The Business of You

You’ve obtained a lot of business knowledge over the years—through a combination of schooling, osmosis, or work experience. Now it’s time for you to start using it to your benefit. You’ve been exposed every day directly and indirectly to knowledge and strategies that can be applied to your career’s advantage. Starting out with a basic from Business 101, it’s important that you have a firm understanding of what drives the Business of You—its strengths and its weaknesses.

The most successful businesses have a strong sense of identity and stay true to their character. They know who they are and, just as important, who they are not. It doesn’t matter whether you’re starting or even restarting your career journey, your success will be built upon the foundation of how well you understand yourself as a business asset. The better you understand this idea, the better you can support and position yourself for a highly productive career.

WHAT DRIVES THE BUSINESS OF YOU AND WHAT ARE THE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF THE BUSINESS OF YOU?

Jim Collins outlined a theory in his classic book Good to Great in which he concludes that businesses are more likely to succeed if they focus on one thing and do it well. By doing so, they can beat their competitors and become truly great businesses. Collins’s Hedgehog Concept illustrates a simple idea that flows from an understanding about what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be the best in the world at, and what most effectively drives your economic or resource engine.

Like the great businesses Collins studied over a twenty-five-year period, you can take your career from good to great by making a series of sound decisions that consistently leverage these principles.

To apply these principles to your career, you will need to start by conducting some personal assessments to know yourself better. During these personal assessments you should:

We’re all capable of performing a wide variety of different career functions. However, that doesn’t mean that we should be performing all of them. Take me, for example: I can manage debits and credits (basic accounting activities). But the thought of being affixed to a desk crunching and organizing numbers all day makes me want to pull my hair out. I crave interpersonal interaction and love to help people learn and grow. I know that for me to be successful, my primary job functions must feed these passions.

Let’s look at a serious of questions designed to initiate the process of finding out about your preferences and passions. Find a quiet place, free of distractions, and seriously think about the questions below. Take your time and think deeply about your answers. The deeper you go with each question, the closer you will get to your core feelings and preferences.

Our childhood memories provide important clues about what our consistent core values and preferences are. Ask yourself:

Just like in your childhood, your educational or career experiences thus far can serve as a reference point for the types of activities and responsibilities that you enjoy and are skilled at—and vice versa. Even the worst work experiences can provide value in terms of identifying functions, environments, and activities that you would like to avoid or, at the very least, minimize in future roles. Now think back to previous roles or jobs and answer the following questions:

Now think about your personal time. Your choice of hobbies and how you fill your free time are great indicators of your preferences.

You may need to repeat these exercises a couple of times to dig deep enough to find your answers. But if you take the time to answer all the questions thoughtfully, you will start to gain a better understanding of what drives you and a conscious awareness about what types of attributes your ideal role and work environment must possess.

Strategic leaders for top-performing businesses assess the strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities of their organizations annually. There are many different frameworks out there, but one of the most commonly used is the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis.

It allows leaders to assess the organization as a whole, along with the competitive landscape, and use that information as a guiding force to drive the business in coming years.

To ensure a thorough analysis, strategic leaders collect input from internal, external, and quantitative data sources. Internal sources are those within different levels of the organization; external sources are a company’s customers and suppliers; and quantitative data sources are industry statistics, customer research, and competitive research.

Take a cue from these businesses and look internally, externally, and quantitatively at your own personal “organization,” so you can establish a wellrounded personal assessment that will help guide your development priorities and strategic decisions around your career. For the qualitative elements of your assessment, you will look inward for resources (in the form of conducting a self-assessment) and outward for other resources (in the form of a 360-degree review) to gain a stronger grasp of your strengths and weaknesses.

First, look inward and list your strengths and weaknesses as they relate to your career pursuits. The strengths side of this list should consist of the things you do well and the activities that come easily to you. For weaknesses, think of skills and activities that are challenging for you and require additional effort and time for you to complete. Be straight with yourself. This exercise is for your benefit, so you must be brutally honest about where you are strong, as well as the areas in which you need improvement. The goal is to obtain a realistic picture from your own perspective of where you are today regarding your strengths and weaknesses. Keep this self-assessment because you will refer to it later when you are evaluating and comparing the feedback you have received from your personal and professional network.

External feedback is the backbone of a well-balanced assessment. Collecting feedback from your manager, peers, direct reports, and friends can be an eye-opening activity, because they each have a different vantage point. If they know you well, they can give you valuable insights and round out some of your potential blind spots.

First, identify a wide-ranging mix (professional and personal) of three to five trusted individuals to provide you with an external assessment. You can use the 360 Review template in the appendix as a guide on what to send over. Prior to sending the exercise to your colleagues and friends, meet with each one personally to explain its purpose, which is to calibrate the feedback provided by each participant. Also, share that you are open to receiving direct and honest feedback because you realize that is the only way you will be able to improve. Remind them to provide specific examples whenever possible, regardless of whether they are providing praise or criticism. These specifics will help anchor you back to tangible events when you are evaluating and taking corrective measures.

THE NEGATIVE FEEDBACK MAY HURT A LITTLE AT FIRST, BUT REMEMBER THAT YOU ARE GAINING KNOWLEDGE ABOUT HOW YOU CAN IMPROVE AND GROW.

Remember to approach this process with an open mind. If you conduct it correctly, you will hear both positive and negative feedback about yourself. That’s a good thing. The negative feedback may hurt a little at first, but remember that you are gaining knowledge about how you can improve and grow. Even if the feedback is delivered poorly, resist the urge to get defensive or make excuses. Instead, accept the feedback and share your appreciation to the person providing it. They offered you a gift: an additional data point. Review it objectively. Some of the feedback will be accurate and some of it will not. As you conduct this exercise more often and gain a true understanding of your skills, you will be able to quickly and accurately assess the quality of the feedback and your progress on professional development.

The last element to round out your initial assessment is to use at least one of the great personality and skills assessment tools out there. These tools provide a different perspective for your analysis. Through the use of a survey mechanism, they collect data points and produce a summary of your preferences, your style for shaping your environment, and how you like to engage with others. These types of surveys have been growing in popularity lately, and the types of insights they provide add a valuable piece to a well-rounded personal evaluation. Two of my favorites among the personality profile tools are the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and DiSC. Myers-Briggs and DiSC categorize your personality traits, how you engage in relationships and with teams, your psychological tendencies and preferences, and how you behaviorally shape your environment.

The last tool I recommend is the book and skills assessment from Strengths-Finder 2.0. This is a great book and online assessment that helps you uncover and discover your strengths. The book is packed with useful strategies on how to apply your strengths in your career.

These personality assessment tools are not guaranteed to be 100 percent accurate; however, their results have proven to be consistently strong indicators of personality traits. Even if you have a strong sense of yourself, and the results confirm a fair amount of what you already know, one of the most valuable benefits of these reports is the guidance they provide about your tendencies, how you interact with and shape your environment, and how you can be more effective in engaging with different personalities.

Think of these survey tools as a good way to round out your understanding of yourself. Even though they may have their limitations, their advantage is that they are neutral and avoid some of the biases that can come from self- and third-party reviews.

As you would expect, self-assessments are inherently limited because of their lack of perspective. Often we are not acutely aware of our tendencies and take our strengths for granted. That is why it’s important to collect feedback from a multitude of perspectives. The external feedback and statistical analysis help to round out your evaluation to provide more of a 360-degree view of yourself.

The external feedback serves a dual purpose. First, it gives you additional data points and helps to identify opportunities for improvement that you may not be able to see by solely using a self-assessment. The other purpose is to better calibrate your awareness and understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. Awareness in this regard is a deep understanding of you as it relates to your preferences and strengths and weaknesses as a business entity. It means having a clear grasp of the thing or things that motivate and drive you and an honest and grounded perspective of your skill set. Awareness is an important piece in these assessments, as it allows you to be able to properly prioritize your development and to market your skill set in the workforce. Refer back to your strengths and weaknesses self-assessment and compare that list to the results you received from the colleague feedback and the quantitative assessment tools. How does it match up? If over 75 percent of the feedback matches your self-assessment, you likely already have a good grasp of your personal skill sets.

Fear not if your self-assessment did not match up well with the other feedback. Isolate the areas where there was a difference in opinion. Then, drill deeper on those items and find out why. Are they things you didn’t notice until someone or one of the tools brought them to your attention? Ask yourself why you may have not noticed them personally. By acknowledging your why, you’ll enhance your level of self-awareness.

The quantitative assessment tools are more accurate than not, but there is always a chance they don’t completely capture your essence. Before you dismiss elements of the results, think hard about those differences and see if the tools caught a characteristic or preference you did not know you had.

Looking at the differences identified between your self-assessment and the colleague feedback, were the issues raised in the colleague feedback a one-time occurrence, or were they part of a consistent theme throughout all your feedback forms? If the issue appears to be a one-time thing, take note of the surrounding factors that could have been at play to trigger it; you’ll then be better equipped to handle similar situations in the future. Finally, consider the sources providing the feedback and the tendency toward recency bias when assessing the feedback.

To get to the core of where your development opportunities reside, focus on the items that were prevalent on multiple feedback forms (meaning that multiple people identified a certain opportunity for improvement). When you look at the feedback and the specific examples provided, see if you notice any themes like the following:

You should leave this exercise with an improved understanding of yourself and a couple of opportunities for professional/personal development. Note that we will use this information to chart out your game plan and development needs to deliver on your personal vision statement.

Tap into your sources for performance information regularly. Personally, I conduct these assessments on an annual basis. Having a solid network of individuals who you can trust and are insightful is an invaluable tool. It can be difficult to get an honest and true assessment simply by surveying ourselves. Make sure to continue to cultivate these relationships and give back to them when possible, because they are providing a great gift. This is one of the major components of creating your own personal feedback loop to gauge your progress.

HAVING A SOLID NETWORK OF INDIVIDUALS WHO YOU CAN TRUST AND ARE INSIGHTFUL IS AN INVALUABLE TOOL FOR YOUR CAREER AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell tackled the widespread American myth that successful people are self-made. “[They] are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies,” he writes, “that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.”

The “hidden advantages” can be chalked up to any number of factors— socioeconomic class, teachers, parents’ education level, country of birth, sex, race, and dozens more—but I think one that is overlooked in the modern workforce, especially among the most ambitious among us, is the right work environment. Putting yourself in the optimal environment for preferences and skill sets can be a huge hidden advantage.

Now, I am not suggesting that you completely steer clear of your weaknesses. I’m recommending that you put some time and energy into finding an environment that will cater to your success. When considering your career path and potential jobs, evaluate the work environment and the role itself.

At its most basic level, a company can be boiled down to the size of the organization and its culture. Typically, larger companies have more structure, move at a slower pace, and have narrower roles and responsibilities than their smaller counterparts. Smaller companies tend to operate a little looser when it comes to formal procedures and bureaucracy, move faster, and have wider-spanning roles out of necessity.

These are general norms, but there are plenty of exceptions. For example, let’s say that at this stage of your career you seek a wider range of responsibilities to round out your skill sets. In that case, a smaller company typically would present stronger prospects for exposing yourself to a wider range of functional experiences, because smaller companies generally do not have the same number of resources as larger companies—therefore employees are called upon to take on a wider range of responsibilities.

But on the downside, it’s worth noting that the smaller company is more likely to have less stability than the larger company and also fewer advancement opportunities. In large companies, you are more likely to find opportunities to go deeper into specific disciplines and be exposed to more structure and formalized processes. As you can see, there are positives and negatives to each, but ultimately you will need to weigh these types of trade-offs with each type of company and determine which is the best fit for your given objectives.

WHEN EVALUATING A JOB OPPORTUNITY, ASK YOURSELF IF THE CULTURE FEELS NATURAL TO YOU.

The other element of the work environment to consider is a company’s culture. When evaluating a job opportunity, ask yourself if the culture feels natural to you. Think about it in these terms: If you walk into a large, formal consulting firm for an interview, does the formality of the environment make you uncomfortable? If so, that is a good sign that this may not be the ideal environment for you. Additionally, pay attention to the following:

Another great way to gain insights on a company’s culture (or at least its desired culture) is to research the company’s values, mission, and purpose. Do they speak to you? Are these targets that you can get behind? Do these align with your personal values? If you cannot find the company’s values, mission, and purpose on their website, ask the interviewer. To take this a step further and understand how they are embodied by the employees, ask the interviewer how the values, mission, and purpose manifest themselves in the everyday office environment. Their response will help you see if the targets set by the leadership team are congruent with what is going on at the employee level.

In my career, I have interviewed hundreds of job candidates and worked with thousands of colleagues. In that time, I have observed that a common fatal flaw in many people’s career advancement is that they are simply working in the wrong environment. No matter how talented you are, when your preferences don’t align with the work environment and its pace, it ultimately undermines your ability to perform at a high level because it zaps your motivation and can warp your attitude. Don’t be one of those people who discounts the importance of environment; doing so can hurt—even cripple—your career.

Personal awareness is the starting point for your journey. Businesses also spend significant amounts of time and resources assessing their strengths and weaknesses. The ones that thrive will look externally and examine the macro environment and their competitive environment to ensure they are best positioned for success. Likewise, you need to truly understand your strengths, your weaknesses, the optimal environment for your performance, the macro environment, and how your skills and talents fit within the broader job market. This kind of awareness can help guide your efforts and your decisions to make your climb through the corporate ranks a more efficient one.

People who participate in the stock market pay attention to what is going on with the economy to improve their decision making. It’s a great way to identify strategies that will bring them value and make money. These same economic trends of the broader economy may impact your career prospects and can be used to steer yourself into business sectors that will provide you with greater opportunities.

HOW MANY PEOPLE REALLY TAKE THE TIME TO STEP BACK AND ASSESS THE LONG-TERM PROSPECTS OF A COMPANY AND THE INDUSTRY IT RESIDES IN?

Pay attention to the big trends going on around you. Is your desired industry growing or retracting? Do you think the career prospects in the taxicab industry right now are good with Uber and Lyft disrupting the space? How many people really take the time to step back and assess the long-term prospects of a company and the industry it resides in? Those who do have a distinct advantage and can steer themselves into industries and business segments with far greater opportunities.

Where do you start? A slew of economic forecasts are out there. Often they will provide starkly different predictive outlooks on what is going to happen. My recommendation is to read several from reputable economists and governmental agencies. Additionally, pay attention to the monthly and quarterly reports (ADP jobs, housing starts, consumer confidence, etc.) for broader indicators of the health of the economy. Round out your regular consumption by visiting economically focused sites (The Economist, Forbes) and tuning to the cable business channels to stay in touch with what is going on.

By committing to the basics I’ve outlined, you will start to develop a foundation of knowledge on overarching trends so that eventually you’ll be able to formulate your own conclusions and sniff out potential opportunities. Right now (at the time of printing) we are at an interesting time. The tech sector is white hot. Businesses today are fixated on leveraging technology to make things more accessible, convenient, and cost effective. Many people who were paying attention identified this trend early and capitalized on it through employment and entrepreneurial ventures by shifting into industries that support the sharing economy and the growing interest and economic benefits in utilizing idle assets (such as Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, etc.).

By staying on top of trends, you will be aware of and able to find opportunities in growing industries where there will be greater opportunities for employment and increased demand for your skills and experience.

▸Step back and take the time to find out what makes you tick and what motivates you. These insights on your preferences, strengths, and development opportunities will serve as guiding forces in your career.

▸Taking cues from the best businesses, you should look internally, externally, and quantitatively to establish a well-rounded personal assessment.

▸A hidden advantage is to find the best environment for you and your skills.

▸Pay attention to the macro environment and trends to set yourself up for success.