How I learned to stop worrying and embrace being wrong.

There are times in life when you have to put your hands up to being in the minority, especially when you’re in the business of putting your opinions out there in the market for all to see. As a lifelong holder of minority opinions, this is not new to me.

So effusive was the disagreement with my first blog in this series, that arrived from all corners of our growing community here, that I feel compelled to present the opposite view. I will wipe the spit and fumes from my face and in all probability convince myself that I was actually wrong in the first place. The source of our disagreement all comes down to this question:

How long should you take making decisions about people?

Last time round, I advocated taking an approach to interviewing that actively sought to avoid a hasty judgment. Bide your time I said. Make sure your first impression doesn’t reinforce itself in an unhelpful way, asking easy questions of the person you like, or tough questions of the person you’re not so sure about, I said. Give them the whole time you’ve allotted to present an overall impression, I said.

Balls. You said.

Almost all the feedback I received, including one rather irate phone call, told me I was talking out of my hat. (And they didn’t say hat either.)

Prevailing wisdom it seems tends massively toward the opposite view, which in the spirit of seasonal democracy, I present to you now. Had this been one of my original blogs on interviewing mistakes I should probably have called it: ‘Trust your primary response, you will make the same decision eventually anyway.’

Some of my many dissenters on the subject refer to rapid cognition, often in reference to Malcolm Gladwell’s hugely successful book ‘Blink’, which explores what happens in our brains in the first two seconds that we encounter a given situation – a job interview being a perfectly good example.

Most of the feedback was less scientific, it just argued the case for calling it early and not wasting time over analyzing something if you know you’re going to do it anyway. The point that stuck in my mind was the Managing Director of a well known oil field services company who told me that while you can change decisions, or walk back mistakes, you can never have back the time it took you to make the decision in the first place. His point was simply that mistakes are so common place in all areas of life, human interaction being based almost exclusively on the actual experience that comes after the fact, that you are as well to make a very quick decision and then be prepared to be equally quick to reverse or adapt it if it turns out to be the wrong one.

To use the example he used, you can navel-gaze over what vacation destination is right for you, you can research it all day long, but you simply aren’t going to know if it’s right for you until you get there. Rather than endlessly debating whether or not you’re making the right decision, you’d be better served ensuring you’re in a position to act quickly if you find you’ve made the wrong decision and correct it. Over time, he argued, you’ll find that you enjoyed 95% of your vacations and not 5%, and that the time you spent second guessing your original thought ‘I feel like skiing, let’s go to Colorado’, was entirely wasted. If Colorado turns out to be too ‘this’ or too ‘that’, it was always going to be anyway. Have an escape plan to the place you’ve always liked in Napa Valley, and don’t ever go back.

A surprising number of people wanted to talk about intuition. This honestly alarms me; sufficed to say that I believe that what people describe as their ability to intrinsically know things with no basis is simply a combination of subconscious sound judgment based on experience, combined with mathematical probabilities and our wonderful human ability to ignore all the facts that don’t suit our narrative. I always trust my intuition. I’ve always been able to know what’s right for me. Really? You’ve been divorced twice, so you might want to put your skills to better use.

Overall, I might even be convinced. There is so much to be said for being decisive, but accepting fallibility. We have a huge amount of experience that we can call upon, whether we realize it or not. Our brains do this for us at speeds we cannot comprehend.

I have heard it suggested that the phenomenon of our lives flashing before our lives as we drown is nothing more than our brains scanning for anything useful it can find from previous experience that might help it escape the danger it is in.

Ultimately, the world is faster than the mind and we will see ourselves pushed and pulled by the decisions we make no matter how smart we are and how convinced we are that we are right. Perhaps it’s time to realize that we may need to jump quickly, and then be ready to jump again.

So in the spirit of quick resolutions, here’s the final Top 5 mistakes made in the interview process from all sides – you can believe me or not, argue or not (I hope you do) and offer, as always – any other ideas:

1.       The first impression trap

2.       Getting the talking / listening balance wrong

3.       Not trusting your first response

4.       Allowing decisions to slide

5.       Accepting uninformed outside advice

Next week, a new topic, new arguments to start and yet more opportunities for you to tell me how wrong I am.



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Your career is an accident. Don't make a plan, get a helmet.

We are driving our careers. That’s what we are told. We are sitting behind the wheel, looking at the road ahead, changing gear when we want to, making decisions about how fast we want to go and ultimately which direction we take. Mirror. Signal. Maneuver.

It’s a comforting metaphor. It’s a pity it’s bull.

So often, the mistake we make as professionals is to look back on our career path and see a logical progression. It’s easy to do this when you look back on things in retrospect. It’s easy to believe that this led to that, which led to the other and so on.

But this is all post hoc ergo procter hoc. Seeing a thing as the result of something else, simply because one followed the other.

Let’s call me John Q. I was working as an assistant manager at Circuit City from 2005-2007. I was made the manager in 2007 and held the position for two years before moving to join Best Buy as the regional sales manager. Obviously I’ve done well for myself; my career shows a clear progression. A consistent, linear progression from junior to senior, from low wage to middle management.

Well done me.

I’m leaving some things out of the story though, things that have been edited out of my career history. These were random catalytic events that shaped the whole thing. Because they’re not on my resume, they’re not part of the accepted narrative of my career – but they change everything.

Firstly, I became assistant manager at Circuit City almost against my will. I was young and ideological. I’d only taken the gig so I could get the rent paid while I was trying to get a job in music. I reluctantly accepted the extra responsibility for an extra five bucks an hour. It wasn’t a career decision. Nor was it a career decision a couple of years later, when the manager I worked for suffered a heart attack and retired early, effectively disappearing in a puff of smoke on a Tuesday morning leaving me to take over. I took the job and I did it well, I expected to retain the management job for a few more years. But then, as we all know only too well, Circuit City went to the wall. Suddenly facing the prospect of redundancy, I was forced to put myself out there again, talk to a recruitment company and put my resume online. The result was a great offer from rival Best Buy, to effectively take the level above the one I was working in. I wound up with 20% more money and some stock. It turned out to be a great thing for me. ‘Turned out.’

Now my sensible linear career progression looks like what it really was – a series of random and uncontrollable events that bounced me around with no care for my plans.

Because the truth is that there is no such thing as career management. There is no such thing as ‘planning your career.’ From the time you first walked into the career councilor’s office at school and were told you should be a chef because you admitted to being slightly hungry, through to this morning when you surfed the internet for jobs for ten minutes because one of your colleagues annoyed you. Your vague intent to push your career in the right direction combined with your occasional decision to act when you were unhappy or undervalued, do not constitute a career plan.

Your list of companies you would most like to work for and your sense of what job title you probably ought to have, and in what time frame, are worth nothing to you.

We spend too much time trying to shape our careers and not enough time trying to create the rounded professional identity that will increase our chances of making progress when the inevitable random catalyst presents itself.

Instead of sucking up to your boss, make an effort to be respected by everyone around you. When her kayaking vacation down the Nile ends in tragedy, it will be your peers and reports who are asked what they think of you as a manager, not her.

Instead of surfing for jobs and blasting out your resume, build a strong relationship with a good recruiter. They can be your eyes and ears while you focus on your job.

Instead of chasing the money, chase responsibility. The more you take on, the more qualified you become for more advanced jobs and ultimately more money. Especially if nobody sees the vacancy coming.

You can’t know what will happen, and you can’t control when or where fate will strike. But you can create a solid foundation that will see you right no matter what happens.

Strategy is not about predicting the future, it’s about having a sensible framework around you so that you can respond to anything. Experiences, references, training, qualifications – there’s a reason these things tend to be headings on the resume – it’s because they’re things you actually need. Take these things off the resume, and think of them as real things that you arm yourself with to create a promotable, hirable human being, it won’t be long before you’re adding another level of advancement – whatever it is you want.

Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering jobs, staffing and marketing in the technical sector.

Urgency vs Importance - the key to business sanity

I want my lunch. It’s 12.30pm, and I want my lunch.

Two distractions in the last hour have stopped me  from completing this blog (which was the job I gave myself the last hour before lunch to complete.) The blog is important, the interruptions were urgent (although neither turned out to be important). But what could I have done differently? They were urgent. It’s not always easy to make the distinction between urgency and importance. Stephen Covey, a clinical psychologist and expert in organizational psychology, uses a simple diagram that was something of a revelation to me when I was first shown it by an old boss. It is a set of four boxes. The diagram divides all of the tasks and responsibilities we have into four categories, called ‘Quadrants’. Covey calls them I, II, III & IV. (Pictured.) As a basic definition, an urgent task is one where speed is the most pressing factor. An important task is one that has a significant impact on the business and your role in it.                                                             

 

Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly prioritizing things in this way. For example, calling a client to confirm a start date for your candidate may be the most important thing on your to-do list, but it is not as urgent as finding the contact lens that has just fallen on the floor. The contact lens has no significant impact on your job in the long term, but it must still be done first.

For a sales person, writing the Meeting Report from yesterday’s visit is very important. Everyone appreciates the need to fully document our interactions with key customers. The knowledge accumulated from these visits contributes significantly to our understanding of our customers and potential customers. It is more important to develop this long term understanding than it is to place one single person. But you still make the call to your customer to confirm that start date first, because it is more urgent.

 

At first glance the answer to all this might seem simple. Spend as much time as you can in Quadrant I, avoid  everything in Quadrant IV and spend what time you need to Q II and QIII as necessary. But the reality is much more complex than that. You might think that a CEO would spend all of his time in Quadrant I and a clerical worker would spend all their time in Quadrant IV. But it’s not the case. Whatever your role, you have urgent and important tasks. The receptionist who greets the big client visiting the office is performing a function of significant importance and urgency. The first impression could make all the difference and this interaction will be their first encounter with anyone at Talascend – it’s very important. As to urgency – imagine your client left standing there for 5 minutes while your receptionist finishes some new hire paperwork.

Balancing importance and urgency in your day to day tasks is the road to sanity in time management,  falling into the common pitfalls, will send you hurtling in the other direction. Basics first. Spending all your time in Quadrant IV will get you fired – and quite rightly. Activities like surfing the net, making personal calls or going to get coffee are not the things careers are made of. But QIV has its place, and more of that later. Quadrant III is the deception Quadrant. This is where time is sucked away. A lot of things in this quadrant are masquerading as urgent when they are actually not. Badly planned meetings, phone calls that are twice as long as they should be, some types of paperwork etc. Interruptions are the most common sources of distraction in QIII like the two I ran into in the last hour. 

It’s difficult. 

If a member of your team says ‘Can you come and help me with this?’ you need to go and help. If it turns out not to be important or urgent – that’s going to cost you. Good time management will ensure you don’t spend too much time in this quadrant, as will clear communication. A friend who works at Google insists that you can control distractions to some extent. If he speaks to an external vendor who might have something he is interested in, He will ask them to call back between 2pm and 3pm. This is also his open office hour for his staff’s minor issues. It allows him to schedule distractions.’ I know I’ve got to have these  conversations,’ he says, ‘At least this way I know when they’re coming.’

Spending all your time in Quadrant I will send you to some kind of institution. Nobody can do it. Quadrant I tasks carry inherent elements of stress (deadlines and pressure mostly) and to be done well need to be balanced with other tasks – even, surprisingly, a little bit of Q IV. QIV is closely linked to QI. In between two urgent, important tasks like finishing a board report and doing a press interview, a friend of mine at Amazon.com always takes a break, he says he will wonder out of his office, get a diet coke and spend five minutes talking to a colleague about football. Even if it means being a little late. He will do a better interview that way. What he’s doing is visiting QIV to help him do a better job in QI. If we don’t plan to spend a little appropriate time in Q IV, we will end up there anyway. Because that’s where we run when we burn out. Spend six or seven hours on any given day focused entirely on something demanding, and you will not be productive for the last two hours. It’s too late to take a sensible break then – you’re done. You’ll end up in QIV – walking round the parking lot, leaning back in your chair with your fingers pressed to your temples trying to re-motivate yourself. If you’d only planned to spend twenty minutes that lunchtime sitting in the kitchen with your iPod on reading a newspaper, and walked outside for a Starbucks for 15 minutes late afternoon – you’d have been fine. You might even have got a couple of extra hours out of your day.

This brings us to QII. QII is your source of sanity and control. Here lies  strategy and planning. Not spending enough time in this quadrant is the reason productivity falls apart. This is where you manage your time in all the other quadrants. Obviously, it’s easy to sacrifice the important in favor of the urgent. Nobody is going to lean over your shoulder and tell you to stop making sales calls so that you can sit quietly for an hour and make a list of things you want to accomplish over the next 12 months. That’s not how a business works.  But every successful business person from Donald Trump to Sir Alan Sugar is on the record saying that it is vital that you make time to do this. Stopping to check that you’re doing the right things is essential – even though it means stopping. 

Most sales and recruitment people are bad at this. It’s because we believe there is nothing more important than picking up the phone and selling. There are metrics to be hit, targets to achieve and money to be made. Surely the best way is to just get on with it? No. It isn’t. What we’re really doing when we do this, is driving our car around aimlessly hoping to stumble back onto the right road, rather than stopping and getting the map out. Chances are the fastest way to get there is to stop. As Yogi Bera said, ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, you may not get there.’ A sensible amount of time planning your week will make that week more productive, even if it means productivity time is spent on it. If you just throw yourself headlong into unstructured and unplanned activity – it doesn’t matter how hard you work or how talented you are, you’re going to spin your wheels without progress – costing you much more time than the  planning would have taken.

At the end of the day, all of this is about forming positive habits. Warren Buffet says that the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they’re too heavy to be broken. A sobering thought, but it’s equally true that good habits are self perpetuating and that the smallest positive impact of good time management on your day to day working life will make your life easier, and motivate you to do even better. Ultimately, nobody can manage your time for you. The right answer could be different for everyone. Understanding the difference between urgency and importance and planning time to carry out tasks accordingly is a starting point.

Now it's lunchtime.





Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering staffing and global engineering jobs.