The Career Encouragement Blog

Building a Successful Business

Terrie Wheeler of Professional Services Marketing, Inc. is one of my heroes for 3 reasons:

1. She kept her eye on the goal.  I had the privilege of knowing Terrie "way back when" she was launching her marketing coaching business.  She had ideas for what her business could be, and she thoughtfully, and persistently worked to make it happen!
2. She's a working mother who figured out how to have success and joy in both her work and her family life.
3. She has worked hard to help others have great careers too. 

Reason #3 inspires me in my work the most.  I truly believe that if you work hard to help others (whether it be your direct reports, your peers, or even your boss) have a great career experience, you cannot help but have a great career experience yourself. 

The Minneapolis Star Tribune recently profiled Terrie's accomplishments and how she has used her success to create opportunities for others.  Congratulations, Terrie!

Reflecting on Lessons Learned

The most challenging manager I ever worked with was an individual who was controlling, aggressive and demanding.  He was a smart individual with a lot to contribute, but he left a wake of human carnage behind him after every meeting or project.  He received feedback on his behavior from multiple sources on multiple occasions, but he seemed to lack the ability to receive and reflect on the messages he was hearing.  Ultimately, his career was derailed as a result. 

Reflecting on our own behavior, the results, and the lessons learned can be a daunting task.  First of all, it's hard to just sit still.  One of my favorite quotes is by Blaise Pascal:

"Most of the trouble in the world comes from man's inability to sit quietly in a room by himself."

That's pretty deep when you think about it!

I encourage you to take some time to reflect on what is going on in your career these days.  Do you feel on track?  Do you feel tense?  What are some signals you are getting about how you are operating?  What do you want to do more of? Less of? 

This doesn't have to be an arduous and painful task.  It doesn't require you to make major, life-altering changes.  The key is to just stop and think and see where you feel encouraged to make some modifications.  By inserting a pause into your work, you can create space to collect your thoughts and move forward more productively.

Great Career Resources

I love the Career Centers that most colleges and universities provide for their students.  They are run by people who are informed about career development and job search strategies, and who are passionate about helping others succeed.  And - especially relevant to you and me - much of what is available is on-line and accessible by folks who aren't students.  These sites can be FABULOUS resources if you want to refresh your career in a specific area or if you are just doing some general research. 

The University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota has a terrific site.   Their Life/Work Model represents a holistic approach for integrating your personal life with the world of work and has six components:  vocational, intellectual, physical, spiritual, emotional, and social.  The site offers information and resources related to each of the six areas, including some fun .  One of my favorites is a link under "vocational resources" that takes you to Andrea Kay's website.  She offers a wealth of ideas and strategies for growing in your career.

Take a look around and find some encouragement in your work today!

Children, Daycare, and Working Mothers

Since 1991, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has invested over 200 million dollars to examine the effects of day care on children.  They have followed over 1,300 children from infancy through various child-care settings (home with mother, home with another relative, home with nanny, or at day care) and into elementary school.  The results have been released and the mainstream media has grabbed on to sound bites such as "poor behavior is linked to time in daycare" and "daycare kids have problems in later life."  Just what every working mother wants to hear, right?

Newspaper and magazine articles like this frustrate me for a number of reasons including:

• They rarely report on the entire study - instead they pump out sensationalized sound bites designed to attract and shock readers.  Critical details about study methodology, the development of variables and measures, and the full context of any outcomes/findings are not readily available for public consumption.
• The target audience is usually middle class families with a wealth of choice in their lives.  They ignore the many families in poverty that don't have an option to think about whether one adult should stay home.
• Why is it always the mother's fault that the child is in daycare?  The concept of complete maternal responsibility for child wellbeing is integrated so smoothly into most of these articles that we neglect to ask, "Where is daddy while this child was developing all these negative traits?"

Thankfully, Emily Bazelon took some time to set the record straight in The Kids are Alright: What the Latest Day Care Study Really Found.  She does a nice job of providing some history of the study and gives a basic critique of the methodology.  She took the time to contact the author of the study, Margaret Burchinal, PhD who stated:

"I'm not sure we communicated this, but the kids who had one to two years of daycare by age 4½—which was typical for our sample—had exactly the level of problem behavior you'd expect for kids of their age. Most people use center care for one or two years, and for those kids we're not seeing anything problematic."

There does seem to be a modest negative effect for children who go into daycare right at infancy.  But before we jump to the conclusion that parents who use daycare are bad parents, there are other, more important questions we should examine.   At a minimum we should ask what is the family situation that requires the child to go into daycare so quickly?  Most parents I know would LOVE to be able to stay home with their newborn children for a year, but it simply isn't possible.  For example, research has repeatedly shown that children whose families own a home vs. renting perform better on most measures of wellbeing.  Does the family require both incomes just to own a home?  So we really need to ask what are the possible negative effects of the child being at home that aren't being considered?  A corollary question we need to be asking is why does one of the richest nations in the world not provide a federal parental leave program for families? 

Check out Bazelon's article here and let us know what you think!

The Relationship Between Health and Work

It's official - there is a link between our health and our work.  Healthier people tend to perform better and work...and people with good jobs tend to be healthier.  The Good Health/Good Economy website of the US Department of Health and Human Services notes (among other things) that:

• Inadequate employment is associated with poor health outcomes.
• The degree of control that employees exercise over their work influences health.
• At least one study indicates that every step up the occupational ladder has positive health consequences.
• Work influences the health of families and children.
• Health conditions affect work status.
• Income inequality affects health.

If this inspires you to spend a little effort improving your health, you may be interested in the My Pyramid website.  It lets you adjust the recommended food pyramid based on your body type and exercise preferences.  From there, the site will quickly customize a tracking sheet for you (see link on the left) so that you can track your progress against the plan.  Very cool!

To your good health and good success in your career!

Who deserves a flexible schedule? - Part 2

Thanks to Ann Bares for reading yesterday's post about flexible work arrangements and telling me about a recent article in the 2/23/07 Wall Street Journal on "Avoiding the Mommy Track" by Sue Shellenbarger.  (Click here for a link to the article, but note that since WSJ is a subscription paper, the link may not work for you.).

The article tells the experiences of Joyce Bordash, a manager for IBM, who wanted to work part-time while her children were young, but didn't want to compromise her career either.  She outlines several innovative strategies she used to keep her career interesting and rewarding while she worked a reduced schedule.  Some important points to take away from Ms. Bordash's story:

• She considered the needs of her employer: How can a parent cut back at work without skidding onto the Mommy Track? Joyce Bordash didn't want to be marginalized. She also knew that as a mother, she wanted to work part-time. ... she set out to make herself so valuable that her boss would let her call her own shots.
• She developed a niche expertise:  "When I made the decision for a reduced work week, I realized the importance of specialization. I needed to make myself indispensable, to have expertise my management team would recognize and value."
• She stayed focused on what she was trying to accomplish: "As I became increasingly specialized, I became a lot more selective in how I spent my time. I had to let go of the extraneous, general-awareness stuff -- to eliminate the nice-to-know information from the essential knowledge."
• She communicated professionally and proactively with co-workers: "I had to condition my co-workers to separate a 'high-priority' item from a 'time to panic' item. I tried to convey that because I worked a four-day work week, my Friday was like their Saturday. If they wanted me to participate in a business call on a Friday, I would tell them, "I can't do this on Friday, but I could do it on Saturday." And suddenly, they would decide it could wait until Monday."

Ms. Bordash is a great example of how to use win-win thinking to benefit the individual and the organization.  Her track record of successful performance gave her the credibility to propose and seek an alternative work arrangement. Her employer recognized that she was looking to make a contribution and they wisely cleared a path for her to do so. 

Who deserves a flexible schedule?

A few months ago I heard a researcher at the University of Minnesota talking about a survey she did of family friendly policies in Corporate America.  One of her criticisms was that alternative work arrangements (AWA's) such as part-time, flex-time, and telecommuting were typically offered as perks to high performers and weren't widely available to all employees.  It seemed as if she intended for this remark to shock the audience and ignite a fire of social justice against the corporate world.

As an HR professional, I'm not surprised (or moved to an activist stance) by her comment.  I'm well aware that AWA's are only available for performers who have proven themselves.  It's perfectly natural for bosses to be slightly distrustful of workers that routinely fail to perform adequately.  If an employee does not get his work done in an 8-hour day at the office, what is the incentive for a boss to allow him to telecommute?  Employees who desire a flexible schedule need to honestly reflect on their work habits and results and decide how they would answer the question: Can your boss trust you with a flexible schedule? 

The naive criticism about corporate life from the researcher is one more example of the gap between academia and the corporate realm.  In some ways it actually insults employees to treat them as helpless victims of a faceless corporate machine, rather than treating them as agents of change and creative beings who are capable of developing skills, doing great work, and making a positive contribution.  I would find the gap between academia and corporate life discouraging, but since my mission on this blog to to be encouraging, I just tell myself this is a great motivation for me to continue to slug it out in a PhD program so that  one day I can work on applied research that makes a positive difference for workers!

Working from Home

So many of the articles about working from home present an unrealistic picture of what it is like to run a home-based business.  Ann Bares commented on this phenomenon for me a while back.  Liz Pulliam Weston recently had a great column on options for working at home.  She presents the legitimate opportunity available along with a healthy dose of realism and concludes:

"The folks I interviewed who are making decent money at home also made decent money in the regular workplace world. They tended to have good educations, strong business skills and a history of workplace success. If you're organized, focused, a self-starter and possessed of in-demand skills, you could do OK at home. If you're not, your options are likely to be more limited."

Do you currently work from your home?  Do you want to?  Please post a comment, share your story, and encourage others!

Is the "opt out" revolution real?

Lisa Belkin's NY Times article on The Opt-out Revolution about highly-educated women "choosing" to stay home with children was a sensation.  Overnight, the phrase "opting out" became synonymous with a down-to-earth, values-oriented, and simplified way of living - a noble an intelligent pursuit for rational beings.  It also invited scathing commentary from Linda Hirshman in her manifesto for women, Get to Work, in which she suggested (among other things) that the women who choose to "opt out" do so 1) at their husband's expense and 2) probably never had real success in their career anyway and so weren't opting out of much.    

A new study from Simmons School of Management in Boston suggests another perspective - that women are Opting In vs. Opting Out but that they are doing it on their own terms.  The researchers, Mary Shapiro and Cynthia Ingols, note that women's career patterns have always been seen as deviant in the corporate world because they are judged against a normative definition of full-time, non-stop career management.  After surveying 400 women they suggest that professional women today aren't opting out, they are simply rejecting a "work is primary" career model and are instead leading a paradigm shift to "career self-agency." 

Their findings include:

• Most professional women don't have the option to "opt out" as they provide a significant portion of their household income.
• Women are using Flexible Work Arrangements (FWA's) to stay in the workforce rather than to "opt out"
• In contrast to the financial impact of "opting out", over time FWA's have no statistically significant financial impact on women.

This is good news for women in the workforce, and for the increasing numbers of men who aren't interesting in "extreme" careers, but are seeking a more balanced lifestyle.

"Take my phone number with you!"

A couple of months ago, I told you about Krista's bad boss experience.  This weekend I heard one that tops it, believe it or not...

My friend Sharon had a stroke at work last week. She was getting ready for a conference call, and was having a hard time reading the number she was supposed to call.  She assumed she was just tired and working too much, managed to figure out the number, and joined the call.  During the call she developed a severe headache.  By the time the call was done, she became aware that her words seemed to be slurring.  She called her husband and he immediately came to take her to the ER.  Feeling very fatigued and dizzy, Sharon got up from her desk, and told Jeri, the woman in the cube beside her (who happens to work for another department), "I don't feel well and my husband is coming to get me."

At the hospital they ran several tests, ascertained that she indeed had a minor stroke and decided to keep her overnight for observation.  The next morning when Sharon woke up, she felt groggy from the sedatives they had given her during the tests, and she was experiencing slight memory loss.  She realized she needed to call in to work but couldn't remember her boss' phone number.  Since she was able to recall Jeri's extension, she called her and left her a brief voice mail that simply said she was in the hospital, to please let her boss (Wanda) know, and that she would try to call back later in the day.

Apparently Jeri had an appointment so she didn't arrive at work til nearly noon.  By the time she heard the voice mail and forwarded the information, Wanda had already come looking for Sharon and was asking around where she was.  Towards the end of the day, Sharon was feeling a little better and called Wanda to update her.  The conversation went like this:

Sharon:  "Wanda, This is Sharon..."

Wanda: (Interrupting) "Why did you call Jeri when you knew you weren't coming in?  Why didn't you call me?"

Sharon:  "Well I actually had a stroke yesterday, and my memory has been kind of fuzzy and I just couldn't remember your extension.  So I just did what I could to get a message to you."

Wanda:  "Well, the next time you go to the hospital, make sure to take my phone number with you!"

Really.  That's what she said to her employee who just had a stroke and was in the hospital.  She didn't say, "What happened"  or "How are you?" or "Is there anything I can do to help?"  Thankfully this story has a decent ending.  A re-org had been pending in Sharon's department for some time, and by the time she returned to work at the end of the week, she found out she had a new boss.  It's a woman she respects and enjoys working with, so she's happy about that.  

By the way, I was stunned when Sharon told me she had a stroke.  She is in her early 40's, has 2 children, and maintains a slim figure by eating a healthy diet and working out regularly.  She assured me it was a minor, non-damaging stroke (I can't remember the actual medical term for it) and she expects to get a clean bill of health at her follow-up appointment next week.   Just goes to show you how fragile life is and not to take anything for granted!