LISTEN: A classy way to make a career move - SVP's 'One Last Thing'

Take seven minutes sometime this weekend and listen to ESPN Radio Host Scott Van Pelt bid farewell to the radio audience on today's final episode of the popular SVP and Russillo Show. Van Pelt is moving on to a (on paper) bigger role at ESPN, with his co-host Ryen Russillo set to take over solo host duties next week.

In just a short seven minute monologue SVP hits all the right notes; he thanks and recognizes the team of contributors and behind the scenes folks that helped make the show possible (singling out specific and personal areas to highlight), he admits that bringing on a talented and creative co-host in Russillo forced him to be a better host himself, as he didn't want to be outshined on his own show, and is honest about realizing that in just about any successful career, there is a combination of luck, good timing, a great team, and hard work necessary to achieve whatever dreams and goals that one has.

The clip is embedded below, (email and RSS subscribers may need to click through). It's worth a listen even if you are not a fan of the SVP and Russillo show or a fan of sports at all. 

Great message on reflecting, caring about your team, and looking forward to the next thing, all in just seven minutes.

Have a great weekend!

Five signs the organization will do just fine without you

There are plenty of mistakes we make managing and navigating our careers. Some are kind of obvious, and easily avoided with just a smidge of common sense (like don't park in the bosses' reserved parking space). Others are a little more complex, more subtle, and usually involve sorting out more nebulous concepts like who the office's hidden influencers are or what projects offer just the right balance of exposure, likelihood of success, and work you actually know how to do.

But possibly the most significant mistake we make in personal career management is that we overestimate our relative value and importance to the organization, or said differently, we take on a "there is no way they can get rid of me" kind of mentality. 

Of course they can get rid of you. In fact, it is usually shocking just how easy it is for the organization to move on after you are gone. But in case you are still deluding yourself as to your essentialness, here are a few tips that you can use to check yourself. How can you be sure the organization will do just fine without you? 

1. You've been there fewer than 2 years - It took you 3 months to figure out where to park your car, to find the cafeteria, and to sort out the office dress code. Then it took 6 months to learn all of the corporate acronyms. Then you (sort of) got down to learning just exactly what it is you were supposed to be doing. So maybe that took another 3 months. Face it, you have been only marginally productive since this March. If you were gone tomorrow, it would not grind the wheels of progress down to a halt. No one hardly knows you are even there.

2. Your job has a Roman Numeral in the title - Maybe you are a Financial Analyst II or a Senior Marketing Planner III. Either way, the mere presence of a Roman Numeral in your title suggests that there are plenty of folks ready to step up a Roman Numeral into your job. In fact, even the most famous Roman Numeral job, Pope, is not immune to this reality. A week after Pope Innocent IV calls it a career, there is a Pope Dominic III ready to step in.

3. You never get called or texted by work after 5:30PM during the week and NEVER on the weekend - In this age of constant connectivity and decreased demarcation between work and not work, if you are never being called upon or contacted after hours or on the weekend or even when you are on vacation that is probably a sign that you are not as important as you might reckon. 

4. Your 'war stories' no longer have any practical value, (but they might still be funny) - If your 'back in the day' tales start to lose any connection to both the reality of current market conditions or the sensibilities of your (probably younger) colleagues, then it could be time for some self-examination. After a while, these stories start to move from 'the wisdom of experience' to 'the insane ramblings of a crazy person.' When does that line get crossed? Hard to say, but once on the other side, it is pretty much a done deal that you are not coming back. 

5. You can explain what you do to a stranger in less than 60 seconds - The depth, breadth, and complexity of what you do should not be able to be summarized in the time it takes to microwave some Top Ramen. If what you do can be distilled into such a compact package then it stands to reason it would not be hard or expensive to train up the next guy to step in for you once you are gone. 

The truth is we all are replaceable. All of us. Bill Gates doesn't run Microsoft any longer. Steve Jobs passed away, and Apple still prints money. Steve Perry of Journey was replaced by some guy that the band found on YouTube.

The organization will be just fine without you. That doesn't mean you didn't do a great job and were respected and valued.

It just means that the time comes for everyone.

VIDEO: Does your LinkedIn profile sound like this?

It is Tuesday, it is not quite Summer yet but you are thinking about vacation, and it is probably a little tough to get it going today. What you need is a break. And a laugh as well. 

So take 5 minutes and check out the hilarious 'LinkedIn OUT LOUD!' video (embedded below, email and RSS subscribers will need to click through), and marvel at what some, (hopefully not your), LinkedIn profiles actually sound like when read aloud by comic actors:

Awesome, and all too true as the source material comes from actual LinkedIn profiles. 

It was worth the 5 minutes right? Now you can go back to being a results oriented, customer-focused, global operator.

Happy Tuesday.

Will you be replaced by a robot? Use this nifty tool to find out

Will you or your job be replaced by a robot, an algorithm, or some other type of automation technology?

Of course it will!

The question should really be 'When?' not 'If?'

But for something fun to on a Friday, head over to the NPR Planet Money site and take spin on their interactive tool that uses data from a University of Oxford study entitled “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?”, and lets you see just how likely your job will be automated away in the near future.

Here is what the tool says about 'Cashiers', one of the most likely jobs to disappear in the next 20 years or so.

As you can tell from the charts, the likelihood of a given job becoming the domain of robots is influenced by four factors: the need to conjure up clever ideas and solutions, the amount of social interaction needed in the job, the space the job requires (robots are still not great at navigating tight spaces), and the negotiation skills needed.

Luckily for many of us, jobs that fall in the 'management' domain still seem (reasonably) safe for now.

Go have some fun on a Friday, and check out your own odds and see if you should be considering a career move (before it's too late).

Have a great weekend!

What are you afraid of?

Note: This week on the blog I am trying out a little experiment - writing on the first five (or so) subjects that popped out at random from a cool little app called Writing Exercises. The app provides suggestions for topics, characters, first lines - that kind of thing. I tapped the 'Random Subject' button a few times and will (try) to come up with something for each subject I was presented. It may be good, it may stink - who knows? But whatever the topic, I am taking like 20 minutes tops to bang something out. So here goes...

Today's (and this little exercise's final) topic is a question: What are you afraid of?, and like yesterday's post, I am going to try and keep this more in a work/workplace/career context. I mean I am afraid of Sasquatch and the a guy sitting next to me on a plane who decides to take off his flip-flops and films with subtitles, but no one cares about that.

So what am I afraid of? Not sure I if I am still afraid of these things, but I probably was at one point or another (or should have been). Here goes...

1. Continuing to work with people that you don't trust - There is always a kind of weird and interesting dynamic in organizations and office politics where on the one hand if everyone succeeds then everyone is happy, but in most organizations 'everyone' isn't who or how we reward that success. Said differently, and hopefully in a way that makes sense, most organizations value team work and collaboration, but when come promotion and raise and bonus time it is literally every man and woman for themselves. Naturally these circumstances lend themselves often to people having to work in their own self-interests, and their self-interests are almost certainly not aligned with yours. Once you get the sense that the big, happy family of collaborating colleagues is actually a pack of loosely organized bloodthirsty pirates, you had better be able to either play the game to win or get yourself out of there. 

2. Staying too long in a job or at an organization that is making you unhappy - Similar to Item 1, I know that there has been a time in my career I lingered at a little too long at a place where I had ceased learning, developing, and being excited to be there. It was for all the usual reasons that I stayed - finances, location, family obligations, etc.  The same reasons you are probably gutting it out in a job you don't like either. But even though we can pretty effectively rationalize the 'stick it out' decision, in the longer term it is almost always one we will regret. 

3. Letting someone else (or expectations) manage your career choices. One of the things most folks should do, at least early in their careers, is take the time to experiment. I am talking about taking at least some time to try a few different roles/industries/kinds of jobs in order to figure out what you are actually good at doing. It is so easy to come out of college as say an accounting major and then take your first accounting job which leads to the next accounting job and so on and so on. Until 18 years later you are the Assistant Controller and you realize that you don't really like accounting. But your Dad told you to major in accounting because it 'Would be easy to get a job after you graduate' and so you did and then, well, you know the rest. So take some time to ty out some things when you are young and you only have to worry about supporting yourself. Finding something you actually enjoy and are good at will make you infinitely happier in the long run.

Ok, that is it from me for the week. And that is the end, (thankfully), of this week's Writing Exercises experiment. Thanks for indulging me. 

Have a great weekend!