Here are a few articles on this topic that focus on tactical activities that may help in this: same job, new boss, surviving new boss, adjust to a new boss, new boss? 5 ways to adjust

In this post, I want to focus on a few strategic aspects of building relationships with a new manager so that you can apply these (or other) tactics more effectively.

Here are the really important things to know about the manager:

1. Goals and motivations – Everyone in a new role comes with a set of career goals and organizational goals. They also have specific likes/dislikes which motivate them to work everyday. Knowing these will help you make sense of their day to day actions.
2. Leadership style (hands-on, hands-off, trusting, non-trusting, etc.) – Leadership Styles, Management Styles
3. Personal Style (big picture vs. detailed oriented, decisive vs. open, etc.) – see personality assessments like Meyers-Briggs or Big Five

Here are the really important things to tell about you:

1. Your understanding of past manager’s style – This is because your behavior will have tuned to that style and it may not be what your new manager expects, and so context will help them.
2. Your preferred working style – How you prefer to work, what you expect your manager to provide to you, what are your personality traits that your manager should know? This helps your manager understand you as a person and an employee much better. Remember, the manager is new to the job so she needs information to be effective.
3. Your career goals and motivations – Very important to communicate this to your manager. She needs to know what makes you tick and what do you expect the organization (and by extension, manager) to provide to you.

Ideally, above conversation should be done as soon as the new manager takes over. I have found that 2 sessions (usually 1 hour each) are enough to cover if you have done some preparation (which you must do).

Here are typical questions to ask a new manager (and then listen carefully, taking notes if you can), once you have set the context that you intend to ask lots of questions to understand her better:

1. What would you like to achieve for yourself and for the team/company in next 12 months?
2. What are your career goals?
3. Can you share some stories about your previous team? How did they work? What did you like about them? Your best guy? Your not-so-good guy?
4. What do you expect me to do in next 12 months in order to be successful?
5. What is your style of managing people?
6. Do you like to know the details of every single thing your team is working on? If so, how do you make sure that you know it? If not, how do you ensure we are doing our work right and you can represent us in your meetings well?

However, keep in mind that there can be a big difference in what someone says and what she does. This is not because they want to be dishonest, but because our behavior and actions are interpreted differently than what we intend to convey. Above conversation should be used as starting point only, and not the final word on the matter. Next steps are very important:

1. Observe your manager in action: this is where rubber meets the road. This will tell you what your manager is really like in action, and whether the words and action match. Remember the quote: “What you are, is so loud in my ears, that I don’t hear what you say”. You should observe these things:
   1. Running a meeting
   2. Conducting 1-1 (with you of course)
   3. Making decisions (during meeting, in ad-hoc meetings, emails, etc.)
   4. Communication format and style (emails, 1-1s, team meeting, etc,)
   5. 360 degrees Interactions (manager, peers, reports, across teams)
2. Observe yourself: It is important that you observe yourself in action too because what you told your manager about yourself may not play out in practice and you don’t want to be caught by your manager acting differently than what you said. It is sometimes hard to observe oneself; in that case, consider asking someone else you trust to give you feedback.
3. Hypothesize: We always want to jump to conclusions and judge people by even a random action, this is human nature. The key to working with a new manager (or any new person in your life/work) is to suspend judgment for a while. After that period is over (say 2 months), you should proceed to judge them and form opinions, but be open to change them because you don’t have enough data yet. It is best to treat these as hypothesis and then attempt to prove/disprove them via more observations and discussions.
4. Discuss with manager: First talk with manager is not enough, you need to have frequent (and planned) discussions with your manager, so that you can validate what you observe. Depending on your hypothesis about how open your manager is, you may or may not want to directly confirm your observations with your manager, but it is important to engage in it nonetheless; every conversation provides more data to prove/disprove a hypothesis.

In a nutshell, here are the steps to follow. It really should be done all the time, whether the manager is new or old, frequency of the cycle may go up or down as necessary.

Everyone wants to be best at what they do, but it is not always easy to do so. Those with a healthy dose of this trait will continue to pursue excellence even when given a boring assignment or challenging environment, while others will give up and settle for mediocrity. So why do some people pursue excellence? Vince Lombardi (great football coach) suggests, “The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.”. For Indian movie fans, Amir Khan character in 3 Idiots says, “seek excellence, success will follow” (more on 3 Idiots).

To make sure we are talking about same thing, let me state the dictionary definition of excellence:

Excel: To surpass others or be superior in some respect or area; do extremely well, Excellence: The state or quality of excelling or being exceptionally good; extreme merit; superiority

Note that excellence is in comparison with others. This means that my excellence is somehow also determined by how others perform. This leads to a sense of hopelessness – ‘if my peers are better than me, I am worthless’ kind of thoughts arise. This may be relevant for skills-based excellence where ‘you can be excellent at anything‘ may be true. However, it is not true everywhere – otherwise college dropouts could never be billionaires, and Harvard toppers would be ruling the world.

There is another kind of definition of excellence, which does not depend on comparison with others for its definition. To disambiguate it, let’s call it ‘personal excellence’.

Personal Excellence: Producing your best in any given situation, within or without a conducive environment to do so; Strive to be better than last time, every time.

This definition of excellence only compares with self, and hence is in my control. Given this definition, it is easy to answer the questions I posed at the beginning. People who believe in personal excellence always compete against themselves and their own performance last time. They don’t let environment come in the way of their performance. When they believe they have given their best, they are happy and satisfied, and see no reason to give up even when their best hasn’t been good enough to achieve desired results.

Such people always strive to be better next time. And they succeed. As great all time basketball coach John Wooden said so well (TED video):

“Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you are capable“.

If we believe above statement, success becomes a controlled process, and is no longer dependent on whims of my manager or my organization, or my competitors. Practicing this with no visible signs of success is a hard thing to do since we crave success so much. However, sustained success can come from following this principle as the coach’s team has shown (nicknamed the “Wizard of Westwood“, he won ten NCAA national championships in a 12-year period — seven in a row^[2] — as head coach at UCLA, an unprecedented feat.^[3][4] Within this period, his teams won a record 88 consecutive games.^[2] He was named national coach of the year six times)

How do we achieve this excellence? Here are a few relevant quotes:

“If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.” — Colin Powell

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit” –Aristotle

Excellence is not about knowing what is excellent, it is about pursuing excellence all the time, in every little thing we do. I firmly believe that our work is our signature, it is our resume. We are what we do. Therefore, it is critical that we are excellent in whatever we do. We are remembered and known by what we created and how we created them, long after we have moved on. Excellence is a habit, mediocrity is a habit too. There are many reasons to do mediocre work (‘I hate my work’, ‘I hate my boss/salary’, ‘I am bored’), but once mediocrity becomes a habit, it becomes you.

Here are a few examples where it is easy to do mediocre work, but then it is easy to be excellent too, and the habit gets formed either way:

1. You need to ask yourself what value you provide in an interaction – if you don’t provide value, don’t have that interaction. When you do, provide value. For example, it is easy to become an email forwarder (receive emails from one set of people, send it to another set of people without adding value), rather than figuring out a way to provide value (read and summarize the issue, talk instead of email, provide solutions without asking others, etc.).
2. Push back on uninteresting work, but if you still get assigned to it, give your 100%. If you need to create a presentation as part of your work, people will remember the quality of the presentation for a long time, longer than they will remember the fact that you had a reason to produce mediocre work (if they remember at all). A PowerPoint deck lives forever!
3. Do not compare with others, compare with yourself. Can you do better than this? If so, do it. If you can create a better spec than last time, do so. Others don’t produce a good quality spec should not be a reason to create a poor spec.

Success comes from personal excellence, personal excellence comes from true passion, true passion comes from deep interest; so work on what deeply interests you and you will achieve long term success. Ancient greeks used arete (outstanding fitness for purpose) and eudaimonia
(happiness which resulted from a life well-lived, being prosperous and fulfilled) in the context of excellence. I firmly believe that having personal excellence is key to long-lasting success, and eventual happiness.

What do you think about personal excellence and its ties to success and happiness?

Once celebrations are over, you start thinking: is this going to be any different than before? Do my strategies for managing my 1 report extend to managing these 4? And you start getting some doubts. Are there some reasons to worry?

In a previous post about industry newbie as manager, I pointed to perils of getting promoted to management position too early in the career. This is a very real problem and newbie managers should guard against this by spending enough time to master these skills and getting good at dealing with ambiguities and achieving results through others. Having 1 or 2 reports to start a management career is a good way to start practicing these.

In another post about management challenges, I discussed major aspects of management that become critical when you have too many reports (my example had 9 reports). All those are very valid for managers having any number of reports, and if you are a new manager, you will do good to review them.

However, when you move from 1 report to 4-5 reports, there is a big pitfall that you will do well to avoid. This is the art of time management.

When you have 1-2 reports, you spend lots of time with your reports since you need to learn more about managing them, and they need more time from you (because most likely, they are junior employees and require lots of hand holding). However, this doesn’t scale to 5 reports. They will suck more than 100% of your time if you try to have the same approach to managing.

Here are a few objectives to aim for in order to be good at managing your time as a manager:

• Interactions between team members shouldn’t require you for decisions and resolutions all the time
• Use 1-1s effectively so that they don’t become too long
• Reports should be able to independently make prioritization decisions in most of the cases
• You should be able to manage by exception, management by knowing everything doesn’t scale once you have more than 2 reports.

Given these goals, here are some solutions I have found to work:

• Set ground rules for interactions – this defines your working style. This allows the team to understand which issues to bring to you for discussion and which ones they don’t need to
• Be very clear about goals and priorities for the team – this helps the team members to make decisions that are aligned with your goals and priorities without requiring you in all their meetings, and without having you overturn their decisions
• Clarify decision-making process – I can’t stress this enough. If this is not made clear and demonstrated in practice, the manager can be overwhelmed by so many decisions that require their attention. Manager needs to tell the team how the decisions will be made, when will it require the manager, what data should be provided to back the decision, who can make which decisions, etc.
• Use team meetings effectively – Team meetings are great ways to demonstrate your goals, priorities, working style and decision making process in action. So use it judiciously and effectively. Have clear agenda, provide opportunities to the team members to bring in issues as well as solutions, and provide an open environment for deep discussions and speedy resolutions.

A note about ‘managing by exception vs. managing by knowing everything’: Most new managers are micro-managers, since their technical smartness has got them this promotion and they need to be in the know of everything (and provide guidance every step of the way) in order to feel good about their own contribution. They will read every email, make every decision that needs to be made by their reports, will want to know every status change in their reports’ projects, etc. This clearly doesn’t scale from a time management perspective. This is what I call ‘managing by knowing everything’. A way to manage in a scalable way is what I call ‘managing by exception’: if you set right goals, priorities, ground rules, and processes in place, team members should be independent in their work, and they will ask you for help (and that is the point when you manage). Here is a geeky way of stating this distinction between these 2 styles: When a process has to respond to a sub-process result, it has 2 options: it can keep polling the sub-process frequently, or you can set notifications that get triggered by the sub-process when it is ready for your intervention. Trigger is always a preferred option (unless in some very specific scenarios when busy-wait may be better)

I also reviewed my post last year on Management Track vs. Individual Contributor Track where I had written the following:

“… skills needed to succeed and measures of success for each track are very different and sometimes unclear. To succeed in management track, one needs to be good at dealing with ambiguities, taking decisions based on partial data, and be able to deal to managing regular management challenges; measure of success most of the time is very indirect (mostly through the success of the team members) and hence can be very subjective and debatable. To succeed in IC track, one needs to have deep technical and domain expertise, should be good at solving complex technical problems, and be able to provide technical and thought leadership; measure of success is very direct and objective and mostly based on visible results of the individual…”

and had received some interesting comments:

“..does salary play a role in why people opt for management as against continuing in IC role? If they want a better salary, is moving into management their only option?..”

“..there is no good appreciation for IC’s to stay longer in their position. Its kind of peer pressure and moment of embarrassment when someone in family or friend ask “Are you still a software engineer?”..”

“..Management shows that it as a carrier growth for the individual. Irrespective of the individual interest they force to get into management..”

“..It may be different in multi-nationals but I think in most Indian companies the situation [people being forced into thinking management is the only career growth path] is what you have described..”

My second inning as an IC seems to have given me a different perspective on this topic, a perspective that makes the picture more complete. I realize that my first post was about a specific phase in the career of an IC, and not complete. This post is an attempt to make it more complete and generate more discussions on this topic.

Two Phases of an Individual Contributor Role

The most important insight for me is that there are 2 distinct phases of being an IC:

1. Phase when most of your peers are IC
2. Phase when most of your peers are managers

These phases exist because the number of ICs and managers in a typical org will look something like this (L1-L6 are just fictitious levels to illustrate the point):

In the above picture, Phase 1 will end somewhere between L3 and L4, and Phase 2 will start. Another way of stating this is that statistically speaking, being a Phase 1 IC is a rule, being a Phase 2 IC is an exception.

A Phase 1 IC is assigned a specific set of tasks and they are expected to complete them in time, with quality, and with limited (sometimes no) interactions with their peers. Therefore the quality of their deliverables is strongly correlated with their performance.

A Phase 2 IC is an expert in their domain and super-specialist. They are assigned complex and broad-scope projects and hence by definition needs to work through many Phase 1 ICs and their manager to deliver results. This means two things:

1. Phase 1 IC’s deliverables actually include Phase 2 IC’s contribution (though it is hard to separate which is which)
2. Phase 2 IC’s personal deliverables may be much smaller compared to their overall contribution to the company (if there is a way to add up the contributions to each Phase 1 IC involved in the project)

Performance Review Model is flawed

Performance of any individual in an organization is impacted by every interaction this individual has with others. Simplistically,

• R = ∑R_i, where Ri is result achieved through a given interaction

There are some interactions that are much more result-impacting than others: Manager, technical lead (mostly this is Phase 2 IC), subject matter experts, etc.

A good performance review, therefore, tries to identify various components of the results for an individual, assigns suitable weights and measures to them, and them attributes them to rightful owner. For example, a Phase 1 IC will have very few interactions other than those with his manager and technical lead. If the value of the manager’s contribution is 20% and Phase 2 IC is 30%, this Phase 1 IC should be credited with only 50% of total value of work. More importantly, the manager’s review should include this 20% contribution (some weighted value of course) as well as other contributions he made to other ICs, in addition to his personal contribution (after subtracting contributions from his manager and other interactions). Exactly same should be done for Phase 2 ICs and others who contribute to others results.

However, typical performance review process in most companies goes like this:

1. Attribute all visible results to the person. So an IC with strong manager or Phase 2 IC supporting him/her gets disproportionately high credit (and reward)
2. Manager’s results = sum of results of all his reports. This means a weak manager gets disproportionately high credit (and reward) if he happens to have strong ICs in his team

The biggest impact is on Phase 2 ICs (as well as SMEs and others who contribute to others results) whose contributions are totally forgotten.

Challenges of being a Phase 2 IC

Being a Phase 2 IC is challenging. Here are some of the challenges I saw:

1. Since leading and working with others becomes key, it becomes hard to define ownership areas and tangible results. This creates problem when performance review is focused on tangible results; results achieved through others become hard to prove
2. As a super-specialist, you are expected to fight many fires and contribute to long-range discussions (same duties as my peer managers have), which means keeping focus on key deliverables is very hard.

Some other insights gained from discussions with other Phase 2 ICs as well as managers in India and US:

1. Phase 2 ICs need to be super-specialists in order to command same salary as manager. This came up in every conversation, if you are not a deep expert in your area, consider staying a Phase 1 IC or a management track.
2. Most organizations perceive a manager to provide more value than IC, so an IC at the same level will mostly be paid less than manager.
3. Performance reviews in most companies do a poor job in measuring a Phase 2 IC performance. Therefore, most Phase 1 ICs tend to choose management track and hence there are very few Phase 2 ICs in a company, which in turn reduces the need to come up with a better measure anyway; and this chicken and egg problem continues.

Being a successful Phase 2 IC

To be effective, a Phase 2 IC needs to be a leader and communicator (to get the work done through the Phase 1 ICs) as well as influential and persuasive (so that Phase 1 ICs can respect and work well with them even without a reporting relationship). They need to be good at multi-tasking.

It is important to be careful when choosing Phase 2 IC as a career path. As a starter, they will not get competitive salary as managers if they are not super-specialists and deep in their domain. Most Phase 2 ICs I talked to said they love being a Phase 2 IC because:

1. They are passionate about their area and love being deeply technical and go-to person
2. They can be very effective, since they don’t have to worry about dealing with people problems
3. They can have a big impact since they can contribute ideas to others’ work and see it succeed (or fail!), they can’t accomplish so much by being a manager
4. They care much more about what they are learning and influencing than about how much they are making as salary and bonuses (of course, they want fairness in review system)
5. They are learning skills that are also required if and when they choose to be a manager, so they aren’t giving up completely on the other career path.

This last point is worth talking more. The core skills a Phase 2 IC needs in order to be successful are leadership, communication, persuasion and influence capabilities. As a super-specialist of their area, they also need to be great at problem solving and multi-tasking. Since it is hard to be successful as a Phase 2 IC (see the performance review section above), this means that if you are successful, you are also ensuring your success as a manager should you choose to be one at some point. This is a key takeaway for me too when I am an IC now.

Also, it is important to note that measure of success is very different for each person. However, a Phase 2 IC has a better chance of success if they choose their measures to be learning and complexity of tasks (things that they control) rather than financial and other measures which are beyond their control. Performance Review process will always be biased against a Phase 2 IC so they need to be an IC in spite of the process (because they have the reasons mentioned above).

This post generated many other questions around performance review models, distinction between Manager and Phase 2 IC responsibilities, organizational strategy to tackle these specific roles, etc. I will attempt to address them in some subsequent posts. If you have comments on these, please let me know.

This post is an attempt to analyze why someone gets into this situation, and how they can be careful and avoid this fate.

Here are some of the things that went wrong for the person in the story:

1. Job requirements are not aligned to what this person can offer or want to offer.
2. Person is not able to put the feedback in perspective, and unable to see that the feedback is about the role and not always about him
3. He doesn’t know what he wants from his job – this lack of direction leads him to believe everything what the manager says
4. He doesn’t know what he needs to change in order to be excellent at the job, so he continues to follow what his manager tells him to do.

If you read this carefully, you will notice that everything points to a reactive approach to career in this story. A reactive approach happens something like this:

Accept Job Requirements: When you join a new job or take a new role, you accept whatever your manager tells you about his her expectation.

Create execution plan: Once you know what is expected, you figure out how you do the tasks and what results need to be produced. This becomes the execution plan.

Execute: You put in lots of hard work in doing the tasks that you think will fulfill the job requirements. Such hard work also raises the expectation in your mind about rewards and gives an impression that you are doing a good job

Receive performance review: Once a year (or 6 months or 3 months), you receive a piece of paper and a talk from your manager, which describes what you are doing well, and what you need to improve on. This assessment and data is put together by your manager based on your execution and results. Often times, this doesn’t match the impression you have about your own work, and so performance review becomes a frustrating experience for manager and you.

New job requirements: Based on the performance review, new things might have to be done, or things might need to be done differently. This forms the input for a new cycle to begin and you start all over again. This goes on and on in your career.

Reactive approach to career never works. One needs to be proactive when managing one’s career. A proactive version of the above flow will look something like this:

Analyze job requirements: You analyze the job requirements that are handed to you by your manager to understand what is required to do them. You also align it with your strengths, interests and weaknesses (see the post about Job selection and transition for more discussions on the subject)

Customize job: This is the first important and proactive step after analyzing the requirements. This requires working with your manager to make sure you focus on areas which align with your strength or with your interests. Job requirements which align with your weaknesses and are uninteresting to you will cause you to do a poor job and should be avoided. More managers are open about creative job customization than you might think, so you should take advantage of this to set you up for success.

Update career plan and measures: It is important to align personal career plan and how your measure your career growth with what you do in your job. Every new job requirement has the potential to impact your plan and may introduce a new measure (see this post for more discussion on career measures). Also, a self-measure for career is very crucial, you can’t rely only on organization’s measures.

Execute: You put in the hard work required to execute against these job requirements and career goals. Important difference here is that the execution is impacted as much by job requirement as it is impacted by your own career goals and measures.

Collect and analyze ongoing feedback: Collecting and analyzing feedback from managers and peers is important to know how you are doing against the goals and requirements. Typical performance review feedback are skewed by the fact that they are also tied with monetary benefits. Ongoing feedback keeps the feedback more genuine and gives an opportunity to change course much earlier if things are not going well. Such an analysis will also result in new requirements for the job and the cycle will start all over again.

For a proactive approach, it is very important that you have a career plan which you review frequently to make sure things are going according to plan. When the review suggests that things are not going as per plan, it is time to make modification in career plan or in the job requirement (role change, company change, etc.). Also, one of the things I have found to work well is to have a sense of urgency around the goals. For example, if you think you have all the time in the world to achieve the career goals, you will tend to follow the reactive model. However, if you give yourself a small window of time (I give myself 18-24 months) to achieve a particular big career goal, it forces you to be proactive because the time is running out.

A note on the role organizations’ culture plays in picking the model you use for your career. To use the proactive model, you require following things from the organization:

1. Clear job description
2. Openness of manager for job customization
3. Get genuine feedback from manager and peer
4. Alignment of your values with organizational values

Not all organizations allow these to happen. If the organization doesn’t have clear responsibilities and accountabilities, #1 may not happen. If the managers are rewarded only for short-term results and not for quality of results, #2 can be a problem. If organization doesn’t reward collaboration and team work, #3 will suffer. If organization is not tolerant of diverse views, #4 can be a problem. It is important to evaluate your organizational culture for signs of problems in each of these areas and then accordingly work on your proactive model. It is important to identify quickly whether you can manage your career proactively in a given organization; otherwise, it can cause tremendous waste of time and energy, and career gets jeopardized.

I have been talking to a friend who has impeccable credentials as far as resume of an Indian engineer goes: IIT + IIM, about 15 years of work experience working in various big and small software companies in US. Such a resume attracts amazing amount of offers at incredible salary points. However, my conversations with him repeatedly bring up a point: he thinks he is no good, his experience is not useful to any company, he doesn’t do anything that deserves a grand salary, etc. etc. This is an insane view of the world, and when I prod him, I realize what is happening: his current company and his managers have been conspiring against him and using every performance review to tell and show him that he needs to improve in his current work, that he is just an average contributor who is found dime a dozen in this world.

Such an atrocious lie! Such a waste of talent! Such an underutilization of human resource!

Of course, companies and managers don’t do it with malicious intention; they do it with good intention. They think the job they have assigned to a person is the job most suited, and hence if the person doesn’t perform 100%, they must provide feedback about areas of improvement, and push the person to stretch and meet their performance bar. All people and performance management books state that giving clear feedback about areas of improvement is the best service you can do to a person, and so every manager and organization do it.

However, at least in my friend’s case (and I am sure in case of many other people), manager and organization are solving wrong problem. They have put him in a role where an average Joe will do better, but my friend will not, because his interests are totally mis-aligned; he wants tangible, visible fruit of his labor that he can be proud of, what he gets is a bunch of random features delivered through others without any clear idea on what he really contributed to the project except maybe sending status reports. All performance review feedbacks that he gets are focused on how to make the average Joe perform to his best, and my friend can’t comprehend those feedbacks.

However, and this was shocking to me, he has started assuming that these feedback must be about him (even though it is about the role and the average Joe who is supposed to do them), and his self-confidence is plunging. This is scary, because lack of self-confidence kills career aspirations. And it seems it is doing the same to him; he is actively thinking about whether to change his career track completely since everyone around him thinks he hasn’t and can’t do much good in what he is doing. Such a shame!

I fear that there are many such people out there whose career aspirations are being killed at this moment by their manager and their company. And I am scared because this means so many careers will not realize their full potential, and there will be so many people leading a miserable life since they can’t fulfill their aspirations. And I am sad about it because the solution is so simple.

This is the solution that I offered to my friend, and is applicable to everyone who finds themselves in such a situation: PLEASE LEAVE YOUR CURRENT JOB RIGHT NOW! It is like slow poison, as soon as you realize, you must stop taking it, even before you find a cure for the problem it has caused so far.

Please, save your career!

Image credit

1. Happiness brings success, not the other way round‘ (the paper) – Scientists reviewed 225 studies involving 275,000 people and found that chronically happy people are in general more successful in their personal and professional lives. Happy people are more likely than their less happy peers to have fulfilling marriages and relationships, high incomes, superior work performance, community involvement, robust health and even a long life.
2. ‘Happiness leads to Career Success‘ talks about the book (The Happiness Advantage) from Shawn Achor that suggest that when we are happy our brain works better and we end up working harder which then leads to success.
3. People who are unhappy in life are unlikely to find satisfaction at work
4. Wall Street Journal (‘Is Happiness Overrated’) distinguishes between ‘hedonic well-being’ (immediate pleasure) and ‘eudemonic well-being’ (long term sense of fulfillment) and suggests that latter type of happiness brings the benefits of happiness (health and longevity).
5. ‘Happiness Lengthens life‘ suggests that ‘Happiness does not heal, but happiness protects against falling ill. As a result, happy people live longer. The size of the effect on longevity is comparable to that of smoking or not’.

If this is true, why have I found so many unhappy people at workplace? 

Over last few years, I have been trying to practice an approach to career management for myself which focuses on happiness as a leading as well as trailing indicator of career success. I am very excited to report that this works very well. Anyone who has been around me for last 2-3 years can vouch for the fact that I have a very successful career and I can attribute a large part of this success to my focus on happiness.

This post is about sharing my learning and process and why it makes sense for everyone to adopt this approach.

Two key insights

1. If our happiness is attached to something we don’t control, it is easy for others to affect our happiness level and we end up being unhappy even if we don’t want to. In my opinion, this is one of the biggest reasons why we have so many unhappy people at workplace.
2. It is possible to figure out ways to attach our happiness to things that we control, thereby controlling our happiness. I have tried to do it for myself, and it is possible for everyone to do so.

Two key lists

1. Happiness + Control – Things at workplace which give me happiness (or unhappiness) and which I can control:
   1. Working on things that are aligned to my strengths (so I have confidence I will do well and I usually do)
   2. Working on things that are aligned to my interests (so I love doing them)
   3. Learning new things about work, about people, about everything there is to learn at a workplace (so that I am ready for being CEO of my own company someday)
   4. Working more with people I respect and like
2. Happiness – Control – Things at workplace which can give me happiness (or unhappiness) but which I can’t control (so I try to avoid getting attached to them – it is hard, but possible):
   1. Salary and promotions, better performance review
   2. Motivation and Recognition
   3. Great managers and leaders around and above me
   4. Team I work in

My Process

Whenever I feel unhappy or frustrated at work, I check to see if I am missing one or more of the above. Most of the time, I am able to discover some gaps, and then I rethink what I am doing (what I call ‘rebooting my system’). This usually leads to a detailed 1-1 with my manager with thoughts on how I want to reorganize my priorities and focus areas. Sometimes this has resulted in change in my role and discipline, most other times it has resulted in renewed sync between me and my manager about what is important for me and the organization. In every single instance, it has helped me regain my happiness, so it works.

The devil lies in the details; however the overall process is simple. And I want to assure everyone that rewards are well-worth the effort.

There are 2 reasons I want to focus on these:

1. These are not considered part of a typical job search and hence don’t get enough attention from job hunters or from those who help job hunters.
2. Decisions made in these phases determine when you have to start your next job search, and wrong decisions bring you to job market much earlier than you want.

Here is the description of these 2 phases:

1. Selection: Picking the right offer from the job options available to you, based on the criteria that enhance your career. Even though this seems trivial (‘pick the best-paying one’), it may not be so since criteria for selection could vary a lot person to person and sometimes getting to the criteria that matters to you proves very difficult.
2. Transition: Making first few months in the new company count so that you can be successful and have a rewarding career in the new job. It is easy to mess up a good job in so many ways, and it requires some careful planning in order to do well in a new job and not spend too much time proving yourself.

Both of these phases depend on how well you know the answers to some fundamental questions about career:

1. What are your career goals?
2. What makes you happiest at your workplace, and in your life?
3. What are your strengths, weaknesses and interests?
4. How do you measure growth and success of your career?

I have written many posts around these topics in the past; for example, see Manage your career please and Mapping your career path. Here is a summary of what I advise to people through these blogs and my 1-1s and mentorship sessions:

1. Create a career goals list – This should be your draft plan for future; this should talk in broad strokes about where you see yourself in 10-20 years. Reflecting on your happiest moments of life and career usually gives you some ideas about what you really want to do, and the more you visualize various versions of future (and see how you feel about them), the better your draft plan will be.
2. Create a career milestone list – Ask yourself why you have the career goals the way you have created them, and keep asking why to the answer; 5 Whys works well. This gives you a further refinement, as well as some intermediate milestones of careers that you need to go through. Review it periodically, it should change based on changes around you.
3. Create growth measurement criteria – Career can be measured in many different ways (financial, learning, job complexity, career milestones, etc.). It can be measured via things you control (see How do you measure your performance) or via things you don’t (see Appreciation at Workplace). Right measures give you control of your career and are important to be kept in mind.
4. Identify your strengths, weaknesses, and interests – These help you make the best use of your time by doing the work that aligns with your strengths and interests, and manage around your weaknesses.

Equipped with answers to the above questions, it should be easy to pick the right offer. Right offer is the one that fulfills following criteria:

1. Aligns with career milestone you have in mind (‘if you want to be a manager, picking an individual contributor role even though it pays higher is a bad idea’)
2. Aligns with your strengths and/or interests (‘if you hate public speaking, picking a sales job is usually a bad idea’)
3. Aligns with your growth criteria (‘If you want to learn about org and process, joining a startup is a bad idea’)
4. Enhances your career progression rate rather than slows it down (‘if picking a new domain takes 2 years, it may be a bad idea to enter that domain later in your career’)
5. For first 10-15 years of career, Learning and handling complex problems should be the criteria for growth, and so next job should always take you to a more complex role and/or very new one (which helps you learn more, and faster).

Once the selection is done, joining the new job brings you to the Transition phase. It is extremely important to manage first few months in a new company well so that rest of the stay in the company is pleasant and productive. There are some basic things to understand and learn when you join a new company as a team member or as a leader:

1. Understand the culture of the new team so you can adapt to it or attempt to adapt it to you
2. Understand the values as practiced by the team (as opposed to what the company handbook says) and adapt to it
3. Identify the influencers (key people who have disproportionately large influence on team) and understand them better so that you can influence them to see your value

In my experience, these can be accomplished by observing and analyzing the following:

1. How meetings run and what is their effectiveness?
2. Who makes decisions, what is the decision-making process followed most of the time, how are decisions made?
3. How is feedback given and received by people/team?
4. How do people/team respond to failure and other adverse situations?
5. What is the process for selecting people/team who should be rewarded, incentivized and appreciated?
6. How and when does the team celebrate?

Most importantly, you need to position yourself in right meetings, right groups, right situations, so that others can perceive your value quickly and correctly. This means being proactive and managing your boss well, among other things.

This wraps up the series on Job Search. I am looking forward to comments and opinions you have on this set of topics.

In this post, I will talk about how other strategies can be applied. As one of the commenters on my previous post mentioned, there is no silver bullet and the best strategy is to mix-and-match strategies that work for you. I will specifically focus on social strategies and project management strategies that can be applied to a job search. These can be used separately or together with the competitive strategies, depending on your needs.

Social strategies model job search as a match-making where the goal is to have a best fit between job hunter and recruiter based on information gathering and sharing. Social and networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook are great places to hunt information as well as people (since all information is not captured on internet).

Project management strategies model job search as a project with clear goals, milestones, resources, and timelines that need to be tracked well. Information and Risk management are important aspects here, and strategies focus on how to do it better.

Here are some of the strategic principles that are applicable to most of the phases of job search:

1. Information Presentation: Information presentation refers to various ways information about you can/should be presented to those who need to see it to extend you job offers. Networking sites offer numerous ways to present information about yourself directly, other internet resources help the presentation indirectly (your web sites, your blog, your presentations on slideshare, your comments on others pages, etc.). Quality and quantity of this information presentation has great influence on your job prospects. Sometimes, this is not in your hands (people commenting negative on your blog or facebook page, someone disparaging you on a blog, etc.), hence it is important to keep a close eye on this. Information is presented even during conversations, body language and tone convey a lot about you.
2. Information Collection: Information presentation by others (your recruiter, potential hiring manager and company, industry, etc.) becomes your source of information. Learning to use market intelligence and other techniques to gather these information is very valuable. This also includes finding about people who have vital information. For example, some of the best jobs are never advertised; so knowing people who know about these jobs is key to getting in the race. Information is collected all the time – lots of information can be collected when reading body language or tones of the interviewers for example.
3. Return on Investment (ROI): Job search, like any other activity, requires time, effort and (sometimes) money. A 1 hour spent in talking to a useless recruiter is worth much more when you could apply that 1 hour to update your online profile on linkedin or gather recommendations from your prior manager. Managing this time and effort investment, and avoiding allocating them to the most fruitful activity yields best results. A focus on is very critical in order to conduct a fruitful job search. Various project management techniques can be used to manage the resources you apply to the job search and keep an eye on ROI.

Here are a few examples and suggestions on how these strategies can be applied to various phases of job search:

In the last post of the series, I will talk about Selection and Transition Phase of the job search in some more detail, since they are not considered to be part of job search, but are critical in making sure you don’t have to do a job search every year!

In this post, I want to focus on how some of these strategies can be applied to a typical job search.I continue to use the strategic framework that is developed for business competition to job search, so most most of the references below go back to businesses. Also, this topic is too large to be covered in a few posts, so I have tried to be brief and not verbose. I invite comments on some of those areas and I can expand those later.

Also, please keep in mind that a strategy is only worth so much, execution is way more important; it is good to keep in mind this quote by Edison: “Strategy is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration”. My usage of word strategy includes a healthy dose of perspiration, because otherwise nothing will work.

In any job change, following phases are involved:

1. Conception: Identify the need for a change and making sure right goals exist for making change. As one of the comments on the previous post suggested, there are many reasons for change: understanding options, solving immediate problems within the team (conflict with manager is #1 reason), looking for a specific change, or looking for a change just for a change. Sometimes, the reason is not good enough to initiate (for ex: you fought with your manager, and want to show him you can get an offer from another company), and searches in those cases are a waste of time or may lead to an undesirable change (you may end up losing a job that you liked and end up in a place which is not a good fit). Understanding our motivation for change and clarifying the goals we seek to accomplish is very important when a job change is being conceptualized and initiated.
2. Organization: Once the job change has been conceived, next phase is about figuring out job verticals to look for change, and various ways to use in order to get an audience with one or more hiring managers. Given the fact that there are always many more candidates than positions (esp. the ones you will be interested in), this phase requires very careful planning and strategizing, otherwise it can waste lots of time and will not yield right options. This phase is resume-driven most of the time, so strategies will be executed in 2 ways: creating right resume, and positioning your resume correctly. Remember, quality of final offers will depend on which hiring managers invite you for a talk, so this is a critical phase.
3. Application: After organization phase, you will have one or more shots at getting offers, depending on how you do at interviews. Application phase is all about how to do your best in interviewing, how you learn from failures to do better at next set of interviews, and do all you can to get an offer from the companies you want. This phase is interview-driven most of the time, so strategies will be executed in 3 ways: how to prepare for interview, how to do the interview and how to learn from failures
4. Selection: Assuming application phase went well, you should have one or more offers in your hand. This phase is about picking the right offer. Even though this seems trivial (‘pick the best-paying one’), it is not so trivial. If right job is not picked, it can derail the career in a significant way (since a bad job change wastes lots of time). This phase is about criteria to apply to pick the right job.
5. Transition: Any change is hard, and a job change doesn’t only mean showing up in the new company on the day of joining. This phase is about doing the transition successfully, and being successful in the new job. It is easy to mess up a good job in so many ways, and it requires some careful planning in order to do well in a new job and not spend too much time proving yourself.

As you may notice, strategies applicable in different phases will vary. However, strategic principles applicable to job search stay the same across the phases, so it is important to understand them first, and then apply these principles in each phase:

1. Core Competency – Core competency for an individual is a unique set of strengths in which the individual is extremely good (and maybe the best). By definition, this set cannot be very large, most individuals will list 3-5 competencies they can claim to be their core competencies. For job change, it is extremely important to know these and always build case (interview, resume, job verticals, etc.) around these competencies and avoid other competencies in which the person may not be that good. So, for example, if you are extremely good at writing and communicating but are a software developer (and hence this skill is not directly applicable in writing code), think of job market for developers which are more business-focused (which are likely to require better communication skills) than say device-driver company; you can also consider adjacent job markets like program managers or product managers which require technical and communication skills. Knowing core competencies well gives you great leverage in all phases of job change.
2. Market Research – Market research in case of job change refers to understanding your target job market very well, understand segments of the market, trends of employment and growth in those segments, and where do you fit in it. There are lots of sources of information to conduct this research, and the information gathered helps in identifying good strategies during Organization phase (‘which job segments to target for best chances of success, which jobs have best growth prospects, and/or are best fit for my core competencies’), Application phase (show yourself as an aware and interested interviewee rather than a nervous and ignorant job hunter, know the right topics to ask questions to interviewers, etc.), and Selection phase (career growth opportunities get created when industry and the firm grows). It also helps you avoid some pitfalls in job search (for ex: for a long time, Bioinformatics field was thought to require personnel who know both biology and maths/computers, but it turns out that companies manage by hiring best from both areas and make them work together rather than hiring one person with both skills, which is hard to find).
3. Competitive Strategy: As applied in job changes, competitive strategies can be categorized into following 4 areas
   1. Differentiation: This is the most important strategy that can be applied to Organization and Application phase: all resumes look the same to recruiters, they are all found at the same place with rest of the world, all interviews go the same way for interviewers, etc. So the candidates who can do a good job at differentiating their resumes and their interviews can go a long way in getting offered jobs. Differentiation can be created in various ways: look and feel (blog as a resume, video resume, etc.), positioning (where is your resume found, how do you describe yourself to the interviewer, etc.), highlighting core competency (papers published in area of expertise, recommendation from industry experts, etc.).
   2. Cost vs. Value: This is an often overlooked strategy: Applying in job markets where you are more qualified than others who typically apply can be a good entry strategy. This is mostly applicable in Organization phase: picking the right segments to apply to. For example, if you have an MBA and you apply for the post of an Admin Assistant, you can get entry into a good organization, and then you can forward your career by moving within the company at the right time (which is easier than changing a company).
   3. Segmentation: Which part of the job market you apply your energy to is very important. For example, if you are an engineer from a Tier 2 university and apply for jobs where all Tier 1 graduates apply, you have much less chances of a call and selection than if you apply to a job segment where few Tier 1 would apply. A special example in this case is that of software engineering: developers consider testing to be a lowly job (which is just a perception) and so developers who can shift to the adjacent market of testing can suddenly find good job offers and satisfying careers.
   4. Creating new space: There are many jobs that are too hard to write job description for. These jobs get advertised as regular jobs in some cases (which then don’t get filled easily) or are unadvertised. Getting access to these jobs take some of the social strategies (to be discussed in a later post), but sometimes you can conceptualize such a position by understanding the market well and then actively look for job postings which might actually be for such complex jobs. If you are suitable for such a job, you can land an offer because there will be very few applying and suitable for it. An example is a project manager job, which is advertised as a regular job but many times requires very specific domain knowledge (‘very technical and software skills’, or ‘very good business sense’, etc.); if you are strong in a domain (say software development) and have core competencies that can make you a good project manager, trying to identifying such special project manager jobs and only apply for those will be very useful. I will discuss this in more detail in my next post of social strategies.

Here are a few examples how these strategies can be applied; you should build your own table, based on suitability, feasibility, and acceptability to you: