Category: Work

Can’t Tell Them What They Don’t Know

Having far surpassed my early formative years, I look back at the advice I was given in a different light. I now find myself sometimes in the role of advice giver1 and I try to be a good role model for those that come after me.

There are a few times in your life when you can tell someone about an experience you’ve had in hopes of giving them some insight into their own future.

The three that I can think of off the top of my head are as follows:

  • A teenager about life in general – specifically about being yourself and love/relationships
  • A first-time expecting parent on what raising a child is like
  • A person starting at a new company

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As girls became less of a weird fascination and more of a “Hello there” <insert Flynn Rider voice> interest, my father would often repeat the following nugget of advice.

“They’re (women) are just as afraid and nervous about talking to you as you are of them. Go talk to them. The worst that could happen is they say no.”

Looking back, this is some of the best advice I’ve ever been given. I wish2 I would have learned to put aside my fears of talking to people – especially people I liked – and just go and say hello. Not just in romantic relationships either, but for all situations where a simple hello would have gotten me much farther than awkward shoe-gazing.

Case in point. Last summer I got to meet a designer and all around excellent guy at a conference where he presented. I, a grown adult, was sweating bullets as I approached him after his speech. I introduced myself and said that I was jealous of the city from which he hails and that I’d love to visit it again someday. He said thanks and invited me to contact him if he was ever in town. This summer I hope to do exactly that.

Had I not made such a simple effort I would have regretted it much more than any possible ‘no’ of embarrassment. I need to do this more often.

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The feeling of watching over your daughter as she sleeps can be explained in great detail, but it isn’t until you experience it for yourself that the impact can be felt. There’s a feeling that no tale can invoke and all attempts to are shallow and pale. But I shall try.

Knowing that a decision was made that led to, out of billions of possible outcomes, the life of this little thing. A being who at one moment can amaze you with naiveté and a depth of curiosity, frustrate you with misunderstanding and shorten your patience in the space of a second.
That’s part of being a parent that can never be explained in a guide to parenting or book about child development. It has to be experienced.
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The expression “the grass is always greener” is perplexing. I understand the meaning, but in my experience it’s more like “the grass is always grass”. They are all different, but the same in so many ways.
I joined a much larger non-profit than the prior one I worked at. 10x larger in the number of employees across 4 states instead of two campuses and in a totally different sector of business. Yet some of the same struggles I faced in the smaller and more tightly knit community I see in the larger and more dispersed organization.
When you’re thinking about joining a new organization you hopefully can do some legwork to find out more about what the organization does, what kind of people work there and what the general culture is like. You’ll compare it to past jobs, past relationships and past experiences in general. It won’t be until you’re at the new place of work for some time until you fully realize what you’ve gotten yourself into.
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After getting the nerve to ask someone on a date and having it go well – you get this feeling.
When you read your child a familiar story and they laugh at a joke they missed before – you get this feeling.
After stressing about your role in the organization and the boss congratulates you on completing a project or task at work – you get this feeling.
That feeling is important. It’s you leveling up. Experience is gained. The kind that can’t be read from a guide or bypassed with any shortcut.

A Certain Kind of Someone

It seems to me that the old way of being successful was to gain as much knowledge as you needed about something, keep it tightly to your chest and keep your head down. Follow that and before you know it you’d be at a company for 30 years.

Getting a new job was much simpler. You’d write-up a resume, attach some references and send it off. If you’re lucky, you’d get called in for an interview and those direct references would shine on about how great you were.

This allowed you to keep things close, the only people who would be called on to speak about you were people who were close. The network and portfolio of work would be kept small. The tools of dissemination made it harder to show everyone everything great you’ve ever done.

Today, we create content all the time, a dribble shot here, a blog post about an interest or work topic there3 and we leave a long body of work in our wake.

Not all of it is on purpose either! Most people don’t close accounts for web services, or use the ones they sign up for regularly.

This content, directly intended for self-promotion or not, gives potential employers (and employees!) a much larger canvas to examine. They can find out more about who you are, what you’re thinking about, where you’ve been in the past.

So if you’re the kind of person who keeps things close to their chest, who doesn’t blog or instagram or tweet – who doesn’t see value in stuff like that, I ask you the following. Who is more likely to get hired? A person with good qualifications and a few good references or a person with equal qualifications and recommendations who, when you Google them, leaves behind a vast trail of personality?

Who would you hire?

Once you’re hired, who’s more likely to get noticed or promoted? The co-worker who communicates their work, who collaborates and creates relationships?

Somebody who can sell to people inside the organization and articulate in a public way their value to the organization will be championed by more of the community than those that keep it bottled up.

Related: The Diva Paradox by Seth Godin.

Ideas of March

I’m all for bandwagons and blogs, so here’s my entry for Ideas of March. Chris Shiflett (Obviously a member of the Chris Club) came up with the idea to encourage more people to write more frequently.

Like most citizens of the Internet, I’m a heavy reader. RSS, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Draw Something (Wait, does that count?) I’m a reader of many personal blogs of people I find to be interesting and who have good things to say about the work they do. The simple act of consuming the thoughts and ideas from people whom I respect and admire acts as a fuel to create and share the things that I have in my own world.

I know I’m no Gruber or Kottke, but that’s OK. I’m not writing for them or anyone else on the Internet. I write for myself and my close friends and family.4

Seth Godin has this to say about blogging, “what matters is the humility that comes from writing it. What matters is the metacognition of thinking about what you’re going to say.” in such that the mere act of putting words to paper (or screen) is why you should write. It helps you form your thoughts around an idea or concept that empower you when conversing with others around the topic.

Writing for me is also about the enjoyment of life, the understanding of my short trip here on Earth and how lucky I am to be working in a profession that allows for such excitement and intrigue. I write because I love life and work and all the other wonderful experiences of being human.

Even if you don’t love to write, you do love something and there’s no better way to show that you love something than to tell the world about it. So write.

IT Needs to Market Itself

IT departments, in general, do a terrible job marketing their services, functions and value to the rest of the organization. While there are many business functions that an average IT shop needs to partake in, marketing is the first and most important. I’ve sat on both sides of the Marketing/IT table and have perpetually been frustrated by lackluster communication around what IT does5 (and is doing).

We’re technologists, the antithesis of the marketing person ,right? A large majority of folks working in corporate IT have more technical backgrounds which, I think, lends itself to the kind of person that either 1) doesn’t value marketing or 2) considers it a ‘soft’ skill set that 3) they often don’t feel comfortable doing.

Maybe I’m wrong, but the past paints IT folks as not being the best people persons. Now that is changing thankfully, in large part to the influx of young startups and entrepreneurs in the tech sector – people who were born into a part of the culture of sharing, collaborating and the Internet.

The “If we build it, they will come.” mentality does not work for any IT initiative. The result is adoption lacks, people don’t see the value to spending the time on ‘yet another thing’ and leadership often doesn’t put their full weight into it.

Marketing needs to be first, if we’re to operate like a business and need to be in the black.6 I think it’s tantamount that we invest in clearer communication and a little panache when talking to people about the stuff we’re working on. The value we bring as it were.

I keep hearing about this idea of commercialization of IT services as being something big shops are looking at, and while I’m not sure I buy it, let’s assume it pans out. Well, in order to get people to buy in to the service you offer you have to be able to sell them on the idea that choosing your company is a wise idea. Same thing applies to our customers – our fellow co-workers. I think some people have the idea that “we’re the IT department, we have a captive audience. They  have to deal with us.”

As we know, consummerizaiton, cheap cloud solutions and BYO movements prove that wrong. In order for IT to survive as a valued and important part of the business of any organization – regardless of size – it’s important to leverage the marketing of our services to remain relevant.

As Seth Godin puts it, “Successful people have discovered how to be better at self marketing.” the same applies to successful IT organizations.

Sharing to Succeed

The person with the confidence to support others and to share is repaid by getting more in return than his selfish counterpart.

The connection economy multiplies the value of what is contributed to it. It’s based on abundance, not scarcity, and those that opt out, fall behind.

–Seth Godin on the sad irony of selfishness

I think there’s a large group of people in the work force – not you dear reader, but you know who I’m talking about – that feel that keeping information and knowledge close to their chest is the path to success. That sharing, documenting, conversing are all things that chip away at their power and control. As Seth puts it above, the truth  could be no farther from the truth.

One of my sage advisors during college told me that the core job of a technologist was to empower people with the technology. To allow them to do more and succeed greater with the use of these tools. In order to do that you have to share what you know – make others successful. Only then will you be successful yourself.