The Brazen Careerist herself, Penelope Trunk, was nice enough to take some time out of her day to do a quick interview with us.

Through her blog and her new book – Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, Penelope doles out tips to navigate through the beast that is corporate life for a new generation of workers.

Allen: On your blog, you mention that your book is about how the current generation has ushered in a new workplace. What do you think the biggest change has been between the old and new generations?

Penelope: The old generation assumed that you pay your dues, and you get to live a fulfilling life at the end of your career. The new generation does not see any point to putting off this fulfillment. It used to be that if you paid your dues to a big company, you would have a secure job for your whole life, and a pension for retirement. Today no job is secure, and pensions are nonexistent for young workers, so the workplace is more about the moment. Young workers today want to get something good right now in exchange for the work they do.

Older generations could be wowed with money — especially when they were young: Work long hours in exchange for a big paycheck, for example. Today young workers are not nearly as motivated as money. Personal growth and flexible hours are more important than money.

What do you think is the most important action this new generation can take to be prepared to transition into leadership roles?

This generation will remake the idea of leadership. In the past, it has been centralized and hierarchical. That won’t fly in the new workplace. Gen Y doesn’t operate like that, and Gen X doesn’t want to be tethered to the insane 100-hour weeks of the typical senior leadership roles. So the idea of leaderhsip will have to become less centralized so more people can share in it. The best way to prepare for this is to figure out what work you are best at doing, because it’s in that area that you can be a leader when the baby boomer’s start moving out of the way.

What can we do to integrate your articles and tips into our daily work life? How do we avoid just falling back into our old routines, or how do we remember to lead when the world is on fire.

Just remember to lead yourself. Be true to yourself. Be honest about your goals and your aspirations and your failings. The bottom line of everything I write is: Know yourself. It’s a process, and the great thing about a career is it’s another way to get to know yourself. Great leaders have a great sense of self.

As your site and book are named, you often say brazen things that todays corporate climate frowns on. Do you see the new generation becoming more or less PC or where do you see this trend going in the future with the generational changes that will accelerate over the next 10 years?

Politically correct is an adjective from the baby boomer’s. They realized that discrimination is much wider than what they fought for in the civil rights movement. They wanted to do more. So they started policing language because discrimination is so language based. But young people today have grown up in such a different climate — and most young people in the US will be racially mixed some time soon (I can’t remember when). So political correctness is much more natural to a generation that did not grow up with separate drinking fountains for black kids. I don’t think political correctness will be an issue once the baby boomers stop writing about it.

I have interviewed Robert Fuller about his rankism movement — the idea that everyone deserves respect, no matter what their rank in life is. And I have interviewed Bob Sutton about his book that chronicles his research about people who are jerks. Both Fuller and Sutton seem to me to be talking about what comes after political correctness. It’s respect. The idea that you should treat everyone nicely. This is something that is really ingrained in young people — everyone gets to play on soccer teams, not just the stars. All kids get to go to school, even the disabled. This is the first generation to live like that.

You often mention the use of stories to create lasting impressions, for example during interviews or networking. The internet in general, and blogging specifically lend themselves to these mini personal stories to brand together people and concepts. How can people learn this skill to help them advance their career?

This is a great question. My mom is always sending me emails about how I am revealing too much on my blog and she is worried that I’ll lose all my readers.

When it comes to blogging, you cannot tell good stories about yourself if you are concerned about never looking bad. To tell good stories about yourself you have to be authentic. Everyone has days when they are so sad that they can’t get out of bed. Everyone has days when they thought they would never succeed. The trick is to tell stories about yourself that reveal both your strengths and your weaknesses. We all have both. You can’t portray a whole person on a blog without both sides of yourself.

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. –Peter Drucker

Who tells your boss what to do?

It has always amazed me that in every position I have worked in my past, employees always have the same response to that question – Who tells your boss what to do? Their boss!

When I ask the same question up the Table of Organization, they give the Ouroborosish like response all the way up -

Nobody tells Leaders what to do

I love to see the shock on their faces when I tell them that Leaders are not told what to do! Leaders see (and work with others to find) efficiencies, problems, and solutions before they become fires. They spread their leadership. They know what their bosses are looking for and provide it before they are asked for it because they understand the vision.

So if your working your way into Management/Leadership, when do you stop being told what to do and change from being an Employee to becoming a LEADER?

You don’t become a Director, and then start becoming a Leader. Just like any job, you get a job only because your skills and experience will ensure that you will be successful in that Job. Once you’re in your new job, you should begin to work on learning the next level There is no better time to begin than now, when being a leader sticks out even more.

Leadership is the fast track to being promotable

As you can see, Leaders rise higher than Managers in an organization. So the sooner you develop Leadership Skills the more promotable you become. Managers usually can only Manage people in their technical area. Leaders have skill sets that make them successful in any area, because those skills are transferable.

Remember, Managers are EVERYWHERE! But leaders are hard to come by. Great Leaders are even more scarce, so keep on developing yourself and you will stand out in a crowd!

What stuck me most about the interview was his passion about what he was doing. How fully he believed in his goal.

It’s worth taking a step back and thinking about it during your day. What are you doing right now that you feel that passion for? As a leader, who around you are you helping to build that passion in?

It’s so easy to fall into the day to day activities of “work” that without using your leadership skills, you can forget who is in control of your life.

If you don’t have that passion yet, what a great day today is to start.

Just as Supervisors have been replaced in the last decade by either Managers or empowering Employees, I believe Managers are next to go…

Managers will always be needed, but Leaders will be what organizations, like yours, are LOOKING FOR! If your company is hiring people from outside, it’s because they can’t find LEADERSHIP from within…

Take a look at how skill sets change as you progress up a ‘Chain of Command’ or ‘Table of Organization (T.O.)’. Where are you in your Organization and where do you desire to go to? Do you have the proper Skill Set ratio, and if not, what are you doing to change that?

Everyone may want to rise to the ‘TOP’, but remember somewhere in your career, the Peter Principle may step in.

Here is a simple and quick Test from Leadership IQ, to help you see how you measure up. Take the Test

So, when do you begin to CHANGE from a Manager to a Leader?

One of the reasons that Skunk Works is so successful is the great leadership structure that is setup. Smart people are allowed to get work done, and are involved in the project all the way through. Unfortunately, the government isn’t setup the same way.

From Skunk Works -

One that particularly sticks in my craw occurred when President Johnson first announced in 1964 the existence of the RS-71, the Air Force two-seater Blackbird. That’s right, RS-71 was its official designation, but Johnson accidentally turned it around and called it the “SR-71.” Instead of putting out a brief correction, the Air Force decided not to call attention to a very minor mistake by the commander in chief and ordered us to change about twenty-nine thousand blueprints and drawings at a cost of thousands of dollars so that they would read “SR-71″ and not “RS-71.”

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating again and again – Do your employees come to you with mistakes as they happen with possible solutions already laid out, or do they work to keep you insulated from the mistakes because of a culture of fear?

YOU will stand out as an Effective Leader if your meetings are different. It is easier than you may think.

1. Have a Clear Purpose. Never meet without an Agenda or a planned outcome.
2. Ensure all the Right People are there and not just the decision makers. Get input from all the best resources, remember to look outside of the obvious ones. Take advantage of all available diversity and listen closely to the people in the trenches; they know more than you give them credit for.
3. Don’t waste people’s time, their time is as valuable to them as yours is to you. Plan enough Time and Start and End on time or sooner. I never schedule a meeting for LESS THAN 1 Hour. It is always better to be done in 30 minutes for a 1 hour scheduled meeting than to be finished in 45 min for a 30 minute scheduled meeting. People will be glad if you “GIVE BACK” some very valuable time to them, and they will be “FRUSTRATED” if you make them late for their next meeting by running your meeting late.

   In some cases, the meeting could be cut short if key people have to leave, making the meeting a total waste.

   Don’t worry if people react when you schedule a 3 hour meeting. If you are well prepared, and the meeting is effective, you can achieve the outcome and save everyone from several more meetings. They will definitely appreciate that and respect you for it.

   This doesn’t mean to rush things, make sure everyone gets a chance to provide input. Remember, that not all participants will be comfortable talking or sharing their thoughts and ideas. You may have to lead and encourage them to share.

4. Communicate results and follow up Action Items quickly. Don’t you hate it when you get meeting minutes weeks after the meeting (usually the day before the follow up meeting). Meeting Notes are supposed to help clarify the outcome of the meeting and help remind participants what follow up Action Items they are responsible for.

You may be saying, I have heard this all before, but knowing what to do and actually applying it are two different things. Here are some more tips for Effective Meetings that will save you LOTS of TIME and impress your Peers and Leadership.

TIPS IF YOU’RE THE MEETING LEADER

1. Write your Meeting Minutes BEFORE the Meeting. If it is important enough to meet, then it’s important enough to document and follow up. I like to use this simple format:
   

   • Date, Time and Place of the Meeting (Replace the Place with a Phone Number if it’s a Conference Call)
   • Attendees: and Excused: (List the names in Alphabetical Order, people will not try to read into the special order you placed the names in. Never use “Absent” it makes them seem like they didn’t think it was important to attend etc…) Refer back to, Are You a Servant Leader?, a previous post on ensuring that you always want to make others look good.
   • Project or Meeting Scope
   • Meeting Notes: (These are very generic) I try to use the next section more if possible.
   • Action Items: I Like a Table format here:
     

     ITEM # (for easy Reference)	WHO (Person Responsible)	WHAT (Specific Item to be Addressed)	WHEN (Deadline Task should be completed)	STATUS (Here you can add Comments or “COMPLETE” when the task is finished)
     1	Robert	Post Meeting Minutes on wiki for Team Follow up	Close of Business mm/dd/yyyy	COMPLETE
     2	Susan	Ensure Action Items are Communicate to Team Members not at this meeting	Close of Business mm/dd/yyyy
     3	TEAM MEMBERS	Update the status of your own Action Items in the wiki (PATH Included)	Close of Business mm/dd/yyyy	Ongoing

   • Next Meeting: (Identify the Next Meeting Date. This usually is discussed at the meeting or you’ve looked in advance to see if people’s schedules are available)

2. Now that you HAVE YOUR MINUTES practically done, you should be able to Create your Agenda from the High Level points. Send the Agenda out with the Meeting Invite. It can just be simple bullets in an email.
3. During the Meeting Update the Minutes you already Drafted. Make sure you have accurate records of who attended and update any new action items and or dates etc…
4. As soon as the meeting is over, you should be able to distribute the minutes usually within a few minutes. The sooner you get them out the better the impression you will leave. Over time you will get better and better at anticipating the issues and action items prior to the meeting.
5. Follow Up on the Action Items. I usually CUT and PASTE the Action Items into my Calendar on the date when I should send an email or call someone to ensure that the items are on track to meet the deadlines as discussed at the meeting. Keep people’s manager’s in the loop if needed to help support the outcome
6. Avoid “Pre-Meetings” with just managers. You may think you need a strategy session first, but these just waste people’s time and isolate other team members from being able to participate.
   

   Tell me & I’ll Forget
   Show Me & I’ll Remember
   Involve Me & I’ll Understand

   Remember collaboration and ‘Buy In’ are critical to the success of any project!

TIPS IF YOU’RE A PARTICIPANT

If you attend a meeting and it is POORLY RUN, you’re not alone. It happens all the time and to all of us. But Don’t Waste your Time by just daydreaming the time away, or doing other work and being rude. Try some of these:

1. Try to help save the meeting by contributing in a way to Make it Productive. Be careful not to make the Leader look Bad in the process (even if that is what you want to do).
2. Always be watching and reading what is going on. You will learn much from others that may help serve you later on.
3. Take some notes on how the Leader can improve future meetings and if you have a good enough relationship with the Leader, share your observations to help them. Be very careful and sensitive on how you approach this. Remember, you doing this to help the Leader LOOK GOOD, at least at the Next Meeting.

I hope some of these ideas may help you. What other tips work for you?

But S.M. Lockridge doesn’t seem to have that problem describing the Leader of Leaders. Do you KNOW HIM?

Remember the Reason for the Season.

Have a Very Merry Christmas!

Usually, the results are enough to keep your team motivated, and encouraged. All of the members don’t need to see personal results, sometimes team results or positive results of another team member can be enough to keep growing themselves or challenging each other.

But what do you do when the results aren’t there? or you, as the Leader, start to feel demotivated? Check out some previous tips to ensure that you, THE LEADER, are ALWAYS on your Game:

• How to Get Started?
• How you should look at your Job.
• Are You a Servant Leader?
• How to ALWAYS get a YES from your Boss.
• Should I STAY or Should I GO?
• Are You a Scary Manager?
• Do You Make Work Harder by not Managing Your Boss?
• Leadership 101 – Seek First to UNDERSTAND…
• What’s a Leader to do when THEY have the BLAHs?
• 5 Reasons Why You Should Treat Your Employees Like Dogs
• Ever Feel like things will NEVER change?

So this year was a good year, but the REAL question is, “How do we, as a team, continue to improve year over year”? Before I answer this, let me tell you a funny story about helping your Boss put things into perspective.

It all started with a simple lock, just like this one.

As I remember the story, I heard my General Manager (I was a Director of Housekeeping at a hotel at the time), call me on the two way radio… “You need to come meet me at the Store Room in the East Tower” (it was not really a store room but what I called the ‘Museum’). You see it was 5 Star hotel and when we stored things in the storeroom, we weren’t talking about old mop buckets and busted up computers etc… but hundreds of items from $30,000 pieces of artwork to antique chairs, or original statues etc… you get the picture. “Come up here right away, I need to see you” was the call… It sounded SO urgent so I dropped everything to respond. When I got there, I was frustrated to find that he only wanted to SHOW OFF his new IMPERVIOUS PADLOCK. As I was burning inside, frustrated that my idiot Boss just called me away from SERIOUS work; I began to ponder all the FACTS he was throwing at me:

• This lock cost me…(can’t remember exactly but it was definately WAY TOO MUCH)
• It’s Bullet Proof, at any distance (blah blah blah)
• Same lock they used at Fort Knox…(oh sure)
• I think it weighed like 8 lbs or something (it WAS Big, I’ll give him that)

All I remember is that he went ON and ON… like this was his FIRSTBORN. Telling me how this will be the perfect solution to protecting all our valuables in “The Museum”. I was thinking frantically how I could get out of this scenario and what I could do to bring my Boss ‘Back to Reality’, when just then my Chief Engineer walked up to see what all the ‘hub bub’ was on the radio. Then it came to me, Find The Weakest Link…

I asked my Chief for his tin snips from his tool belt and with two quick snips I cut the ‘$2.00 hasp’ holding the expensive lock and all 8 lbs came crashing to the floor (I was lucky it did not break the marble floor, that was not the impact I was trying to make) saying, “that is what I think of your Lock”, as I walked away…

You may think I purposefully tried to embarrass my boss (and maybe I did) but I did ask my Chief to see if he could remedy that for me and he said yes as he tried to keep from laughing out loud at the scene.

In order to continually grow a strong team, you need to continually find the ‘weakest link’ and improve it or replace it. Help your team find and correct the weakest links themselves, then your ready to move on to other opportunities. With these newly developed skills and perspective, they will be UNSTOPABLE.

When you’re NO LONGER NEEDED, consider it a JOB WELL DONE and leave with Pride.

Now Go Out There and find another opportunity to add value to.

Good Luck, and may this year be another good one for you as well. Thank you to Darren Rowse for the topic + group writing project.

My wife and I recently got a dog and I immediately saw parallels between puppy training and growing employees. Below the top 5 reasons why you should treat your employees like dogs -

1. Reward and Punishment – Very simply, you get much more bang for your buck in rewarding correct actions than you do from punishing incorrect actions. Rewarding can be as simple as saying “well done,” you don’t need to be handing out $50 gift certificates everyday. The trap that people stumble into is that everyone makes tons of mistakes and it seems natural to point out the mistakes. Constantly.

   Puppies will work very hard for praise and treats. They will sit still for 30 minutes and just stare if you have a treat in your hand and ask them to stay. Yelling at them doesn’t have this lasting effect. If she tries to eat something off of the table and we yell at her, 5 seconds later she will try to eat off of the table again.

2. Reward for the Right Actions – Make sure that the rewards that you give your employees are in line with your vision. If your vision is to have top notch customer service, don’t give out bonuses based on sales – give them out based on customer service!

   When Returning home from work, I have to be careful to only praise the puppy when she is calm and not jumping around like crazy. By doing this she connects people coming in the house with being calm.

3. Don’t Punish for Failing Desired Actions – If you want innovative employees, don’t punish them when their ideas don’t pan out. Instead of yelling, have an after action review with a group and talk about what can be improved next time. Most of all, be sure to praise them for their innovative thinking.

   Never yell at your dog for going to the bathroom in the house. Most likely she’s already forgotten that she did it. Even if you catch her in the act, all it does is make her scared to poop in front of you and actually makes it more likely she’ll go hide somewhere in the house to go to the bathroom next time. You are better off praising them when they do it right.

4. Be Consistent – Employees count on you to treat them fairly and to provide them support. Consistent leaders create environments where employees are empowered and confident.

   Puppies don’t understand “sometimes.” Either they are allowed up on the furniture or not; its either OK to jump on everyone or no one. You have to decide what is acceptable and be consistent in what you ask for.

5. Training investment – It’s easy to forget to train your new employees, as the reason you hired them in the first place is that the current workload is too high! But you have to make the time to start training as soon as new employees come on board or you are either going to end up playing cleanup or finding that you have to micromanage them to get results.

   The best time to start training your puppy is right away. The sooner you teach your puppy how you want them to act, they sooner you don’t need to watch over their every move.

Am I a sadist or are there parallels in good puppy training and growing your employees? I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on growing employees.

How can they successfully Lead the Team if they are down or discouraged?

The answers are simple. Yes. and they can’t.

So what do you do when your the Leader and you have the BLAHs?

…my wife says… try an anti-deppressant…. but the real answer is Check your Balance!!!

Depending on how ‘out of balance’ you are, will determine the extent of your remedy.

Rate yourself, or better yet listen to others around you.

My wife often tells me I work too much, I guess I always have. But when you start hearing that from your employees or your team members want to know why your so down… You better do something quick to CHANGE…

It doesn’t matter what you do, just DO SOMETHING to change.

• Get Some Sleep, go to bed early
• Get some MORE Sleep, take a long NAP, your Body and Mind needs the rest
• Spend more time with Family and Friends (Holidays don’t count)
• Find some ME time. Read, excersise, go fishing, work on a hobby (whatever works for you)
• Serve others by Volunteering
• Hang with POSITIVE people, it is definately contagious
• Go to Church, Seeking God always helps to put things into Perspective
• sometimes JUST DO NOTHING (Give yourself permission to be UNPRODUCTIVE)

Hope this helps. Let me know what works for you?

Go out there and make a difference. Tomorrow your attitude can Make or Break someone else’s day!