Ask this question first

Winding down to the end of a long, and extremely snowy week here (Thanks Vulcan!), with a quick shot and sort of a companion to the first post of the week, 'The trouble with deadlines.'

In the 'Deadlines' post, I submitted that when attempting to negotiate the completion of some task, the key information wasn't (just) how long the given task would take to complete, but rather how motivated your co-worker, colleague, supplier - whichever was about even starting, much less completing said task.

So today I'm giving you the opposite side of the equation - most of us, no matter what kind of role we are in, are facing a barrage of 'asks'.

Can you do this?

Would you review this?

I emailed you last week about this, have not heard back, so I am passive-aggressively forwarding the same email I already sent so you can see how serious I am in my desire to get an answer.

What's the status of that?

Did you speak to Molly about that?

And on and on.

Once your job starts to get a little complex, requires just a touch of individual judgment or discretion in not just how but in what order you attack the large list of 'asks' that keep coming, it can get really, really tough for some people, (Note: I am sometimes one of these people), to make those very critical to your success decisions about prioritizing and time management.

So while it is so easy (and sometimes compelling) to turn towards the endless 'To-do list' each day, I think it makes more sense, or at least helps to offer some clarity and context, to ask yourself this one question each day, (or at least at the beginning of each week), before you take on anything, apply any 'productivity' system, or otherwise start the process of meeting other people's demands.

Here's the question:

What is the most important way to spend my time and effort?

Asking this question, and taking just a half-step back from the 'list', where you'd be asking yourself a question like 'What task should I attack first?' is a way to remind yourself just what is it you are meant to be doing, what overarching goals are you working towards, and how your active decisions about time and task management will or will not contribute to those goals.

And if a big part of what you are working towards are personal goals, then re-setting with that one question will naturally or at least usually force a re-alignment of the To-do list away from prioritizing the tasks that are mostly about other people's goals and guide you to keep your eye (and time and energy), on the things that matter to what you are trying to get done.

I am not saying that you or me or anyone else should not be a team player, far from it, working on the team and contributing in a team setting might be extremely important to you and thus the 'asks' that come from this team context should fit the model of focusing your time in the most important manner.

But it is also really easy to have these kinds 'Other people's most important things' asks to show up in your Inbox masquerading as 'Team' asks.

And I think it is important to recognize that, and understand what the difference means to you, your career, and your success, and your happiness.

Have a great weekend!

How much does industry specific experience matter?

Lifted from a comment left on Tuesday's 'Chocolate Foresight Activator' post was this question from commenter Stew, who wondered about my conclusion/observation that since Hershey didn't mention the word 'chocolate' at all in the job posting for this 'Chocolate Futurist' role, that maybe what they really wanted was the best marketer/planner/designer/strategist they could find, even if he/she didn't know much or even care about chocolate:

This job scares me a little as it sounds more like the "Phillip Morris's" style job..

i.e. you don't have to care about smoking - just love marketing.

If you look at "Whittakers Chocolate" they would argue you should have a passion for the chocolate......and the marketing will follow.

Another way of raising the classic question about industry specific experience, and its relative importance as a predictor of success in most types of support functions or back office roles.

Or said differently, do you really need to have had 5 years experience as a chocolate company marketer, in order to qualify for a job as a marketing manager for say a jelly bean manufacturer?

Or does someone's marketing functional experience generally translate across industries, making the fundamental or core marketing skills like demand generation, content creation, sales enablement, etc. the real prerequisites for success in most any marketing job?

After all, a bright enough and motivated enough person can learn just about anything, (leaving aside for obvious reasons those highly skilled and really critical you don't mess up kinds of jobs like airline pilot, brain surgeon, point guard), so in the above example if an organization had a choice between a great marketer than did not know the candy business or a candy expert that did not know much about marketing, then which way should they go?

But since no one has time, budget, resources to do much on the job training, we usually try to land candidates that meet both criteria - functional expertise and industry experience.

We want candidates to show not only can they do the job, but that they can do the job here.

I wonder how much of the 'skills gap' isn't masquerading as a 'industry experience gap?'

What say you, how much, for roles that are generally pretty transferable from one domain to another, does specifc industry experience matter for a candidate?

Job Titles of the Future #9 - Chocolate Foresight Activator

I caught this Job Title of the Future from a recent piece on The Atlantic, describing the Hershey Company's quest to find, what the Atlantic called a 'Chocolate Futurist', or what Hershey refers to in their still-posted job ad, a 'Senior Manager, Foresight Activation.'

I think The Atlantic wins points for the jazzier job title.

Just what does a 'Chocolate Futurist/Foresight Activator' have to do?

Straight from the Hershey job listing:

Supports the activation of existing foresight (trends, forecasts, scenarios) into strategic opportunities (SOs) and platforms with commercial value for Hershey, mining existing foresight content for highest potential business impact opportunities or threats.  Performs ongoing monitoring of the external environment for new insights and trends approaching tipping points.  Partners with external agencies to identify new trends that can inform and accelerate foresight activation.  Collaborates with Corporate Strategy, R&D, Global Knowledge & Insights and Silicon Valley Advance Team as well as other business and functional teams to flesh out opportunity assessment and business case.  Shapes new initiatives in the front of funnel and drives to successful completion through Gates A, B and C.

What kind of background or education do you need in order to activate foresight and drive to successful completion through Gates A, B, and C, (what the heck does that even mean, btw?)

Education: MBA in Marketing or Masters in related field required

Experience: Minimum of 8+ year’s relevant experience.  Multi-disciplinary background (Marketing, Corporate Strategy, R&D, Management Consulting).   User design or consulting experience a plus.  Solid front-end innovation capability including the identification of insights and translation to business growth strategy.

Experience with a major innovation consultancy (i.e. What If? IDEO, Doblin, Innosight, Prophet, Jump Associates, Eureka Ranch, New & Improved) supporting multiple clients to accomplish the same.

Progression of successful accomplishments in identification and commercialization of new business opportunities. Experience with a top-tier consumer packaged goods company preferred.  International and technical experience desirable but not required

So, in order to 'activate foresight' it probably would help if you had a solid, cross-functional background, had a fair bit of customer-facing experience, and new something about product development and management.

But, at least according to the posting copy, in order to be qualified to be a Chocolate Futurist/Foresight Activator, you don't necessarily have to know anything much about chocolate. In fact the word chocolate doesn't show up anywhere in the listing.

Which in a way is kind of cool. The future might not be all that chocolat-y, who knows?

Maybe the foresight activator for a chocolate company should be someone that doesn't view the world through cocoa-tinted lenses.

Maybe Hershey is actually showing some foresight themselves in looking outside their normal frames of reference to find someone to help them 'form presentations that create a tangible vision of what the future might look like that business partners can grasp.'

Sounds like a cool gig. And one that earns official SFB designation as a 'Job Title of the Future.'

The problem with deadlines

Is that, all too often, they are completely one-sided.

When I need something done, answered, actioned, or otherwise handled is almost certainly not perfectly aligned with how you would like to accommodate my request, (or to spend the time to take a decision to actively not accommodate the request).

My, 'I need it by the end of next week' has to be translated into the language of your workflow, capability, availability, and most importantly, that mental list of the things that are ranked in order to their importance to you, (and that I almost definitely am not aware of).

I can ask you if it is reasonable if I can have that thing by 'End of next week', and you will likely tell me 'Sure, not a problem' because when looked at on a Monday or a Tuesday 'The end of next week' seems like forever away from now and the commitment to deliver seems so far afield from the promise that I would think you kind of incompetent if you simply said 'No'.

I think a better question than 'Can I have this by the end of next week?' or its close equivalent, 'About how long will it take before you can turn this around?' would be, "Where is this item on your priority list?' or 'Assuming you had everything you needed to work on this, when would you actually, you know, start working on it?'

I think it is much more important for the requestor to know how the person being asked to do something actually has the item prioritized and importance-ranked in their own mind than the often irrelevant 'How long will it take to complete?' angle.

It almost never matters how long something will take to complete.

What matters is how motivated you are to start.

Have a great week everyone!

This weekend's company culture test

I am of (pretty) firm belief you can tell just about everything you need to know about company culture from tracking and analyzing email usage patterns, traffic levels, and response expectations.

Sure, not all organizations, and certainly not all roles in organizations, are overly reliant on email as their primary communications, collaboration, and general project management tool, but for those that are, and I suspect that would include just about everyone reading this post, your email Inbox is largely a proxy for your 'work' in general.

Very few initiatives actually get started without first sending an email to someone.

Progress is communicated and monitored on those tasks in ongoing series of emails.

Organizational structure and power dynamics are reflected in who you are 'allowed' to email, and who will or will not respond.

You overall stress level and relative satisfaction with your job can be extrapolated from the point in time condition of your Inbox.

Finally, you probably leave the office with a warped sense of accomplishment if, at the end of the week, you have successfully triaged all of your incoming messages, sent the necessary replies, and achieved that most elusive of states, so-called 'Inbox Zero'. You pack up shop for the week and head home, (or to Happy Hour).

And that is when my favorite test of company culture begins, what happened to your Inbox from say, 6:00PM on a Friday up until 6:00AM on Monday. (this is what we used to call the "weekend".)

As you enjoy whatever it is you enjoy this weekend, think about these few questions:

Who in your company is (still) sending emails on a Friday night? On Saturday morning? Or on Sunday evening when you are clinging like grim death to your last few precious hours of downtime?

Who is responding to weekend emails? And no, I am not talking about genuine business or customer emergencies, just 'normal' kinds of things. You know, the kinds of things you worry about on Tuesday.

Are your management or senior leaders making a habit of tapping away message after message (always "Sent from my iPad") all weekend long while they are ostensibly watching Jr's soccer game?

Are you checking or at least thinking about checking your work email on Saturday afternoon when, I don't know, you're supposed to have something better to do?

Finally, when you get one of those weekend emails do you respond? Are you expected to? And if you do are you now "at work?"

It's odd for the one piece of workplace technology that we all probably use more than any other, that we think about and really try to understand it's usage so little.

Email is just always there. It is always on. We engage with it constantly.

But we don't ever think about what it might tell us about the organization, the power dynamics, and most importantly, what it can tell us about the culture of an organization.

So, are you on email this weekend or are you off?

Have a great one no matter what you choose!