Have U Prufed Yr LinkedIn Profile to Suport Yr Sucess??

Gentle readers:

I know, it's annoying.  The English Major is at it again.  I'm reading a lot of your LinkedIn profiles and finding typos / errors.

Frankly, this is much worse than finding these typos / errors in your job applications:  please read my advice to you on this front in my earlier post, Thank You Fer Teh Job Oppertunity.  As a recruiter and a hiring authority, the audience for your errors as a job applicant is just me, theoretically.  The advice, however, is universal to all of your reputation management, online or not.

On your LinkedIn profile:  well, it's the entire online community worldwide, viewing your handiwork (or lack thereof) real-time on their Droids, iPads, and related hardware.  It's like a picture posted of you with clumps of spinach in your teeth, in full view of your potential customers / employers.  Hopefully you already know that your LinkedIn profile, unless you've changed your LinkedIn settings, shows up in Google among other search engine results when a hiring authority / potential customer conducts a simple Google check on you. 

So potential decision-makers in Melbourne (and everywhere else) are chuckling ruefully at your lack of precision and attention to detail, and clicking on the next LinkedIn profile in their search results for a vendor, a consultant, a Ruby-On-Rails Developer, an Online Reputation Manager, or a Controller.

And sadly, not calling you for potential career and business opportunities.

Now, intentional misspellings have been used since advertising has existed.  One of my favorite local examples is the beloved ice cream joint, Kurver Kreme.

The LinkedIn examples I've seen recently are clearly not intentional; and in fact, are actually in (ouch) current LinkedIn profile headlines (censored to protect the careless):

• Business Developement Manager at xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx  (a U.S. profile, FYI)

• Marketing anager at xxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx

• Human Resoruce Manager at xxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx

• Here's a doozy - not just one but multiple misspellings at the top of this person's LinkedIn profile:

            HR Manger at xxxx xxxxxxxx

Xxxxxx xxxxxx  | Human Resources

328 connections

Current:

HR Manger at xxxx xxxxxxx

Past:

HR Buisness partner at xxxx xxxxxx

Manger at  xxxxxxx

                  Recruitment Manger at xxxx xxxxx

Now I know that after experiencing both an earthquake and a hurricane within the same week, we all need a little Christmas, right this very minute, with the serene visualization of a manger scene.  But please:  not in your LinkedIn profile, unintentionally!

By the way:  by entering misspelled words into the powerful LinkedIn search engine, I was able to generate a list of nearly one million LinkedIn users with potential misspellings in their LinkedIn profiles.  Yikes!

So, gentle readers:  get thee to Merriam-Webster Online and a trusted editing buddy and fix your LinkedIn profile typos, fast, to best support your online reputation as well your ongoing success.

Hire Smarter Than You to Succeed

The entrepreneurs and business owners in my network by and large already know that they need to hire folks who are smarter than them in key areas in order to build their businesses.  As their businesses grow to a certain point, they know full well that they need to hire the talent and the subject-matter expertise (SME) they don't personally possess as the CEO in order to take their businesses to the next level.

A key success factor for these entrepreneurs is their status as life-long learners.  As Tom Peters tweeted over the weekend:  "Came to agreement with very senior team that one of 2 or 3 most important traits in a senior exec is childlike compulsive curiosity."  In other words, the most successful entrepreneurs love to learn, and they especially love to learn from their SMEs.

These go-getters are clearly secure about their own accomplishments and their roles as business owners and leaders, so feeling threatened by say, an Accounting SME or a Logistics SME they hire (whether they're an employee, a consultant, or a temp-to-perm SME), to bring structure and consistency into their business isn't even on their radar.  Their hunt is to build the team that's going to make their business successful and grow.

Unfortunately, this model is not yet consistently endemic to the employee-leadership paradigm, e.g. non-owner managers and leaders who hire employees.  And they didn't start the fire, frankly.  Most organizational performance / compensation paradigms still reward just individual performance, not the badly needed manager-employee team and/or organizational performance incentives.  In other words, most managers are still held accountable just for their own performance, which creates an inbred culture of finger-pointing at subordinates and ultimately, abstaining from accountability to the performance of the organization as a whole.

I have been lucky enough to have worked with a few non-owner employee managers who chose to put out the fire of that mediocre paradigm and hire SMEs who were smarter to support mutual and organizational success.

It was woven into the fabric of the GE culture.  The manager who hired me into GE saw me eventually becoming the head of GE Public Relations.  "You're a mini-Joyce,"  Chuck would often say to me.  Chuck's prediction did not come true, but I always appreciated his faith in my abilities.

Another GE manager, Bill (who at this writing, is the best manager I've experienced in my career), firmly believed that the success of his employees equaled his success.  And as I mentioned in an earlier blog post lifting up Bill's leadership qualities:  instead of keeping me in position to ensure that his work got done, his goal was to get me promoted:  the merit badge of a manager's / mentor's success.  And he did, pushing me to a promotion at another business unit, even though I wanted to stay in my job, as a member of his team.  But he was right, as usual.

Consequently, I seized the opportunity to pay it forward when I was in a similar leadership role.  When the time came for me to hire a Recruiting Manager, I hired Alison, who is an AIRS-trained recruiting maven and SME.  A great deal of my knowledge base as a Recruiting SME is thanks to what I learned from Alison.  I'm happy to report that Alison subsequently followed her entrepreneurial bliss as the owner of her own successful recruiting firm.

I am a grateful student, indeed.

When the Workplace Student is Ready, The Teacher May Be An A**hole

"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear."


"When the workplace student is ready, the teacher who appears may be an asshole."

                                                                               
Guess which quote is from Queens, NY, like me?

The other source is Buddha, of course.

I'd like to thank Bob Sutton (author of the great workplace tome, The No-Asshole Rule) for helping me to express myself more authentically as a professional.  As Sutton asserts in his book and elsewhere, the word "jerk" doesn't quite capture the visceral experience of working with an asshole.

But what the hell do I mean?

That the assholes you encounter in the workplace are, more often than not, the teachers / gurus in your path to career excellence and success.

That the asshole who tries to demean you publicly in front of a large meeting can be a test of your belief in your talent, developing your resilency, diplomacy and leadership:  if you Keep Calm and Carry On, there's very little an asshole can latch on to, and they more often then not will, eventually, move on.  If they don't move on, you may need to move on:  only you know the limits of your stress tolerance and the standards for the quality of the work life you envision.

That the asshole who once tried to demean you may become your subordinate, and you can coach them towards compassion:  and if that fails to work, you can make them available to industry.  Sometimes time and consequences heal assholes, sometimes not.

That the asshole who tries to keep you out of the loop as punishment or power play, can be a test of how you can stay centered, continually discover your empathy for them and keep them completely in the loop in return.

That the asshole who gossips about and bad-mouths you in an attempt to destroy your reputation is actually extremely hurt and wounded themselves, and that their venom usually backfires into their own public substandard  performance review.  And that the compassion (and even love) you discover and display for the asshole can heal the world, one asshole at a time.

That the asshole who tries to bait you into a conflict to embarrass you publicly teaches you to more carefully choose your battles (e.g., how important is it) and to stand up factually, professional and functionally when it is a conflict worthy of your time, attention and talent.

That when the asshole has nothing left in their arsenal to hurt you, then they may be ready for a conversation where you are the teacher and they are the student (if they're ready and willing to listen).  Time can sometimes be the universal asshole-healer.

For as I learned as a diversity trainer and as a mediator:  meet ignorance with compassion; be prepared to be the teacher of inclusion; and keep your courage up to discover the real needs under the yelling of the asshole. 

Oh, and the most important learning of all:  don't let the assholes get you down at work; and don't become an asshole yourself to survive.

In that way, you are not only the eternal student of career success, but also the advocate of peace at work:  one asshole learning-opportunity at a time.

Work Friends Are Risky Rungs on the Career Ladder

"There are no such things as friends at work," my friend Barry declared to me one day a number of years ago, coaching me on a (now) minor work dilemma.  A mutual colleague at work, who I assumed was a friend of several years based on our warm sharings together about our child-rearing experiences, had just pulled a maneuver on me worthy of a cannibal cousin of the Borgia clan.  Frankly, and annoyingly, my feelings were hurt.

I uncharacteristically did not respond immediately, processing the paradox of his statement and a bit taken aback.  As we were both Logistics professionals, I responded logically.  "So we're not friends," I replied, a bit puzzled.   "No,"  Barry reiterated.

I started chuckling:  it worked, I snapped out of my moping.  "We eat lunch together at least twice a week; we travel together at least twice a month, and we hang out together voluntarily on non-work-related time.  So we're not friends?"  Barry shook his head, grinning.  "It's business, not personal," he said.

I rolled my eyes.  Here we go, about to take another trip to the Gender Gap.  Barry, however, would not let me off the hook.  "Here's the deal," he continued. "The bottom line is that results count.  We're here to produce, not to play.  You know that as well,  if not better, than I do."  I nodded, and Barry continued.  "That guy's always been an asshole when it comes to getting his work done.  He just needed to get work done, and it happened to be in your area, so it was your turn.  Plain and simple."

I thought for another minute about Barry's assessment.  "But you and I get our work done:  we knock heads occasionally, but the net is that we pull our results, have fun and we're not assholes to each other," I asserted.

"True," Barry agreed.  "It makes our work together more productive and pleasant.  But when the opposite happens, I accept it and move on.  I get the majority of support from my family and friends outside of work.  Now, I may have met some of my great friends at work:  however, it always better when I don't work with them."  Seeing me uncharacteristically quiet and pensive, Barry drove his point home. "As another example, I accept the fact that, while you and I are friends at work, I also know that you, as the HR Director, may someday be in a position to lay me off if our business starts tanking."  He grinned at me again.  "It's part of your job:  it's business, not personal.  The work comes first."

"So you do understand that, especially in my line of work, friendships are always a risk," I responded.  "I appreciate your feedback."  I grinned back at him.  "I'm still willing to take the risk."

Barry rose from his desk chair and put on his coat.  "Great, I'm done.  All this talking has made me hungry.  Let's go grab some lunch."