Episode 130 – Accelerate your Career – Skills For Success

Negotiating, recruiting, career planning, interviewing... rarely taught, crucial skills that are indispensable to career success. Listen in as Mark Herschberg, author of The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You, gives valuable career advice about pivoting and about the value of knowing your Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) tactic to deliver significant negotiating power.   Table of Contents 01:40 … Meet Mark02:58 … Pivoting Your Career04:56 … Impact Of COVID on Career Progress06:27 … Post Pandemic Work Shift08:19 … Being Intentional with Relationships11:01 … How to be Better at Interviewing15:11 … What are Good Interview Questions?21:17 … Preparation for Negotiations23:48 … The BATNA Approach27:10 … How to Anchor your Negotiations31:37 … How to Contact Mark32:48 … Closing. MARK HERSCHBERG:  So you want to prepare ahead of time, think about what is it that you want to get out of this negotiation.  What’s your ideal outcome?  What’s your BATNA, your Best Alternative To Negotiate Agreement?  That’s the point at which you walk away.  You shouldn’t take anything less.  What are some possible scenarios that might come up?  What are some tradeoffs you might want to do?  And what might the other side be doing?  WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Thank you for joining us today.  I am Wendy Grounds, and joining us on Skype is Bill Yates.  Today we’re talking to Mark Herschberg.  Mark was educated at MIT, and he’s spent his career launching and fixing new ventures at startups, Fortune 500s, and academia.  Mark helped create the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program, MIT’s career success accelerator, where he’s taught for 20 years.  Bill, you’ve read Mark’s book, and you’re going to tell us a little bit about that. BILL YATES:  Yes.  The goal of his book is to be a career success accelerator, just like you mentioned.  And there is so much application to project management.  He’s got a chapter on communications, and the leadership chapter talks about how do we motivate team members, different ways to do that.  There’s some familiar topics here, things like Tuckman’s Ladder, the five different stages for project team development, looking at the 5 Whys technique, the Iron Triangle.  So he goes into some of these things that we’ll look at as project managers and go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that.  And then he goes deeper, and those are the topics that we want to talk to him about today, things like negotiation, interviewing, tips that I think project managers can really benefit from. Meet Mark WENDY GROUNDS:  Mark, welcome to Manage This. MARK HERSCHBERG:  Thanks for having me.  It’s a pleasure to be here today. WENDY GROUNDS:  I want to hear a little bit about your book.  You authored “The Career Toolkit:  Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You.”  What prompted you to write this book? MARK HERSCHBERG:  Years ago, when I first started hiring people, software engineers, project managers, I found when I had asked them a technical question, I’d get a technical answer.  But when I would ask a question like what makes someone a good teammate, what are the communication challenges we face, I would get blank stares.  And I realized we never teach this in our undergraduate curriculum.  So I had to start training up folks that I was trying to hire. At the same time, MIT was getting similar feedback from corporate America and began to put together their own program.  So I heard about this.  I was about a year ahead of them.  I said, “You know, I’ve been working on this.  Can I help?”  So I then got involved with MIT.  I helped develop this program.  I’ve been teaching for the past 20 years.  But of course these skills, it’s not just for MIT students.  It’s not just for students.  They are universal skills.  Again, corporate America said these are the skills we want to see, but can’t find.  So I wanted to reach a larger audience with them.  And that’s why I turned a lot of what I’ve been teaching at MIT and elsewhere into a book. Pivoting Your Career WENDY GROUNDS:  I’d like to start with pivoting one’s career.  You know the pandemic has caused a lot of disruption.  There’s a lot of people, and I’m sure project managers as well, who have had  projects canceled.  Work has changed.  The environment has changed.  What advice do you have for people who are kind of at that point where they’re looking to pivot their careers? MARK HERSCHBERG:  It’s to make sure you have a clear understanding of where you want to go; right?  And that starts by saying where do I want to be five, 10, 20 years, if you can.  It doesn’t have to be a specific job.  It might be an idea; right?  I want to be leading a team of 50.  I want to be in this particular industry.  So don’t worry about fixating on a job title.  Once you have that goal, you want to work backwards.  And now project managers will get this better than anyone.  Because so many people say, well, you can’t really plan for your career.  You would never say, “Hey, we’ve got a six-month project.  Let’s just wing it.”  Right?  Of course you’re going to create a plan. You also know it’s not going to go according to plan.  We know things are going to come up along the way, and we’re going to revise our plan.  Our careers are longer than six months.  Of course we need a plan.  So you want to create that plan.  You want to think about what is your goal.  And of course in certain types of projects, especially software projects, it might be more Agile, where, well, we have an idea, but the goal’s not defined.  As opposed to bridge building, where it’s a very well-defined goal. BILL YATES:  Yes. MARK HERSCHBERG:  So you want to set as close as you can what that outcome is, specific or general; create that plan to get there; and then do regular check-ins every six or so months.  Are we on track?  Is this where I want to go?  Have I stepped closer?  Because you don’t just say, well, in six years bridge is built.  Right?  You don’t just say, well, in six years I’ll be here.  Where do you need to be in four years?  In two years?  And then how do you measure progress to that?  And so when  you’re going to pivot, whether you’re pivoting or staying on a path, it doesn’t matter.  You have your goal.  You have your path to get there.  And do the check-ins along the way. Impact of COVID on Career Progress BILL YATES:  Mark, have you seen any impact of the pandemic on this approach or on these steps that people should take? MARK HERSCHBERG:  I actually reference this in the book because when we have our plans, we know there are certain things that some might go a little faster or slower, the usual project management, the bumps along the way.  But we also know sometimes you’re in the middle of a project, and then a massive lawsuit upends the company and the project and puts it on hold.  Or there’s a big strategic shift, or M&A.  All these things can happen.  In our personal lives, same thing.  It could be your boss leaves.  It could be your division gets shut down.  A pandemic happens.  And that’s why we want, just like in our project plans, we want to be prepared for when something happens.  Same thing in our personal life. Now, when we see these changes, we know they can be setbacks.  They can be opportunities.  It’s just how we look at it.  Right now, with the pandemic, I think a lot of people have put their careers on hold.  They were just focused on heads down, let’s keep the job, and let’s make sure the company survives this. BILL YATES:  Yeah. MARK HERSCHBERG:  I think we’re about to see a massive shift in people moving between companies.  All that pent-up change is going to be happening over the second half of this year.  And that’s a huge opportunity for your career, whether you’re staying where you are, and you’re going to become more senior perhaps, you’re going to take on more responsibility, or you’re going to shift into a new role. Post Pandemic Work Shift BILL YATES:  Related to that, how do you think that those roles are going to shift in the future?  So when the pandemic is over, and we return to work, for a project manager, how do you think that work will look different? MARK HERSCHBERG:  I don’t think there’s going to be as massive a shift as other people are predicting.  It’s not like the world is suddenly going to look entirely different.  We will see more remote work.  The conversation of course went from can this work to we know it works.  And certainly one thing we really need to think about as project managers, it is about that communication.  And in fact in my book I have two chapters on management.  One is on people management; one is on process management.  At the core of them, as well as the communication chapter, it is about communication; right?  It is about engaging with people and making sure you get the right information from the right people at the right time. Now, when we are remote, that gets harder.  We all know you’ve got your audio channel.  You’ve got tone of voice.  You’ve got body language.  You have images.  And so depending on how much you engage, and how you engage, this gets easier or harder.  Even simple things like being in the meeting room a couple minutes ahead of time and saying, “Oh, yeah, how’s that project going, Bill?” and finding something out that may not happen when we’re offline.  We’re not going to run into each other at the water cooler. So as we move to a slightly more remote, not massively more remote, slightly overall, though for an individual company you could go fully remote or 50% remote.  But overall, as we get a little more remote, remember that you’re losing some of that serendipity, and that the width of that conversation channel gets narrower.