Musings on design & other stuff jen's place

I know, I write a lot about one particular band, but I really like this lyric (the title of this post), and it got me thinking — what is my "walk on the moon"? What is the most revolutionary, amazing accomplishment of my life? Is it submitting patent applications? Getting my Masters degree at 40? Having papers published at international conferences? Having a child? Or having a great marriage after 10 years?

Those are all tremendous accomplishments, and those are the things that I'm most proud of in my life, but I just read Randy Pausch's book, The Last Lecture, and that's influencing my thinking. Randy was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon when he was asked to give a "last lecture" — a talk on what he learned in his life as though he were at the end of it; except that he really was at the end of his life, because, unbeknownst to the college at the time of it's asking, he'd been told that he only had a few months to live. He had three children who were all under the age of 6, so he used the last lecture to try to tell his children who he was, and what was unique about him.

So while I am immensely proud of the work I've done, of the child I've brought into the world, and the marriage that I've nurtured, those things don't make me unique. What Randy decided made him unique was that he had achieved his childhood goals. I suppose that is something I share with him.

No, I didn't always want to be a user experience engineer :) But I remember a letter that my kindergarten teacher wrote when I graduated from high school — she talked about how at age 4 and 5 I would help the other children with academic work. Yeah, I know, that was like the alphabet. Then in first grade, I was appointed "student teacher" to mentor my classmates through difficult math problems. In college, I tutored English, Calculus, Statistics, and English-as-a-second-language. After college, I volunteered to teach adult literacy. And the list goes on ... until this past month.

This past month, I asked my former graduate adviser if I could have permission to launch and run a new program — a mentoring workshop series to help students and alumni to get their work published in a professional journal, magazine, or presented at a conference ... and he said "yes". So we start next Thursday, with a panel of 7 speakers, and 20 participants. It's not a class. There's no grade. I won't get paid. But this is my one small step — this is my walk on the moon.

Back in part 2 of this series, I suggested that, "Humility is a great quality. Save it for everyone but your boss."

So what did I mean by that? Did I mean that you should take credit for other people's work? No. Did I mean that you should throw your colleagues under the bus by blaming everything that goes wrong on them? Not even. What I meant was that you need to continually communicate the value of your work to your manager, so she or he doesn't have to guess, to read your mind, or to figure it out on their own.

Your manager is busy. Save her some time. When you go in for your next 1-1 with her (you are having weekly or bi-weekly 1-1's with your manger, right?), listen to what ever she wants to tell you first. Then, looking over your notes (you went in with written notes, right?), tell her what you've been doing, the challenges (briefly) that you've faced, and either (a) how you overcame those challenges or (b) what you need for her to do, so that you can move forward. What if you talked about it in your last meeting? Well, if you're still working on it, then give her a status update — tell her what progress you've made. Or, if you are completely stuck or overwhelmed, what kind of help you need.

Here are some tips:

• Schedule regular status meetings with your manager. These meetings can be weekly or bi-weekly, but should not be further apart than every 2 weeks. These meetings should last no less than 30 minutes, and you should come with an agenda (see above).
• Share all the good news. From time to time, you will get emails thanking you for all your hard work. These may come from customers, other managers, or colleagues. Immediately forward anything that has a thank you in it to your manager. I usually add a brief summary at the top of the forward message, like "Nice words from the VP of marketing" or "Thanks from Sarah" or "Kudos from the web team". I'm saving my manger time with the summary, and then he can decide whether to send it up to his manager. Managers love doing that, by the way ... sharing good news. So make sure that you give him that opportunity.
• Ask for feedback from the people with whom you work. So you don't have any of those letters or emails to share? It's okay to ask for them. Really. I had one mentee whose boss told her that she couldn't be promoted until she got some rave reviews from her customers. She knew that she'd worked really hard (often much harder than her colleagues), so she asked her customers to write an email to her or her boss to give feedback on her performance. She got the rave reviews that she needed, and almost immediately got that promotion.
• Show some appreciation. Call it Karma or the golden rule or whatever you want, but the best way to get external appreciation and validation is start by showing some. Thank your colleagues. Publicly. And in writing. That's how you'd like to be thanked, right? And it shows that you have leadership skills or leadership potential, because it's not all about building yourself up, it's about building and sustaining a team.

And, if after all this advice, you still don't believe me, then don't take my word for it. Take someone else's (just scroll down to the November 6th posting, How to move up the ladder).

I said in my first post on mentoring that I'd talk about how to deal with difficult people. But I've been putting it off, because it's such a big topic. I tend to put the people that I work with into a few categories:

• Peers
• People who I can help (generally more junior people)
• People who can help me (generally more senior people)
• Managers up my chain of command
• Managers in another chain of command

I'm not sure that those are all of the distinctions, but those are some rough categories to start. The goal with each of them is the same, however: to get the work accomplished, efficiently, effectively, and in such a way that the person you are working with really wants to work with you again. When people are being difficult or playing games, it's hard to keep that goal in mind, but it's important.

Here's a game that senior people like to play with me, when something that I've said moves them out of their comfort zone (please pardon the language, but this is how I think of this kind of conflict)... the game is called, "mine's bigger than yours is". It's great to recognize when this game is started, because it means that they are feeling threatened or insecure. You'll know you're a player in this game when the subject of conversation moves from the thing that you wanted to talk about, to a topic that they know they can "beat" you at; a place where they know they can win. This almost always happens in a large group setting, frequently over email.

Sometimes, just acknowledging that I've done something to make them defensive will diffuse the situation, and then I try to redirect them back on course. I'll say something like, "My intent was not to put you on the defensive. I'm sorry to have done so. Your last point was the one that that I'd originally wanted to discuss ..." or some such thing. But what about when they really want to get into a conflict? I have a couple of tactics:

• Take the discussion offline -- posturing is less interesting to the person when they don't have an audience, and most people are very reasonable 1:1
• Look for areas of agreement or convergence between your points of view and then play them up -- acknowledge when and where the two of you agreee, and then refer back to that agreement at least once
• Stay calm -- emotion is your enemy -- if you can't respond without getting angry, then wait until you can. If you can't wait, have a colleague review your response.
• Ask open-ended questions and listen to the answers -- try to discover what it is that this person really wants, and then use that to find more points of agreement
• Pick up the phone -- some people are just more comfortable voice-to-voice than in email. Once you've had your discussion, send a email to the person (not the larger group) that summarizes your discussion and invite them to edit and respond to what you thought you heard on the call. Once you have their agreement in email, you can return to the large forum with a summary of your new-found convergence.
• Don't dig in your heels -- as much as you want the other person to come around to your way of thinking, you need to be able to acknowledge when they have a good point, and then move forward from there.
• Don't make an enemy if you can help it -- by using the tactics above, I've converted many people that I've been in conflict with into strong supporters of mine.

Again, your goal is to get the work done, efficiently, effectively, and in such a way that the person you are working with really wants to work with you again. Generally, people just want to be treated with respect and have their points heard and acknowledged. If you can do that, it won't matter whose intellect is bigger ;)

There are a number of aspects to effective communication — I mentioned how and when you ask for a promotion in an earlier post — but there are many more dimensions to communicating effectively than just timing and voice. Probably the one aspect of effective communication that I spend the most time talking about with my mentees is understanding your audience: who are they and what is their communication style?

I've found that I use several techniques to learn about communication style and adjust how I communicate, as a result:

• Introvert or Extrovert?
• Other Myers-Briggs letters
• Birth order & family life

If you don't already know if the person is an introvert or extrovert, here are some questions that will help you figure it out: does the person think out loud (E) or prefer to get information in writing so they have time to reflect on it before responding (I)? When you have a meeting with the person, do they frequently have an agenda that they use to guide the discussion (I) or do the wing it (E)? When they do have an agenda, are they comfortable discussing other things (E), or do they prefer to stick to the agenda (I)? Obviously, the line along which we fall as an Extrovert or an Introvert is a continuum, but most people fall to one side or the other as their comfort zone or default style of communication. I'm pretty much on the line between I and E, but when all is said and done, I am definitely an Extrovert, so I consciously adapt my communication style when I need to work with Introverts.

The other Myers-Briggs letters are important, as well. For example, my last letter is a P, which means that I perceive time as flexible or expandable, and as a result, I tend to procrastinate. I'm also more of a thinker than a feeler, which means that I err on the side of logic more often than not. If you're a feeler, then you need to adapt your style to give me data on which to base a decision, not just what you feel.

Another aspect is birth order & family life. I had a boss who came from a family where his father drank and was verbally abusive. As a result, he'd only communicate with people to reprimand them — if you were doing well, he wouldn't say a word to you, so we frequently didn't talk for weeks at a time. A colleague of mine was asking for resources on how to manage up — I had to be honest with her that, as an only child, I'd never had a problem managing up, because my whole childhood had been spent trying to get my parents to interact with me.

Lastly, and I mention this with some reluctance, sometimes birthdays can be helpful in understanding a person's communication style. I'm a Virgo and my life is filled with Pisceans, Sagittarians, and Cancers. Why that happens, I won't guess, but it's a pattern nonetheless.

At some point, you may decide that what you're doing is not what you want to be doing. I've had that feeling. I started out as a programmer, moved into multi-platform system administration, then consulting, then technical training and course development, and then technical writing.

And then I was stuck. I didn't want to be a technical writer forever -- some people do, and I admire them for that -- but I didn't know what to do next. At the same time, another technical writer I knew was also looking for a new role. She'd talked to our career counselor, who gave her some excellent advice: "Do the job before you try to get the job." That really resonated with me, because in each of the job transitions that I'd made before, I'd done just that. The career counseling term for it is "developing in place".

To expand that just a bit, here are three steps that I recommend to my mentees for changing roles.

1. Read about the new kind of work
2. Take a class (or two or ten) in that new field
3. Start doing that kind of work in your current role

It's a progressive process -- if you like what you read, take a class. If you enjoyed the class, then apply what you learned back at work. The colleague that I mentioned above did that, and went to our boss, who allowed her to manage a small project. After a few weeks, she discovered that, while she liked the idea of being a project manager, she hated being a project manager. No harm, no fowl.

Now, one of my mentees asked if that wasn't a waste a time -- going through all that time and effort to find out that you don't like something. On the contrary, I consider it a good investment of time. Imagine how my colleague would have felt if she'd gotten a full-time job as a project manager, only to find out then that she hated it.

I used that process above to make my last career change: from technical writing to user experience design. I read, I took classes, I applied what I did in class back at work, and in 12 - 18 months, I got the role that I wanted. It took a ton of work on my part and the trust of my new manager, but now I love what I do.

Like I tell my daughter: Trying is the first part of doing.

This technique is so simple, that you may curse me for making you read my blog. About 10 years ago, I was working with a guy who seemed to have it good. He'd just gotten a computer system from our boss, he was working on a brand new project that was outside his regular duties, and he generally seemed to be getting perks that the rest of us weren't. At first I got frustrated at the inequity of it, but then I asked him what his secret was. Are you ready for this? He said, "I ask -- the worst that can happen is that she says "no", but I haven't lost anything by asking." That was his big trick. He asked for what he wanted.

Now, there is just a little more to it than that -- there's how you ask and when you ask, but the critical part is that you ask. Don't wait for the good luck fairy to come sprinkle the dust of success over your head. Like the slogan of the Maryland state lottery says, "You've got to play to win".

Set expectations with your manager, find out what steps you need to accomplish to get from here to where you want to be, and then execute on those steps.

And does it work? You bet it does. This isn't about being a squeaky wheel or a whiner, this is about discussing your goals with your manager and putting a plan of action in place. It could be that you have done everything that you need to do to get what you want -- in that case, it's even easier. It's just a discussion where you lay out what it is you want, and why you think you have earned it. Humility is a great quality. Save it for everyone but your boss.

I've had the benefit of being mentored by two VPs at Sun. In return, I've been the mentor for four people at Sun, and I'm seeing some patterns in the things I tell them.

During the first few sessions, I recommend that they read these two books:

• The Unwritten Laws of Engineering
• Career Warfare: 10 Rules for Building a Successful Personal Brand and Fighting to Keep It

Now, the first book was written by a Caucasian male over 50 years ago, so you can take it in that context, but it still holds quite a lot of value. I found out about this book from my first SEED mentor.

The second book, I found on my own, but I was led there by a woman who used to be a career counselor at Sun. I'd just attended a class of hers on personal networking, and we were chatting after it had concluded. She introduced me to the term "personal brand" -- I went straight to my desk, searched on Amazon, and bought the book above. I only wish I'd had it 10 years earlier.

In subsequent installments, I'll give you my recipes for how to get a raise/promotion, how to change careers, and how to succeed when you are working with difficult people.