Call the Ball - Career aspirations start with being authentic

Managing your career is based on a combination of aspiration, inspiration and attitude.  You are charged with manifesting your own destiny.  All our lives are products of the many small decisions we make. How you spend a minute can dictate how you spend an hour and eventually how you spend your hours determines whether you will reach your goals. An opportunity lost is lost forever and ultimately, self-control lets you relax because it removes stress and enables you to conserve willpower for the important challenges.

 

More and more people are looking for their purpose in the world and in the workplace looking for validation as a sign of life. People want to be heard, but more importantly they want to know that their contributions are being noticed and not taken for granted.  Not for the sake of attention, but more so because they want to know that their skill sets are still relevant and useful and that they are making a difference to advance the organizations they serve.   With training and professional development budget cut-backs in recent years, people have had to start investing in themselves as concerns grow about where their capabilities best fit in their organizations and what their futures hold.

 

At the same time, leaders are trying to make their people feel more secure in order to maintain consistency, conscious that if too much disruption leaks out into the workplace, there is risk of losing high-performers which is challenging to replace from the impact of time, lost intellectual capital and cost. In this ever changing “war on talent”, landscape, leaders need to think differently about how to keep their teams on track. 

 

They must become more intuitive, diverting from the traditional ways of leading that have become too predictable and uninspiring. Many leaders are out of touch and disconnected from their employees, focusing solely on their own personal agendas.  

 

Where it becomes most apparent, are when leaders try to use a “one-size-fits-all” approach to earn trust, build loyalty and inspire team and individual performance. Leaders must understand that in today’s new workplace, there does not exist a single formula to inspire employees to perform better.   Rather, it’s about how to maximize all the components in order to create hundreds of formulas that provide long-term value, continuity and impact, but are most importantly authentic.    Organizations have a responsibility, but so do the people who comprise  the organization.  The mutually beneficially relationship between employer and employee has gone by the wayside like work life balance.  These are semantics and you need to be authentic and true to yourself, leading your own career, in order to realize your full potential in any organization.

     

 

Differentiation – Waiting for the Perfect Solution

The concept of being unique of different is far more important today than it was ten years ago. The key to successful marketing and competing is differentiation. Our global economy is in a constant state of disruption based on advances in technology, speed of the consumer, changes in regulations and socio-economic and political instability. All of these changes are signaling that the shape of the global market is moving towards a services based economy.

With the enormous competition markets today are driven by choice - your targeted clients and customers have too many choices, all of which can be fulfilled instantly. Choosing among multiple options is always based on differences, implicit or explicit, so it is paramount to differentiate in order to provide the reason and factors to select your product or service. Differentiation is one of the most important strategic and tactical activities in which companies must constantly engage and shape to outperform your competition.

 

Your differentiation strategy is an integrated set of action designed to produce or deliver goods or services that customers perceive as being different in ways that are important to them. It call for you to sell non-standardized products to customers with unique needs.

 

This requires challenging convention and thinking creatively to yield a focused differentiation strategy. It requires BREAKINGTHROUGH!

Breaking through requires creativity and curiosity – the ability to explore beyond the normal confines of linear thinking.  This means going outside traditional barriers of expected ideas and solutions that have already been brainstormed or developed. 

• Just do it – Take a lesson from Nike’s mantra and have the courage to do what’s needed. 
• Being creative ultimately is about being resourceful in thought, mindset and execution.
• Creativity is, and had been a resourceful tool for getting out of tight spots, and it undoubtedly had a place in the lives of artists looking for their next inspiration.  

Waiting for perfect – I frequently learned that in a world of titles, tools and all kinds of other associations, there is accepted convention that unless you have permission then trying to share creative ideas with others may meet with disapproval. 

Don’t wait for perfect - Consider the unspoken conditions to choose between feeling that permission and approval must be sought before deciding how to create something in 5 Steps (Reserve 30-minutes to quickly drive a process and do not get caught up in looking for perfect).

 

• Background and Context – take 2-3 minutes to frame the problem
• Context – What is the Reason or Relevance in solving the problem?
• Define – The information to include
• Hypothesis – Outline three solutions and considerations
• Conclusion - Follow-up or Questions you expect to be asked or that you might ask

 

This simple approach can drive creative solutions by forcing yourself to think differently.  New ideas are not produced in the confines of traditional or conventional thinking.  In order to breakthrough – don’t wait for permission frame out the problem and drive multiple solutions.