Ask Liz Ryan

Ask Liz: replace boilerplate resume language?

2009-09-25T16:05:00.000-07:00

So Liz...you leave us hanging. Your observation of the "10 deadliest" only tell us what NOT to do...can you help those of us struggling with how to replace these?

Hiya Dan, there aren't any stock phrases to replace the boilerplate ones we're going to excise from our resumes. We want to be very specific about what we've done, and if we can talk about accomplishments that are especially relevant to the opportunity we're going after, all the better.

Let's think about the resume Summary. Here's a corporatespeak Summary:

"Results-oriented professional with a bottom-line orientation and twenty years of progressively more responsible experience in Finance and Accounting. Superior organizational and communication skills and experience leading cross-functional teams."

Yuck. Let's back up. Who(m) is this resume written for? It doesn't look as though it was written for anyone in particular. It's pure sludge. What sort of job are we going after? There are millions of different types of Finance and Accounting jobs. Our resume plan must start with our job-search direction - otherwise our resume isn't targeted to the audience we're pursuing!

Let's say we're going after Controller jobs in medium-sized manufacturing companies. We have lots of Cost Accounting and manufacturing stuff in our background, so we understand inventory turns, costed products, etc. Why do we like manufacturing so much? Here's why: Dad had a manufacturing company, and we worked there during summers through high school and college. Let's try that Summary again:

=====================================================

Since I helped out in the Accounting department of my dad's manufacturing business during high school, I've been drawn to manufacturing Accounting roles and the points of leverage that smart and nimble analysis can uncover. With six years of manufacturing Accounting for Caterpillar and a bent for spotting and exploiting cost-saving and revenue-boosting opportunities, I'm eager to help Eagle Manufacturing accelerate its growth in the Controller spot.

==================================

Notice that our job-seeker (we'll call him Jack) names the company and the job right in his Summary. Why not? He can tweak his resume every time he applies for a job. He's using a human voice in this Summary (the E-book "Put a Human Voice in Your Resume" is for sale on my site, www.asklizryan.com, if you're interested in that) and talking very specifically about what he's good at, without getting all abstract and lofty a la "I'm a strategic thinker and problem-solver yada yada yada." He's just saying, "Here's me, and this is what gets me up in the morning." Thanks Dan! Liz

Five Waste-of-Time Job Search Activities

2009-08-04T05:40:00.000-07:00

Here's the story on Yahoo!:

Deceptive Targets in the Job Hunt
5 Methods That Waste Your Time
by Caroline M.L. Potter, Yahoo! HotJobs

Time is money -- whether you've got a job or not. While it may be tempting to chase down every possibility when you're searching for work, don't. Many can lead you down a blind alley -- where you may lose the contents of your wallet.

A focused search using tried and true methods, especially networking, will lead to your next job, not tactics that smack of desperation.

Avoid these five job-hunting "don'ts" that will yield the poorest of results, according to leading workplace advisor Liz Ryan.

1. Spray and pray.

Don't blindly send your resume unsolicited, electronically or otherwise, to any company without first making verbal contact. Says Ryan, founder of AskLizRyan.com, "Tossing out un-customized cover letters and undifferentiated resumes in huge volumes and crossing your fingers is a job-search non-starter. That doesn't work, and it hasn't worked in 10 years, or more." Establish a connection before sending a customized cover letter and, adds Ryan, "You can even customize your resume if a job opening calls for it."

2. Stand in line for a job fair.

Admits Ryan, "Sad to say, but most job fairs are a waste of time. Avoid the huge cattle call-type job fairs where zillions of employers have booths, yet no one is taking resumes." There are some job fairs that have value. Ryan, a former human resources executive, points to company-specific open hours and college placement job fairs. Tap your network to learn if anyone can recommend worthwhile fairs. "Ask around before you head off to a job fair or risk having your time wasted and your ego dashed."

3. Earn certifications nobody wants.

It's common to feel less-than-confident in your skills if you're having a hard time finding work, but don't rush out to spend money on any additional training unless you're certain it will yield improved results. Ryan reveals, "Before you sign up for a certification training program, check the job boards to make sure that employers are asking for it. There's no sense investing time and money in a certification no one wants."

If you're getting the hard-sell from an educational institution, Ryan says, "Ask the people at the school that's doing the certifying, 'Which local employers have hired your graduates in the past year?' If they can't tell you, run away."

4. Pay a headhunter.

Don't dole out money to any kind of recruiter or sign a contract agreeing to do so. "Real headhunters, also known as search consultants or third-party recruiters, won't take your money. They get paid by employers to fill open jobs." She warns, "If a recruiter calls or emails you to say s/he's got jobs open, and then invites you to his or her office for a counseling session and presents you with a range of career-coaching services, bolt for the exit. Real search professionals won't take a dime from their candidates."

5. Sign up with a resume fax-blast service.

This old-school -- and desperate -- tactic is a total turn-off to potential employers and smacks of spam. Ryan says, "Services that send out hundreds or thousands of your resumes might have been worthwhile 20 years ago. Today, they're worse than pointless, because it irks employers to get unsolicited resumes. Forget the fax-blast services and do your own careful research to reach decision-makers with messages they actually want to hear."

Sam Sent Me These Similes to Make Me Smile

2009-03-07T10:27:00.000-08:00

Words to Prompt A Smile or A Chuckle!

from Sam Lloyd:

Every year, English teachers from across the country can submit their collections of actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country. Here are last year's winners.

1.Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was
room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated
because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag
filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

14. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.

15. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

16. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

17. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

18. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

19. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

20. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not
eating for a while.

21. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

22. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

23. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

24. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

Web address:

How to Ask for a Networking Introduction

2009-02-01T19:09:00.000-08:00

The Savvy Networker
How to Ask for a Networking Introduction
by: Liz Ryan

Introductions are the fuel that make networking go -- and most of us
know people who know people we'd like to know. It's one thing to have
a friend whose sister plays bridge with the CEO of a well-known
company. It's another thing to ask, "Say, can your sister introduce
me to that guy?" There's an essential introduction protocol involved.
Here are some tips for wending your way through the Introduction
Jungle.

You Mean So Much to Me

The first rule of networking introductions is that it's a grave
insult to convey to a person, "You mean nothing to me, but your
Rolodex rocks." That means that you can't ask a person for an
introduction the first time you meet him. Networkers do this when
they go to a networking event and spot an employee with an IBM
nametag, for instance. They'll ask, "Can you introduce me to a hiring
manager at IBM?" Rude!

Instead, you can cultivate a relationship with a new acquaintance, if
you're willing to spend the time. Once you've helped a person out
once or twice -- with an introduction of your own, or help with a
business problem, for instance -- you can request an introduction in
return.

Be Specific

No one likes to be asked, "Do you know anyone I should meet?" That's
a tough question to answer. When you're looking for introductions, it
helps to be specific. You can ask your friends whether they know
people at specific companies you're targeting. You can ask them
whether they know headhunters who work in your functional area. These
are concrete requests that your friends can react to quickly.

Be Grateful

It is easy to forget that a networking introduction isn't just a
quick email message that says, "Frank, you should meet Sally." It's
an endorsement. When you ask someone to make an introduction, you're
asking him or her to endorse you. Don't take that endorsement for
granted.

To read the full story, please jump to Yahoo! at this link:
Please jump here.

Planning Ahead for a Downshifted Future

2009-01-26T16:38:00.000-08:00

Dear friends,

Here's a new story on LifeMeetsWork.com, about planning for a downshifted future:

Planning Ahead for a Downshifted Future

By Liz Ryan

"Downshifting" came into the workplace vocabulary a decade ago. Back then, the term was applied to go-go executives who wanted a slower pace and more work/life balance, and sought less-demanding jobs to provide those things.

Downshifting is still a term used by stressed-out mid-career executives looking for work outside the pressure cooker. But new downshifters have joined the party—parents looking to spend more time at home, veteran workers seeking jobs with fewer hours, and even young employees looking for ways to get off the treadmill and enjoy themselves before taking on the high-ticket commitments of house and family.

Can you downshift successfully, without going broke? You can do it—hundreds of thousands of people have. Downshifting is a career shift just like a switch in industries or functions; it takes planning and focus. Here are some tips for creating a downshift plan for yourself and working it to create your downshifted future.

Know your priorities, and your needs.

I've known at least a dozen parents who have announced "I'm going to find a part-time job at half my pay level, and spend afternoons with the kids" and have spent time and energy going after those things, only to learn through painful experience that part-time jobs don't tend to pay enough to cover the costs of diapers and piano lessons.

The first step in building your downshift plan is to know what you're after, and what you can afford to give up to get there. The four-hour work week is a great idea, but it's not a near-term reality for most of us.

Make a budget, and be clear about why you're looking to get out of the rat race. A generalized notion like "My job is too stressful" may not fill the bill when you can't take vacation on your downshifted salary.

Study the landscape.

Many downshifters look to part-time jobs (W-2 positions or part-time consulting roles) or to not-for-profit opportunities when they plan their downshifted futures, because of the associated reduction in hours (part-time jobs) and/or stress (not-for-profit jobs).

Here's where it pays to do your research. One mom at my kids' school earns $49,000/year without missing a classroom trip or an afternoon pick-up, and is delighted with her downshifted life. Another mom at the same school left a PR executive role to head up a local not-for-profit, and now works more hours than she did before (for half the pay).

Investigate opportunities closely; if an employer squirms when you mention "work/life balance" the shop may not be a downshifter's paradise.

To read the full story, please jump here.

Why Yes, I Do Blame You for Trying

2009-01-19T15:04:00.000-08:00

My friend Ellis is a marketing consultant. "Get this," he tells me. "This woman's been asking me for marketing advice for three years. We've talked and talked; she's never hired me. Now she says 'I need your help! Naturally, with the economy how it is I can't pay your full rate.'"

"What did you say?" I asked.

"I told her I'd be happy to help, but it'll take awhile for my schedule to free up, since I'm busy with clients who see the value of marketing in a down economy. I told her I've raised my rates a bit for '09, and I sent her the new pricing information."

"Oh mama!" I said. "I'm used to it," said Ellis.

I heard from another friend who writes Web site copy in Chicago. "I got a call out of the blue from a not-for-profit I've never heard of," she said. "We spent 40 minutes on the phone talking Web site copy. I should've asked about budget earlier than I did, because when I broached that issue, the lady said 'We have no budget! We're a not-for-profit agency.' I don't know these people from Adam, but I'm supposed to write their Web site copy for free."

"Has that happened to you before?" I asked.

"Ten thousand times, at least," she said. "After we got off the phone I browsed their Web site -- which really does need new copy. They're building a new headquarters -- looks swanky in the architect's drawings. Guess my puny fee would have cut into the drapery budget, or something."

Eventually it was my turn. I got a call from a fellow in California who enjoyed one of my columns. He thought I'd make a great speaker for a gathering of the Old Ivy Alumni Club.

"We can't pay a fee or travel expenses, but we get A-list speakers nonetheless," he said.

"That is magnificent," I told him. "As much as I'd love to join you and the Old Ivy grads, it would be unethical of me to do that, as so many clubs and associations have paid me to speak."

"Ha!" said the gentleman. "I figured you'd say that. Well, someone will bite eventually. Can't blame me for trying!"

Ellis checked in again. "How's that lady you were telling me about?" I asked. "She's great," he said. "She invited me to a brainstorming meeting where six of her 'friends' -- me and God knows which other consultants she's never hired -- are gathering to Toss Around Ideas.

"I said I'd be happy to come and I mentioned my hourly rate. It sounded like she plotzed on the floor then and there."

"Ellis," I wondered, "with the economy being tough and all, is the lady lowering her company's prices?"

"Are you joking?" he chortled. "Bodywork services. She's telling her customers, 'If you don't need a massage now, when will you need one?' She tells them, 'It's an INVESTMENT!'"

We had a good laugh about that. My Chicago friend heard from three other writers who'd been pitched by the same writing-is-cheap, construction-fees-are-no-object agency. I wonder how the building contractor would have responded to the we-so-needy pitch. Not sure that line would carry water with a Chicago builder. Still, why not give it a go? You can't blame a person for trying.

Interview with Kyra Cavanaugh, founder of LifeMeetWork.com

2009-01-16T11:56:00.000-08:00

Dear friends,

Before Christmas, I was happy to be able to chat with Kyra Cavanaugh, founder and president of LifeMeetsWork and the publisher of www.LifeMeetsWork.com. In this time of economic upheaval, is work/life management feasible or even on a smart business leader's agenda? Here, Kyra explains why work/life issues still matter.

INTERVIEW WITH KYRA CAVANAUGH, FOUNDER OF LIFEMEETSWORK.COM

LIZ: Kyra, thanks for joining us today. We're curious what you've been hearing about work/life issues lately -- lots of people are concerned about keeping a job or getting one, so we're interested to know what people are saying about flexibility at work.

KYRA: We recently conducted a survey of close to 700 working Americans and companies to understand their attitudes about work/life issues.

What we found was that 77% of employers said they offered flexibility programs, most often in the form of accommodation (individual flex plans) or flexible start and end times. But, when we asked employees whether they felt that employers supported their work/life needs, only 20% of them said "yes".

This presents a problem, right? If employers think they're addressing the flexibility needs of their employees with their current programs, but employees don't give them credit for it, then what? Then, employers aren't doing enough, or they aren't doing enough of the "right" things, to get recognized for their efforts.

LIZ: Why is this important?

KYRA: Studies have shown that flexibility is key to employee retention, loyalty, engagement and productivity. So, if employees don't feel employers are providing enough flexibility, then there's a business risk that your employees will leave.

LIZ: Leave? They can't leave, look at the economy.

KYRA: Well, yes and no. Right now, in this economy, in this job market, employees can't change jobs. They're going to hunker down and ride out the storm. But, when you look back at recent history, you'll see what I mean. At the end of the last three recessions, there's been a mass exodus of employees to new companies.

LIZ: Why is that?

KYRA: There are a number of reasons and flexibility is part of it:

1) Layoffs erode employee morale and employee loyalty. There is a pervasive sense on the part of the employee that the company doesn't care about them. Even though they can't take action at the time, they file that away and when they can make a move at the end of a recession, they do.

2) There's little room for advancement during a down economy. That hunker down mentality applies to companies too. Opportunities for promotions, new projects, and other career advancement opportunities slow down. Raises and company bonuses are cut back and workers' earning potential is squelched. So, when the job market rebounds, so do career advancement opportunities with other companies.

3) Forward-looking companies recognize that flexibility is a competitive advantage. It goes beyond just the benefits that are being offered to something deeper. The only way you can run a successful flexible workplace is to TRUST your employees. When employees know that they're trusted, productivity improves and word hits the street about their culture: think Google, Southwest Airlines, and Microsoft in their day (remember how astonished we were that employees could work in the middle of the night and bring their dogs to work?)

So, when the economy turns around, where do your best employees want to go? To cool companies where the pressure to perform is intense, but where employees are given the freedom to succeed without having the "how and where" managed by the company.

LIZ: But, there are always people in an organization who complain and want more than what we’re able to do for them, isn’t that the case here?

KYRA: It would be easy to pass off as whiners employees who desire increased recognition and acknowledgement of their flexibility needs. Or, to think that they have unrealistic expectations. But, the problem is that the labor market is tightening. In a recent SHRM Workplace Forecast survey, six of the top ten trends for 2008-2009 involve threats to the current workforce: baby boomers retiring, shortage of skilled workers. Companies acknowledge that they need to find ways to retain their employees (that was trend number 5 in the SHRM study).

LIZ: So, what's a company to do, if they feel like they're trying but it isn't enough?

KYRA: We offered a number of ideas in our webinar which you can get by watching the rebroadcast on our website. But here are a couple of ideas:

1) Consider new technology solutions without spending an arm and a leg:
Replace desktops with laptops when the leases are up.
Consider cloud computing (migrating file sharing, project management systems, calendars to the internet)
2) Rethink the FTE default. What I mean is: we tend to automatically define every job as full-time, onsite.
Before you post to fill a job, think about whether it could be cut in half and performed by two part-timers by dividing up the accounts, or responsibilities in some other way.
Consider whether the job requires the employee to be onsite at all times.
3) Rework position descriptions to be performance and measurement based. Describe the results that you expect from that position (and how they'll be measured) rather than documenting what the position does.

Once you’ve made these sorts of changes, then you've laid the groundwork for going flex. Looking at the examples I just mentioned, let's follow it through:
--Employees can work from home because they have the technology in place to do it.
--Employees will be able to maintain their same job-level when they want to work part-time.
--Managers won't have to see their employees everyday because the performance expectations have been laid out and the employee will have agreed that's how they'll be evaluated.

I think it goes back to that old question, “How do you eat an elephant?” “One bite at a time.” It’s too intimidating to say "today we’re going to start converting to a flexible workplace". No one has that kind of time, energy or luxury.

But, by examining how your company functions, and then taking small steps, in the course of your daily business to move your company toward becoming more flexible over time is much more realistic.

Given the economic and demographic realities companies are facing, I’m not sure you have a choice.

Can Human-Voiced Resumes Surmount Keyword Searches?

2009-01-12T19:51:00.000-08:00

Liz and Hiring Managers – I have a question about human-voiced resumes and how they work with key word searches or are key word searches that once were performed by hiring managers now passé? It seems to me one of the reasons we ended up with “boilerplate” terms in resumes was to match up with key word searches. And I’m a total fan of human-voiced resumes! Thank you, Liz, for the revitalization. Appreciate your feedback. Thanks. Dianne

Great question Dianne -- when we're in functions and industries where
technical or function-specific terms are involved, we've got to get
those terms on our resumes somehow. Organizations that use keyword
searching need to be able to find them. If we want to, we can get
more generic words like "communication" and "teams" into our resumes
without resorting to the hackneyed "excellent communication skills"
and "effective team player" malarkey.

We could create a list of 20 or 30 words we want make sure appear in
our resumes - and get them in there - without using them in their
conventional, dry-as-dust or kill-me-if-I-have-to-read-this-phrase-
again settings.

Let's take the infamous "out of the box thinker." You don't want to
work for a company that would load the phrase "out of the box
thinker" into its keyword search algorithm, and I'm not even being
flippant. No sane HR person would do that. There are far better ways
to use our precious resume real estate to illustrate (not to assert!)
our success in breakthrough thinking than to parrot that idiotic
phrase for the forty-millionth-time.

By keeping the words we believe we need but changing their
arrangement, we can have our human-voiced-resume/keyword-searchable
cake and eat it, too. Carrot cake for me, please!

Cheers - Liz

It's the Culture, Stupid

2009-01-09T10:45:00.000-08:00

Liz Ryan: It's the culture, stupid

When my family arrived in Boulder some years ago, our big kids were little and our little one wasn't born. We wanted to meet people and keep the kids busy, so we signed up for every kid activity under the sun.

Skating lessons at the downtown ice rink: delightful! Swimming with Curt Colby: tremendous! Avid4Adventure, Bits, Bytes and Bots and Renaissance Adventures: magnificent! The kids had a blast. I enjoyed meeting the parents. Everyone was happy.

There was only one dark spot on our family activity schedule that year: my daughter's ballet class. The ballet school was unfriendly and poorly run. It felt like a stereotype, a striver's dream, built for parents hell-bent on seeing their kids dance in the Joffrey.

The school had a music program in addition to dance classes. We tried that one, too. Ick! Through the heavy wooden door I could hear the teacher screeching at my third-grader. No thanks! The school was broken, and the malevolent culture was palpable to me as a parent. That's the thing about organizational culture: it's loud.

Years later, I heard the back story. The original, grassroots, warm and inviting music school had undergone a disruptive and unpopular change in control some years before. When we hit town, the effects of that unfortunate series of events were evident. When a culture is broken, clients can tell.

There's an old New Yorker cartoon that shows a CEO barking to an underling, "Get me a corporate culture by Monday morning!" The joke is that, of course, every organization already has a culture. We may love it or hate it or be oblivious to it, but it's there. Whether the culture supports our goals is another question.

I got a call from a CEO this week who said, "I must be crazy calling you now, when conditions are so tough in the marketplace. But I think we could be working together more effectively in my company.

"Our employees aren't rallying around the mission just because we're under competitive pressure. I guess I don't blame them. We need to figure out how to manage in this new environment. I can't afford to have my best people quit on me now, and I need every person's best efforts."

I give the CEO credit, because it would be easy to say "I'm not expending one iota of mental energy on soft-and-squishy people issues now, when our company is under siege." The CEO understood that turnover and motivation and culture are all related. If employees don't care about the game plan, a Dave and Buster's gift certificate will not do much to change their views.

As a newcomer to the broken music-and-dance academy (now out of business, no surprise) my gut told me that the culture was awry. The CEO's gut told him the same thing about his organization.

He decided to act rather than wait for the malaise to magically disappear on its own. He told me "My instinct says that I'd better dig into this topic now, before it badly disrupts my business."

Instinct, gut -- if you can't pay attention to those trusty scouts, who can you listen to?

If Your Boss Could Talk

2009-01-02T16:48:00.000-08:00

Working men and women have a tough way to go these days. Longer hours, more work, fewer perks and bennies: and companies are not quite as focused on being "employers of choice" as they were a couple of years ago. But if you think your boss is the source of your higher stress level, you might be surprised. Being a boss - fending off pressure from above and below both - is harder than ever these days. Managers have smaller budgets and fewer staff members to accomplish a lot more work as cash-strapped companies frantically try to turn their fortunes around. Sure, there are incompetent, unfriendly and just-plain-evil bosses out there, but in our experience, the majority of middle managers are reasonable people who are trying to do the best they can for the employees they supervise AND the higher-ups.

Skeptical? You might not think that your supervisor is just as interested in a fair, friendly and reasonable work environment as you are - but he or she has lots of other fish to fry, too. So we've polled middle managers, and developed this list of ten things your manager wants you know - called "If Your Boss Could Talk, [What He or She Would Say]." (Of course your manager can talk - but not every manager feels comfortable sharing these pet peeves and wishes with employees. Do any of these fit your situation?)

Here goes:

1. When I am abrupt and impersonal, it's probably because I'm doing something I don't want to do.

Feel shut down by your boss sometimes? Your great ideas may interest your manager personally, but he or she may not have the approval or the budget dollars to say "yes" very often right now. If your manager is acting squirrelly or suddenly gets very "corporate," it may be because he or she isn't comfortable telling you that The Answer Is No. A rough exterior helps to shield your boss from the reality that it's him (or her) - not a title or a job description - disappointing you once again. A good tactic when this happens, is to ask, "Is this topic uncomfortable for you?" That might throw your manager off enough for him or her to open up and tell you the real problem.

2. I care about a lot of stuff that you care about, but I can't make a federal case out of every slight that you experience - you have to let me pick my battles.

Your boss is, among other things, the one who's supposed to stick up for you when those punks in Marketing or the bureaucrats in Accounting or anybody else in the company does you wrong. But there are only so many battles that one person can fight! So, your boss wants to tell you, I have to let some of these wrangles slide. Don't be disgusted when I don't march off to blast someone in HR on your behalf because they goofed up your insurance claim again. You gotta let things go sometimes.

3. Don't try to make me King Solomon, especially about the small stuff.

Your boss is saying, I know that you and your co-worker both want the cubicle next to the window, but I really don't want to have to make that call - I'd rather see you play Rock-Paper-Scissors, if I had my way. When you try to put me in the King Solomon mode, somebody ends up being upset about something really inconsequential. I'll be very grateful if sometimes you and your colleague can figure these things out on your own. You don't even have to tell me when it happens.

4. I don't want to watch you like a hawk, so don't give me a reason to.

Here the message is, with precious few perks to dole out, I'd love to at least give you some schedule flexibility, the little that the workload allows. I'd let you come in and leave the office when you choose (roughly) as long as the work gets done, if you're a great employee in every other way. So make my job easier, please, and get your work done and don't disappear just when you're most likely to be needed. I can give you a little slack if you work with me, but if you don't, I'll have to come down on you like a ton of bricks.

5. You will always be more familiar with everything about your job than I will ever be.

When we talk, your boss wants to say, Remind me of what you're working on, what's causing you trouble and what's going well. Remind me of what's important to you and what you need from me. It's really hard to remember the priorities, needs, and obstacles of every one of my department members, so any help you can give me is welcome. I do value you, but you're just much closer to your work than I am. I have a different set of priorities, like our department's goals, budget, timelines and hurdles. If I'm micro-managing you in your own work, let me know.

6. When you're angry with me, let me know.

Boss wants to say: I've got a lot on my mind - you could spend two weeks on hard stares, monosyllabic answers to my questions, and other pointed signals that you're mad at me and I might still miss the message. So just tell me! Pick a moment when I'm not up to my eyeballs in crises, and ask me for a quick meeting. Tell me what I did that ticked you off and why it was a bad call. I promise to try and listen and not be defensive. If you don't tell me, how will I know?

7. Don't ask me to tell you what you know I can't talk about.

Are there layoffs coming? Is a big customer planning to shut its doors? Are we merging with XYZ company? If I know, I can' tell you. If I could tell you, I would. Don't ask me to tell you what you know I can't, and don't be offended because you think we're friends and I should spill the beans. Can't do it. Don't create tension by making this unreasonable request.

8. Bring me problems as far in advance as possible.

I love to be surprised when things are going better than expected. I love to hear that a problem was solved or some other good fortune befalls our department. Don't surprise me with bad news, please. Let me know way in advance when something's not working. At the last minute, problems are much harder to solve, so feel the fear and tell me anyway, "Project ABC is behind schedule." I may shoot the messenger just a little, but it's better than my reaction will be further down the road.

9. Create a feedback-network to give me painless advice on my management style.

Here's how this works. If I badger Sally mercilessly and I tend to ignore Joe, then trade feedback bits and deliver them to me in a friendly say. So Sally, say to me, "You know Stan, you're probably not aware of it but at times you seem to miss what Joe is telling you," and then I can take that without being defensive. And Joe, you say to me, "You know what, Stan, for some funny reason, even though you're a patient guy in general, you seem to give Sally a lot of grief." That way, no one has to take the feedback-heat on themselves and I still get the message. This would really be a gift, and I promise to try and take the advice as it's intended.

10. Don't do anything stupid.

I can help you out if you goof up to a certain degree. But if you mis-use the company credit card, download garbage from the internet, or slug a co-worker, I'm out of the loop - you're gone. So help me out, and don't do anything stupid.

What's the gist of what your boss is telling you? Let's work together. Why create tension in the relationship when the environment has enough of that already? You might as well team up with your boss (and vice versa) to lessen the stress and get the job done that much more easily. And if you put yourself in your boss's shoes just a little, you'll be surprised how much you learn. You might even consider becoming a boss yourself!

SURVEY: Flexing or Floundering?

2008-10-06T05:07:00.001-07:00

Dear friends,

We're starting off Monday with a survey to see how our members are faring vis-a-vis flexible workplace arrangements. How's your flexibility? Share your opinions (and stories) with us! This survey focuses on flexible organizations versus independent workers, but everyone is welcome to participate. Please take the survey -- it's here:

This is a joint LifeMeetsWork/Ask Liz Ryan survey: our first! We can't
wait to see what our members have to say. Have trouble with the survey? Please write to Dana at dana@marketingsavant.com.

THANKS!

A Bunch of Liz's Columns in One List

2008-09-27T22:05:00.000-07:00

Column Title, Publication, Category

How HR and Recruiters Can Work Together Business Week Online HR Advice
Ten Biggest Networking No-Nos Yahoo! Hot Jobs Networking advice
Ending an Endless Networking Conversation Job-Hunt.org Networking advice
Career Manholes to Avoid Colorado Biz Magazine career advice
Career Lessons from the Candidates Business Week Online career advice
Tech Cred Gen Ten Problem Business Week Online generational tension
Price Yourself Like a House Business Week Online job search advice
When an Employer Just Is Not That Into You Yahoo! job search advice
Mind the Gap Boulder Daily Camera job search advice
Watch for Interview Warning Signs Business Week Online job search advice
Love the Offer, Hate the Money Business Week Online job search advice
Is Your Job Search Ready for Prime Time? Business Week Online job search advice
Ready, Fire, Aim Business Week Online job search advice
The Art of Job Search Networking Job-Hunt.org job search advice
Choosing the Right Resume Fodder Business Week Online job search advice
Effective Job Search Networking Job-Hunt.org job search advice/networking advice
Anthropology in the Handbook Daily Camera job-search advice
Rules for the Job-Search Networking Lunch Job-Hunt.org job-search advice
Lose the Lame Lingo Colorado Biz Magazine job-search advice
In Job Search, Follow-Up is Key Daily Camera job-search advice
Six Reasons to Run from a Job Interview Business Week Online job-search advice
Who's Vouching for You? Daily Camera job-search advice
Other Departments are Poaching My Team Business Week Online leadership advice
When the Candidate Says No Business Week Online leadership advice
Bosses to be Thankful For Business Week Online leadership advice
Upgrade Your Career, Not Your Title Business Week Online leadership advice
The (Possibly) Pregnant Employee Business Week Online leadership advice
Should Performance Grading Be on a Curve? Business Week Online leadership advice
Is Praising Employees Counterproductive? Business Week Online leadership advice
When a New Job Leads to Resentment Business Week Online leadership advice
Managing a Damaged Corporate Culture Business Week Online leadership advice
A New Mindset Colorado Biz Magazine leadership advice
The Viral Anti-Marketing Message Colorado Biz Magazine leadership advice
Fitting New Moms in the Schedule Business Week Online leadership advice
How to Develop Your Management Goals Business Week Online leadership advice
Six Signs You Don't Care About Workers Business Week Online leadership advice
Something Doesn't Have to Give Colorado Biz Magazine leadership advice
How to Take the Diss Out of Dissent Business Week Online leadership advice
Wheat and Chaff Revisited Colorado Biz Magazine leadership advice
The Mom Advantage LifeMeetsWork.com leadership/HR advice
Network Like an Entrepreneur Business Week Online networking advice
The Creepiest Networking Advice Ever Yahoo! Hot Jobs networking advice
Building Your Online Soapbox Yahoo! networking advice
Lose the Elevator Pitch Yahoo! Hot Jobs networking advice
Meet People; Don't Peddle Wares Yahoo! Hot Jobs networking advice
Just Don't Call Me Diva Yahoo! networking advice
Etiquette for Online Outreach Yahoo! networking advice
My Mom's on Facebook Business Week Online networking advice
Ten Tips for Networkers Business Week Online networking advice
Stay Out of the Networking Hall of Shame Yahoo! Hot Jobs networking advice
The Case of the Pushy Lady Yahoo! Hot Jobs networking advice
Jump Into Social Networking in 2008 Job-Hunt.org networking advice
Five Networkers to Avoid Yahoo! networking advice
I Like the Look Of Your Friends Yahoo! Hot Jobs networking advice
May I Kiss Your Hem? Colorado Biz Magazine networking advice
Beyond 40 WPM - Part-Time Jobs for Pros LifeMeetsWork work/life advice
Don't Count on HR Business Week Online workplace advice
Timing a Layoff to Get Severance Business Week Online workplace advice
In-House Subject Matter Experts Business Week Online workplace advice
When the Need to Win Runs Riot Business Week Online workplace advice
When a Colleague Hungers for Your Time Business Week Online workplace advice
A Management Star for Six Months Business Week Online workplace advice
How to Get A Raise Business Week Online workplace advice
The Case of the 'Juiceless' Manager Business Week Online workplace advice
How Do I Tell My Boss I Want Her Job? Business Week Online workplace advice
Remember the Three Monkeys Business Week Online workplace advice
You're Being Fired Business Week Online workplace advice
How to Treat a Touchy Colleague Business Week Online workplace advice
Borrowing Trouble at Work Business Week Online workplace advice
How Not to Be the Obnoxious Newcomer Business Week Online workplace advice
Frenemies at Work Business Week Online workplace advice
PowerPoint Play Business Week Online workplace advice
How Not to Be the Obnoxious Newcomer AOL http://workplace advice
Calling the Policy Police Business Week Online workplace advice
The Sunny Side of HR Business Week Online http://workplace advice
Top Desktop Diversions Business Week Online workplace advice
The Right Coach May Be Hard to Find Business Week Online workplace advice
They're Just Not That Into You Business Week Online workplace advice
You Can't Run on an Empty Tank Business Week Online workplace advice
We Don't Care About Your Pet Project Business Week Online workplace advice
Too Heavy for Our Team? Business Week Online http://workplace advice
Gateway to Better Hiring Business Week Online workplace advice
Addressing Deep-Rooted Conflicts Business Week Online workplace advice
Surprise, You've Taken the Worst Job Ever Boulder Daily Camera workplace advice
Like, How Can I Seem More Grown-Up? Business Week Online workplace advice
Off the Management Track Business Week Online workplace advice
Paid Extra For Training? Business Week Online workplace advice
Just Saying No to Newsletters Business Week Online workplace advice
Ten Best and Ten Worst Corporate Practices Business Week Online workplace advice
Time for a New Job - or a New Attitude? Business Week Online workplace advice
How Much is Too Much Information at Work? Business Week Online workplace advice
Keep Going Until You Can Go Business Week Online workplace advice
Jobs to be Thankful For Daily Camera workplace advice
Out-of-State Job Offer a Red Flag Business Week Online workplace advice
How to Treat the Touchy Colleague AOL workplace advice
Managing Your Boss's Political Battles Business Week Online workplace advice
Ready to Move up, and Maybe Move On Business Week Online workplace advice
Hitting the Ground Running Business Week Online workplace advice
When You're Passed Over at Work Business Week Online workplace advice
To Bill or Not to Bill Business Week Online workplace advice
Building Your Power from the Inside Out Business Week Online workplace advice
What Your Boss Really Wants You to Know Appeal Democrat workplace advice
The Facebook Generation? Business Week Online workplace advice
Telecommuting: Getting Bosses on Board Business Week Online workplace advice

Handling the "O" Word -- Overqualified

2008-09-06T11:18:00.000-07:00

Dear Liz,

I was on an interview last week for a Marketing job and things were going well as far as I could tell. At one the interviewer (the hiring manager) asked me to talk about my PR experience, and I began a story about building a relationship with a media person over time and eventually getting a terrific story published promoting my employer's product. At that point the interviewer's face froze and she said "It appears that you're overqualified for this position." I was stunned and didn't know what to say. How should I have reacted? I fear I've lost the opportunity, now.

yours,

Brice

-------------

Dear Brice,

It is hard to say for sure but I can think of two explanations for that unfortunate turn of events. It may be that the manager heard your media-cultivation story and thought something like 'This Brice is a serious PR person, and we need someone to do a million other things as well, including administrative and clerical things, and I can't afford to hire a person who's going to make the PR aspects of the role that high a priority.' My other thought is that the manager herself doesn't have the PR cred and chutzpah to do what you did and feared that you might upstage her on the job.

In a situation like that (for next time) the thing to do is to pause, smile slightly and say "That's an interesting observation. I'd love to understand your thoughts on that." Sometimes the dreaded Overqualified label pops out when a manager is intimidated. Sometimes the candidate shares a particularly canny or strategic story or insight and the hiring manager thinks "This person may be too high-powered for our team/for this job," for example if the first major deliverable due from the newcomer is a purely clerical SKU listing. The manager may think "I need someone in the weeds, not creating strategy and spending months on PR outreach." That's no slur on you of course - it's just that hiring managers are naturally very focused on the top two or three items on their must-get-done list and may be wary of candidates whose interests seem to lie thousands of feet higher in altitude than what the job immediately requires.

In the instant, sometimes you can ascertain that the hiring manager's Overqualified button was pushed when she heard a story that illustrates your perspective and thought process, and immediately thought "This person won't be happy doing what I need done." Sometimes she may be right. Other times you can calm her fears by reminding her that while you were cultivating that fruitful PR relationship, you were simultaneously editing six brochures and creating an updated SKU list!

If the manager is simply intimidated by your background, thinking that you may steal her thunder, you don't want to work for him or her anyway. Good managers hire people who are better at what they do than the manager him- or herself is, not people who will always stay in the manager's shadow.

If the manager fears you would leave in a heartbeat for a better job, you'll need to be able to convincingly assure her that THIS job is very appealing for X, Y and Z reasons. Maybe you're in a career downshift mode. Maybe you've got kids in elementary school and would rather stay in your town than take a higher-powered job in the city. If the O-word comes out because of salary concerns, you can remind the hiring manager that you're happy to trade off salary at this point in your career for the ability to reduce your travel schedule.

If you think the Overqualified issue is likely to arise in a future interview, be ready to address it very specifically. Only an ultra-specific, rational reason for preferring this opportunity (over the zillions of highly-paid, glamorous Marketing opportunities that the interview mistakenly assumes are out there pleading for you right now) is likely to win the point for you.

It may be too late to resuscitate this particular opportunity, but you can try. Write a wonderful post-interview follow-up letter that includes something of value for the hiring manager (an article, e.g.) and talk in the letter about why this job is ideal for you and why you're a great fit for it despite the manager's concerns.

And remember that when you're shocked, stunned, gobsmacked and without words in an interview at some point in the future, it's always okay to say "Ahh...please tell me more about that."

Best of luck! -- Liz

Trust Among Your Team Trumps Policies

2008-09-03T10:40:00.000-07:00

Trust Among Your Team Trumps Policies
Yes, you could ask employees to prove that they were really out sick or at their grandmother's funeral. Instead, why not treat people like grown-ups?

Dear Liz,

Our company is growing—that's the good news. I joined in '05 when there were 200 employees, and we all knew one another to at least a small degree because we were located in just two facilities in the same city. Now, we have more than 1,000 employees in several locations and the culture is rapidly changing. I am the HR manager, and I'm under pressure from several managers to install policies meant to prevent some kind of abuse or other.

One policy that managers want to change is the Bereavement Leave policy. Right now, we don't ask for any kind of proof of death or a funeral notice, and some of our managers want to begin to do that. Another policy that I'm getting pressure on is the sick-time policy. I've got managers pushing me to create a policy that requires a doctor's note on the second date out of the office with an illness or injury. These don't feel to me like the right policies for us to be implementing, but I need some ammunition to fight the "more policies are better" trend. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Joe

Dear Joe,

It's a tough transition for a company to go from the grassroots stage to something bigger. It's not uncommon for some infrastructure to be installed during that phase change, and HR policies are one of the most common elements of infrastructure. Managers may feel a loss of control, and that creates a desire in them for more rules, more laws, more guidelines to keep people in order.

If you can learn more about what's motivating your colleagues to push for more policies, that will help you settle on a course of action. For example, they may feel that before, when everyone knew each other, there was a kind of family—granted, a large, extended family—feeling and that meant people could be trusted. If that's the case, perhaps the emphasis should be on managers creating a culture of trust among their teams rather than crafting policies that would do just the opposite.

A big challenge for many managers, especially less-experienced ones, is the notion of initiating conversations with their employees on sensitive subjects. If a boss has one or two instances of something unexpected and unwelcome happening (an employee comes to work dressed inappropriately, for instance) that boss may lean toward pushing HR to implement a new policy. One new policy means one sticky conversation that the reluctant boss doesn't have to have.

That would explain why, when a manager may have doubted the word of an employee using Bereavement Leave, the manager's first instinct is to ask you to change the policy. If the Bereavement Leave policy requires employees to present written proof that Grandma died (and in fact that Grandma was even still around), one problem is solved. No one can successfully abuse the Bereavement Leave policy—at least not without some real work and ingenuity.

But in dealing with one's manager's problem, you've created a new, bigger one: Now ALL of your employees have gotten the message that your company doesn't trust them not to fabricate relatives' deaths and the existence of the relatives themselves. Do you really want to send such an insulting message to your team?

This is the trickiest—some would say most fun, also—aspect of HR leadership. You're the Culture Minister, and you've got to decide where to draw the lines. I'd advise you to strenuously resist all efforts to infantilize your employees by assuming that if they don't bring you a piece of paper saying that Grandma died, then there is no Grandma or she didn't die. (By the way, plenty of families don't have funerals anymore and/or prefer that no obituary or death notice is published in the paper.)

The same principles apply with your sick-leave policy. You can require employees to trot off to the doctor's office after two days of illness or even one day, but at what cost? Most of us will lie in bed for two days with a common flu rather than spend time and money on a doctor visit, especially since the doctor's advice for flu will be "Get plenty of rest and drink fluids." (And good luck getting to see a doctor on one day's notice.) Why would we as employers want to be so heavy-handed as to require our trusted colleagues to prove to us that they were indeed sick with flu and not malingering?

To read the full story please jump here.

Beyond 40 WPM - Part-Time Jobs for Pros

2008-08-22T18:08:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,

Here is my latest column on LifeMeetsWork.com - a piece about part-time jobs for highly-skilled people. Take a look!

BEYOND 40 WPM - PART-TIME JOBS FOR PROS

Back in 1997, I was pregnant for the third time. But for the first time, I wasn't working. I took the opportunity to attend a Moms & Tots playgroup with my two-year-old son, chatting with the moms week by week as my tummy grew.

The moms were delightful, and our conversations struck a chord. Nearly every one of the Moms & Tots ladies had an issue about work and life. They weren't working and were starting to get antsy. They were ready to do something with their free time — something to challenge their brains and excite their passions.

But part-time, professional jobs were hard to find in '97. Kelly Temps looked like the only game in town, and the women in my playgroup were lawyers and marketing chiefs and experts at a dozen specialties.

Isn't there a way, we wondered, for smart and capable women to plug into the working world for a few hours each week? Isn't there an alternative — something halfway between staying home full-time and working as a cashier at the local deli?

Out of these playgroup conversations, I started an online network for women. One of the goals was to connect full-time working women and talented stay-at-home moms for mutual advantage.

That group morphed into a global women's community, and then morphed again to embrace men. Now, we still talk about work/life issues along with a wide range of career and business topics. And women are still looking for ways to make some money and exercise their brain cells without typing themselves into oblivion.

Over the years, our group has shared ideas and strategies for securing part-time, professional employment. Here are some highlights:

To read the full story, please jump here.

Wait! You Forgot the Kitchen Sink!

2008-08-20T23:18:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,

My friend H. sent me this job ad from Craigslist today because it
made her chuckle and it made me chuckle too. Are there a lot of
people out there who can set up computer/telephone hardware, whip up
a new database, knock out a brochure using Photoshop, design a
customer newsletter and then happily refill the breakroom salt and
pepper shakers, make a few dozen phone calls for the Sales team,
call Staples to order Post-it Notes, and end the day with a bit of
filing? Geez Louise, who's scrubbing out the insides of the Mr.
Coffee with Bon Ami? Granted, a small office always has extra work
that can be done, but this multi-skilled person (if s/he exists) is
made of solid gold and worth twice the money this company is offering.

I assume the salary range has a typo in it - if not I know a few
hundred people who want the job!

OFFICE MANAGER
Responsibilities include:

Technical Support
Provide staff with routine technical support, including setting up e-
mail accounts, importing and backing up data, setting up computer /
telephone hardware, etc. Requires basic knowledge of Microsoft
Office, Outlook, databases, networks and an ability to quickly
understand new technology. The Office Manager works closely with our
Network and Database Administrators.

Desktop Publishing
Work with staff to create and print newsletters, brochures,
proposals, etc. Requires knowledge of Publisher, Word, and Adobe
Acrobat. Some Photoshop experience is helpful. Should have basic
graphic design skills.

Office Organization
Order and maintain office supplies, such as brochures, kitchen items,
paper, etc. Should proactively make certain office is well equipped
and organized.

General Administrative Tasks
Mailing brochures / materials to customers, administrative support
for Sales and Account Management teams, document management, filing,
data entry / report creation, etc.

Location: Denver
Compensation: $29,297 - $139,277

Say It Don't Spray It

2008-08-17T14:40:00.000-07:00

Women are awesome, but there's something off about a lot of women's business gatherings.

Half the women-in-business events I attend have a fake, air-kissy vibe to them. The worst is that the host is always talking about how women are "fabulous" and "authentic", while the energy in the room feels anything but. (Maybe it's just me.)

I went to one event and sat at a table with a group of nice ladies. I learned that this group has a standard networking activity. They go around the table introducing themselves. They use an egg timer to make sure nobody talks too long. They say their names, describe their businesses and why they're the best at what they do, and mention something they'll be looking to buy in the next month or two.

I wasn't prepared for this exercise. I hate stuff like that. Who am I to say I'm the best at what I do? Networking to me is about people and what they're up to, not a live eBay where we buy and sell one another's offerings.

Once the activity was kicked off,I dashed to the ladies' room. I did the math: one minute per lady, seven ladies: this activity should last seven minutes - 10, to be safe. I chilled for ten minutes in the loo and then peeped out. Hurrah! The exercise was done. I rejoined my tablemates.

A few minutes later, the meeting host instructed us to move to new tables and do the round-robin thing again. I knew I couldn't get away with another 10-minute stop in the ladies' room. I was the speaker that day, so I got up and sidled over to the videographer setting up his stuff.

I said "Talk to me about anything, I beg you."

"Okay," he said, "how 'bout those Rockies?"

We chatted for 10 minutes. Saved! I went back and took my seat. Then someone said, "It's a shame you missed the networking activity, Liz -- go ahead and do yours, now." My goose was cooked.

"Okay," I said. "My name is Liz and I do x, y and z. I'll pass on the 'Why Are You the Best' question, for all sorts of reasons. In the next month, I need to buy, er, um, a whisk broom. My son has a rabbit, and the rabbit leaves pellets in his pen, and I need a whisk broom to sweep up the pellets."

Finally, it was time for my presentation. I talked about networking vs. marketing -- how networking isn't marketing, and how one-on-one communication shouldn't be confused with broadcast-style communication and vice versa. I talked about why it's insulting to geta message from a friend that says "I saw this article and thought of you" and then to hear that everyone on your friend's mailing list got it, too.

I am so allergic to these events that I had to get a cup of coffee afterward and unwind. I didn't get back to my office until 3 p.m. There in my inbox was a message reading: "Dear Liz. Great to hear you speak about networking today. I totally agree, networking is different from marketing. Would you like to try a 30-day free trial of my product? It only takesa minute to sign up online."

True story.

Here's the story on the Boulder Daily Camera website

Nervy Women of the Future

2008-08-03T22:38:00.001-07:00

I was in the car with my five-year-old and my seven-year-old. The very left-brain-dominant seven-year-old asked, "Are there actually vehicles that can travel into the future?" I thought for a minute, and said "You know, the thing about the future is, every single minute is the future compared to the minute before. So right now is the future compared to this morning. And tomorrow morning is the future, as we sit here now. So, you could say that this car is driving into the future, this very moment."

The two kids sat and chewed on that for a minute as I turned into the supermarket parking lot. Then the five-year-old yelled out, "Mom, look! It's the grocery store of the future!"

Smart aleck kid. But the kid is right - this IS the future. I used to daydream, when I was their age, about the days we're living in now - it seemed so remote and inconceivable that I'd actually be alive in a different milennium, years that had no "19" on the front of them. How could it be? And here we are. I had no definite mental picture for these days, couldn't imagine being 40. All I saw in my mind's eye was a kind of rosy, pleasantly-colored place where grownups had a lot of fun and read interesting books all day.

When I was in eighth grade, women were pushing for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Equal Rights Amendment. I was floored and discouraged when it didn't pass. But I never thought for a second that my chances - to do whatever I might want to do, as I got closer to adulthood - were limited by that setback. When I went out looking for my first post-waitress, post-babysitting job, the papers were full of ads for "Gal Fridays." This seems laughably historical today. But at the time, a Gal Friday (as I understood it then) was a pivotal role in an office, the person who knows what's going on. This was a big improvement over the even more historical, stereotypical secretary job popularized on TV and in movies as a cute blonde thing in a short skirt, being chased around the desk by the boss.

A lot of the rhetoric back in the those days went something like this: You Women Are So Demanding. You Don't Know When to Stop Asking for Handouts. In the sixties, women wanted to be in the workforce, not marginally there as extra office help, or nurses or teachers (not that those aren't incredibly important roles), but as professionals of all kinds, and not just until we got married. And as the sixties turned into the seventies, that started to happen. Then we had the nerve to push for equal pay. Equal pay!?! How can you pay a woman like a man?, was the complaint, Companies will go broke. We haven't reached parity yet, but women's pay is getting better vis-à-vis men's pay, by a tiny bit every year. We were not satisfied, and we shouldn't have been. We want to be in management, we said. We want to be in traditionally male jobs like in the building trades, in technology and in manufacturing. We want to be surgeons, astronauts and senators.

Those changes began to happen, too. Then we said, We want to be entrepreneurs, and we want to have access to funding the way that male entrepreneurs do. Fighting words! For all the mythology built up around the go-go 90's and the dotcom era, there were plenty of rock-hard paradigms that didn't shift one little bit. Women got barely one percent of the venture capital dollars invested during the internet boom. But look - we didn't need those sources of funding to go on our own. Women are launching businesses at a rate never seen before, downturn be danged. And we still aren't satisfied.

Now we say, We should be in corporate leadership, we should be on corporate Boards of Directors. We make the vast majority of family purchasing decisions and our voices should be heard - we should have a say in the way that companies are run. We have requirements that aren't being met. We will blow whistles, we will complain, and we will take our business elsewhere. Nervy! Who do we think we are, half the population or something?!

Not content to have a couple of seats in government, not content have a couple of our own in high-profile corporate roles, now we want even more. We want companies to be managed in an ethical way, and we want to have meaning in our work. Meaning! We should be happy to have a job, for Pete's sakes! When will we be content? When will women stop complaining? Here's when:

When the picture of the future we dreamed up and colored in as children is the one we experience every day. When companies are citizens of the communities they operate in, and people in organizations are respected and their work is valued and their lives outside of work are viewed as high priority engagements. And when women are heard in government, in corporate leadership and in the circles where investment dollars move from hand to hand. We're not asking for that much, the way we see it. Just to be riding up in the front seat in that car going into the future.

How Long to Keep Last Job on My Resume?

2008-07-19T09:59:00.000-07:00

Dear Liz,

I was laid off in June and haven't updated my resume, because I think it looks letter to show my last employer with the dates 2004-Present than 2004-2008. I know I can't keep the job on there forever. When do I need to update my resume to show that I am unemployed?

Yours,

Dennis

=======

Dear Dennis,

There are certain resume questions that allow for some wiggle room and others that don't. Being employed is a bit like being pregnant, in that you either are or aren't. I'd update your resume before you send a copy of it to any more employers. You haven't worked for the company since June, and so your resume is, sad to say, inaccurate.

Now, if you worked for Wild Oats Market and the company were acquired by Whole Foods (as indeed happened) most employers wouldn't care if you kept the name Wild Oats Market on your resume for a few months after the deal closed. They'd know that you're not trying to mislead anyone, and that deal is common knowledge. But we can't keep sending out resumes that say we're working, when we're not. I wouldn't say that you get any grace time at all when it comes to the issue of being employed by/not employed by a given employer.

So, in answer to the general question "How long after I leave XYZ Corp can I keep using a resume that shows me working there?" the answer is "up through your last day of work in the company."
Enjoy your weekend!

Cheers -- Liz

Piano Tide

2008-07-05T15:46:00.000-07:00

At least once a year for the past ten years, I've asked my oldest son, "Would you consider taking piano lessons?" He wouldn't. My daughter takes lessons. My three younger sons have taken 'em - the next-to-smallest one is on a hiatus right now. The five-year-old takes Suzuki piano.

One of the first bits of our Boulder infrastructure that got put in place when we got here was piano lessons. Three of our kids studied with Lisa. She is a great player and a very well-known teacher in town. Her style is cool, friendly. The kids took lessons for years. This year, our 12-year-old decided he wanted to focus on jazz and rock. I was surprised when Lisa said "You should switch teachers. Here is Rebecca's number." Off went the 12-year-old, to Rebecca. Soon after, my next-to-youngest son, the ten-year-old, decided he was through. My daughter had thrown in the towel with piano lessons after eighth grade.

Here is the miracle: Rebecca got everybody revved up. The little one. My daughter, who plays pop songs and sings along. My ten-year-old is on the fence, but the amazing thing is that my fifteen-year-old son, who hasn't had one piano lesson ever, says he will try it. One year, he says. Here are my terms: a Wii game, a PS3 game and some other game, who knows what. I figure it's about a $100 bribe. That doesn't seem so bad to me. It's a half-hour lesson once a week for a year, plus practicing. I think he's impressed that his little brother can play all his favorite rock songs.

Four kids in piano lessons? That's a lot of driving. It's worth it. The ten-year-old may waver if his big brother jumps into the pool. I have no demands for these kids. I don't force them into activities. I just wanted them to do music, and all of them do. That's a gift. Even the ten-year-old, who no longer takes lessons, sings with me. His bribe is a Bionicle - can't complain about that.

Ten Big Networking No-Nos

2008-07-02T22:23:00.000-07:00

10 Biggest Networking No-No's

Networking is a great activity and often a fruitful one, but it's not for the faint of heart.
The networking jungles are full of prowling and slithering creatures who can make you wish you'd stayed at home and far from your computer. Just so you don't emulate these unclear-on-the-concept networkers, here's my list of the Top 10 most egregious networking missteps:

1. Trip-Worthy

Writing to or calling a stranger to say, "Let's meet for coffee -- say, halfway in between our offices?" is highly impolite, since the person you're approaching doesn't know you from Adam. If you've got the desire to meet this person, you can figure out how to get within a half-mile or his or her office.

2. Join My Fan Club

Meeting a new person and adding him or her to your newsletter without permission is another capital networking crime. Don't do it -- write to each new acquaintance and ask for permission (and wait for an answer) before padding your subscriber list with his or her email address.

3. You're Nothing to Me, But Your Employer Isn't

Striking up a networking conversation with a person based on his or her name tag -- for example, because the person works at IBM -- and then, within five minutes, asking the person for an introduction to a hiring manager or purchasing decision-maker at IBM is the height of rudeness. Walk away from a networker like this.

4. Dear Trusted Colleague (Whatever Your Name Is)

Sending a LinkedIn invitation to every person you've ever met, using the standard LinkedIn boilerplate invitation language, will get you dropped from polite networking society. LinkedIn connections are intended for trusted colleagues, and if you must invitation-spam your new acquaintances, you can at least take 10 seconds to compose your own, personal note to each one.

5. Remember Me?

Popping up after 10 or 15 years to ask an old contact, "Say, could you help me find a job?" brands you as a me-first networker. The proper outreach to a person you've lost touch with is, "Dear Stan, it's been too long! I'd love to hear about what you are doing." Smart networkers don't wait until they're job-hunting to keep up with friends, old and new.

6. I Was Thinking About You, You, You, and You

Sending a mass mailing disguised as a personal message earns you a one-way ticket to Networking Hell (imaginary) for good reason. When you write "I saw this article and thought about you" it should be true. Unless you can think of about 400 people simultaneously, it's unethical to send any kind of mass mailing disguised as a one-on-one message to each recipient.

7. I Practiced It; I Have to Deliver It

Spitting your "elevator speech," unsolicited, into a new acquaintance's face is a major networking faux pas that happens far too often. Conversation is a give-and-take activity, and isn't built to enable either participant to launch a 30-second-or-longer monologue about his business. Wait for your conversation partner to ask questions -- don't shower her with details about your fabulous firm and its amazing products.

Click here to read the full story on Yahoo.

Once Was Plenty

2008-06-18T22:39:00.000-07:00

Like it or not, we learn as we get older! Here are ten things I've done once and do not feel the need to do again:

Go to the Boulder County Fair.
Why: Have you been? Eight million degrees, the scariest carnies west of the Mississippi and really, no fun at all.

Get involved with Amway.
I made this mistake in my twenties. Silver lining: extricating myself from the cult taught me useful boundary-setting skills. I'll never forget the sight and sound of a Polish man in a bright yellow three-piece suit standing in my living room berating my twenty-something slacker friends to buy Amway products out of the disposable income they had left over from their $5.45/hour jobs. One punk rocker wandered in and the Amway guy said "Everyone needs soap!" and the punk rocker said "My friends don't use soap," and then got drunk and slipped off his chair, onto the floor under the table, where he lay for the rest of the meeting.

Have a Boulder Library Card.
Why: $110 in fines, and because when I called to say "Gee, so sorry, our bad, we moved, we will find the books, and I thought you didn't fine kids?" they said "Those were from the Young Adult Fiction section." Right, because nine-year-olds don't read "A Wrinkle in Time." Spare me.

Go to the Denver Stock Show.
Why not: I can't say never, because I have kids. Still. Less than meets the eye.

Get the BriteSmile or similar teeth-whitening process.
A Rip-off. Expensive, uncomfortable, doesn't last.

Have a lizard for a pet.
Why not: too unpredictable - healthy, healthy, health, dead. Heartbreaking.

Live in a condo, or anyplace with an HOA.
Why not: not my cup of tea.

Hang around with est/Landmark people.
Why not: I can't tell you, or I'll get sued.

Take my kids to a martial arts place that uses a three-page contract.
Why not: Should have seen this one coming. Trans Martial Arts, rung number six of Dante's Inferno is reserved for you.

Buy an expensive vacuum cleaner that uses its own special, expensive bags.
Why not: Goes without saying. Was this item anticlimactic? Here's one more:

Participate in any women's networking group that has Wild, Wonderful, Fabulous, Outrageous, Passion/Passionate, or Amazing in its title.
Why not: A personal thing.

Headhunter Dos and Don'ts

2008-06-10T03:29:00.000-07:00

A friend in the search biz is a boon. Our search buddies can keep us on top of activity in the job market and let us know about great opportunities we'd never find on our own.

On the client side, search partners are invaluable. They find terrific candidates for us and let us know what the talent pool thinks of our shop. That advice is golden. Good headhunter-client relationships are precious, and the same goes for strong partnerships between search pros and the candidates in the marketplace.

There are obligations on all sides - for corporate folks (HR people and hiring managers), for candidates and for recruiters. Since there is a great deal of confusion surrounding the candidate-recruiter relationship, particularly for job-seekers who haven't worked with recruiters before, here are a few thoughts on how those relationships can work to everyone's advantage.

For starters, recruiters owe it to their candidates to keep in regular communication with them. That means that if they've got a candidate on the hook waiting to hear back from a client, the search guy (a unisex term) needs to stay in regular contact with the candidate, period. Didn't hear back from the client? Say so. Didn't have a chance to send the resume into the client yet? Share that news. Silence is not okay, and it's not a reasonable excuse that you don't have any news, yourself.

If you're a candidate and you're working with a recruiter, you have a reasonable expectation of a check-in/update call once a week. There may be no news. You still deserve a call.

When a headhunter calls a candidate out of the blue with an opportunity, it's appropriate for the candidate to ask a bunch of probing questions before giving the search person authorization to send in a resume on his or her behalf.

One of the those questions in "When and how often can I expect to hear from you during the course of this process?" The candidate should insist on hearing the client's name. The candidate should agree to allow the search person to drive the process as long as the search person is hewing to his or her agreement. If, God forbid, the search pro drops the ball and drops out of sight, the candidate has my permission to approach the client directly.

How could we say otherwise? Your conversation with a search person, and your permission for him or her to forward your resume to a client, doesn't say or imply "If you stop communicating with me altogether, it's okay; I'll let this opportunity go by, for the sake of maintaining my end of our crappy relationship."

Perhaps you will never hear from the search pro again, after approaching his or her client (is it even a client? who knows?) directly. Perhaps you will never receive a phone call inviting you to sing on "American Idol," also. Life goes on, in both cases.

If a recruiter calls you about a specific job, it's reasonable to expect him or her to give you some general feedback on your resume and your job-market prospects, beyond this one job. Over the years I have heard from many unhappy job-seekers who were hot commodities for a week or two when a recruiter thought they'd be perfect for a given opening. They were in the recruiter's spotlight, for a brief shining moment. As soon as the company rep said "No thanks on Candidate X," they were demoted to dogmeat in an instant, and couldn't get the recruiter on the phone.

That isn't right. The search person does not owe you a job, or an interview. But if he or she says to you "You're not right for this job" or "The client says you're not right for the job," the recruiter owes you the answer to the question "What sort of job am I right for?"

Candidates have obligations toward their search partners, as well. They should be on time to interviews, answer search pros' questions as quickly as they can during the course of an assignment, and be reasonably available for interviews. They should give early notice if they have to change an interview or phone-screen time, and they should stay true to the comp range or figure they've shared with the search person at the start of the deal.

They shouldn't disappear in the middle of the action, either.

They shouldn't work with two different search folks on one assignment.

They shouldn't approach a client directly once they've given a headhunter permission to forward their resume for that role, unless, as we mentioned above, the headhunter has broken the compact.

They should allow the search person to handle negotiations with the client, unless all parties have agreed that the candidate and the client will negotiate directly.

And, once hired, the candidate should keep the search person up to date with their progress (the search person, let's note, should check in!) and if they change jobs, should keep the search person in the loop. I know candidates and headhunters who've worked fruitfully together this way for twenty years.

Everybody has to step up. It's commonsensical stuff.

Don't have a headhunter in your corner? Get out and network, and post a profile on LinkedIn.
Write to me at liz@asklizryan.com if you're not sure how to jump in.

Ten Biggest Networking No-Nos

2008-05-26T13:51:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,Here is a new story on Yahoo! Hot Jobs about networking gaffes:

Cheers! Liz

TEN BIGGEST NETWORKING NO-NOS

Networking is a great activity and often a fruitful one, but it's notfor the faint of heart. The networking jungles are full of prowling and slithering creatureswho can make you wish you'd stayed at home and far from your computer. Just so you don't emulate these unclear-on-the-concept networkers, here's my list of the Top 10 most egregious networking missteps:

1. Trip-Worthy

Writing to or calling a stranger to say, "Let's meet for coffee --say, halfway in between our offices?" is highly impolite, since the person you're approaching doesn't know you from Adam. If you've got the desire to meet this person, you can figure out how to get within a half-mile or his or her office.

2. Join My Fan Club

Meeting a new person and adding him or her to your newsletter without permission is another capital networking crime. Don't do it -- write to each new acquaintance and ask for permission (and wait for an answer) before padding your subscriber list with his or her email address.

3. You're Nothing to Me, But Your Employer Isn't

Striking up a networking conversation with a person based on his or her name tag -- for example, because the person works at IBM -- and then, within five minutes, asking the person for an introduction to a hiring manager or purchasing decision-maker at IBM is the height of rudeness. Walk away from a networker like this.

4. Dear Trusted Colleague (Whatever Your Name Is),

Sending a LinkedIn invitation to every person you've ever met, using the standard LinkedIn boilerplate invitation language, will get you dropped from polite networking society. LinkedIn connections are intended for trusted colleagues, and if you must invitation-spam your new acquaintances, you can at least take 10 seconds to compose your own, personal note to each one.

5. Remember Me?

To read the full story, please jump over to: http://tinyurl.com/5brjfr

The Moderating Life

2008-05-24T22:59:00.000-07:00

I belong to a few discussion groups besides my own, and when I dive into a conversation on one of them, I'm reminded of something important about online discussion.

I write a post that says "X" and I post it, and someone else writes "Y" and someone else writes "Z" and everything swims along. Then, once in a while, there is a post to the group that says "X is idiotic," or - much worse - that says "X is not even a letter, and whoever wrote 'X' is stupid," etc. This is the reminder - I'm glad I moderate in what my fellow Yahoo!group members call "full filtering mode." It isn't tricky. It's just a matter of reading every post before it gets posted.

When people post messages to our group, they are typically thoughtful and warm and full of good ideas. Once in a great while, someone will misinterpret another person's words and will post from that misunderstanding. One time, a member of ours wrote in to ask our opinions on the early-toilet-training method. I don't know anything about it, but some people are way into it and others aren't, as you'd expect. This member got bunches of advice. One person must have read her query quickly because he wrote in, "Why did you have a baby if you don't want to take care of it? Is the baby just a plaything to you?"

So, I didn't post that message.

But that's not how most groups are moderated.

This is the reminder that I get when I dive into the conversational pool on most Yahoo!groups. It's not a good or bad thing. It's just a reminder to me that the incentive to join a discussion drops precipitously when a thought or observation can lead to a dialogue from hell. I don't find one minute of my moderation time wasted. I am happy to do it. Of course, reading the messages before posting them is the easiest part of the moderation task. It's much harder to find a polite way to say "Er, we can't post this" and to explain why in a way that won't insult a person. It's worth it.

Rules for the Networking Lunch

2008-05-12T16:08:00.000-07:00

The networking lunch is a time-honored tradition, but that doesn't mean that the protocols surrounding it are well-understood. For job-search networkers, understanding and practicing networking etiquette is, if anything, even more critical than for other types of networkers. That's because job-search networkers rely so heavily on favors from the people they're meeting along the way.

Here are five lunchtime networking protocols to keep in mind as you make your way through the local networking ecosystem. For our examples, we're using the fictional character Carlo as a stand-in for all the networkers you may encounter on your travels:

The Happy-Life Rule.
One of the very most important notions to keep in mind about networking is that when you're the one making the overture, it's your obligation to bend over backwards to accomodate your target contact.

This is because the person you're reaching out to is almost certainly leading a happy and productive life, even without benefit of knowing you! We have to keep in mind that even though Sally and Jack think you and Carlo should meet one another, and even though you've heard incredible things about Carlo and imagine that he'll be happy to have met you once the two of you connect, your initial phone call or email message to Carlo is an intrusion. If you're suggesting lunch, you can't say to Carlo "Let's split the driving distance."

You have to go where he is, within a half-mile or so - or a shorter distance if Carlo lives and/or works downtown and will be walking to your lunch spot.

The Entree Rule. Read the full story here.

I Like the Look of Your Friends

2008-05-10T14:50:00.000-07:00

Here's a new story on Yahoo! about those networkers who see you strictly as a conduit to your network. An excerpt:

I LIKE THE LOOK OF YOUR FRIENDS

If you went to high school, perhaps you remember the "once-removed" theory. The theory says that if you hang around with cool people, you'll be slightly cooler yourself. I don't know whether the theory holds true, but I know there are plenty of networkers who believe in it.

The networking version of the once-removed theory goes like this: The most appealing thing about you, O New Man or Woman in My? Networking Orbit, is your friends! You can spot a friend-seeking networker in a heartbeat.

A Sure Sign

The first thing this type of networker will do is ask a new acquaintance, "So ... know anyone at Microsoft?" Your new acquaintance may feign modest interest in your own likes and dislikes, accomplishments, hopes, and dreams. The friends-first networker truly couldn't care less about any of that. He mainly wants to get his grubby paws on your Rolodex, or the modern equivalent thereof. Your friends, in his eyes, are the sum total of your value.

Read the full story here.

In Da Hoo-uhl of Fame

2008-05-03T21:40:00.000-07:00

Great news, and it's high time, too. Frankie and Yogi and Tom Edison are among the first 15 inductees into the New Jersey Hall of Fame, lemme tell ya. Great stuff.

Derra so many a dese guys! You could induct 15 a month. Famous painters, authors, all sortsa famous people come from the Garden State. I was just there a few weeks ago, and it was the greatest time. I come from Montclair, in North Jersey. Over there, when people say "What exit?" they mean the Parkway. But no one says that, of course, if they're from Jersey.

Lots of crooks in New Jersey, let it be said. They could have a Crooks Hall of Fame, no problem. But you're talking about one of the oldest states, one of the earliest colonies. Lots of history. Seemed like every week in elementary school (they called it grammar school then) we'd be off to some Revolutionary War site for a field trip, some restored colonial farmhouse, or a stop on the Underground Railroad. It's a great state. Lots of heritage. Lots of action packed in there.

2008-04-25T18:32:00.000-07:00

Telling New Boss About Pregnancy

2008-04-24T16:44:00.000-07:00

Here is a post from the Ask Liz Ryan discussion group's conversation today:

A friend of mine has been agonzing about this issue so I thought I would ask all
the wonderful experts on this list.

So, she just accepted a great job but she is pregnant. She wanted to lay
everything out on the table during the interview but many of us talked her out
of it. Now, by the time she starts her job, she will be 15 weeks pregnant and is
stressing out about how and when to approach this issue with her new boss. Any
ideas would be much appreciated because most of the articles out there discuss
how to tell an existing boss and not a brand new one.

Thanks in advance,

Tess

(NOTE FROM LIZ: First off - congrats to her and her family! Fantastic news. Love
those babies! She can wait until she starts the job to share her news, or she
could tell her boss now. It is unlawful to hire or fail to hire a woman based on
her pregnant status, so it's not likely that the company would rescind the offer
after hearing her news. So, she could call her new boss and say "Melinda, I just
wanted to let you know that I'm very excited to start the job on May 5th, AND to
let you know that I'm expecting." Then, she must pause, and wait for Melinda's
reaction.

If Melinda says "What!?@? You didn't know you were expecting when you
interviewed with us?" your friend can say "Just went to the doctor this
morning." It's an unspeakably tacky question, but people ask it nonetheless.

If your friend chooses to wait until she starts working to share her news,
here's a roadmap for her:

1) Wait until day three, four or five of the new job.
2) Steel yourself.
3) Take a deep breath, or several.
4) Walk into your boss's office, and say "Melinda - I haven't been to the doctor
yet, but I'm pretty certain that I'm pregnant, so of course I wanted to let you
know."
5) Clamp your lips together while Melinda reacts.
6) If Melinda asks the unspeakably tacky question, say "I will not be officially
certain until I see the doctor, but from what I understand, I should be having a
baby." Smile.
7) If there is a frosty silence, say "Josh and I are very excited of course, and
I guess there'll be a lot more to talk about down the road, but I wanted to fill
you in right away." Smile. Exit.

There is definitely a certain type of boss who will be angry at this news, but,
not to be flip, that is the boss's problem. No company is legally or ethically
entitled to know the pregnant status of any candidate it is considering for a
job. Best to your friend, Liz)

If You Were an Animal, What Kind Would You Be?

2008-04-10T14:53:00.000-07:00

It's hard enough to find a job that suits your qualifications, your commuting radius and your industry background - one where the people are smart, the leaders are ethical and the managers have a general understanding that people need to go home now and then.

Things get more complicated when you stop and think about how people make hiring decisions.

We've been talking about this topic on the Ask Liz Ryan discussion group lately. It's been a fascinating discussion. Some of our members have strongly-held beliefs about the way that job applicants should behave.

Can we blame them? As long as hiring practices don't discriminate, we're allowed to hire whom we want. You can hire, or not hire, a person because s/he liked "Beowulf," which, in your opinion, reeked.

Or because s/he loved or hated the final episode of "The Sopranos."

Or loves Willy Wonka Nerds Ropes or hates 'em.

You can lose out on a job opening by refusing a glass of water that's offered to you at a job interview.

Does this mean that as a job-seeker you should be on guard, or change the way you answer questions?

Of course not! How could you know what the interviewer is looking for?

When we stop and think about the idiosyncracies of hiring managers, we realize that the only way to get a job is to be yourself. That's the surest course, because you never have to guess at the right answer. If the hiring manager spurns you for refusing the water or for not hating the last episode of "The Sopranos" as much as he does, you dodged a bullet. (Unlike poor Tony. What, you don't agree with me? Why not? - it's obvious, the guy in the Members Only jacket whacked him! Why, anyone could see it! Forget it - I'm not hiring you. :-)

There is another silver lining to the realization that a capricious hiring manager could refuse you a job for the silliest of reasons. The silver lining is this:

If such whimsy has a part in the hiring process, then there's no sense beating yourself up when you lose out on a job.

It's always a good idea to replay the events of the interview process in your mind, to see what you could do better next time. But that's 'better' in the sense of more prepared, more focused and more true to yourself - not 'better' in the sense of 'closer to what they wanted you to be.'

The members of our online community know how I feel about pseudo-psychological interview questions like "What sort of animal would you be?" I loathe them. I think they're insulting and out of place in a professional discussion. But that's just me. If you are a hiring manager and you love these questions and feel they enhance your hiring process, you'll just have to keep asking them. Whether you ask the questions or not, you are bound to hire people who hew to your worldview if it's important to you to do that.

People like to work around people who are like them. So the logic goes like this: if you're a job-seeker, you could lose out on a job because you answered the "type of animal" question with the wrong animal. That seems unfair. But if the manager you interviewed with really cares to populate her office with tigers and cheetahs versus three-toed sloths and bearded dragon lizards, would have been happy there anyway?

I hate the caprice and I hate the pseudo-psych questions, but I bet I'd hate even more a world where hiring decisions were always based on some set of supposedly factual hiring criteria like years of experience, certifications, degrees and test scores.

The silliness/caprice factor does keep some smart people out of jobs they could handle with one eye shut.

But it also keeps job candidates from getting jobs that would be likely to cause them frustration down the road. Imagine the scene - you're in the job for six months, and you share your new marketing plan with your manager. "Ach!" he says, "This is too far out there. Our customers won't understand it." "But they will," you protest, "this is the way the industry is moving."

"I should have known!" rails your manager. "You said you'd be a red-tailed hawk when I hired you - flying dangerously fast and high. We like anteaters and hedgehogs around here. I should have followed my instinct!" And you think, I should have followed mine too - that goofy interview question almost drove me out the door.

Be yourself, hawk or lizard or black-headed ferret. There is a right and wrong environment for you - maybe the silly interview questions are the universe's way of helping you get where you belong.

Not Easily Intimidated

2008-03-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

I'm not saying I'm dauntless, but I'm no fearful bunny either. You can't have five kids and lack an ability to buck up to difficult situations.

Still, I have the feeling I'll be in some sort of distress about a week from now. We are moving on Wednesday. Tomorrow is Easter, and I haven't even purchased eggs, much less set up the annual dyeing operation. I sing at church tomorrow. The day after the move I go out of town to deliver a speech in New York. We will have a house full of boxes at that point. Still, it's exciting - right?

We didn't plan to move. We've only been in our current house for three years. A couple wanted to buy it. We didn't list the house. We didn't use a broker, because these people wanted it - we sold it to them. No broker, no staging, no inspection. Off we go. We found another house quickly - we only looked at two homes, total - on the same block. Location was the big thing.

We painted and re-finished floors and put up a privacy fence and did a few small things. I really hate the new exterior house color but my husband likes it - pick your battles. We've been packing and giving things away and I've been choosing my most favorite house plants to keep. All 75 of them won't fit in the new place, or at least they won't fit in places where they'll get enough sun. So I've got to give half the plants away. As it is, we bring five kids, two dogs, a cat, a rabbit and two guinea pigs with us.

I remain upbeat and excited. We've been cleaning out. We filled two huge dumpsters with stuff we aren't moving. New fridge, new outlook. New colors on the wall, new floors on the -- floor. Shake it up. We'll be able to walk to the grocery store. The last time I lived so close to the supermarket, I didn't have kids. Will I actually walk there? That remains to be seen.

As luck would have it, our good friends around the corner have a new daughter, ten years old - she arrived just this week. She's the perfect recipient for my daughter's outgrown clothes, shoes, books. Fate sent us a young man and his family, new in town, who took the massive redwood climber that our kids were too big for - it took him two full days to disassemble it. Good timing!

So am I in pre-moving denial? Maybe I am. That's okay. I will face down whatever chaos we encounter. The kids are excited about their new bedrooms and the number of kids in the new neighborhood, versus here in Scrape-Off-Ville. I have learned the valuable life lesson that houses with off-white carpet are not ideal for the under-ten crowd - give me those hardwood floors!

Declan's New Cavies

2008-02-23T16:21:00.000-08:00

Just before Christmas, our son Declan lost his precious Puffy, the guinea pig. His tenth birthday is this weekend, so today we had one of our Mystery Bus Tours. We went to Aurora, to a place called Cavy Care Rescue. Shannon, the chief Rescuer, keeps all the guinea pigs that people don't want or can't take care of and adopts them out. She also has a chinchilla and some bunnies, plus a sweet nine-year-old Pomerian dog. Here are the guinea pigs Declan adopted.

The top one is called Chocolate and the bottom one is Dumpling - these are the names Declan gave them. They are a bonded pair of females. Chocolate is a black and red Abyssinian and Dumpling is called a Teddy Bear guinea page. Here is their description (and their former names) from the Cavy Care website:

Yaffa is a lovely little teddy bear tri colored. Her companion Aida is an Abyssinian black, red with a little white milk mustache that is quite charming. They came together and must remain together. It is not our policy to split up pairs because guinea pigs bond for life and I would not want one to mourn the loss of the other. We are here to promote healthy guinea pigs and healthy adoptions. If you would like to meet these little Loves please call to meet them.

They rode home in a box on his lap. Tonight one of Declan's friends is sleeping over and the guinea pigs are the chief attraction! That, and the Wii.

February Networking Ideas

2008-02-08T23:16:00.000-08:00

I don't mind this time of year, but then again I lived in New York for a decade and in Chicago for two more. Wait, I almost forgot Pittsburgh. So February in Boulder doesn't totally depress me, although some town around here got 110 mph winds today - like a hurricane without the rain. I almost got blown off the road yesterday in Broomfield.

Anyway, this is a great time of year to network. Everyone is stuck in their offices or home offices or wherever they work. You can shake it up and get some people together. Here are five February networking ideas to give you some important moral support and idea-sharing opportunities this month.

Invite three friends who don't know one another, to lunch. Four is a good number, and you'll do each of your friends the favor of introducing him or her to two terrific new people.
Do a spa networking thing -- okay, this might work better for women than for men. You can invite people who don't know one another, but if it were me, I'd rather do a spa day with women I already know, because of the scanty coverings involved. Schedule the treatments so that you have plenty of time just to talk. Heavenly!
Call a couple of people you haven't seen in ages -- I mean people you're borderline embarassed to call or write to because it's been so long - and suggest a meeting. I'll be very surprised if any of these folks says "What, you?" People like to hear from people they like. You'd be pleased if one of your old cronies thought of calling you. So do it - networking doesn't have a statute of limitations.
Ask a friend to go with you to a networking event hosted by a group neither of you is familiar with. Let's face it, you're unlikely to do it on your own. So make it a twosome. You'll meet some new people and with luck, get some good ideas, plus the chance to catch up with your friend on the ride to and from the shindig.
Call someone and ask him or her for a catch-up meeting that is not over coffee or lunch. Rather, suggest a walk. Walking and talking is the greatest, and you'll feel much better after your walk-and-talk than you would downing one more cup of coffee. Seriously.

If you are not a natural or a comfortable networker, write to us in the Ask Liz Ryan discussion group and ask for suggestions. We've got loads of 'em. Networking is not just about business leads or job-search leads or any other kind of transaction. The benefits of networking are many, but my top three are: fresh ideas --- moral support --- and the opportunity to help other people. What more could you ask for from an hour's time?

Memorability and Significance

2008-02-05T14:33:00.000-08:00

There was a post on the Ask Liz Ryan discussion group about being memorable - so that when you meet other people, they don't immediately forget you about you.

This is a great topic because if you have ever experienced it, you know the particular mix of feelings - dismay, disconcertedness and irritation, for instance - that go along with being forgotten by a person you've met, had numerous heartfelt conversations with, or even shared a meal with. It stinks to have people forget you, no doubt about it.

So the topic was "how can I become more memorable?" Here are my thoughts.

There are ways that are commonly suggested to networkers to help people remember that they've already met you. One is to wear the same lapel pin all the time, or different lapel pins with the same motif, such as zebras or goldfish.

This is a good suggestion - in my experience, it works. When I see that zebra or goldfish, I think "Okay, I've met her before." The zebra or goldfish helps to do something. A good question is "What does the zebra or goldfish do?" It causes some neurons to fire, and say "You know her." The zebra lady's memorability quotient goes up.

Now, let's ask this followup question: what do we want to be memorable for?

Here in our town, there is a young man of about 20 who has his whole face tattooed. It's a bit shocking. I feel bad for him, and as a mom, I feel bad for his mom. Whatever this young man may have accomplished or may yet accomplish, everyone knows him because his face is tattooed. The teenagers call the poor young man "Face." There is another young man in town whose face is half-covered by a tattoo. The kids call this fellow "Half-Face." You see one of these guys, you won't forget him. The memorability level for both of them is off the charts.

And here's the thing - we don't know anything about these two guys, Face and Half-Face. One may play the cello and the other one may be incredible with animals, but all we know is that they opted to get their faces tattooed.

Memorability is not the same as significance. I had a neighbor across the street for four years. I knew the guy did not register me - I'd say Hi and he'd say Hi and I was not on his radar screen in the slightest degree. I went to eat lunch with a friend, and the friend said "Oh, let me introduce you to Terry!" I smiled, because I recognized Terry as my former across-the-street neighbor and I knew that when my friend introduced us, he'd say "Nice to meet you," and of course that's what happened. I was not significant to him. It's not hard to see why. He saw me schlepping around town with my kids, smaller than his kids, and I'm sure he thought "a mom" and that was that. We never talked about business or the arts or politics or anything else. The conversation never went that far. I could say "his loss" but I don't feel that way - after all, none of us has time to meet all of the six billion people in the world. My significance (and memorability) to Terry was very low. That is reality - it's not a problem. Had Terry and I had lunch or sat in committee meetings together, if he forgot that we'd met, I would be concerned.

So if that happened and if I were concerned, I would work not on my memorability with Terry (lapel pins etc.) but on the significance of our interaction. If I had a reason to be known to Terry, e.g., we served on a committee together, I'd try for a conversation that found common ground in our interests. I'd get to know enough about him to create a bond based on what Terry cares about.

Significance is more important than memorability, in my view. It is easy to be known and to remembered for what we are known for - a loud laugh, a goofy introduction line, or a face-sized tattoo. It is a bit harder but more effective to become significant to the people whose connection we value.

I don't want Terry or anyone else to see me and start firing neurons that say "I've met her - I see that zebra pin." If I am significant to the people I care to know and be known by, they won't forget me. That's my plan for this lifetime. Next lifetime, I may opt for that half-face tattoo.

Something's Gotta Give

2007-12-29T14:01:00.000-08:00

Even before we found out about Revels in our family, and the winter Solstice tradition, we were way into New Year customs. My best friend, Caty's godmother, Alice, told us about sweeping out the house on New Year's Eve and about throwing pennies out the doors and windows.

It's a new year, for Pete's sake.

If now isn't a good time to make changes, when would a better time be?
It's cold out - at least in Boulder. You're not going to go for a bike ride, not unless you're one of our local maniacs who cycles in all weathers, ice be damned. It's a good time to think about what you'd like to do differently - and what you'd like to leave the same.

I know, some people aren't into resolutions.

Call them goals, call it visioning, whatever you call it, isn't this the time?

What to keep and what to sweep away, this year?

Wishing You My Kind of Christmas

2007-12-13T13:30:00.000-08:00

There was some discussion on the Ask Liz Ryan email group this week about donation-type holiday presents. This has been a popular discussion topic this Christmas season because so many people are becoming eco-conscious. That would seem like a good thing, but the counter position is that it's not right or appropriate to force your views on other people via message-laden holiday gifts.

For instance, let's say that your sister is vegan and gives you a vegan cookbook as a present. That might be a great present if you're interested in vegan cooking. On the other hand, it might be a terrible present if you've had many conversations with your sister over the years about your love of meat and fish and whatever else vegans don't eat.

You might feel like your sister was trying to shove her views down your throat.

Way back in the summer, one of our members wrote about having received a diet book from an aunt when she was a child. Yuck! Most of us could imagine the bad reaction that gift would inspire. Undoubtedly the aunt was only trying to help her dear niece shed some lbs. But what a disastrous way to send the message!

Here's a fictional dialogue about this message-bearing-gift issue. What's your take?

JILL: You know Sarah, I don't want you to be unhappy with me when you see what I've bought your girls for Christmas.

ELLEN: The fact that you're saying that at all is alarming. Do you want to tell me what you got them, or leave it a surprise?

JILL: Let's just say I got them items that I think are great for girls their age. I mean, a gift is an expression of who you are, right? So this is a gift straight from the heart of their Aunt Jill.

ELLEN: Okay, Jill. But I can tell you, and please don't take this the wrong way, the book on composting that you got Melody last year went over like a lead balloon. And I can't say that Tiffany was overjoyed with the hemp weaving kit she got. I mean, the girls are 13 and 14. They're just not into composting and hemp.

JILL: I understand that. But how can they be into things they haven't been exposed to? Is it wrong of me to try to have a positive influence on two children I love?

ELLEN: I'm trying not to hear that as a statement about the terrible influence you must feel that Roger and I have on them.

JILL: Look, you and I are different. You are the girls' mom. You know what they like, what they talk about. You gratify their wishes to get jewelry from Claire's and all that junk.

ELLEN: Hey, don't be so subtle, Jill; just tell me what you really think!

JILL: You know what I think. I think the girls are drowning in stuff they don't need. Is it so awful of me to try to be a small voice in the opposite direction?

ELLEN: Not at all. I believe that kids are influenced by all sorts of people all the time, and you are certainly someone the girls look up to. But you have to know in all candor that the girls don't love your gifts, and here's why. They feel that you buy gifts for the nieces you wish you had, instead of the ones you've got. In every gift from Aunt Jill is a little message: You Should Be Different Than You Are.

JILL: People can expand their horizons! Would you rather I got them iTunes gift cards?

ELLEN: Roger and I already got those. You know why? Because the girls asked for them.

JILL: Exactly my point. Like every other teenager in America, they'll have more pop tunes to listen to. When do they learn about the planet we live on, and what's happening to it?

ELLEN: I can't talk you out of buying the girls whatever you want to buy them. But I need to tell you this. Your relationship with them will suffer if you use them as a little slates for your political agenda, especially in gift-giving. If I recall, gifts are supposed to be given from the part of our hearts that says "I know you and I have thought about what you'd like" rather than from the part of our brain that says "Here is what you need."

JILL: But isn't it an expression 0f love to take a chance and give someone something that might help them more than whatever they think they want? Or should we just throw in the towel and buy them makeup and bling for their cell phones, every year?

ELLEN: This is how I feel - like you want to deny the girls' right to be exactly who they are, absolutely perfect creatures the way they are right now.

JILL: And this is how I feel - like you want me to say "it's okay girls, you don't have to know who Aunt Jill really is and what she cares about. I'll just kowtow to your mom's wishes and pick up some Limited Too gift certificates on my way home from work."

ELLEN: My personal view, positive influence is always voluntary. There are ways that you could educate the girls about things you think are important without turning their favorite holiday into a forced educational experience.

JILL: Gifts are to be accepted with gratitude, Ellen! One could make the argument that it's rude of you even to suggest what I should give the girls for Christmas.

ELLEN: You are correct. I always instruct the girls to thank you and all of their relatives for the presents they get. I'm not talking about protocol here. I'm talking about something that I hope is more important than protocol, namely, what your relationship will be with these two girls as they get older. I'll tell you this much, they won't tolerate being little test tubes in your grow-an-environmentalist laboratory for much longer.

JILL: That's great, Ellen. Turn my expression of love for my nieces into a personal attack.

ELLEN: I just think your gifts are anti-gifts. I'm telling you because I care about your relationship with the kids, and every time we go through this, they're pushed further away from you. You've been sending the same message for years. We get it. You care about the environment. What if you put your own agenda to the side this year and delighted the girls with something THEY care about?

JILL: Why don't you just send me a typed list of the things they've asked for and I'll dutifully head to Target and start working on the list.

ELLEN: Oh for Pete's sake, Jill....

Is there an answer to this dilemma? I'm not sure. For me, a donation to a group like the Heifer Project steers mostly clear of the problem. Maybe not for everyone - maybe not a 13-year-old. Tricky, tricky.

What's the More Evolved Version of "I Told You So?"

2007-11-29T14:12:00.000-08:00

3com is being sold -- they found a buyer for the company, somehow. I know, I know, it's impolite to say "I told you so." Still, there must be an acceptable version of that sentiment, something about validation and trusting your gut.

Anyway, in this case, I was far from the only person who told you so. There were about 7000 of us, as I recall. Plus, in my example there's no "you." The story is that about 7000 of us U.S. Robotics people, back in 1997, had the sharp and unmistakable feeling in our guts that nothing good could come out of our company's acquisition by the muddled-thinking, pompous, Starbuck's-in-the-reception-area-by-the-reflecting-pool people of 3com.

So ten years down the road, 3com is being acquired for $2.2 billion by a Chinese concern, and there's some consternation in Washington about it because of the idea of the Chinese having access to our technology. Why am I not losing sleep about whatever technology the Chinese can get from 3com?

Given that USR was acquired for six billion dollars, ten years ago, and that one of the smaller divisions of the company at the time of the deal was Palm Computing, and that 3com was about USR's size at the time of the acquisition, I'd say that 3com's stellar management team destroyed something between $10 - $15 billion in shareholder value in ten years. Does that sound about right to you? I'm not a financial person - I'm an HR Opera Singer, for Pete's sake.

One of my favorite post-acquisition stories was from a person who stayed on with the new combined company after USR was sucked into 3com. He went to a meeting about a year after the deal closed, at 3com's then-headquarters in Santa Clara. At the meeting, he was horrified to see a presenter walk the audience through a Power presentation on the state of some project. Horrified - because this fellow in the audience had created the Powerpoint himself and had presented it a full year before! Not only was the purloined Powerpoint offered up as original, but in the intervening year, none of the recommendations had been taken up and none of the milestones had been met. Someone just took the Powerpoint and changed the dates. Talk about Office Space!

So this was the 3com that bought USR and then slowly tanked, and it sounds melodramatic, but they killed something really cool when they bought USR and smashed into robo-paste. It was not perfect by a long stretch, but we had a good company where people had fun working hard and coming up with great products. You don't find that every day.

I've written more 3com-inspired bad management stories than I can remember, but here is one of my favorites.

We said it, we said it over and over: this can't work. These guys are full of hot air. From the first moment I was exposed to the 3com leadership, I wondered: why does every manager you talk to in this place make excuses for Eric, the CEO? They say, "He's really smart, it's just that..." and they say "He's a great guy, but you have to understand...." What kind of company has a CEO that people have to make excuses for?

Then there was Homer. Homer was a great friend of mine since we were literally teenagers working together at our previous job, before we ever heard of USR. He passed away just before I moved to Colorado - at age 40, the saddest thing ever. I met Homer before he learned English, when he'd just arrived from Baguio City in the Philippines in order to replace his older brother Hernando (8 boys in the family, all bearing "H" names) who wasn't coming back to the U.S. anytime soon after his vacation.

Homer worked at USR and got laid off soon after the 3com deal was done. At that time, they didn't want to pay anyone the six months severance package, so they'd search like crazy for another job for you in the company in hopes that they could force you to take the lower-level job available or quit, sans severance. Amazingly, they found nothing in IT for Homer to do, so they gave him the six-month check and his walking papers. He found a job in ten minutes (this was during the boom) but a month later they called him back. Hey Homer, they said, we have another job for you. He called me up. Should I go interview with them? he said. Do it, I said, it will be interesting. Mostly likely you won't want the job, but there'll be anthropological value in talking to them.

So he did. They offered him the job. And they said, "Of course, you'll have to give us the severance check back. You can keep one month's pay and give us back the other five."

Really? You laid me off, and I only have to pay you five months of salary for the privilege of coming back to work for you? As my dear husband would say: pull the needle out of your arm. Can you imagine the organizational braindeath that would allow a human being to say that to another person with a straight face?

Homer stayed put in his new job, of course. In a company, the quality of leadership is everything. Culture is everything. Respect for people is so important. We said it in '97 -- these people are headed straight down the tubes. Hate to be right about a thing like that, for the sake of thousands of laid-off 3com people and the customers and the shareholders too. But we can at least say this: we saw it coming, from a mile away.

This is Networking?

2007-11-06T10:39:00.000-08:00

A few months I more or less bashed the new social-networking site Viadeo on this blog, and after that post was published I heard from a couple of people who work for Viadeo. I was impressed that they would take the time to write to me, and one of them offered to talk on the phone, but, sad to say, I don't have time to do that.

I just can't make it a priority to talk to these folks, nice as I'm sure they are, and hear about how they're working on the bugs that I complained about in my earlier blog post.

The thing is, though, that after I heard from these Viadeo guys I felt kinda bad. I'm not a basher, in general, except when I bash abstract ideas like forced-ranking systems and companies abusing job-seekers and junk like that. These Viadeo people, of course, are real people, so it was a little different. Even though the excuse they gave me in their email messages -- explaining why the site had so many problems --- was the world's worst excuse ("we have just launched the English version of the site") --- I've been wondering whether I should give them another chance.

Okay, so now you have the setup. Then, today, comes this message in my in-box. I'm not blaming the Viadeo guys for the message, of course -- you get this kind of thing from LinkedIn and Facebook too -- but check this out. Is this networking?:

I have recently been invited to join this network by Eric Didier, COO of Viadeo. He has encouraged me to build a profile and a group for my company [whatever]. We are currently building a network that spans an endless taxonomy for [blah blah blah]. [Our thing] is a [yada yada] website where members can upload there books, media, training courses, PDF, presentations, etc… and give it away for free or fee. Our vision for [this outfit] is to have a common medium of communication for cross pollinating global teachings on everything in the world. Our hopes are that we will help bridge the gaps in education, religion, politics, and economic barriers globally. Every business connection brings us one step closer to finding the contributors who will hopeful one day change the world through education. I look forward to sharing ideas and a mutually beneficial relationship! Sincerely, [el Spamito]

Seriously -- is there any way this could be considered networking? Don't know the guy from Adam; and here comes this email message inviting me to connect directly with him on Viadeo, and the message is nothing but a misspelled, long-winded promo for his website. Yes, let's do, by all means, I couldn't imagine anything more delightful than being your direct connection on Viadeo! And also, can you please come to my house and stick needles in my eyes? What the heck!

You reach out to someone, you want to say something about that person. Like "we know Marjorie Smith in common" or "I have heard so much about you" or "I saw you speak at the Rotary Club luncheon last month." The worst part of it is that every other word I write is networking how-to advice. So if you send me a spamtastic opening message, then it's a double diss, because you're saying "I don't have two seconds to spend looking into who you are or what you've written" along with the usual "here's all about ME."

Yeah, so Viadeo is back in my doghouse.

The Two Faces of Ivo: A Fable

2007-11-01T08:56:00.000-07:00

Ivo Jukic stared at his computer. He’d been struggling with the same logical problem for twenty minutes, and that wasn’t like him. Ivo frowned. Why is this so difficult? he wondered. He’d solved harder problems than this in half the time. He pushed back his chair and looked at the ceiling.

Ivo knew why he was distracted. His wife Marjana was six weeks away from delivering their first child, and things at Ivo’s company weren’t great. His boss, Jason, was in New York today meeting with the company’s president. Ivo blew out a breath. He’d been reading up on COBRA. If Ivo should lose his job, his family’s medical coverage would continue for a while. But what about the mortgage, and the utilities? What about gas for his car? Ivo sighed. Just then, the phone rang.

“Hi, gorgeous!” sang Marjana’s voice.

“What are you up to this morning?” asked Ivo. ”Just work,” said Marjana. “I called to remind you, my doctor’s appointment is at three this afternoon. I took the train to work, so do you want to pick me up at my office?”

“Babe, I’m not sure I can go with you to the doctor today,” said Ivo. “I’m glad you called. You might have to take the train downtown. Jason is in New York, and somebody might need a quick bug fix from our group, so I have to stay here.”

“Shoot,” said Marjana. “Are you sure?”
”I don’t want to be paranoid,” said Ivo. “Probably, I can disappear for two hours with no problem. But things are so weird here right now. Let me call Jason really quick and call you back.”
”Okay, I’ll be here,” said Marjana. Ivo dialed his manager’s cell phone and Jason picked up on the first ring.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Jason,” began Ivo, “but I wanted to see if you thought there’d be any problem if I went with Marjana to the doctor this ---“

“No problem,” said Jason wearily, “go for it, and take her to lunch. Tell Marjana I said hi.”
”What’s wrong, Jason?” asked Ivo. “You sound exhausted.”
”We were here until three a.m. last night,” said Jason. “It’s a bad deal, Ivo. It looks like our whole division is going under the ax.”
”Whoa,” said Ivo. “Are you allowed to talk about it?”
”I told Frank that I was going to tell you and Cindy about it,” said Jason. “There’s an all staff meeting planned for Friday, but I wanted to tell you two guys about it myself, because we’ve worked together so long. Please don’t say anything to Cindy until I get ahold of her.”
”Of course,” said Ivo. “Is there anything else I should know?”
”The meeting will be Friday, and that’ll be our last day,” said Jason. “I’m leaving, we’re all leaving, and they’re figuring out the severance packages now.”
”Do you know what you’re gonna do next?” asked Ivo.
”No idea, but we can have coffee next week and brainstorm, eh?” asked Jason with a sad laugh.

“Listen, Jason, this sucks, but you’re a great boss and I appreciate what you’ve done for me,” said Ivo.
“That is just like you, Ivo!” laughed Jason. “This is where you’re supposed to say, ‘What the hell, I’ve worked my ass off for seven years and now—“

“Shut up Jason, you’re insulting me,” said Ivo. Jason laughed.

The two of them were silent for a moment.

“It’s been fun,” said Jason finally.

“I can’t believe I was twenty-five when you hired me,” said Ivo. “You’ve taught me a lot.”

”Okay, that’s enough of that,” said Jason. “No group hugs yet. I’ll see you on Friday morning.”

”Thanks, Jason,” said Ivo. “I know this sucks for you.”

”What are you gonna do?” asked Jason, and hung up the phone.

Ivo looked out the window. He picked up the phone.

”Marjana?” he said. “I’ll pick you up at two-thirty.”

.........................

Ivo stared at his screen. He’d been applying for jobs online for a week, and he was already burnt out on the process. He dialed his brother’s number. “Darko, do you remember the name of that headhunter who came to your niece’s christening?” he asked. “Sure, that was Al Maklovic, and I’ve got his number somewhere,” said Darko. “How’s the job search going?””It’s okay,” said Ivo. “I’m not too worried, but it’s so isolating, sitting here staring at the computer. I haven’t had any interviews yet. But I’ve sent out about a dozen resumes.”

“You gotta crank it, bro,” said Darko. “A dozen resumes in two weeks won’t cut it. It’s all about volume.”

“I’ve been painting the baby’s room and working on my car,” said Ivo. “I can’t just stare at these job sites all day long.” “I know, it’s the worst,” said Darko, “but that’s the only way you’re gonna get a call.”

“Okay, get me that number, willya?” asked Ivo, and went back to the screen. He looked over his resume for the fifteenth time. Is this resume going to do it for me? he wondered.
Ivo looked at his watch. He had promised to meet Jason for coffee at four p.m. and it was noon already. Ivo set a goal for himself. I’ll send out a dozen resumes before I go to meet Jason. Just then, Ivo noticed that the red light on his phone was flashing. When did that happen?,he wondered. Ivo picked up the phone.

“You have four new messages,” the robot lady’s voice said. Four! Ivo tried not to get excited as he grabbed a pen to write down the messages.
“Ivo, this is Gloria Smith from Klein Manufacturing,” said the first caller. “We got your resume, and we’d be interested in learning more about you for an opening in our Applications Engineering group. I’ve sent our candidate questionnaire to the email address listed on your resume. If you could fill that out and send it back to us, we’d be very grateful.”
Ivo downloaded email and, sure enough, there was the Klein Manufacturing questionnaire. He wanted to open the attachment and take a look, but no – three other messages were still on his machine.

“Hello Mr. Jukic,” said the second caller. She stumbled over Ivo’s last name, like everyone else who wasn’t Bosnian. “This is Amanda Reynolds, from Charles Electronics. We were very impressed with your resume and would like to schedule a phone interview when it’s convenient. Can you please call me back?” Ivo scribbled down Amanda’s number. Pay dirt! he thought. Two job leads in ten minutes.

The third message was from Marjana’s mom, wanting to know if Marjana could join her for a concert a few weeks out. Ivo smiled. He knew there was no concert, only a surprise baby shower, but he’d promised his mother-in-law he’d keep the secret. Marjana probably suspected, too, but it was fun pretending.

Ivo skipped ahead to the last message. “Ivo, this is Sandra Levine from Parallel Industries,” said the caller. “We got your resume, and would love to talk with you. We have an opening that you might be interested in. Can you please call me when you can?” Ivo grabbed his pen and scratched down Sandra’s number. He stood up, went to the sink and splashed his face with water. Showtime!, he said to himself. He sat down and picked up the phone.

Two hours later, Ivo stood up, stunned. He’d left a message for Gloria Smith, letting her know he’d received the Klein Manufacturing questionnaire. He’d spoken live to Amanda Reynolds, the HR person from Charles Electronics. They’d had a good conversation, and she’d set up an interview for him – tomorrow! – with the head of Engineering. Then, he’d called Parallel Industries, and gotten the biggest surprise of the day.

Sandra Levine was the VP of HR for Parallel, and she’d spent fifteen minutes on the phone filling Ivo in on the company’s business and its latest big project. Then, she’d transferred him to the VP of Software Development, Mo Cloonan. Mo and Ivo had talked for another half hour, during which Mo shared his plans with Ivo and learned what Ivo was looking for in a job. Somehow, they’d gotten off the topic of work altogether and Ivo had said something about Marjana’s pregnancy – sending Mo off on a tangent about his new granddaughter in Michigan. Mo and Ivo had made plans to meet tomorrow night, for dinner. Mo had even said “Your resume caused quite a stir over here, and your three patents didn’t hurt either. We could really use someone with your background.” Ivo dialed Marjana’s number at work, thinking: I wonder if these guys would have a job for Jason?

The next thirty hours were an exhilarating blur. Ivo had a fantastic interview with Charles Electronics, and an even better talk over dinner with Mo Cloonan of Parallel Industries. Mo had finished their meeting by saying, “There are three or four people I’d like you to meet in our shop, Ivo. But I have an offer to make you right now, if you’re interested. We are exhibiting at a trade show next week. If you can join us in the booth in Las Vegas, we’d love to have you there. I’ll pay you as a contractor if you can make it. You’ll have a great chance to get to know the product and team, and we’ll get to know you better, too.” Ivo said yes to that offer on the spot.

Back at home, he filled Marjana in on his day. “This is crazy, Ivo,” said Marjana. “We’ve still got another four weeks of your severance package. You may be working before the severance runs out.” ”Well, I don’t feel bad about that,” said Ivo. “Our baby deserves a little bonus, and so do you, with all the hours I worked at the old job.” “Oh, I know,” said Marjana, “but it’s kind of a lucky thing, isn’t it?”

“Say, Marjana,” said Ivo, “Did I tell you your mom called, about a concert?”

Two days later, Ivo was standing in the security line at the airport, headed for Las Vegas. He’d just gotten off the phone with Mo Cloonan, who’d laughingly told him that the division VP had said, “If this Jukic guy is so hot, why don’t you hire him? I don’t want to pay an hourly contractor rate for all those dinners and parties in Vegas!” But, as Mo explained, Ivo couldn’t be brought on the full-time Parallel payroll until his background check was complete, and that would take a few days.

Ivo had said, “Look, Mo, I’m grateful for you speeding things along. I’m really excited to work with your guys. The product is very cool, and your team is incredible.””Thanks for saying that, Ivo,” said Mo. “At Parallel we feel like the only thing we can compete with is the people who work in the company.” “I can see that,” said Ivo. “I only met you for the first time less than a week ago, and I already feel really comfortable with you and everyone in the group. I feel really lucky.”

“Hey, we feel lucky too, Ivo,” said Mo. “I talked to your last boss, Jason, earlier today, and he couldn’t say enough great things about you. I’m hoping we can create a position for that guy – he sounds like a winner.” “He’s the best,” said Ivo. “You don’t even have to pay me a referral bonus.”

“Whoa, whoa,” said Mo, “Your referral bonus is the dinners I’ll be buying you in Vegas.” “Vegas dinners are cheap,” said Ivo. Mo laughed and hung up. Ivo thought, “If I’m a manager someday, that’s how I’m going to hire people.”

Hailing a cab at the airport in Las Vegas, Ivo felt his cell phone quiver on his hip. He grabbed it and snapped it open to see a familiar number on the screen. “Luba!” he said. “Long time no talk! What’s new?”

“Hiya Ivo,” said Luba, Darko’s ex-girlfriend. “I’m great. I’ve been thinking about you and Marjana and the baby. It’s so exciting!”

“We are excited,” said Ivo. “We’re looking at cribs this weekend. It’s getting close.”

“Well, so I was thinking about you, and then I started hearing your name in my office,” said Luba. “It’s crazy! You’re the talk of the town at my job!”

“Uh – I am?” asked Ivo. “Where are you working now?”

”Well, I’m temping,” said Luba. “I’ve got a year to go in my nursing program, so I’m working office jobs to pay the bills. I’ve got this temp assignment at a place called Klein Manufacturing. You must have sent in a resume?”

“Oh man, that’s right,” said Ivo. “I did, but you know, I got these two incredible opportunities on the same day, so I backed out of the process. I told this Gloria woman that I didn't have time to fill out this questionnaire they sent me, because I was pursuing these other things. And the one that I’m taking, Luba, it’s unreal, let me tell you, I’m in Vegas right ---“

“You don’t have to explain to me,” laughed Luba, “even though I’d love to catch up and hear how you and Marjana are doing and all about your job search. But anyway, here at Klein, they’re saying you’re arrogant because you didn’t fill out our questionnaire. They’re talking about you like they know you, which really pissed me off because I DO know you and I think you’re the greatest guy on the planet, better than your hot but unreliable brother Darko.”

”Hey hey, none of that,” said Ivo, “I still root for you and Darko to get back together –“

“Which might happen if he solves his arrested development problem,” said Luba, “but I’m trying to tell you, these people were dragging your name through the mud.”

”Seriously?” asked Ivo. “I mean, what could they know about me?”

”Well, they know that you think you’re too good to fill out their questionnaire, or they think they know that, so they take that little piece they think they know and blow it up to say that you’re high-maintenance and a prima donna. I just wanted to let you know, so in case this job offer falls through, you don’t circle back to Klein Manufacturing. But listen, I’m happy for you Ivo, and give Marjana a hug for me. I gotta fly.”

“Okay, take it easy Luba,” said Ivo, and paid the cabdriver. So, Klein Manufacturing thinks I’m arrogant? How strange. Well, life is long. I’m not gonna lose any sleep over it.

Ivo spotted the team from Parallel huddling in the hotel lobby. “Hey, guys!” he called. “Yo, Ivo!” they answered. “Come over and look at these plans for the booth. This demo is in a weird spot, right? We can change that. Hey, Marco, get Ivo a drink, wouldja?”

Should Hits the Fan

2007-10-24T09:49:00.000-07:00

I always say that righteous indignation is the most dangerous emotion. When you're full of self-righteous fire, you can do anything...including all sorts of ill-advised things that you might regret later. The weird thing that you learn as you get older is that being right isn't the be-all and end-all. Sometimes it can feel like it, though. And that's if you are right. You might be righteously indignant and be wrong. Or right and wrong might not even enter the equation.

One day I was sitting in a coffee shop sipping my coffee and reading my newspaper. A woman across the way looked vaguely familar, so I smiled at her. She came over to me. She stood next to me with a kind of pursed-lips look on her face like she was wondering whether or not to speak. Finally she said, "Liz, right?" "Uh, yep." I said. Strange greeting.

"You were the one who was supposed to sing with our choir and then didn't," she said.
Whoa!
I thought back. I've sung all over town.
"Sorry, which choir do you sing with?" I asked her. She told me. I was silent for a moment. I didn't feel like I needed to launch into a whole explanation of the choir story to this lady I didn't even know. She seemed to be kind of pissed off and challenging. I asked, "Were you curious about why I didn't end up singing with the choir? And by the way, what is your name again?"

She told me her name and said "Yes, I was curious." So I told her.

It's a simple story. I'm a soprano soloist. I sang once or twice at this particular church, and the music director asked me if I'd sing more often there. I said sure, send me the church schedule and I'll suggest some pieces to sing on certain weeks during the year. The lady sent me the schedule and I sent her back a bunch of musical ideas, and I never heard from her again. That was that. I have a regular church thing now. I explained this to the lady in the coffee shop. She looked sheepish.

"We just wondered what happened to you," she said. On my lips was "You should have asked the choir director" or "Why didn't you ask, then?" But really! What's the point? I'm not going to should on this lady, even though she was more than ready to should on me, a complete stranger.

I still believe that righteous indignation is the scariest emotion. But it's hard to put that belief into practice. You can say to yourself "What's just happened is outrageous and someone needs to speak. I am full of righteous wrath or fortitude or evangelistic fervor right now. But will something terrible happen if I don't react to the heinous thing that's just happened?" Sometimes it's best to stay cool. I'm sure you have experienced that.

Now I have a new mantra. It springs from the righteous indignation thing, but it's more specific. It's one word: should. That's a very loaded word. There are two different kinds of shoulds. One is non-judgmental. Someone says "I got this scratch on my car" and you say "You should take it over to Joe at the Auto Wash, he's brilliant with scratches." No judgment. You can should away the day with tips like that.

The other should is the dangerous one. Here's how you should act. Here's how you should feel. Older I get, the less I see this kind of should being appropriate - no matter who you and and no matter whom you're speaking with. People get to live their own lives. Who are we to tell them what to do?

It comes up on our online community. You should tip x or y percent. You shouldn't have reacted this way when this or that person said this or that to you. You should take responsibility. You should stop complaining.

There is a nerve that gets hit. Sometimes I post a message from one of our members, and it seems perfectly innocuous to me. It's just a message, a query, an observation or a request for help. But it hits a nerve in some people. It ticks them off. Some people can be ticked off and still react to the issue - here is what I think or I have a different view. Other people can't stop at the issue. They go right to the person, the original poster. You should. You shouldn't. You should have this, you shouldn't have that.

This looks a lot like fear-based behavior to me. Fear of what? Good question. But a nerve gets hit and the Shoulds come out of the woodwork.

I don't post messages that disparage other posters. That's easy. Sometimes the Shoulds are postable but, in my view, inappropriate. It's not just in our online community that this kind of communication is sub-optimal. It's anywhere and in any way that humans converse. We have posted before about unsolicited-advice-givers. What sort of unsolicited advice is more unwelcome than "you should believe what I believe" or "you should act as I would act?"

Here is an example. A person writes to say that she doesn't like her job. She wants advice on dealing with this problem. I understand all the kinds of advice she gets, except one kind...the kind that says "deal with it, stop complaining." Where does that come from? Someone was angered by the original query. You should just buck up is what this person writes. What kind of advice is that, really?

I will be more conscious of my Shoulds from now on. What is your experience with Should-y conversation? What brings on a Should attack, and what is the best way to handle one? If you are prone to Should-ing from time to time yourself, please post a comment and help us understand the motivation. There are two sides to every story, so they say.

In Praise of Small Fun

2007-10-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

I took two of my kids to visit my parents over the weekend. It took two long flights to get there, but we got to see Grandma and Grandpa and my kids' cousins and two of my sisters and my brothers-in-law. One day, my dad took us to visit a friend of his in the same community, who let my kids goof around with his very elaborate flight simulation software and controls. We examined the catfish fighting over bread crusts in the lake. We went swimming and went to my parents' church.

In our house, we are always looking for small fun opportunities. Disneyland is fine. We've taken our kids there a couple of times. We look for less-stimulating, less-expensive things to do when we're not doing big, exciting things.

The weekend before, we made our leaf-spotting drive up the Peak to Peak Highway to Estes Park, where the elk are bugling and gathering in the golf course downtown. The bigger kids complain about that trip every year. But we get to talk, and hear what's new with them. In the Spring, I take the smaller ones down to Marshall Road where the cow moms gather with their babies.

When we lived in Chicago, we used to go to Door County, but there's nothing quite like Door County in Colorado. We've been to Aspen. It's not my cup of tea. Even Steamboat Springs is a little glitzy, but we like the rodeo there, and walking around downtown and visiting the waterfall. We go up to South Dakota every now and then, and see how the Crazy Horse carving is coming along, and visit Mount Rushmore and the Badlands.

It is easy to forget what the country looks like, and how far it really is from Denver to Kansas City, when you fly everywhere. We've never taken all five of our kids anywhere by air, although they've flown here and there in twos and threes. We drive or take the train. We've taken the train coast to coast, to the beach in North Carolina and to Sacramento on the other end of the continent.

We drive to Yellowstone and Texas and southern New Mexico and northwest Arkansas where my husband's parents are. We love to drive with the kids, and sometimes we bring the portable DVD player and sometimes we don't. By now, they sing along with Frank Sinatra and Johnny Cash and Hank Williams and the original cast of "Oklahoma," though the older kids bring their iPods and headphones, too. The younger boys have comic books. Everyone except the driver gets to nap. We know all about Lusk, Wyoming and Chadron, Nebraska and Siloam Springs and lots of little towns in Minnesota and Idaho and Missouri. We like to go from Point A to Point B and see what's in between.

We know all the cheesy roadside Route 66 museums and the small-town historical societies by now. Now, we want to see them all.

Small fun is its own reward. You don't have expectations of it, the way you do of an exotic destination. You have to walk a ways uphill to get to Doc Holliday's gravesite in Glenwood Springs, but when you do, you are glad you make the walk. When you embark on a small-fun expedition, you're not stressed out about possibly not getting your money's or your time's worth. And there's so much of it around!

Nursing Mom Wins Extra Test-Taking Time

2007-10-04T23:36:00.001-07:00

Sophie Currier won her case on appeal, allowing her to have extra time to nurse her baby during the nine-hour medical exam she needs to pass in order to get a job in her field. Here's what kills me about this story. The people who resent Ms. Currier's extra-time allowance point to the fact that she already got approval to take the test over two days, versus the usual one, because of her learning disabilities. How much special treatment does she want? they wonder.

How about this: as much as she needs, given her real-life condition. The board had already granted this student extra time to take the test based on her ADHD and other diagnoses. At issue more recently was whether her breast-feeding state should entitle her to more breaks during the test -- not more time to answer the questions. The board said no, but they were overruled in this latest decision.

Are we still at a place where we don't think learning disabilities are real? Maybe this lady just loves to file lawsuits. Maybe she's a big slacker. The lady has a combination MD-PhD from Harvard. How many of us could manage that without a nursing baby and without ADHD?

The question is whether a nursing mom has a legitimate, significant obstacle to performing tasks such as nine-hour tests if she's not granted an accomodation such as a longer break. That's the issue. If the lady had already had special accomodations made, that's not relevant to the nursing issue, because the very same board who pushed back against her against-time-to-nurse request had already granted the other accomodation. What's sad is for people to look at this case and say, "This lady is a complainer" or, as in the case of the commenter below, "I hope she fails." Nice.

You think that Sophie Currier went to the Board of Examiners and said "Hey you guys, I have ADHD, I need extra time to take this test" and they said, "Sure, take all the time you want"? No way. She had to jump through major hoops on that issue, no question. You think she used up her God-given allotment of accomodations then?

Maybe she just has a lot of nerve having a baby when she's trying to become a doctor. Or she has a lot of nerve to keep nursing when she would have made the Board of Examiners' lives so much easier by weaning the kid at four months.

This med student had one of the foremost pediatricians in the country championing her cause, not some girls from the gym. The pediatrician argued that there are negative health effects to a mom when she doesn't nurse her baby every few hours. Like, for one, her breasts get engorged and it's excruciating. Is that not a real thing? Or is the official view STBY?

Here are reader comments from the Arizona Star website - my comments in italics.

If she gets extra time, everyone should get it. "No" special treatment

"No" comment.

2. Comment by d,h,a .. (d,h,a) — September 27,2007 @ 8:23AM
Rating: 0 Thumbs Up
You'd think that the National Board of Medical Examiners would have a holistic, physiology-based view of this issue. Instead, they fall back on socially conceived norms and technicalities. Their fear of further accusations by others has impeded their ability to recognize the human animal. Too bad. What a waste of time, energy, and money. I hope they lose their appeal.

You got my vote.

3. Comment by Sharon H. (sharon455) — September 27,2007 @ 9:13AM
Rating: 1 Thumb Up
She's already failed the test once; personally I hope she fails it again, even with more time.She has been asking for special rights all her life, citing her ADD and dyslexia. I can just imagine her asking for more time to diagnose a patient in the ER. If she can't compete with other applicants she shouldn't be there.(and p.s. I was once a working, nursing mother and not unsympathetic to her needs.)-hour

That's so sweet, you hope she fails the test. To hell with those people who fight for their rights. To hell with people with ADD, who needs 'em?

And in this unrelated story, a woman was kicked out of a YMCA pool in Canada for nursing her baby while watching her older kids' swimming lessons.

Here is a notice about the pending Breastfeeding Promotion Act.

Here's a story about a mom who was asked to cover up at Appleby's restaurant, sparking a public outcry and multiple "nurse-out" events. Here's what kills me about this story. The manager says that patrons who nurse at Appleby's are expected to do so in a respectful manner. He doesn't say jack about the respectfulness obligations of the many Appleby's patrons who curse, spit, use abysmal table manners, belch, or behave badly toward the waitstaff. It's the nursing moms who have to be respectful! Toward whom exactly, I wonder? The most misogynistic person in the restaurant, or just people who hate babies, or what? No standards for other people baring flesh in Appleby's, yards and yards of it sometimes. But those nursing moms better watch their respect level!

Podcast: How to Conduct a Wide-Open Job Search

2007-09-27T10:12:00.000-07:00

Here is a podcast on the topic of conducting a wide-open job search: where you could go almost anywhere in your job search. That's not a trivial thing. It's hard enough to manage a traditional job search in the city where you already live!

This podcast was prompted by a post to the Ask Liz Ryan discussion group by our member Manisha (forgive me Manisha, I called you Manish in the podcast) who is in this situation.

To hear the podcast, click here and then click on the podcast name. Thanks!

Much Ado About Tipping

2007-09-20T20:15:00.000-07:00

I seriously did not guess that when I posted this message about tipping waiters, such tumult would ensue. Man oh man! Never had I guessed that such strong feelings swirled around the subject of tipping waitstaff. Now I know. Here are more messages on the Tipping topic. We had people posting messages who feel strongly about tipping, people who don't, people who don't tip, people who tip for great service but not otherwise, and interestingly, people who feel just as strongly (or couldn't care less just as much) about the topic of other people's tipping as they do about their own. Is that even a sentence? Probably not one my first-grade teacher, Sister Mary Elizabeth, would have accepted without covering the paper with red marks. I think about her sometimes - she was only about 20 when I was six, so she may still be teaching. Sadist. Seriously - I'm not just sayin' that for effect, she really was.

Here is, for me anyway, the perfect way to get out of a fractious topic like this just in the nick of time before an old-fashioned barroom brawl breaks out (virtual variety), courtesy of our well-spoken member T.E. Jones:

Hi everyone,

I totally love this group, believe me, but aren't we over-killing this subject just a bit? I mean, this is the longest running subject on this circuit that I can recall. As far as tipping goes, let's just leave it to the individual. It IS discretionary whether they want to tip or not. It IS NOT a written rule that you have to tip when you into a restaurant or that you should refrain from going if you cannot.What I am finding in this subject is not "that we should tip".

What's really being conveyed here is apparently "This is the way that I see it and you should see and do it MY way." Servers like tips (if I were a server I would too), but they also know that they will have some customers who will not tip. They know this when they sign up for the job. They also know that if they do not give good service that they may not receive one. They're not blind to these facts when they choose to become servers. Everyone has their own opinion about the subject.

Do what YOU feel is right and leave it at that. A server's heart will not stop if they don't receive a tip (it especially shouldn't if the service was bad). Let's save this energy for things in the world that really do matter. Sorry for my ramble but if you think it's right to tip, then tip when you go into restaurants and leave other people alone.

T E Jones

Thoughts on Lucy's Boss

2007-09-14T20:42:00.001-07:00

We had a bit of controversy on the Ask Liz Ryan discussion group this week about this post. Lucy wrote about her difficulties with her boss. Here's my take on the issue and the suggestions given.

Boss Don't Communicate

Lucy's boss is not a big communicator. Lots of our members hypothesized that he might be a serious introvert. Could be. The lack of communication and some weird habits (standing behind people as they work without announcing himself, failing to respond when Lucy says "good-bye," and others) are causing Lucy stress. She's thinking about changing jobs.

The Deal With It Approach

Taking me completely by surprise, a number of folks responded to Lucy's post to say "Get over it." Some said we come to work to work, so just do that, and stop worrying about your boss. Some replies weren't post-able at all. I was really shocked. Not sure what about Lucy's story got people so irate. If you think about it, just about every post in our group could be answered the same way. Relationship problems? Just deal. Mice in your house? Aw, quit whining.

I posted a couple of times to suggest that that type of advice isn't really helpful or appropriate. I wrote a blog post on this topic before, called "Equal Parts Advice and Support." I'm still curious though, why Lucy's story brought out the unsympathetic vibes. Most of the time our members are full of boundless good will and helpful suggestions.

No Laughing Matter

In my reply to Lucy's query I suggested some gentle humor to get the topic of her boss's not-super-well-developed-social-skills out from under the "can't talk about it" blanket. Several members took big exception to that suggestion of mine. Not appropriate, they said, if the guy has Asperger's! It's passive-aggressive to joke! said some. He won't understand, said others.

Humor is a great way to tease out tough communication issues and deflect anger. It's a must-have tool at work. Some folks thought that humor might make this boss feel bad, but you know, sorry to say, that might be not such a bad thing to get the communication to open up a bit. I worry about a person in a management position who can't deal with the use of humor. Reading social cues is about as critical a skill set as you imagine for a leadership position in a business setting.

Back to the Issue

Lucy is trying to decide whether she can deal with this guy enough to stay on the job. Her task is not to diagnose him. Someone in his management chain should have noticed this problem and acted on it, before now. The people in Lucy's work team, and Lucy herself, shouldn't have to be the victims of the guy's style. I said that social and communication skills are a prerequisite for a leadership job. I can't be a CFO. I accept that. I won't be a professional ballerina in this lifetime. Not everyone can lead people.

Could There Be Exceptions?

After I mentioned that "not everyone should lead" thing, I heard from people who said that bigtime introverts can lead, can be managers and can be mentors. I don't disagree at all. If supervisors surround themselves with people who can work with them given their unconventional communications style, then things might work out duckily. But that's not the case in Lucy's situation. This is not a manager who says "I need your support, since people skills are not my strong suit." It's just the opposite. The staff is left to wonder what's wrong and wait for the guy to creep up behind them. Not good. Our members who pointed out the unsuitability of this guy for the job he's in, including me, aren't being less than compassionate. We can have compassion for folks such that we want to see them in jobs where they'll succeed and the people around them won't quit. That's what kind of compassion we're showing, here.

No Email Diagnoses

Several of our members wrote to say that this boss most likely has Asperger's or some other learning disability or disorder. I didn't post those diagnoses (I offered to post the rest of the messages people wrote, without the Asperger's part, and some of them wanted me to do that and some didn't) because I don't post diagnoses of our members' friends and bosses and colleagues, ever. I don't thnk it's appropriate for us to diagnose people we've never met based on a quick email message. I don't think our forum is the place to zero in on whether someone unknown to us has condition A, or B or possibly C. Doesn't feel responsible to me.

Triumphs to Share

Several folks wrote to talk about how they'd overcome initial negative feelings toward uncommunicative bosses. Those stories are great, although I noticed that no one said "He ended up being a great boss" but more like "So it wasn't so bad in the end." Bottom line, for me: I'm still puzzled over the lack of sympathy shown by some (granted, only two or three) of our members toward a person who feels that her work life could be better. Like Harvey Fierstein says, "Is that so wrrrrrong?"

Can't Please Everyone

2007-09-12T21:42:00.000-07:00

This week I made some enemies on the Boulder Daily Camera comment pages for not being sad enough that the cougar who killled a miniature horse in Nederland might get killed. I was a little sad, but not distraught. The lion got away all right in the end. Am I happy enough? Hard to say.

I drew some ire for not posting messages to our Ask Liz Ryan group with various diagnoses of a manager that one of our members is dealing with. I don't like to post off-the-cuff diagnoses that are based on a reading of a 200-word email message. Doesn't feel responsible to me.

Hate to say it, hate to acknowledge it, but the more you say what you mean, the more less-than-total-well-wishers you will cultivate. That's how it is. In the DiSC assessment I'm always fairly high D but off-the-chart I. The D communication style, you'll recall, is the driver/dominant type. I is the interpersonal type who is consumed with the state of relationships. My I-over-D attribute is my problem, because I'd rather have people like than respect me. But yet and still, as my friend Andrea used to say to me all the time, I have to say what I feel, because if I don't, what kind of blogger/commentator/pundit am I? Gotta say it. Take whatever heat. Can't please everyone.

It's kind of affirming in a way.

I did that NPR Radio interview about moms leaving the workforce and even drew heat for that, the most motherhood-and-apple-pie-ish topic going. The heat came from a mom who had no issues at her job and left it anyway to raise her kid and objected to my observation that some moms face issues after returning to work post-maternity-leave. Give me strength. "You didn't mention ME and MY SITUATION." Sorry about that. Point being, you can't worry about whom you make unhappy, if you're saying what you believe.

If you get mealy-mouthed, you're done. What do you stand for, then?

I've always had issues with the subset of HR people who thinks the function is in ducky shape and couldn't be better. Them, and the sixteen hiring managers and recruiters in the country who think that employers do a fine job communicating effectively with job-seekers. One lady wrote "the problem stems from job candidates who call and email us incessantly to check on the status of their resumes." Yes, I can see that problem. You never communicate with these folks and they're bad for wanting to check in with you. This is why my job is so much fun.

Har Har

2007-09-07T12:11:00.000-07:00

This came from my friend Alice in NJ.

"Last night, my friend and I were sitting in the living room and I said
to her, 'I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on some
machine and fluids from a bottle. If that ever happens, just pull the
plug.'

She got up, unplugged the TV, and threw out my wine.

She's such a bitch..... "

You Can't Run On An Empty Tank

2007-09-03T11:44:00.000-07:00

We joke and commiserate with our friends about the Dilbert-esque escapades at our jobs, but here's the thing: our jobs can take a huge toll on us, emotionally.

It is not easy to deal with a bunch of people and their ups and downs and needs and frustrations and sensitivities and fears and indignation and self-esteem problems and conflicts and shifting loyalties and everything else the white-collar world throws at us. We have to manage our emotional stores. We have to keep our fuel tanks filled, or a tiny slight while merging on the expressway may send us over the edge. Here's an article from Business Week Online about maneuvering at work with an eye toward keeping the fuel reserves stocked.

Write. Train. Coach. Consult. Repeat.

2007-09-02T14:55:00.001-07:00

Kathy is an Ask Liz Ryan discussion group member, and she wrote me a nice note saying "we want to see what you do." I'm not sure if she was suggesting that I put a webcam in my office, or something else.

Man, watching me at work in my office would be unbelievably boring! I'd rather watch polar bears sleeping on the ice, naked mole rats, anything. On a typical day, I'll sit here at the computer and write an article; get up and water the plants; sit down and moderate the discussion groups; talk to a client on the phone; prepare some notes for an upcoming training session; and then have a phone session with a person who's job-hunting. Phone, computer, computer, phone; punctuated by really lively stand-up sessions in big and small rooms! The small rooms are for meetings with people in organizations who have HR issues they need help with. The big rooms are the rooms where I lead training sessions and make speeches.

I do podcasts from my desk, like this one, and one of our members listened to one of them and wrote to say "You sound placid." That's hysterical. I'm the furthest thing from placid. I get exercised about almost anything.

Every day I get some face-to-face time with someone -- not including my family. That's essential. Some days I hop up at three p.m. and get in the car to fetch some kids. Some days I'm in Denver or elsewhere in the country and on those days, I sneak in a little bit of email-group moderation at night after I'm done. I talk a lot on the cell phone when I'm otherwise idle, in airports and in cabs and rental-car courtesy vans. I am talking with people about job-search issues, career-change issues, and I'm-going-t0-strangle-my-boss-issues. Those are the big three topics.

Now I am convening a group called Ask Liz Ryan Future for people who are interested in looking at the next steps for our online community. There are many possibilities for us!

"Torn Between" Story

2007-08-25T18:38:00.000-07:00

Jodi used the phrase "torn between our professional and personal lives" on the Ask Liz Ryan discussion group and that resonates with me - haven't we all been there? You don't have to be a parent to face that tug-of-war. I've had a few of those crises, but the one that sticks in mind happened when I was working for a startup in Chicago.

The company was based in Chicago but most of its operations, over time, moved to a Boston suburb. So I was commuting full-time to Boston every week - going out on Sunday night after the kids went to bed and returning home on Friday night. I did this while I had twins in first grade, a pre-schooler and a nursing infant. I was in major distress, but here's when the job went off the rails. I came home one Friday night and knew that I had to get a report finished over the weekend, so I brought my three older kids into the office with me on Sunday afternoon (the company still had a satellite office in Chicago, and I still had a desk there). I worked on the report for five hours and then took off, but not before cleaning up the popcorn the kids had strewn on the office carpeting - down to the 1/10th-kernel size pieces that were too small to grasp between my fingers.

The next day, emerging from the Ted Williams Tunnel in my rental car back in Boston, I got a call from my friend Sue, our CEO's assistant. "I can't even stand to tell you this," she said, "but the CEO is mad at you for bringing your kids into the office yesterday. They left little bits of popcorn in the carpeting." "But, there's no vacuum cleaner in that office!" I said, nearly in tears. "I picked up popcorn bits by hand for twenty minutes. Once they're below a certain size, you need a Dust Buster...." I realized how ridiculous I sounded. My boss, a decent person in other circumstances, had completely lost perspective --- instead of having the reaction "Gee, Liz worked on the weekend, with her kids in tow, after working all week out of town" he freaked out about the popcorn my kids left on the carpet. I wanted to turn the car around, go back to Chicago and call in my two weeks notice, but Sue persuaded me to continue driving to work. Still, that shock gave me the nerve to talk frankly with my boss that day, and we continued having frank discussions until I gave notice a week later.

If you work your tush off and produce results, you know it and your boss knows it. If that's not enough and your personal priorities are also scrutinized and second-guessed and found fault with, then the relationship is broken.

That could be a good thing, however - in my case the break with that job prompted me to shake things up, move cross-country and launch a new thing. So, here we are. Maybe the angst and frustration happened for a reason.

Equal Parts Advice and Support

2007-08-18T15:06:00.000-07:00

Every human being I know over the age of sixteen has learned that you can't give advice in some situations. If your friend is dating the wrong guy, you can't tell her. If she asks you the question directly, "Is Henry the wrong guy for me?," you might be able to tell her the truth, but even then, it's dicey. She has to find out for herself.

Advice is complicated because the thing that people ask for help with is not always the thing they really want help with. I learned this as a young HR person, twenty-some years ago. People would come into my office and talk with me about problems they were having with their managers. I'd listen, and recommend some actions they could take. They'd say "Can I come see you again?" It took me awhile to figure this out. They didn't want to be told what to do. They wanted someone to listen to them.

There is a well-known communication gap between men (some) and women (some) around this issue. At times, some women (see me waffling?) want to vent and some men want to problem-solve, and so these women end up feeling unheard and these men end up feeling like "Why do you ask for advice if you don't want advice?" That's why advice-giving is tricky. It's not like plugging a query into a black box and getting an answer on a little piece of tape. If you really want to help a person solve a problem, you have to incorporate into your advice-giving an understanding of what the person is ready to hear.

In our Ask Liz Ryan group we run into this sometimes. I try - I wouldn't say I'm always successful - to listen carefully to what a member wants to know when I respond to his or her query. For instance, people will write about job situations that sound really bad. Sometimes I write what I'm thinking, namely, "Hit the road. Get another job." Sometimes, it is clear that the poster isn't open to that advice. I can understand why. Big changes are incredibly hard to make, and stressful. We're not ready to make the leap until we're ready. In that case I'll lend some advice about what to do in the meantime.

Our group is designed to provide equal parts advice and support. That is, the moral and emotional support is critical. It's not secondary to the what-to-do advice, the actual action steps and resources. We get responses to our members that I can't post, because they bash the original poster for feeling the way he or she feels or for finding him- or herself in the difficult situation to begin with. This isn't verbatim, but the gist of such a response might be "You dumbass, why'd you get yourself into that situation? Buck up and do x, y and z." I can't post that. Support is as much a reason for our existence as the advice itself.

When I write back to those would-be advice-givers they often reply with a remark about Tough Love. They say, "Hey, people need to hear the truth and get their s**t together." I get that. Tough Love is absolutely appropriate when there's love involved. That's why books about how to parent teenagers talk about Tough Love. Your parents actually love you, so they get to Tough-Love you, for your own good.

We, in our group, don't know another well enough to do that. We haven't earned that right with one another. The stronger the relationship, the greater the trust, and so the more forthright one can be in giving advice, even if that advice is painful to hear. Among well-meaning people who may care about one another but don't have that experience of establishing mutual trust with a particular person, of experiencing mutual vulnerability and reciprocity and all of that, it isn't appropriate. That's my view; as the group moderator, I'm less concerned about a member missing out on some Blunt Advice But Nonetheless Advice Someone Really Needs to Hear. I'd be more concerned about a member regretting having posted to the list at all, which could easily happen if he or she gets slammed for having made unfortunate life decisions - as though any of us hasn't done that.

Equal parts info and support, that's my goal. The more confident our members become in the quality of our advice AND the level of emotional support they get from our group, the more valuable our community will be to everyone. It is fun and satisfying to write snappy prose that makes an incisive point in a tart writing style worthy of Dorothy Parker, but that won't help a brother (or sister) out. Don't think those bon mots are unappreciated, though; I appreciate the heck out of 'em. I just can't post 'em.

She Called it Nerdvana

2007-08-17T12:49:00.001-07:00

My friend Ellen coined that term, so if you use it, you have to say "Nerdvana, courtesy of Ellen." Ellen said that when she heard me on BBC Radio and NPR in the same week it was almost Nerdvana for her. Almost nerdvana, but ot quite - she needs to see me interviewed in The Economist to get to the top of the nerdvana mountain. What are the odds of that? It's not all that likely. What about the other one, the newspaper with pink pages? I can't even remember its name, how am I going to get interviewed in it?

The truth is that all the cabdrivers in the US listen to BBC Radio and NPR and that's whose been writing to me, every IIT graduate looking for a technology job in the US but driving a cab in the meantime. I am sympathetic. But the messages are all the same - I think I need to write an ebook specifically advising Indian cabdrivers with technology backgrounds on how to get employment in their field in the U.S.

What about that? Micro job advice? You think that would fly? Mass customization is the shiz so why shouldn't it?

JOB SEARCH SECRETS FOR PEOPLE RECENTLY OUT OF PRISON
I TOLD MY BOSS TO TAKE A FLYING ! AT THE MOON, CAN I TAKE IT BACK?
TEN WAYS YOUR MOM CAN HELP IN YOUR JOB SEARCH AND GIVE YOU MORE TIME FOR WORLD OF WARCRAFT
LINKEDIN FOR SPAMMERS

and so on.

I joined Twitter, at Ellen's suggestion, so if you want to get my updates and see what I'm doing every day, although I can't imagine why you'd want to, go ahead and do it. Today is big - first Friday of the school year, although the two smalls (kindergarten and fourth grade) don't start until Monday. We are going to celebrate. This week, we are six years in Colorado. That calls for ice cream, at least. I'm thinking ice cream and toppings like a make-your-own sundae party.

Bad netiquette story: I posted a notice on Ask! in Denver about the upcoming Revels auditions. (Revels plus Twitter plus Yahoo!groups: THAT is nerdvana.)
Anyway, Karen, the Artistic Director for Revels, gets a phone call from a lady who saw the posting on the email list. She's a matchmaker, and she has a client who is looking to meet women who like to sing. She wants to know whether Karen will ask around to see whether the lady Revellers might want to date this guy.

I'm thinking not.

Stop Licking Him or Obi-Wan is Mine

2007-08-12T10:35:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I run over by CU's running track I see a bunch of goats. They hire a woman who has goats, and the goats eat the weeds. Love the goats. Sometimes I think I'd like to have a bunch of goats, although I'm completely ignorant of the practical realities of that. It just sounds like a nice idea. It seems like the goats would be easier than a pack of human kids.

When we go on vacations, we drive, or take the train. We haven't taken all of the kids on a plane anywhere, yet; the last time we did, it was in 2001 (we had one fewer kid then) and we were coming to check out Boulder for the first time - the only time, before we moved here. Nowadays, plane travel is worse. Plane travellers with kids are especially in danger of getting screamed at or thrown off a plane. Our kids are reasonably well-behaved, but I don't need that agita. We drive with them. It takes longer, there's more to see, and you get to talk about anything you want, without hundreds of other people in the same compartment with you.

This year we went to Jackson and then to Yellowstone. We went canoeing and swimming and sightseeing and visiting with family. At some point in each of our long drives, there is some kind of meltdown. My brain just about dies on me. This year, it was the four-year-old, sitting in the middle row of seats. He was tormenting the older kids in the back row, by licking their feet whenever they'd rest their legs over the middle row of seats. My husband caught me yelling 'Stop licking him, or Obi-Wan is mine!' The four-year-old didn't want to lose his Obi-Wan toy, so he quit the foot-licking business.

Meltdowns and all, driving is the way to go. You see so much stuff, and you meet very different people. Here is what I've noticed: when you stop in the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming, or any of the little museums or historical informational spots (Stonewall Jackson's gravesite, The Cowboy Hall of Fame, the Route 66 Museum, and on and on) it's not college-educated people you see. It's blue-collar folks and their kids, and Harley Riders (not the yuppie kind, but the other kind) and older folks. Maybe one day we will do a straight-from-the-plane-to-the-resort kind of vacation, but I'm not pining for that. We like to go slowly and see just how big all that flyover country is.

Following the Thread

2007-08-10T20:11:00.000-07:00

If I doubled the number of workplace-advice columns I write in a week - currently it's seven - I still couldn't keep up with the number of topics that get brought up on the discussion list. It's absolutely crazy. Tonight there was a query about how to send a thank-you letter after an interview if you've decided you don't want the job. I almost jumped out of my seat - wow! That is a great topic.

And there are two or three like that every day.

Right now, because of the interview on NPR earlier this week, I am getting flooded with email messages from people who want specific one-on-one help, like mentoring, while job-searching or dealing with an issue at work. Some of them are entrepreneurs. I want to figure out how to work with them, but it will take a level of infrastructure I don't have now (it's me, my desk, my phone, and my conputer). So that is one of my big September plans. When I first worked at U.S. Robotics, the original guys used to tell stories about how they put an ad in some computing magazine for their earliest modems, and they got checks in the mail before they had a product ready to ship. This is what's happening to me - people want the product but it doesn't exist. So I have to get on that.

Anyway, as far as Following the Thread goes, here is what I wanted to say: someone writes on the discusison group about something, let's say weight discrimination in hiring. I write a Business Week Online story and more people write to me. I get more interested and do some online research. After the NPR thing I got a call from NELA, the National Employment Lawyers Association (plaintiff-side only, that means the employee's side) and talked to the fellow there about this weight issue. Then I get pulled in a little more. Right now I am looking at the arguments that were used in pushing through the first few weight-discrimination statutes. Great stuff. Next, I will talk to NPR about the weight thing. So it's a thread that weaves all over.

There are so many great workplace issues. Because of the transition to Ask Liz Ryan I did not do anything with the National Breastfeeding at Work Week event this year, but that is another great one. Loaded issues. Sounds like motherhood and apple pie to promote breastfeeding at work, but I'd talk to employers last year and they'd be afraid: "But if we promote breastfeeding at work, won't that offend the non-breastfeeding moms?" Hmmm -- you sponsor a fun run, does that offend your non-running employees?

This coming week I'm hosting two local networking events - one for LinkedIn users in the area and one for Ask! in Boulder. Workplace nirvana for me combines global discussion and knowledge-sharing with local face-to-face. What could be better than that?

Posting Guidelines Discussed: Local Queries

2007-07-17T08:37:00.001-07:00

Our Ask Liz Ryan community has tremendously smart and worldly members. We very seldom receive messages that we can't post. When we do, it's almost always a matter of posting a message to the local Ask! in group versus the global Ask Liz Ryan group.

Sometimes people write to say "Even though my question is specific to one city, I'll reach a lot more people if we post the message on the global Ask Liz Ryan group than if I post it on the city-specific one. Why can't I do that?" Here's why. The one thing we know about the members of our Ask! in Boston group (e.g.) is that they have agreed to receive Boston-oriented messages. The one thing we know for sure about the members of our global Ask Liz Ryan group is that they haven't agreed to get city-specific messages. They've had a lot of chances to sign up. I've promoted our local Ask! in groups at least twenty times on the global group since we launched in April.

So if we go ahead and post a Boston-specific query to the global Ask Liz Ryan group, we are saying "We know you didn't ask for this type of message. Too bad! We will force you to read it anyway." It's not appropriate.

It may be that a local query is related to a city where our local group has only four or five members. Some of the local groups have really taken off and others haven't. That is fine with me, as the moderator; the members should decide whether or not local conversation is their cup of tea.

If we don't have a large (or perhaps, any) membership in a local Ask! in group, then the overall Ask Liz Ryan community may not be the best place to get a particular answer, and we accept that. I received one query from a person in a rural area who wanted to make contact with an old schoolmate. There are much better resources for that. We can't help with every imaginable need. For sure, if we misuse the attention and goodwill of our members in sending them messages they specifically didn't ask to see, we are sunk.

If you find that you need local resources and recommendations frequently, you can begin by telling your friends about your local Ask! in group. Our Ask! in Chicago group has over 600 members two months after launching, so we know that these groups can grow. You can help!

In Which I Throw In the Towel

2007-07-16T21:44:00.000-07:00

I've been doing pretty well keeping my Careful Connector status on LinkedIn. I've never been exclusive or elitist about making connections, I just hew to the Terms of Service and only connect to people I actually know - for the most part. I have made exceptions, especially in the early days of '03 when I was a new LinkedIn user and assumed that everyone who sent me a connection invitation really did know me -- and I'd just forgotten their names.

So for over four years I held the line. I'd write people polite messages asking how we actually knew one another, and they'd either fail to respond or else send a reply saying that they didn't know me but wanted to connect to me for this or that reason.

But all these years later, with over 50 invitations sitting in my in-box, I'm exhausted. It actually takes way more time to inquire and solicit information and help a person explain his or her case for connecting than to do one of two other things: ignore people entirely, or connect to them.

If I ignore them - and I studiously ignore the LIONS and "I belllieve in OPEN NETWORKING" people - nothing bad happens, if they're invitation-spammers. If they're not, I get puzzled/upset email messages reminding me that I met the person at a luncheon in Salt Lake City a year ago, or something like that. Now, in my book, that STILL wouldn't be a strong enough reason to connect, but here's the thing: people's feelings get hurt.

Lately I have started to get connection invitations from members of the Ask Liz Ryan discussion group. And they say "I've been a member of Ask Liz Ryan since its beginning and a WorldWITter for years before that. I saw you speak in Kansas City and read all your columns." What am I gonna do - write "That's all fine, but I still don't know you" and refuse to connect? Would you feel comfortable doing that?

So I'm more of an Open Connector than ever before, with this provision. I'll connect to people I don't know if they know me or feel they know me, through advice columns I've written or webinars I've presented or my discussion group or what have you. Here's why. They are asking for help, and being connected to them on LinkedIn is one way I can help them. Refusing that request feels rude to me. So I am a slightly-more-Open-than-before networker under those conditions. The random invitation from left field, I still delete. If the inviter includes the number of his or her connections, or his or her email address in the Name field on LinkedIn, even more so.

Posting Guidelines Discussed: Content Requests

2007-07-14T21:37:00.000-07:00

In our Ask Liz Ryan community, most of the posting guidelines are obvious. Our members intuitively know that we can't flame one another, or use the list to promote products or services. We can't disparage one another and we can't disparage other people or organizations. Sometimes folks get frustrated because they really want to post a message that runs afoul of one of these posting guidelines, but after a moment of thought they can see how we can't post things like that.

From time to time members get confused about our no-content-request guideline. Here is a little more information about that. When members write to the group to ask for help with situations they are facing, our members respond. They know that that's why we are here: to help one another "at the intersection of work and life."

It's a different thing when we write to the group to ask for stories for a newsletter, or for a book, or for questions to ask of a radio or webinar guest, or with other kinds of content requests. That's not what our group is for. Good content is hard to find, to be sure, but our members' time and goodwill is scarce, and we don't find that collecting stories or survey responses or personal histories for another members' project is a good way to use that limited resource. That's why we don't post surveys for members, including survey-type questions and other content requests. If we did, we'd be overwhelmed with posts like

"Tell me about your favorite Mother's Day gift, for a new book I'm writing"
"What are five things you'd like to ask your company's CEO? Send over your questions to be included in my company newsletter next month"
"Write 100 words about your first job out of school and get a chance to win a free iPod"

You can see the problem. Thanks for understanding.

People to Know: Bill Vick

2007-07-13T12:49:00.000-07:00

My fear is that when Bill Vick and the people like him retire in twenty years or so, the business world -- well, and the whole world in general -- will be even colder and less friendly than they are now. Bill Vick is a recruiter, an author, and an expert on people and jobs. But what makes him so awesome is that he's so helpful to people like me, whom he only knows a little, and to people he doesn't know at all.

Bill has written several books about recruiting and online networking, and he's working on a book for recruiters right now. You can read more about Bill at his website.

Vincent Wright of MyLinkedInPowerForum introduced me to Bill. We talked about a bunch of things. I told him about my online community, called Ask Liz Ryan. I had imported members of the WorldWIT group to the new Ask Liz Ryan group, and had had some problems in the migration. I did a bunch of stupid things like sending out messages before people were set to the Digest setting - really annoying stuff like that.

So a bunch of those early members unsubscribed right away, and six of them wrote me very angry messages. I corresponded with all of them and some of them cooled down. Two of them were really unhappy and wrote on their blogs that I was a spammer and so on.

I told Bill all of this. I was debating adding the second half of the database to Yahoo!groups because of the commotion. Bill listened to me. He said "If you sent out money to twenty thousand people, six of them would be unhappy." He convinced me to go ahead and migrate the second half of the database to Yahoo!groups and it went perfectly. Of course, the Yahoo!groups folks had always thought that I was being paranoid and overly conservative, but I have this weird thing that I can't stand to have people upset with me. Bill got me over that, but as it turned out, everything worked out fine.

Bill can help you be a better job-seeker, a better hiring manager, a better recruiter and a better networker. Visit his site and learn something. Heis a superstar, but he is as down to earth as they come.

Scott Allen on Shifting the Burden

2007-06-18T18:38:00.000-07:00

Scott Allen is the co-author of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, and an avid networker. Here's an interview with Scott on the notion of Shifting the Burden as it applies to networking and online community.

An excerpt from the interview:

Scott Allen: In any exchange, each person has certain responsibilities. Most of these aren’t usually spoken out loud or formalized, but we have certain implicit expectations as to whose responsibility some of those things are.
Liz Ryan: Such as?
SA: For example, if I’m trying to reach you for a phone call—if I’m the one requesting the call, the burden is primarily on me to accommodate your schedule and talk when it’s convenient for you.
LR:: Yes!—and the same is true for lunch and coffee-type networking appointments?
SA: Absolutely. Generally speaking, anyone request anything of someone else should do as much as they can to shoulder as much of they burden as they can themselves.
LR: And Scott, something I have wondered about—when you reach out to someone for networking who doesn’t know you, don’t you bear a little extra burden - to explain your purpose, and perhaps also to know a little something about the person you’re contacting? It cracks me up and sort of irritates me at the same time when someone writes me begging to have coffee, because they heard I know a bunch of people, and then when we get together they ask “So, what do you do?”
SA: It’s not only a matter of simple courtesy, but also increases your odds of them agreeing to do what you’ve asked of them. So one of the things that these technology tools do for us is make it easier to reach out and manage our connections with other people. In some cases, I think it may make it TOO easy. Because what happens is they make it easy for people to make some kind of request of someone with minimal—even trivial—effort. What this does is “shift the burden” of evaluating the request entirely to the other person.
LR: And that other person, the recipient, can feel overwhelmed by that—if the request is vague, or comes without any context, etc.?
SA: Exactly. Now they have to spend time evaluating the request and deciding whether to act on it or not and how to act on it if they decide to. The person making the request has already spent some time getting to that point—it will only take a few more seconds of the requester’s time to provide some context, and it will save the recipient several minutes.
Shifting the burden is especially annoying when the person who’s doing the shifting can accomplish the same task with far less effort! So for example, if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn—or even just start a communication dialog with me—there is an implicit responsibility on you to at least tell me what you want to talk about—what you see as the common interest. But if you can send me just a generic LinkedIn connection invitation, or like in Ryze, just click the “Network With Me” button, now it “shifts the burden” to me. I’m expected to go look at your profile, read the whole thing, and figure out what we might talk about. And I’m starting at square one.
You’ve already read my profile and decided that there was some reason you wanted to talk to me—at least TELL ME WHAT IT IS!

What Does "Engagement" Mean to You?

2007-06-14T22:26:00.000-07:00

I had the greatest conversation tonight while I was sitting on the floor of a stage, leaning on a trunk. I was talking with a 22- or 23-year-old singer who is a Muleteer in the upcoming Colorado Light Opera production of "Man of La Mancha." I play the Housekeeper in the same production. And so we're talking, me and this young man, about how our respective days had been going before tonight's rehearsal. He talked about his errands and taking a hike and this and that -- my day was much the same (got in a hike on the Flagstaff Trail and ran around town here and there) except that I was doing business stuff in between -- the young Muleteer doesn't do business stuff, all the better for him.

So on the way home from rehearsal (thinking about what I would make for dinner) I realized that this is the way I want my Thursdays to go (and the rest of the days of the week, as well). Ten years ago, I was a corporate HR VP and one day, I was talking with my boss, the company's President. He said "So what's your next goal?" I couldn't tell if he meant professional or personal goal, so I said "I want to get more integrated in the things I do." "How so?" he asked, and I said "You know, I love my job, but I feel like here at work I'm 100% On-The-Job-Liz and then I go home and I'm someone else, and I don't like that separation."

I really think my boss thought I was crazy.

Ten years down the road, I'm still an HR person (of sorts) and I still do the parts of my old HR role that I loved the best: speaking to groups and training and writing. And I sing musical theatre and water my plants and zip my kids around town, which were things I never got to do as a corporate person. My four-year-old has never had a nanny - an unimaginable thing for our family, ten years ago.

This is "engagement" to me -- specifically, engagement in my job enabled by the way that job supports the rest of my life. I never got the big WORK/LIFE equation -- isn't your job supposed to fit INTO your life, not compete with your life for top billing?

Granted, we all have to work to support ourselves, and we don't always get to choose jobs that give us lots of flexibility or other perks -- but still -- the 22-year-old Muleteer has a job that supports his life (he sings all over), gets to do what he wants to do outside of work, and loves what he does for money. Isn't that engagement to the 10th power, at least?

How can we get a little of what the kid has got? Why is it so complicated for us as we get older?

Train Wreck on LinkedIn

2007-06-09T19:27:00.000-07:00

It's awful to drive by a car crash a moment after it's happened, but you can't look away. This is how I feel about my all-time favorite social networking site, LinkedIn, these days. Some months ago, I talked with one of the LinkedIn founders and said "You guys should have user-generated content on the site! You could easily poll the members, put members in touch with one to share content [in addition to the person-to-person links that the site specializes in] and generally go to town vis-a-vis Web 2.0!"

Famous last words, because LinkedIn Answers is the user-generated content section of the LinkedIn site, and it's not what it might be, to say the least. For the first two or three weeks after LinkedIn Answers debuted earlier this year, I went there often to see what was cooking. The questions were generally smart and the answers were insightful. But over the intervening months, LinkedIn Answers has devolved --- whatever the LinkedIn member demographics may be, LinkedIn Answers is differentiated from mass-market "Answers" sites like Yahoo! Answers by the slimmest margin, if it's different at all.

Here is the basic problem: it's easy to ask a question on LinkedIn Answers, and the site is flooded with random, bizarre, obnoxious, and silly questions (to be fair, some thoughtful ones are scattered about as well). While the functionality exists for LinkedIn users to ask for useful advice and to share wisdom, what happens too often is that questions are inane, self-serving, or unintelligible. In order of prevalence, my top three LinkedIn Answers complaints are these:

1) Questions are obscure or so broad as to be nearly meaningless, like "If everyone was buying what you were selling. What would you sell?" You wonder what purpose is served by posting a question like this. Does someone have too much time on his or her hands?

2) Questions are thinly veiled (or not even veiled) marketing messages, like "Are you coming to PodCamp Europe 12-13 June 2007 in Stockholm?" which is nothing more than a promotion for this event; and

3) Questions are unintelligible, based on either the varying levels of English proficiency of the users or some other difficulty with English vocabulary and grammar - like: "USA(America) .Tired lion and old super power. chinese the fresh and the strongest of them. the super power"

Then there are the questions that come from so little exposure to the topic area that a useful answer would take two pages -- like "How to make money on Internet?" All of my examples are real questions currently posted on LinkedIn Answers. I don't know why the quality of the discourse has fallen so far, so fast. It must have something to do with folks' motivations for posting questions and answering them - in fact, the site contributes to the problem by heralding TOP EXPERTS, which turn out to be the people who've answered the most (silly, obscure, unintelligble) questions in a week -- and there are people who answer 200+ questions a week! How the heck can they be experts on anything, except perhaps typing? I would think that there's a more suitable title for someone who answers an average of 30 questions every single day on a site like LinkedIn -- somehow expert isn't the one that springs to mind.

Why Vent?

2007-06-07T11:53:00.000-07:00

There was a provocative comment after the last post (Let's Get Negative) that inspired me to write this post, in response. The writer wondered why, on an email group like Ask Liz Ryan, people would vent about problems they had had or were having -- what would that help? This is a great question, and here are my thoughts.

First off, the Ask Liz Ryan email group is a discussion forum -- not just a give-and-take of recipes and service-provider recommendations and answers on how to get a copy of one's birth certificate. All of those things are perfectly useful and worthwhile. We are glad to be able to enable information-sharing of the most practical kind, from advice on pot-cleaning to sinus-cleansing to summer camp clothing tags.

But our purpose is to Support Working People at the Intersection of Work and Life. The intellectual/philosophical stuff on our list is what makes the group worthwhile, in my view. We can talk about what works, and what doesn't work, in our work and life situations. We can learn a lot from reading the other members' stories. Our shared stories and observations are the heart and soul of our community, from my standpoint.

So if one of our members is frustrated and wants to share his or her observations and his or her experiences -- whether the situation is working with headhunters (that's how this whole topic came up) or something else, we are all ears.

What purpose does 'venting' serve? I think there are a few different "goodships" that venting can promote. Venting allows a member to feel heard by the rest of the community. It allows him or her to hear from other members who have had similar experiences, and to realize "It's not just me." We all need to hear that, sometimes -- that we're not alone in experiencing what we do. It allows other members to share their experiences and their advice for overcoming whatever problem is inspiring the original poster to write in to the group. It allows us as a group to analyze the issue at hand and perhaps suggest what basic mechanism is broken (e.g., job-seekers don't always understand how search people get paid, and may have expectations that a search person who's paid by his or her clients can't possibly meet).

When members vent in our group, it allows us all to consider how an issue that another member raises -- the difficulty of getting health insurance, or a job-search challenge, or a debt-collection challenge - affects us personally. We may have advice. We may have encouraging words. We may be able to say nothing more profound than "I'm sorry that happened to you," but those words mean a lot.

One observation I've had about the folks who have participated in the email groups I've led, starting back in '99, is that they are generally positive and forward-looking. They don't stew. They talk about issues and look for solutions. But that doesn't mean, and I hope it will never mean, that we won't be open to hearing someone's story of frustration or disappointment. In a funny online-networking kind of way, our members are friends. And if our friends won't listen to our fears and concerns and bad experiences, who will?

Let's Get Negative

2007-06-05T10:08:00.000-07:00

My husband and I have a long-standing difference of opinion. I am for the most part one of those annoying Shiny, Happy People and he is not, so much. When something breaks on the car, he says "There's a thousand bucks" and I say "Betcha it's nothing." He thinks I'm naive, I think he's negative.

Who's right? No one. Both of us. It doesn't matter.

Lately, I am feeling more affinity for my husband's side of the positive/negative fence, because I notice that when I write an article decrying something that's broken in the corporate work-world (and what a range of choices I have to write about!) I get mail that says YOU ARE NEGATIVE.

I wrote a story about why people don't rely on HR - well, I told them that they'd be wise NOT to rely on HR, and as far as I'm concerned, that's a public service. People walk into HR departments and spill their guts every day, at their peril. So I wrote the story and I posted the link on some HR email groups that I moderate, and sure enough, replies come back that say "You are slamming us HR people - this isn't how it works -- etc."

So here's my question: when people experience negative things, isn't it a negation of their experience not to validate what they've been through? Are we seriously saying that people DON'T have bad experiences with HR groups? They do - they write to me every day about them. Certainly not every HR person or group is bad; I'm an HR person myself, and I don't feel especially evil. But when people do have bad experiences, I don't think it's appropriate to say "Well, that's not the whole story -- let's not talk about that bad stuff."

This week on the Ask Liz Ryan discussion, there was a provocative post from a person who'd had a bad experience with a search person. Lots of people have had those. Several really smart and articulate search folks wrote back to the group to talk about how to work with a headhunter and how the profession works economically and so on - all great stuff. Then another member wrote in and I think she had a good point, in saying 'the first person wrote that she had bad experiences. There are all kinds of things this group can teach her about how to work with headhunters and why lots of headhunters are great and so on - but she still had the bad experience.' (I'm paraphrasing.)

I take something pretty significant from this, which is: it's one thing to say 'all HR people aren't untrustworthy.' No argument there. It's one thing to say 'there are tons of good headhunters who don't abuse candidates or string them along.' True, true, most definitely. But people have bad experiences. Do they get to talk about them without being told 'that's not typical' or 'you did it wrong' or something else? What is wrong with venting? Surely, nothing -- it's one way we can support one another.

Back to the HR example, if I had had more time and energy I would have posed this question to the HR email group: would any of us make the argument that there is no current bad feeling directed toward HR by office-types? I don't think anyone would take up that banner. HR is not generally exalted, notwithstanding tremendous examples of HR champions fighting to change the reality and the image of HR. Would any of us likewise make the argument that job-seekers don't have bad experiences with headhunters? How do we talk about the bad stuff, without making all HR people, all search people, all whomever - whatever population we're talking about - feel badly? Because we have to talk about the negative stuff -- it's real.

Posting Guideline and FAQs for Ask Liz Ryan Email Discussion Group

2007-05-21T13:14:00.001-07:00

POSTING GUIDELINES for Ask Liz Ryan email discussion group and local Ask! in Groups

Here are the Posting Guidelines for the Ask Liz Ryan email discussion group and the local Ask! in discussion groups.

1. All member conversation about workplace topics, business topics, and "life" advice, is welcome. Local recommendation requests should be posted on the local Ask Liz Ryan group (e.g. Ask Liz Ryan Chicago) instead of the AskLizRyan email group.

2. We don't post commercial messages on Ask Liz Ryan or the local groups. This includes classes, offerings, discounts, grand openings, etc. We will be happy to post one announcement for any not-for-profit event on any of our local groups. We understand that some commercial events also benefit not-for-profit organizations, but we still consider those commercial events. We don't post ad-hoc events (at people's homes, e.g.). Because of our marketing-free posting philosophy, we don’t post messages promoting products and services other than to recommend products and services that other members are looking for (i.e. have inquired about using our community). We don’t get into back-and-forth discussions of the merits of products and services, organizations or industries; it is fine to post “I had a good experience, specifically X” and/or “I had a bad experience” but not to quote studies, surveys, third-party endorsements, etc. That isn’t our purpose.

3. We really value a positive discussion and so we don't post flames, disparagement of any person, organization or entity, thanks! We also can't post religious or political messages. Thanks for understanding.

4. The moderator has to make the post/don't post judgment calls, and we err on the side of caution. We really appreciate your support as we make those decisions.

5. We reserve the right to edit posts for length or to keep the message in line with our posting guidelines; to shorten long email signatures, and to remove links in your posts if they are questionable. We reserve the right to remove words, phrases and sentences in posts that violate our posting guidelines. Our word-length limit is 400 words per post. We will clean up spelling and usage mistakes if we have time. We may revise your post slightly (removing rather than adding content) in order to clarify the message if an edit-for-length makes the meaning unclear. We may edit (delete) inappropriate content, flames, and political or religious content, as well as marketing-promotion language, flaming or disparagement, etc.

6. It's okay for members to contact other members directly, using the member's email address, regarding the topic the member posted about. Contacting members for any other reason (to pitch a service, e.g.) or saving email addresses from member posts to add them to a database or mailing list are two HUGE "Don'ts." We will regretfully unsubscribe any member who does either of these things.

7. If a member asks for a recommendation (say, for a mortgage broker) it is of course fine to recommend mortgage brokers, but please DO NOT forward the member's mail to mortgage brokers in order that they may contact the member. If anyone contacts a member to sell a product or service based on an Ask Liz Ryan message that was forwarded to him or her, we will regretfully have to unsubscribe the member who forwarded the message. So please be very careful forwarding our group messages to non-members.

8. Posts for the Ask Liz Ryan discussion group and the local Ask Liz Ryan groups should be suitable for all members - no adult content, and no strong language - thanks.

9. Messages for the Ask Liz Ryan group should be queries and observations that people anywhere in the world could answer or respond to. A local Ask Liz Ryan group - not the global Ask Liz Ryan community - is the place to post a query about finding an attorney in Baltimore, for instance. We have several local Ask Liz Ryan groups but we don’t have them everyone in the world. So, unfortunately, we can’t oblige every request, and may not be able to post your message or, in some cases, recommend a better group on which to post it.

10. We can't accept attachments to any of our email groups. Thanks.

11. Please try and remember to "snip" your replies so that our members don't read the same messages over and over again. Thanks a million!

12. Please do not forward posts from the Ask Liz Ryan discussion group or any of our local discussion groups, to other mailing lists or online discussion groups. Please do not post conversations or threads from our discussion community on blogs or websites.

13. We occasionally will post a message posted to the global Ask Liz Ryan discussion group to one or more of our local groups and vice versa. We will occasionally post a message from one of our groups to one of our blogs or to Liz's blog on Examiner.com. Thanks!

14. Please ensure that anything you post to our groups is your own content, or that the source is noted in your post and that you have permission to post the content to our group. Thanks!

15. At the moment we are posting job postings on our local groups only (not our global Ask Liz Ryan group) for jobs in those cities, states, countries or regions. We may modify this posting guideline as our list traffic increases. The cost to post a job is $50 US.

16. We cannot post surveys of any kind, or requests for newsletter or book content, or suggested interview questions or collect content for blogs, articles, etc. We cannot post messages that ask our members to visit one member's blog or website and comment on it.

17. We cannot post to our lists to promote individual or corporate blogs, websites, LinkedIn or Facebook groups, or email groups. Because of our high volume of traffic, we also cannot post unsolicited advice, e.g. “Check out this great website I found!”

18. We will post not-for-profit physical events on our local Ask Liz Ryan groups, one post per event. We will also post some fund-raisers (online auctions e.g.) for local not-for-profit organizations on our local Ask Liz Ryan groups. We cannot post not-for-profit fund-raisers on our global Ask Liz Ryan group because of the volume of list traffic. The moderator's yes/no posting decisions are final; thanks for understanding.

19. We post recommendations for products and services only when such a product or service recommendation is requested. If a member asks for advice, we provide advice and not product or service recommendations. Members must identify themselves as sellers of a product or service that they distribute, and of any other relationships (e.g. current customers, spouse, relative) with any product or service provider that they recommend. We reserve the right to cut off product and service recommendation discussions (like other discussions) that become repetitive or that wander off-topic. If a product or service provider recommends his or her own product or service to the group in response to a query on that topic, we won’t post successive recommendations for that product or service in the same thread. According to our no-marketing policy, when a product or service provider responds to a request for recommendations, we will post only a short “I provide that service, please contact me” message free or any other marketing language. Because the group is called Ask Liz Ryan, and built around the workplace, career, HR, leadership, networking and work/life advice of Liz Ryan, we don't post queries about or recommendations for other experts, pundits, speakers or advisors in this arena.

20. We don't post messages that say "I agree with that advice" or "I don't agree with that advice" that don't provide more value to the membership than that. With so many members, we can't use the discussion group for what is essentially a voting process. "I don't think that would work" or "That is not what I would do" fall under the same guideline.

21. Because our group is large, we don't post our members' blog posts, articles, media appearances or links to their blogs, podcasts, articles, etc. That's what the list-serv itself is for: to share each member's favorite 400 words on any topic, right in the group discussion rather than by pointing outside the group to our members' blogs, sites, videos, etc. Posts can include links to outside articles, podcasts, videos etc. created by non-members. Those folks don't belong to our group and don't have the opportunity to share their 400 favorite words with us.

22. We'll delete the note in a member's post that says "Please reply to me off-list" unless replies are likely to have no interest for the rest of our readers. For instance, if a member posts to ask whether anyone would like to join him or her at an upcoming conference, those personal replies aren't relevant to the other members. But if a member is asking for information, we'll delete the "please reply to me off-list" note because the purpose of our group is to share information. We believe that our members can follow the list postings in order to get the advice that other members share with them - asking for replies off-list feels a bit selfish to us, as those off-list replies keep the rest of our members from learning important things and business, work and life.

23. We are a large and busy group. The Moderator’s decisions on moderation are final. Thanks for understanding.

24. In addition to these list-specific posting guidelines we expect that our members will happily follow the Yahoo!groups Terms of Service: http://tinyurl.com/uummg

25. Lastly, we have two posts on our Ask Liz Ryan Community Blog whose purpose is to answer the most common questions about our posting guidelines. You will find those two posts at these links:

Local Queries: http://asklizryan.blogspot.com/2007/07/posting-guidelines-discussed-local.html
Content Requests: http://asklizryan.blogspot.com/2007/07/posting-guidelines-discussed-content.html

Questions about our groups or their moderation? Please write to Liz at liz at asklizryan.com

Experts Weigh in on "Advice for New Business Travellers"

2007-05-10T14:14:00.000-07:00

Here is the collected advice on Business Travel from the Ask Liz Ryan email discussion group. Also, check out the comments on the previous post for more sage business-travel advice. Please add your advice as a comment --- thanks!

Here is the original query:

Hi Everyone,I recently started a new job as a technical service representative that requires me to travel all over the nation 75% of the time. This the first job I've ever had that actually traveled. I would love to hear any tips that would be helpful in my new job and traveling? I do get to keep any frequent flyer miles or award points given by other businesses.

Thank You
Donna M.

And here are the responses:

Carry a comfort bag where you put all essential comfort items for the trip.Mine is colorful and small so it is easy to find and unzip.Kleenex, lip gloss, ear plugs, hand lotion, treats and peppermint oil.The peppermint is great because it helps clean the stale air in the plane.Put in your own special items and tell me what they are so I can add to mine.

Doris Jeanette,
motivational speaker
more travel information at : http://www.thevibrantmoment.com

Carry zinc tablets and echinacea too, because you're sure to come in contactwith cold & flu germs. I was flying quite a bit a few years ago, and foundthat if I started with the zinc (lozenges like cough drops, or the tabletsthat melt) as soon as I felt that funny feeling in my throat or nose, kept thatup for a couple of days, it really helped ward off the cold. Made abeliever out of me and now I'm never without them. Drink LOTS of water too.If you have health concerns or chronic issues be sure that your medicationsare easily found and in their original prescription bottles.Have an entry on your cell phone for "home", "husband", "boss" etc. Makesit easier for some Good Samaritan to turn in your phone if you lose it, orcall someone if you need help.

Allie

I always have a pair of ear plugs with me to use while sleeping at night. I'vefound that your neighboors may be noisy in hotels (especially if you're there ona Friday evening), and you definitely want to sleep if you're on the road forbusiness.I also carry a pair of underwear set and shirt/pants along with toothbrush andface cream in my carry-on luggage in case my suitcase is lost (I was in Brazilfor 3 days last August and I didn't have my suitcase for 2 days!!!).Also, a friend of mine mentioned that she has a credit card that gives her$500 every time the luggage is lost and returned to you after 5 hours (I guess).I don't know which credit card offers this service, but if someone knows, let usknow! It may be worth applying...

Clarissa Ceruti
http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5131532

Always keep travel incidentals in your purse/briefcase/carry-on (hairbrush oreven extra underwear). More traveling means a higher chance of having lostluggage. It can take days for the airline to find your luggage and you want toavoid having to go to the store right away if you can. :-)

Angela

If you usually wear contacts, bring 2 things: a contact lens case with solution, ready to receive your lenses. It holds less than the fluid limitation, so no worries there. And your glasses. Nothing so bad as the "gotta-shed-these-scratchy-awful-things" feeling, nowhere to put them, and no option for spying the right gate for your connecting flight. Tip bonus - but please don't read further if you gross out easily. My eyes deposit excess protein. Saliva comntains enzyme that begins protein digestion. Grubby lenses? Clear your mouth - take a drink of water if you have it - and slip lenses into your mouth one at a time. Use your tongue to dissolve the protein. After a couple of minutes, reinsert the lens and blink several times to remoisturize it. It's been a life-saver more times than I can count!!

(no name given)

Avoid Cranberry juice and drink only clear liquids. Turbulence and colored liquids do not mix....or maybe they mix too much

Amy

Always carry 2 forms of ID and keep them in different places in case you lose 1 (E.G. Drivers license in your purse, passport in your computer bag). Similarly, when traveling internationally, keep a copy of your passport in a different place than your passport.

(no name given)

Silk long underwear takes up minimal room and is great for using the same clothes when traveling between climates on the same trip

Get another cell phone charger, pair of glasses, hairbrush, toothbrush, etc..and always keep it packed with your travel goodies, reduces accidentally leaving town without something vital

Get lightweight, durable, rolling luggage....expandable luggage is even better Mimimize beauty and grooming items so that you carry less (shampoo/conditioner combo, pressed powder that can also be used wet for foundation)...non liquid makeup is great with the new travel restrictions.

Roll your clothing, you can fit more and it always wrinkles less

Invest in a travel wardrobe that is comprised of silk knits, poly/rayon/spandex, and other travel friendly fabrics. Also, learn to layer and always pack for the trip with a common color theme so it all goes together and you can bring less.

Minimize the pairs of shoes you bring..shoes weigh quite a bit

Always bring something to do in case your flight is delayed or cancelled - notecards, paperbacks, your checkbook to balance, etc...

Sign up for online statements, online banking and create automatic debits for some of your bills (especially those that are the same every month such as your mortgage, car insurance, etc..) so that you can focus on your trip and late fees are eliminated

Make sure you have all of your key numbers with you - doctors/dentists, schools, hairdresser, etc.. so that you can schedule appointments and handle crises while you are on the road

Make a pack list for items you bring for every trip with space to fill in those items for the particular trip...even someone who travels all the time needs a list when they are tired or distracted

Invest in some plant waterers if you don't have someone drop by your place to perform the task. In the garden, plant low maintenance varieties and invest in self-watering pots

Have a large mailbox at your place so that if you are gone for a week, it is not obvious that you haven't picked it up.

Ask a trusted neighbor or friend to watch your house and call you if anything appears suspicious. And let them know when you will be out of town for extended periods and if anyone is stopping by...have heard horror stories about entire houses being stripped while someone is out of town

Pack some home dry cleaning sheets...they take up minimal room and help refresh your clothes on an extended trip, when you are in a hot climate, or when you may have had to sit in the hot seat at a client or executive meeting

A travel clothes brush is also a good idea to have handy..and a friend goes nowhere without shout wipes

Minimize your load as much as possible...do you really need the huge purse and the heavy wallet? Take out anything that isn't vital (e.g., the frequent buyer card for the store that is only at home) and leave it at home.

If you wear a treasured piece of jewelry that you never take off..great. Anything else that is truly valuable, leave it at home.

Invest in a small, but sturdy collapsible umbrella and a packable coat or two...invaluable in inclimate weather

Take advantage of online booking and check-in...sometimes those lines are loooooong and in smaller airports, they don't always have machines dedicated to travelers not checking bags.

Always tip the curbside baggage check-in personnel, they can mess with your world

Always carry on essentials in case you are delayed or your luggage is lost (e.g., prescriptions, glasses, toothbrush, that great fitting bra, makeup remover, hairbrush, perfume)

Learn to sleep in less than desirable conditions. Pack ear plugs and invest in noise-cancelling headphones...valerian root and melatonin capsules also come in handy if they work for you. You can deal with all sorts of travel snafus if you are rested, refreshed, and not toting heavy baggage

Someone who has been there

Ideas for New Business Travellers

2007-05-09T15:24:00.000-07:00

I have done a lot of business travel for years, but in the fall of 2002 I had a new wrinkle in my traveling. I started to bring my son with me on trips when he was six weeks old (first destination: Philadelphia). He traveled with me on every business trip until he was a year old - he's been grounded since then. But traveling with a baby (in order to nurse him on demand, and save my husband the challenge of watching the baby 24/7 along with four other kids) was an experience not easily forgotten.

For months after I began traveling solo again, I thought "How could I ever have complained about business travel, when I wasn't toting a baby, a Snap & Go stroller and an extra suitcase with me?" That was then -- this is now. Now I complain, plenty. But there are ways to make business travel less, er, grim.

Here are ten tips I've found useful. Add your own!

1) Bring your iPod and your tiny speakers. You never know what wretched movie they'll be showing on the flight.

2) You can't bring water in your carry-on, sadly, but you can bring a snack, and you should. An apple and a banana and a little bag of nuts should get you through anything except an unscheduled six-hour detour on the runway.

3) Get a Bucky pillow for your neck - best investment you'll ever make. There are lumbar pillows for your lower back, too.

4) Never get on a flight without a book you're dying to read, a crossword puzzle or Sudoku book if you're into those, and some writing paper and pens (or, your laptop). If the mood strikes you to finish your marketing plan or the outline for your novel, you'd hate to be caught without the proper tools.

5) I like to bring stationery in case I decide to write some letters. Who has time to write letters on the ground? If anyone gets a letter from me, he or she knows I've been on a flight. Bring stamps and envelopes, too.

6) You will need cash if you want to buy one of those snack-boxes. There is nothing like being starving on a flight and being without the five dollars in cash you need to buy a snack box.

7) Remember the Bridal Gown Rule. Unless a bride ships her dress to her wedding spot ahead of time, she must carry it on the flight, because if her luggage is lost -- no gown! If there is anything you must have at your destination (no matter what), carry it on -- presentation slides, proposals, your business suit for the client meeting, etc. You can sleep without your pajamas, if need be, but carry your essentials with you.

8) Bring a sweater. It can be freezing on the plane and there's no telling where those blankets have been. If you take a blanket, make sure it's still in the plastic bag. Otherwise - put your coat over yourself! I'd rather sleep under the New York Times like those guys on park benches than touch a used airline blanket.

9) Take some business cards with you. The person sitting next to you may want one after you spend a few minutes in conversation. If you don't want to give out your card, say "I'm sorry, I didn't bring any" and then pick up the SkyMall catalog and page through it with an air of "I just decided I desperately need to buy a motivational teamwork poster."

10) When you land, you will do everyone around you a favor if you can wait until you're in the terminal before grabbing your cell phone to tell someone you've arrived.

Mom Let Me Off the Hook

2007-05-06T20:01:00.000-07:00

I come from one of those large (eight kids) 50’s and 60’s Irish Catholic families. My mom worked before she got married and went back to work full-time when I was in fourth grade. She is smart - she had been in the first graduating class of women from the Georgetown U. School of Foreign Service back in the early 50’s, and was President of the local chapter of Mensa when I was a kid. So she rose quickly once she got back into the work force.

But when we were little, mom was always at home. There was no such thing as preschool, that I know of - my first organized experience with other children was in kindergarten (and I was terrified to go!).

Fast forward 25 years - I’m living in Chicago, married with twin toddlers, and working my tush off as VP of HR for a technology company. I loved my job - couldn’t get enough of it - but combining the job with new motherhood and double babies was a challenge. One time, my parents were visiting from out of town, and I had to work a bit late. Not very late, as corporate schedules go - but I didn’t walk in the house until about 7:15, and I felt very guilty on two counts. Number one, my parents were sitting there with my husband and the kids, waiting for dinner plans to be made. Secondly, my mom would see my crazy schedule close up and probably think “What a bad mom.” But actually my mom gave me a boost that evening.

As soon as I walked in the door, I hugged my parents and my husband and immediately plopped down on the floor with my twins, piling up blocks or whatever they were doing. My mom looked at that and said “I never did that.”

“What do you mean, Mom?” I asked. “I never got down on the floor with any of you kids,” she said. “There wasn’t time. Your preschool equivalent was toddling along after me as I ironed clothes, grocery-shopped, scrubbed the floors and tended the garden.”

I thought about that. Of course! When would a housewife in the sixties (no microwave, no household help, no car at home until Dad got home from work) have time to play blocks with the babies? I’d guess that the oldest preschoolers watched the baby-of-the-moment, in fact. Those were the days of playpens, now that I think about it.

Now, I still get down on the floor with my kids when I can. But I don’t stress about it. There was a whole period when people stressed Quality Time over a simple quantity-of-time-together equation. But I’m not even down with quality time, in the sense of putting one’s total focus on the child and his needs. Kids get a lot by being with their parents, whether the activity is putting together an Adirondack chair out of the box or doing something more child-focused.

Above all, I know, my kids are fine. I work a lot, then I’m home a lot, and I have a ton more flexibility in terms of how to spend my time than my mom did when I was little. Full-time job and all, I have time every day to focus on each child and see what’s up with him or her. Whether it’s on the floor or driving home from school, we can talk and catch up.

Guilt is the disease of working moms in 2007. Guilt imposed by our employers, our friends and neighbors, sometimes by our savvy button-pushing children, and often by ourselves. Give it up. Guilt never helped a child or a mom. Your kids are golden. Look at the powerful role model they’ve got in their lives (I’m talking about you, honey).

My mom’s remark about not getting down on the floor to do blocks with her children was offered in an incredulous, maybe even slightly disapproving way. That’s fine! She let me off the hook, bigtime. I realized that it’s WE PARENTS who stress about the child’s mental state, the child’s emotional health, the damage done to the child by our absence…..when three seconds’ thought would remind us that for 100,000 years of human history, parents have not devoted their waking hours to entertaining their children. Somehow, the children survived. Ours will too.

Who You Are Online

2007-05-02T16:18:00.000-07:00

I was talking with Vincent Wright today -- Vincent is the moderator of the popular LinkedIn-related email group, MyLinkedInPowerForum. Vincent and I were talking, as we often do, about the way that people behave and interact online.

My brother says that in the online forums he frequents, where the topics are things like photography and rock-climbing, the flames and insults are much worse than anything on the PowerForum or any group where members use their real names. My brother says the real names are what keep people from getting too crazy. But I've seen some awful, insulting things posted on Yahoo!groups and on blogs by people using their real names.

It's almost as though people forget that there are real people attached to these names and online personas. It's as though when they write - publish - for the world to see, "Amy Smith is a cow and an idiot" that there is no real Amy to see that remark and react to it. Or, maybe they don't care?

Vincent said that it is important to say exactly what you mean, to make strong statements, no matter how other people react. I have drawn some fire lately for proposing that the Open Networking standard on LinkedIn (the one that has all living people connecting to as many other living people as possible) might be damaging to all LinkedIn users, and therefore not simply a valid choice but possibly a practice that can take value from the whole community. Lesson learned: Open Networkers tend to be very attached to their position.

Way way back in the eighties I read that hostility is the flip side of fear. That's a handy thing to know. You're reminded of that when you see the venomous things that people can say publicly about people they don't know. I was sharing with Vincent today that I think he could teach St. Sebastian a thing or two (you remember Sebastian, the guy full of arrows). Vincent said that he has had pleasant and warm conversations with people who later turned vicious and nasty in online discussion. What causes this online-ugliness thing to surface? I can understand a one-on-one email war among overstressed co-workers. No one else will see the correspondence, except maybe a curious IT person. But a public flame campaign? Is that the downside of Web 2.0?

Lose the "Elevator Pitch"

2007-05-01T14:51:00.000-07:00

Okay, here is a story on what I hate about the famous "Elevator Pitch." I don't think it's natural or appropriate to blurt out your business credentials in a 30-second monologue. Here's an excerpt from the story:

For at least 100,000 years, human beings have been carving out a system of social interaction that says, "Tell me something, ask me something, let's get to know one another, and see what develops." There's a reason why audio business cards delivered 10 inches from your face have never taken off as a marketing tool before. They're rude!

A lot of people like scripts, and since an elevator pitch is a script, I understand that it is a kind of conversational crutch that some people feel comfortable with. That is fine. It's the unnatural use of the script right in the first minutes of a conversation that feels so out-of-place and so ill-mannered to me.

Get That Fishing Rod Out of My Face and Take Me to Long John Silver's!

2007-04-29T21:53:00.000-07:00

There is an old saying that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for the day; but if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. That is a great saying, but here's what I am finding: lots of people who don't want a fishing lesson -- they just really, really want a fish.

There was the lady who wrote to me wanting introductions to HR people among my contacts. I have a bunch of those, because I was a corporate HR type for twenty years. She had a business idea to pitch to HR people, so I said "Perhaps if I hear the idea, I can give you some tips on approaching HR folks with it." She had been calling on HR people in her town for months with no nibbles. So I heard the idea. I gave her some ideas on how to develop a cost-benefit analysis that would help HR people sell her services to their bosses -- always a big deal for budget-strapped HR types. Thanks anyway, she said, I'll take care of my own product development. Now, how about those introductions?

Keep in mind that the lady wasn't asking for my copy of a published list of HR contacts or a list of HR websites to troll. She wanted my own, personal contacts -- just the fish, please, no time for the fishing lesson.

Then there was a man who found me on LinkedIn and wrote to me asking for help with his sales pitch. I gave him some comments, and then he wrote back asking me for a LinkedIn endorsement. Gosh, I said, I'm sorry, I only write endorsements for people I have worked with. "Doesn't this count?" he asked. "What, if I were paying you for your advice would you say we had worked together?" Ouch, ouch, classless boor, be glad you got that one dose of advice because you will never get another tip from me. Just the fish, lady!

Recently, I posted a message on a LinkedIn-related email group to say that, as sympathetic as I am to less-than-sensational networkers (you can tell when someone's networking skills are not great when they approach you, in person or online, in an unfortunate way a la the people in the last two examples), I don't typically suggest ways for them to change their networking approach. I don't do it but I don't want to presume that they want help. They haven't asked for assistance. There are plenty of other people asking for networking tips, so I respond to them before dispensing unsolicited advice to people whose overtures turn me off. People who write to me asking for help, after all, have already indicated a desire to learn something, not just an appetite for a Mrs. Paul's fishstick.

After I wrote this message to the email group, a fellow on the same list-serv responded with this: "Now I know why you didn't write back to me when I wrote to you months ago, after you missed a LinkedIn Denver event that ALL of us expected you to attend!" Spooky. Who are you again, sir? You expected me to attend an event in Denver and I didn't attend and....and therefore I'm bad? You wrote to me and I didn't respond, you say? Did I get the message? Do you care? Ick, ick, icky --- I don't even mind getting flamed on the list-serv as much as I mind the creepy feeling that people I don't know and have never heard of are waiting for me at events, unbeknownst to me..... waiting, and feeling put-upon because they (members of my creepy fan club of people I don't know?) are expecting me....while I, clueless of the insult inflicted by my non-presence, was busy feeding the children and helping with their homework and bathing them and reading them stories and putting them to bed.

At least now I know -- avoid those LinkedIn Denver events!

I have tried to offer networking how-to advice to people who didn't ask for it, and of course I did it gently. But for me, manners are a big deal, and it's bad manners to suggest to people that they're doing something badly, even when it's true.

There is a huge, crying need for networking lessons, a/k/a fishing lessons -- not only do lots of people not know how to do it at all, but also lots of people do it badly -- and there are people out there teaching people to network badly, only adding to the problem. I would spend all day teaching networking, I truly would. But I won't spend all day -- or ten seconds of my time --debating someone who wants nothing less than a fishing lesson and nothing more than a juicy fish sandwich. There are other, as they say, fish to fry.

Better-than-Boilerplate LinkedIn Invitations

2007-04-27T17:26:00.000-07:00

You may have seen our silly LinkedIn invitations last year -- those wouldn't fly on LinkedIn these days, because the character limit for invitations has been vastly reduced. (Also, my kids let me know that I goofed up the Haiku form.) But still, it's much better to send a personalized LinkedIn invitation than a boilerplate one. Even with the reduced character limits for LinkedIn invitations, it is not too difficult to write something more appealing than the standard language in your invites. Here are some alternatives:

******************

Dear Jane, I downloaded the LI toolbar which alerts me when someone (like you!) from my Address Book is a LI user. Want to connect?

Yours sincerely,

Piotr

******************

Dear Maxim,

I often think of you and hope you are well. I remember when we were National Guard trainees together in ’87! Would you like to connect networks and help one another cultivate our networks?

Fondly,

Caroline

****************

Dear Hans,

We haven’t met, but I was transfixed by your description of ball lightning in last month’s Obscure Electrical Phenomena Journal. Want to connect networks with me?

Regards,

Dexter

*******************

Dear Evangeline,

I’ve been a terrible friend for the last two years since I had the triplets – but I’d love to stay in better touch going forward and help you however I can. Want to connect?

Best,

Ginger

Ten Essential Tools for Online Networkers

2007-04-24T15:50:00.000-07:00

Everyone wants to know, How do I start networking online? (I'm talking about business networking, not finding a date or a knitting buddy - not that there's anything wrong with that.)

I wrote a book about the topic but this quick post will take less time to read. Here are ten things you need to put together (in my view) to get your online networking action started.

1) LinkedIn profile. Basic membership is free - write a great profile. Tweak it a few times, and make sure and add your blog url, your Jaxtr link if you have one, and your industry, local and other affiliations and memberships.

2) Dedicated email address. Get a gmail or hotmail or yahoo account that you can use for email groups and other memberships. The new Yahoo mail beta is good - but of course, so is gmail.

3) Photo that you like. A good, business-y photo is hard to get but it's worth it. About a zillion sites allow you/encourage you to upload your photo (not LinkedIn, but bunches of others). Head over to whichever local photo studio will let you have the digital image -- you'll need it.

4) Email signature. Just-your-name email signatures are fine, of course, but there might be more that you want to say. Then again, an endless email signature is in bad taste, if you ask me. I'd say four lines of text is perfect - your LinkedIn profile, your website url, your email address, and your blog (or something else, like your Skype or AIM screen name).

5) An instant messaging account. AIM is owned by AOL, which is pretty funny, if you've avoided being an AOL user for the last twenty years. But it's worthwhile if you have certain folks you want to ping back and forth throughout the day.

6) A Skype or Jaxtr account is a great thing -- I use Jaxtr. It's free, and people can call you (and vice versa) for free using VOIP technology. Plus, they don't see your phone number - just your link.

7) MyLinkedInPowerForum membership. If you use LinkedIn and you want to get better at it, plus meet brilliant and helpful people from all over the world, you might join the MyLinkedInPowerForum group at Yahoo!groups, led by master networker and Chief Encouragement Officer Vincent Wright. MLPF is a wonderful Yahoo!group, welcoming to newbies, and nearly flame-free (a big departure from way, way too many email groups).

8) A listing on ZoomInfo. This site collects data on people and creates profiles that other people can search. It's a good idea to claim your own profile (you have to enter a credit card but they don't charge you anything) so it's correct and up-to-date.

9) A Plaxo account. Some people hate Plaxo, and it's true that the functionality is not what you'd get from a contact management application like Act! or Goldmine, but it's still wicked convenient. You download your Outlook address book into Plaxo, and the site keeps those contacts updated by asking people to send you their latest info as it changes.

10) A business card scanner. But wait, you're thinking, I thought you were listing tools for ONLINE networkers? Well, here's the thing: people you meet in person (and get business cards from) are part of your online network - or they should be. No sense keeping the online and offline networks separate, right? I paid $200 for a business card scanner and it's cool, it scans both sides of the card in about ten seconds and throws the data (and the actual card image, too) into a file where I can manage it, sort it, etc. Not that I am organized enough to do any of that. But at least it's better than my old system of sticking business cards in every vessel in my home and office (empty flowerpots, toothbrush holders, etc.) as I dug them out of my jeans pockets or my purse.

Leader's Studio

2007-04-16T23:51:00.000-07:00

This Leader's Studio blog linked to me Ten Best/Ten Worst Corporate Practices story in Business Week online, but even if they had not, I'm glad I found it because it's full of great leadership information. Take a look!

Ten Tips for Launching Your Public Speaking Career

2007-04-16T18:24:00.000-07:00

After years of experience, you know you’re an expert in your field. You have something to say, and people tell you you’re a great speaker. But how do you launch your public speaking career, for real? Here are ten tips to get you started --- and build a database of testimonials to help land future speaking gigs:

Here are some ideas to get you started:

1) Make a list of your speaking topics. Add them to your profile on LinkedIn so people who visit your profile will know your areas of speaking expertise.

2) Write some articles on these topics and post them at Ezine Articles. They’ll get picked up by newsletter and website publishers, with your bio at the bottom of each article, promoting you as a speaker on these topics!

3) Do a few “trial” speaking engagements at your local library or the Chamber of Commerce. Make sure and get feedback from each of your ‘clients,’ the people who invite you to speak. If you can get a written testimonial, get it! And save it!

4) Get a good headshot that you are comfortable with and add it to your website – if you want a very simple website, you can contact CMIT Solutions, which offers a really inexpensive website builder/hosting option. People really want to see what their speakers look like!

5) Write some articles for your industry trade publication(s). You may have to submit a few stories before one is selected, but don’t give up. Check out each publication’s editorial calendar online to see what topics they’ll be focusing on in upcoming issues – then write about those.

6) Create a blog! I have two Blogger blogs and they aren’t fancy, but they give me a chance to write and get feedback from people. My Ask Liz Ryan blog is a place where I write about topics that interest me, and often a blog post leads to a conversation that leads to a speaking engagement. My friend Alison’s Whole Gourmet blog is much prettier than mine - take a look.

7) Add a tagline about your speaking career to your email signature. Include your favorite speaking topics.

8) Speak, speak, speak. Speak for free (when you are overbooked with free speaking gigs, you can begin to charge fees for speaking.) The more experience, the better. And get a testimonial every time!

9) Join Speaker Match, to get hooked up with speaking gigs you wouldn’t hear about otherwise.

10) Lastly, when finances allow, create a speaking video. Use clips from your favorite speaking gigs --- this will help vault you to the next level.

You Can Eat Berries

2007-04-13T18:08:00.000-07:00

I was huge into the Atkins thing, and got my tush into size eight jeans that way, but the thing is, if you go off it, which seems inevitable, you're hosed. Now, I try to be more balanced. Here is a great article from Alison Anton's Whole Gourmet blog about berries, the thing I most hated to have to give up when I was in the Atkins vortex. I've known since I was a kid and my mom was all into Adelle Davis, that berries are good for you. Doctor Atkins was never down with berries, though.

permanent link for this post

Who's Lucky Anyway?

2007-04-13T07:42:00.000-07:00

This is from the Boulder Daily Camera:

WHO'S LUCKY ANYWAY?
by Liz Ryan

I was standing in the bake-sale line at a middle school fundraiser when I was jarred out of my stupor by another mom's question.

"So, do you work?" asked the woman standing behind me.

"Yes," I said. "I write and speak about the workplace, and train and consult for employers."

"Ah," she said. "That's great. I am lucky. My husband has a good job, so I don't have to work."

Startled, I blurted out: "What do you do instead?"

"The house keeps me busy," she responded.

I thought about that. I guess our houses would keep us busy, if we let them. I beat my house back with a stick, if it gets that demanding.

"I'm lucky because I don't have to work." The words sounded so strange. I found myself in a time tunnel, hurtling toward 1964 and my parents' living room with the black-and-white TV.

Wow! I thought. That expression takes me back. "Don't have to work?" I haven't heard that one in years — no, decades.

Forty years ago, if a woman's husband had a good job, she was lucky because she didn't have to work. Today, those words sound terribly anachronistic. They remind me of an era when the work available to women was so limiting that it might have been more interesting to stay at home.

But today? I can't put "lucky" and "not working" in the same mental framework.

As the school-mom spoke, it hit me that the notion of "lucky, because I don't have to work" is something you never hear from men.

Living through the dot-com era, I know plenty of guys who will never have need of a salary again, and that goes for their children and their children's children. Every one of them is busy, starting the next company or writing a screenplay or tutoring kids.

Women who've made the big score, ditto. It used to be that our husband's or partner's income was relevant to women's own working lives. But not today!

In the unlikely event that my husband wins the state lottery, I'll have a long list of interesting things to accomplish. And as it turns out, I love what I do already. That feels lucky to me.

I wondered whether the school mom left the workforce for awhile to raise her kids, and found it difficult to return to a meaningful job. In that case, "I don't have to work" would be something you could say to yourself apart from "it's frustrating not to be able to use my skills in a worthwhile assignment."

As a workplace commentator, I believe this is one of our biggest employment problems as a country. We put up barriers for returning-to-the-workforce moms.

It's absurd. Employers behave as though moms managing busy kids and households are utterly without marketable skills. That gap on the resume is as off-putting to them as garlic to a vampire. That's a shame.

Moms, dads and all adults should work if they want to. In the best case, their work will make them feel lucky to be doing it, and their employers will feel lucky to have them. In a perfect world, they'd get a little time off to attend to middle-school bake sales, too.

Twenty Question for Employers

2007-04-12T08:55:00.000-07:00

This post was inspired by Janice's comment on the Ask Liz Ryan discussion group. Janice pointed out that a savvy job candidate could steer clear of my Ten Worst Corporate HR Practices by asking good interview questions. That made me wonder: have I ever asked a prospective employer (or advised another candidate to ask) about things like who keeps frequent-flyer miles (the employee or the company) or whether the company uses a Forced Ranking system?

So, inspired by the Ten Best/Ten Worst story and Janice's question, here are twenty questions for candidates to ask prospective employers before jumping into the pool. Note: these questions should be reserved until AFTER you've gotten the job offer, or at least until you're well along in the interview process.

Ten Best Practices - Questions for Candidates

1. Does the company use Employee Referral Bonuses?
2. How do inter-departmental transfers work in this company?
3. Does the company have any programs promoting public transportation?
4. How do employees stay informed of company developments? (re: Town Hall Meetings)
5. Tell me about your Ethics Policy and programs (re: Ethics Hotline)
6. Does the company have formal training programs (re: Distance Learning)
7. Does the company keep in touch with former employees?
8. What is the company's position on Corporate Social Responsibility?
9. Does the company match employees' charitable contributions?
10.Is there an employee Intranet here?

Ten Worst Practices - Questions for Candidates

1. Does the company use a Forced Ranking system in its performance-review process?
2. How does the company deal with frequent flyer miles earned for employee travel?
3. Does the company use Love Contracts (chances are good most hiring managers won't know the answer to this one)
4. What is the company's position on employees' part-time work after hours?
5. Do you require my previous years' W-2 forms to verify my past salary?
6. Is there a written dress code policy?
7. How does the company deal with employee-relations issues?
8. Our ninth Worst Practice - radio silent recruiting - shouldn't apply, if they're offering you a job
9. Does the company use employee-internet-usage software and reporting tools?
10. Golden parachutes for dismal leaders - not sure if you can really ask about that

Only Woman in Firm = Clean-Up Gal?

2007-04-12T08:37:00.000-07:00

Dear Liz,

I work as the only woman at a small IT firm, doing both administrative work and
writing. All of the men are much younger than I am, yet my boss expects me to do
gender-specific tasks all the time. He even has expected me to straighten up the
office, which I did for a long time, but I have refused to do anymore. He even
expected me to take out the trash, without actually saying it.

I am never invited to meetings, both with clients or staff, as he feel these are
"technical meetings with the guys". or "strategy" meetings that I am not invited to.
He meets with me separately - usually not at all, however, as he only values
independence in my area of work.

What do you recommend? There are times when I get discouraged and feel like leaving
this job for another. I haven't gone as my boss has actually encouraged me in the
field of proposal management, and is giving me opportunities to write professionally
- which I value and expect to eventually have a salary increase, as a result. I pay
heavy dues for this opportunity, however, and feel the sting every day of not being
included.

Susan

Dear Susan,

This stinks, but I think it can get better. Let's look at the positives that you have to work with. Your boss has encouraged you vis-a-vis proposal management, and you're getting opportunities to write professionally. Those are great things, but the cost is also really high. I think you need to set up a very formal meeting with your boss - if not out of the office, then scheduled, in a conference room, not on the fly - and address your concerns with him.

You can say "You know Stan, there is a lot about this job I like. I love writing, and X and Y and Z. But I wanted to let you know that there are a few issues here that are really causing me trouble. I need to let you know about these things because they're bothering me a lot, and I knew you'd want to know that."

Right off the bat, you've let "Stan" know that YOU know HE values his employees. That is huge, because you don't want to convey the idea that you suspect he couldn't care less, even if you sometimes feel that way. So you're giving him props from the get. Then, you can say:

"Stan, I believe I should be in the strategy meetings, not only because I need to know about our projects in order to be effective, but because I know I could add value to those meetings. That is one big issue for me. The other one is the fact that I've become the designated office clean-up person, making copies, making coffee and so on. I'm not comfortable with those duties, and especially uncomfortable with the idea that these tasks somehow fall to me as though everyone else is incapable of them. It's not okay with me, and I wanted to share the problem with you so that we can resolve it."

Boom - now the hard part. You have to be quiet and let him think, and speak. I'd be surprised if your boss didn't invite you into these meetings, and spread around the office-mom work so that everyone gets a piece. I don't think I would bring up gender, unless you feel you have to. People get defensive when they feel you're calling them on their gender-stereotyping, even if it's justified to call them on it. Your goal (I think) is to solve the problem, and I believe you can do that, or make signficant improvements, with some firm (gird your loins!), but still respectful, conversation. Let us know how it goes!

cheers,
Liz

Who Keeps Airline Miles?

2007-04-11T08:27:00.000-07:00

Here is a fun mini-debate from a yahoo!group that I moderate for HR people. I posted my story from BusinessWeek detailing my ten favorite and ten most-despised corporate HR practices. One of the Ten Worst practices was the policy of companies keeping the frequent-flyer miles that their employees accumulate. To me, that is the lowest of the low. A member of the HR yahoo!group asked why I called the practice Stealing Miles, and here's what I wrote:

Liz Ryan wrote:

Hi all –this is a great question: Do you consider it stealing if the
company pays for the flight? Here's why I do consider it stealing.

The airlines call these programs Frequent Flyer deals. They
establish these programs to reward people who fly with them – who
trudge through Security, put up with airline delays, and spend days
and evenings away from home and away from their families. Who pays
for the trip, to me, is beside the point – the employee is the one
doing that travel duty. The airline points are a tiny price for a
company to pay for the benefits of having its employees in customer
facilities, at conferences and trade shows, and elsewhere supporting
its business.

The overarching theme of that article (Ten Worst Corporate
Practices, www.businessweek.com/careers) was that those ten "worst"
practices were, at the end of the day, tacky. If you wouldn't be
proud to say to a customer, supplier or shareholder, much less a
prospective employee, "Our company takes its employees' airline
miles!" or "Our company has an anti-moonlighting policy!" then the
practice is a bad one. Don't you think?

Thanks

Liz

And here's the reply from the other member of the group:

Actually I look at it as an employee taking something to which they are not entitled. Just as you wouldn't expect them to steal company property, they shouldn't expect entitlement to something in which they have no financial interest. If a person is important enough to a company to be travelling on company-related business, they are already being more than adequately compensated for their "travel duty." I have known companies that use the miles to purchase other business travel, to reward employees, or to use as travel to company off-site seminars. Just like any other expense, it increases the bottom line when resources are used effectively.

I have worked for companies who "own" the miles and companies who didn't. It was very common for employees to route themselves, even in the era of business travel as it is today, by indirect routes in order to maximize the mileage. When the company "owns" the miles, this didin't happen, travel expenses usually decreased, and less time was spent actually travelling.

If I were a customer, I don't really think I would mind if the company said they own the Frequent Flyer Miles (there is more than one way to phrase the issue), although I can't imagine a circumstance where the question would ever arise unless their own company was considering it. A supplier might be worried that their own cost structure has been, or will be, scrutinized and will have to pass some hurdle.

As a shareholder, I would say bravo because the management is looking at ways to maximize its return to shareholders, rather than spend foolishly ala Dennis Kozlowski, the Galvins of Motorola, Jack Welch at GE to mention a few.

What is your take? Leave a comment!

Ten Tips to Interpreting Your Boss

2007-04-10T20:03:00.001-07:00

Workers have it tough these days. Longer hours, more work, fewer perks and "bennies," and organizations are not quite as focused on being "employers of choice" as they were a couple of years ago. But if you think your boss is the source of your higher stress level, you might be surprised. Being a boss — fending off pressure from both above and below — is harder than ever these days. Managers have smaller budgets and fewer staff members to accomplish a lot more work as cash-strapped organizations frantically try to turn their fortunes around. Sure, there are incompetent, unfriendly, and just-plain-evil bosses out there, but the majority of middle managers are reasonable people who are trying to do the best they can for the employees they supervise and the higher-ups.

Skeptical? We've polled middle managers and developed this list of 10 things your manager wants you to know: "If Your Boss Could Talk (What He or She Would Say)."

When I am abrupt and impersonal, it's probably because I'm doing something I don't want to do.

Feel shut down by your boss sometimes? Your great ideas may interest your manager personally, but he or she may not have the approval or the budget dollars to say yes very often right now. If your manager is acting squirrelly or suddenly gets very corporate, it may be because he or she isn't comfortable telling you, "The answer is no." A rough exterior helps shield your boss from the reality that it's him or her — not a title or a job description — disappointing you once again. A good tactic when this happens is to ask, "Is this topic uncomfortable for you?" That might throw your manager off enough for him or her to open up and tell you the real problem.

I care about a lot of stuff that you care about, but I can't make a federal case out of every slight that you experience; you have to let me pick my battles.

Your boss is, among other things, the one who's supposed to stick up for you when those punks in marketing or the bureaucrats in accounting do you wrong. But there are only so many battles that one person can fight. Don't be disgusted when the boss doesn't march off to blast someone in HR on your behalf because they goofed up your insurance claim again. Let things go sometimes.

Don't try to make me King Solomon, especially about the small stuff.

Your boss is saying, "I know that you and your co-worker both want the cubicle next to the window, but I really don't want to have to make that call. I'd rather see you play Rock-Paper-Scissors, if I had my way. When you try to put me in the King Solomon mode, somebody ends up being upset about something really inconsequential. I'll be very grateful if sometimes you and your colleague can figure these things out on your own. You don't even have to tell me when it happens."

I don't want to watch you like a hawk, so don't give me a reason to.

Here the message is, "With precious few perks to dole out, I'd love to at least give you some schedule flexibility, the little that the workload allows. I'd let you come in and leave the office when you choose (roughly) as long as the work gets done, if you're a great employee in every other way. So make my job easier, please, and get your work done and don't disappear just when you're most likely to be needed. I can give you a little slack if you work with me, but if you don't, I'll have to come down on you like a ton of bricks."

You will always be more familiar with everything about your job than I will.

When we talk, your boss wants to say, "Remind me what you're working on, what's causing you trouble, and what's going well. Remind me what's important to you and what you need from me. It's hard to remember the priorities, needs, and obstacles of my department members, so any help you can give me is welcome. I do value you, but you're just much closer to your work than I am. If I'm micromanaging you in your own work, let me know."

When you're angry with me, let me know.

The boss wants to say, "I've got a lot on my mind. You could spend two weeks on hard stares, monosyllabic answers to my questions, and other pointed signals that you're mad at me, and I might still miss the message, so just tell me what's wrong. Pick a moment when I'm not up to my eyeballs in crises and ask me for a quick meeting. Tell me what I did that ticked you off and why it was a bad call. I promise to try and listen and not be defensive. If you don't tell me, how will I know?"

Don't ask me to tell you what you know I can't talk about.

Are layoffs coming? Are we merging with XYZ organization? If the boss knows, he or she can't tell you: "If I could tell you, I would. Don't ask me to tell you what you know I can't, and don't be offended because you think we're friends, and I should spill the beans. Don't create tension by making this unreasonable request."

Bring me problems as far in advance as possible.

Any boss loves to be surprised when things are going better than expected, but "Don't surprise me with bad news. Let me know far in advance when something's not working. At the last minute, problems are much harder to solve, so feel the fear and tell me anyway that Project X is behind schedule. I may shoot the messenger just a little, but it's better than my reaction will be further down the road."

Create a feedback network to give me painless advice on my management style.

Here's how this works. "If I badger Sally mercilessly, and I tend to ignore Joe, then trade feedback bits and deliver them to me in a friendly way. Sally, say to me, 'You know, Stan, you're probably not aware of it, but at times you seem to miss what Joe is telling you.' I can take that without being defensive. And Joe, you say to me, 'You know what, Stan? For some funny reason, even though you're a patient guy in general, you seem to give Sally a lot of grief.' That way, no one has to take the feedback heat on themselves, and I still get the message."

Don't do anything stupid.

Finally, a boss might conclude, "I can help you out if you goof up to a certain degree, but if you misuse the organization's credit card, download garbage from the Internet, or slug a co-worker, I'm out of the loop — you're gone. So help me out and don't do anything stupid."

What's the gist of what your boss is telling you? Let's work together. Why create tension in the relationship when the environment has enough of that already? You might as well team up with your boss (and vice versa) to lessen the stress and get the job done that much more easily. And if you put yourself in your boss's shoes just a little, you'll be surprised how much you learn. You might even consider becoming a boss yourself!

Big Believer in Networking

2007-04-10T17:27:00.000-07:00

I'm a big believer in networking - don't know whether that makes me a Big Networker or not, or whether I'd like to be called a Big Networker, for that matter.

My first email group was ChicWIT, in 1999. Right now, I moderate these email groups:

HRColorado - for HR people in Colorado
HRIL - same thing, in Illinois
LinkedInBoomers - a subgroup of MyLinkedInPowerForum
AskLizRyan - job, work, networking and life advice
LowerChautauqua - my neighborhood group
NewWestNetworking - this group is associated with the New West blog magazine
HRNation - HR people all over the place
USR-Alums - for alums of the old U.S. Robotics company that was bought in '97

There is an online forum on my website, but it hasn't gotten much traction yet. I am a big LinkedIn user. I wrote a book about LinkedIn, Yahoo!groups and online networking in general. I collect networking stories and networking horror stories - I have experienced a bunch of them, myself!

Pundit Fairy Strikes

2007-04-09T19:39:00.000-07:00

Imagine if you were making big changes, stepping away from things you'd been doing for a long time to head in the direction of different things that you really like to do - wouldn't you just love some reinforcement from the universe?

Our furnace went out a week ago and we've been poring over estimates and trying to figure out what to replace it with -- which was okay when the weather was balmy, but it got absolutely freezing over the weekend, and it snowed on Easter. So we huddled in front of space heaters, under blankets - praying for the warm weather to come back. When it warmed up again today, I just started cleaning house, because I hadn't had the energy to clean a bit while the house was a freezer.

Anyway, I didn't go online until about four p.m., and here's what I had in my inbox:
one of my workplace stories was on AOL. A networking-advice column was on HotJobs. My slide show Ten Best, Ten Worst Corporate Practices was generating a lot of email on BusinessWeek.com, and there was mail about another story, Ten Things Your Boss Wants You to Know, that ran in print somewhere (I don't have a link for that). Someone wrote from the BBC wanting to interview me on the Ten Best/Ten Worst story. What a gift! I guess it's good I am writing all this stuff. The reader mail that floods into my inbox (300 messages, the last time a story was on AOL in mid-March) generates more columns. There are a real, real lot of workplace issues to address.

So it is good to get that, er, I hate to say AFFIRMATION. Call it reinforcement, instead.

Endorsements and the Phantom Tollbooth

2007-04-05T14:53:00.000-07:00

Do you remember the Norton Juster book The Phantom Tollbooth, from your childhood? I highly recommend it. This kid named Milo gets a tollbooth in the mail from a mysterious source, and gets in his toy car and drives through the tollbooth to have a whole series of magical adventures. Anyway, at one point, Milo starts jumping to conclusions as he's driving (and chatting with his magical travel companions) and finds himself, you guessed it, transported to an island called Conclusions.

The other night I wrote a blog post about the value of LinkedIn endorsements, and posted a note about the article on the popular LinkedIn discussion forum MyLinkedInPowerForum. In my intro, I also suggested that those of us on the LinkedInPowerForum who can vouch for one another's work (e.g., me and group owner, Vincent Wright, whom I met through MLPF and who has since helped several of my job-seeking friends) could also endorse one another. One of the other members took exception to my post, in a big way, writing (excerpt):

Liz, with all due respect, "Worth a million bucks". So can people
expect commissions ???

So where does this start and end. LI is becoming the recruiters easy
way out. Will we see recruiters offering more "spotters" fees for
finding people. What is the true value of a trusted and reliable
contact. I am in great fear of this being discounted by the mad keen
rush towards the "pen pal" mindset.

Granted, there are people for whom a large contact base is part of
their "business" - recruiters and the like, and there are those whose
minds are capable of handling hundred or even thousands of "contacts"
but those are not the norm, and I would refer readers to the concept
of a "Dunbar Number" as discussed by experts in the field of social
anthropology. (simply put, most people are unable to handle a social
contact context of more than around 150-250 people). People that are
in the "wannabee" category with respect to this stand out like sore
thumbs as offering little addition to the concept of networking (such
as validation, and citeable reasons for endorsement) and IMHO do
their own credibility a disservice, rather than being perceived as
being "in the know" or well-connected. What is forgotten by so many
that head down this path, is that Linkedin itself offers that service
with a level of safeguards and integrity, as part of it's core design.

> Since we are thinking about endorsements, why don't we on the MLPF
> endorse one another (as appropriate, of course)? Forgive me if you've
> already had this conversation on the list.

Endorsements, just because people subscribe to the same online forum.
Give me a break.

That is almost as bad as the folks in LinkedinBloggers, who came up
with the idea of "referring each others blogs" in order to increase
their technorati etc rankings. With all due respect, collusion to give
impression of professional endorsement, blog readership or the like is
deceitful, and an "easy way out" for giving the impression that
someone is either knowledgable (wrt blogs) or well connected and or
well respected (and justifiably so).

This is right up there with the people who think that linking to
anyone and everyone that they can gives them "better networking". Nope
it just gives them a bigger rolodex full of people that they haven't
met, don't converse with, and have not even validated.

On the issue of Validation, There has been discussion in forums
recently of sexual harassment. I am aware of bankrupts, and people
being chased by the fraud squads in multiple countries, as members of
Linkedin. There is a member of MLPF who is a senior exec of a company
that is under investigation for securities fraud, and appears to be
avoiding prosecution on civil matters.

I think that discussion of what "as appropriate" means would better
serve everyone's purpose rather than a headlong flight into
promiscuous networking, for it's own sake, whatever that may be.

This guy got a little exercised, as you can see. What's comical is that I have written reams protesting the connect-to-anyone, vouch-for-anyone style of networking. I'll remember this overreaction the next time I get all puffed up about something -- I'll try to remember to take a few moments to calm down before I start ranting.

Apart from all that -- it is nice to endorse your friends and colleagues. I would do it if I were you.

Ask Liz Question: The Unpronounceable Last Name

2007-04-04T21:54:00.000-07:00

Dear Liz,

Through diligent internet research I've found the person I want to reach at a Marketing agency I would love to work for. She doesn't use LinkedIn and rather than send her a surface-mail letter, I'd like to call her up and introduce myself by phone. But I don't know how to pronounce her last name. If I call up the agency and stumble over her last name, that won't look so great. I don't know anyone who knows her. How do I figure out how to pronounce her name before I make my phone call?

Yours,

Carina

Dear Carina,

You call the front desk at the agency from some generic phone number (even a pay phone) just in case of caller ID, and you simply ask the front-desk person "Can you please give me some guidance? I have been given the name of Laura, um, Geezwint? Jessuwinch?" and wait for the front-desk person to help you out. Once you get the proper pronunciation, wait a day, call back from your own phone and pronounce that name with confidence!

If the company uses an automated phone system, it will either speak the employees' surnames to you in the course of handling your call, or allow you to type in the letters of her last name and eventually put you in her voicemail box where she should speak her own last name. If you go through the automated system and she picks up her own phone, you're home free, because if she picks up her phone she won't expect you to say her name. She'll say "Hello?" and you'll say,
"Hello Laura, my name is Carina Brillant and I....." and so on.

Cheers - Liz

Real vs. Manicured Speech?

2007-03-31T14:23:00.000-07:00

I taught a managerial communication workshop this week and included the DiSC assessment - you probably have run across that one at some point. The DiSC identifies participants' favored communication style - D for Driver/Dominant, i for Interpersonal (people people, in other words), S for Steady/Stable and C for Conscientious - that means detail-oriented in "DiSC" language. Anyway, this class had a large number of Cs in it. Those are the accuracy-first, detail-minded people.

So my premise throughout this workshop and all the communication workshops I deliver is that communication is a skill like typing or html programming. You can get better at it. You can become a more effective communicator over time. The first thing that pops into your head doesn't have to come out of your mouth a half-second later. You can, and should, strategize your communications as you do your other professional (and social) activities. Make sense?

So one of the "C" folks in the audience was thinking all this through, and asked a great question, namely: Is it manipulative to plan your communications with different people based on those people's own communication styles?

For instance, if you get feedback that some of your email messages come across as terse or abrupt - whereas your intention in writing these messages was merely to convey information precisely, with no tone at all apart from an informative one - you might start adding little openers like "I hope your week is going well" or closers like "Thanks so much for your help." You might add these 'filler' lines in order to soften your tone so as to communicate more effectively with "i"-type people who value relationships more than anything else. If you made those adjustments, would that be manipulative - or cynical?

Is the only valid communication the kind that springs organically from your heart and brain to your lips? If you manage or censor your own communications, is some of "you" lost in the translation? Or is it a sensible and polite thing to communicate for the benefit of the recipient?

The Vortex

2007-03-27T21:52:00.000-07:00

I am in the business center of a Best Western in Pueblo, Colorado. We took the kids to Santa Fe for a few days during their Spring break, but a lot of things are closed at this time of year in Santa Fe (including the children's museum and the only mini-golf place) and so we headed home early -- we made it halfway, to Pueblo, and here we are. The four-year-old, Darrien, has been driving us a little crazy, so much so that my husband referred to the kid as Damian today.

The busy state of the new Ask Liz Ryan email group when I've been able to check email, once a day, reminds me that I still have a job and things to attend to. In my mail today were fact-checking requests for interviews I did with Working Mother magazine and an HR magazine ages ago. On Thursday I am doing a training workshop in Denver; time and tide give way for no working mom, evidently. Still, on this little trip Darrien has learned to spell. He's conquered the "at" family (cat, bat, sat, fat, hat)and is moving on to the "an" family. He is excited to be cracking the code: every few minutes, in the car, he'll ask "How do you spell 'corndog'?" or "How do you spell 'secret castle'?"

Here's my take on the multiple-W2s-question that the brilliant commenters have already nailed: run away from that weird request and possibly shady company. I'm anti any W-2 requests at all in the hiring process, but seven!?!? Could be an identity-theft scam, don't you think?

Meanwhile, USA Today's front-page story on the War for Talent today reminded me that there are at least two job markets out there. On the one hand, companies are bemoaning the fact that they're not deluged with talented candidates for every job they post. (Waaa, waa if you ask me.) On the other hand, plenty of smart people are still job-hunting. How can this be? Much of it is that companies are still being hyper-frugal, meaning they want multiple, tough-to-find skill sets embedded in every new hire. For instance, PMI certification and seven years' project management experience plus html skills and experience coordinating large events. I'm not joking! Take a look at the job openings out there.

What's your take?

The Job That is Open Vs. The Job You Want

2007-03-22T21:48:00.000-07:00

I love both pieces of advice for Shel, the person who wrote in yesterday to ask about interviewing for a job he doesn't want, in hopes of getting a better job. If the job you are interviewing for is so uninteresting that you couldn't stand to do the job while positioning yourself to be promoted internally, don't interview for it; the company won't go for that at all. They'll feel you're toying with them. Instead, seek to contact the decision-maker for the job you do want (via LinkedIn, e.g.) and bypass the more junior-level job altogether.

Today I got a message from a job-seeker in Manhattan who got this request from the prospective employer: not one year's W-2, but SEVEN years' worth. This woman doesn't have her last seven years' W-2s sitting around. What do we think about that request? Leave a comment and share your views....

New Start, and Our First Question

2007-03-21T16:21:00.000-07:00

Well - it was a good day for my Outlook account. Several dozen people wrote to me, some to say they are sad, others to berate me. You never know what will happen next.

Meanwhile, people who don't know me at all apart from reading job-advice articles that I've written, continue to write every day with questions about job-hunting, surviving corporate life, growing their own businesses or managing their lives outside of work. So, perhaps this blog will give me a chance to answer those questions in a way that will be more efficient than via one-on-one email messages.

Here is one of the questions I got in my email today:

Dear Liz,

I want to work for a certain company, but not in any of the jobs that they are advertising. Should I go on an interview for one of the open positions, and from there convince them that I'm a great candidate for a higher-level job? Or will that make them angry at me?

Yours,

Shel

Dear Shel - this is a great question and I would like to wait 24 to 48 hours to answer it, in hopes of seeing what kinds of phenomenal advice the other readers will provide. Please folks: leave a comment below with advice for Shel!