in your decision making. They expect you to have an opinion. They’re hiring you for a role where you’re going to need to convince and lead people who don’t agree with you. So coming off as overly-sensitive or wishy-washy with a lot of “that depends…” answers won’t serve you well. Don’t ramble. Rehearse so it flows naturally.

In addition to extensive role-playing, David and I carefully deliberated on how he’d handle tough questions like “You’ve been in startups for the last 7 years, so why ‘big company’ again now?” We closely examined the specific political and organization dynamics that existed within his target companies. Having a strong network to complement his also enabled me to reach out to a contact that had recently worked in the organization where he was interviewing and I found out that one of the key issues was lack of collaboration across different development teams.

The stakes are too high not to be fully prepared for final round interviews. Getting yourself organized in both content and form is most efficient and productive when you do it with someone you trust. Fumbling through your practice sessions will only help you to get better. Be prepared, because a misstep during game time could mean “game over."

For more information on leadership development, visit ExecCatalyst What techniques do you use to prepare for late-stage interviews? Please share your thoughts.

Don't Let Your MBA Work Against You

Moving Walkways and Secret Weapons…

I remember a particular lunch I had with a colleague in the early 2000’s. We’ll call him Henry. He was an MBA graduate from Kellogg and was explaining in a matter-of-fact tone that he was entitled to a Director promotion because he found out recently that 2 of his classmates from business school had recently become Directors. He believed his graduating class was on the same timeline (as if they were all standing together on a moving walkway you’d ride at major airports) and should all be advancing in parallel, even though they were in many different industries and roles.

As background, I was working at Siebel Systems at that time as the result of the acquisition of Onlink Technologies. Onlink’s Product Management team was folded into Siebel Product Marketing, which was staffed with roughly 80% recent MBA graduates from top programs. It was a very talented (and competitive!) employee pool.

At the time of this conversation, Siebel had been struggling for a few quarters in a row and quarterly layoffs had been the norm for more than a year. The economic slowdown, 9/11, ERP players like PeopleSoft and SAP grabbing market share, and the emergence of Salesforce.com’s disruptive SaaS offering were all contributing factors to disappointing results. The company’s “We’ll just succeed by being more ‘Siebel’ than we’ve ever been” mentality wasn’t turning things around. It was making them worse.

We were faced with yet another wave of layoffs, and some of the people being laid off this time were recent MBA grads who had been hired in just the previous 3-4 months! Managers had to make the tough call to let some promising new recruits go simply to save proven A-players who had 2-3 years of experience at the company. I felt very bad for the employees who were being let go and asked Henry the question “Why do you suppose our organization still hired a large class of new MBA grads when there was obvious risk that many could be cut only a quarter later?”

He answered immediately, with a tone of absolutely certainty. “To keep them from falling into the hands of the competition!” Seriously?, I thought. As if every single new grad was capable of radically tipping the scales in our competitive market? I asked him why, if our market was so competitive, and new MBA grads were the “secret weapon” that would shift the balance of power, those same competitors wouldn’t instead come after MBAs on our team who also had 2-3 years’ experience at Siebel, the CRM leader. His puzzled look and inability to answer betrayed the fact that he had a deeply-internalized belief that new MBA grads (which he had been a couple of years earlier) were the single most high-value asset in the high-tech marketplace.

Enlightenment or Entitlement?

The potential problem with getting an MBA from a top school is the attitude that many new graduates develop. For numerous reasons, the system itself and the expectations it creates actually work against many graduates’ initial professional success. Business school staff, alumni, colleagues, and media can create a “Chosen One” aura for a new MBA graduate.

On-boarding into a new organization with an entitlement mentality, or confidence that borders arrogance will fail more often than it succeeds. And don’t forget that in high-tech laden Silicon Valley, many of your peers don’t have MBAs, but do have advanced Engineering degrees, or have successfully launched $100M product lines, or have otherwise proven that they can deliver results. You’re not likely to be working with a lot of “second-stringers,” in this neighborhood, and if you are, you chose the wrong company.

Many MBA graduates are incredibly talented and successful. But I believe that in most cases, those people are successful for their own talents, not for the prestige or even the education of their MBA. It’s a question of correlation versus causation. Do incredibly talented people who are highly likely to be successful get MBAs? Yes. Do MBAs make that same person far more likely to be successful than if they had not gotten an MBA? That’s unclear.

Making it Work for You

If you are a new MBA entering the high-tech workforce, here are some keys to help you get traction quickly, sustain it, and reap the benefits that you deserve as you make a huge contribution over time.

•  Stay hungry - In almost all cases, when you’re a new, non-executive employee, people will respect and respond to an attitude of “I’m here to learn and contribute (and by the way, I’ll learn fast because I’m talented)” far more positively than an attitude of “I’m here to teach” or worse, “I’m here to get what I deserve.” You even see this in professional sports. A star athlete moves to a new team. Their new teammates, coaches, and fans embrace them when they project an attitude of “I want to learn the system here, see how I can make a contribution, and prove that I can deliver a lot for this team.” When they project an attitude of “I’m a proven star. Now watch and learn and try to keep up,” they lose support and suddenly a bad game, bad practice, or even a bad play can generate significant criticism because some observers want to see the “star” fail just because of his arrogant attitude. Stay hungry, and you will reap the rewards of your education far more quickly.

• Show it off without “showing off” - There isn’t much value in spending the time and money to get an MBA if you can’t use that knowledge to enhance your contribution to your employer. The issue is how you demonstrate that knowledge. Recently, another colleague of mine who’s a Director at a $1B+ software company described a direct report of hers by saying “In between constantly reminding us that he has a Business degree from Haas, he actually brings some great ideas to the table.”  Of course, talking directly about business school is probably the clumsiest way to try to showcase your knowledge in the workplace, but using obvious “B-school vocabulary” or citing a case study will often invoke the same eye-rolling reaction from your peers. Imagine the example without the “In between constantly reminding us” qualifier. Her direct report would get the recognition and respect for her great ideas from her manager and peers without the distraction or annoyance. That’s the way to demonstrate that you got a great education from a great school.
• “Pick your spots” - Choose the right opportunities to demonstrate strategic thinking. One of the most useful things I’ve noticed in many of my MBA colleagues is that it becomes quite natural for them to approach challenges and opportunities in high-tech with a more strategic view. But it’s important to consider at what time and what level to raise strategic issues because it doesn’t always help you to come off as the “strategic thinker.” When a critical, mid-stream project that’s behind schedule needs to be completed and you’re in a meeting discussing ways to get it back on track, talking about how the company needs to re-think its market segmentation is inappropriate. You’ll likely be seen as an academic who lacks either the sense of urgency or the work ethic to jump in and help out. It’s also wise to keep your strategy recommendations at your manager’s level unless you’re specifically asked to participate in a higher level strategy project. For example, if you suggest how a certain major acquisition should have been made and wasn’t, without having been involved in the due diligence, you’ll make it look like you think you should be running the company, not that you’re thinking strategically.

Avoid an attitude of entitlement like the plague. Focus on how to effectively bring your new skills to bear in your workplace and you will earn the respect and support of your coworkers and reap the rewards you deserve over time.


For more information on leadership development, visit ExecCatalyst.

We appreciate your thoughts, so please weigh in with your comments.

Don’t Make the Wrong Case: 3 Worst Reasons Why You Should Be Promoted

Due to popular request, we continue with the 3rd part in the “Promotion” blog topic series.

A Not-So-Happy Birthday…

A few years ago, a Senior Manager who reported to me (I’ll call him “Rick”), with whom I had a very good relationship, greatly disappointed me when he asked for a promotion. It didn’t bother me at all that Rick asked. It was how he asked that troubled me, and it’s a good lesson in how not to justify a promotion.

We were having our weekly one-on-one meeting, and after getting through the fairly standard update on key projects and metrics, Rick said “Can I ask you about something?” with a tone that implied we were about to shift gears into a more serious conversation that he had clearly prepared for. He grabbed a small pad of post-it notes that was sitting on my desk, wrote on it for a moment, and passed me a post-it that said “Age 30: Director.” Rick proceeded to explain - “My thirtieth birthday is coming up next month. It’s been a goal of mine for years to be a Director by age 30, so I’m here to discuss my promotion and see how I can meet my goal.”

I was stunned and took a few moments gather my thoughts and remain composed. This “title X by age Y” reason for a promotion was an incredibly myopic way to plan one’s career, but more than that, the weak justification based on his birthday demonstrated that he had no understanding of the promotion process and hadn’t considered what actions I would need to take to promote him. Moreover, it showed that he didn’t respect the Director role for anything beyond being a nice title. It made me think that I had overestimated him because he clearly was not thinking at the next level. Put another way, asking for a promotion in this manner actually proved that he wasn’t ready for it.

Three Proven Paths to Promotion Failure

Rick isn’t the only colleague I’ve worked with who demonstrated weak reasoning to support a push for a promotion. Here are the three that I’ve seen most frequently in my years in high-tech:

•  Comparative justification – using someone else  at the target promotion level as a comparison to prove that you’re deserving of the same level
• “It’s about time” – using time-in-grade, performance ratings, or a combination as the primary justification for a promotion
• Non-business justification – using something that’s completely extraneous to the business  to justify a promotion

Comparative Justification

We’ve all heard people say “I’m contributing a lot more than she is, and she’s a Director” or “I’ve been in the industry and the company longer than he has, and his department just made him a Director.” I’ve never seen this work. While those comments might be true, they set you up perfectly for an argument with your manager. Now, instead of focusing on what you bring to the company and how you could contribute even more at the next level, you’ve put your manager in a defensive posture, forcing him to justify why someone else got promoted. It’s more productive to spend time talking about you than getting side-tracked by talking about someone else. Worse yet, your manager might even feel compelled to lay out a case against you to explain why you really aren’t as deserving of a promotion as the person to whom you’ve compared yourself. An inexperienced manager might even agree with you, effectively undermining another manager by agreeing that the other employee was not deserving of the title. But every one of these outcomes is a distraction, a potential setback, and has nothing to do with your manager partnering with you to put together a promotion plan. Even a passing mention of a comparison jeapordizes any chance of a positive outcome for you.

“It’s About Time”

When you’re in low-level, individual contributor roles, promotions are fairly simple and easy. Your manager can probably promote you from Product Manager to Senior Product Manager without any other approvals, and can do it just to reward your hard work while sending a good message to the rest of the department. Time-in-grade and performance-based justification alone don’t work for promotions at the Director level and above. The primary justification for your promotion needs to be built on why it’s better for the business for you to move up. Your talent and initiative are great supporting arguments, but you want to engage your manager in a conversation to create a plan for you to move up, not to review your timesheet or your performance ratings.

Non-business Justification

I’ve also seen experienced, talented people completely undermine their manager’s willingness to promote them by using non business- related reasoning. There’s the example from the opening about the employee who tried to drive a promotion discussion based on his upcoming birthday. Others have mentioned that they just bought a house and need to make mortgage payments, that they’re getting married this summer, or that their Business school classmates were all recently promoted. I knew a manager back at Hyperion Solutions who told me that he was going to explain to his boss that he needed a raise because he recently purchased a new BMW and had not realized how much more he would have to pay for insurance. Again, much like the “comparative justification,” any mention of non-business justifications will kill your credibility with your manager.

Put Yourself in Your Manager’s Shoes

We’ll continue to discuss the key ingredients that go into successful ongoing promotions in future blog posts. Meanwhile, as you consider how to make a strong case for your promotion, simply put yourself in your manager’s shoes. Imagine your manager having a conversation with his manager, advocating for approval to promote you. What would you want him to say? Would you rather have your manager outlining how promoting you would help the department (and overall business), or lobbying for you based on your birthday or even explaining how there was a promotion mistake in another department?

Which brings us back to Rick. As we wrapped up our conversation, I asked him to “Put yourself in my shoes, and think about what Director-level skills you can demonstrate and what projects you can deliver successfully so that I’ll have a strong case for your promotion down the road.” Within a year after he successfully delivered against his plan, I was very happy to promote Rick. 

What lessons from the “school of hard knocks” have you learned from when pushing for a promotion or discussing with your direct reports? Please share any other insights you have.

For more information on leadership development, visit ExecCatalyst.