“Change is inevitable, growth is intentional.” — Glenda Cloud

The field you’re in can slow you down or it can speed up your career success.

Whether you find the free prize or not, this post will make you think.

“Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.” – August Wilson

As a parting gift at the end of one of my projects, I wanted everybody to walk away with their list of personal strengths. Not just a list that I made up, or their own list, but a list of strengths through the eyes of the team.

When i first joined Microsoft, I felt like I had joined an elite team of smart people that gets results. Microsoft is a big place, and I had joined the Developer Support Team. It was an interesting team and I was surrounded by people who worked smarter, harder, faster, and more effective than anything I had ever seen before. There were people that built robots and people that built rockets. There were former accountants and former professors. The intellectual horsepower was stunning and so was the passion.

I was curious how I too could become a skilled Softie.

Editor’s note: Meet Dan Schawbel. Dan’s super skill is personal branding and he has an impressive set of credentials.

Dan is the bestselling author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success, an award winning blogger at Personal Branding Blog, the publisher of Personal Branding Magazine, a national speaker and consultant on branding, and a BusinessWeek columnist. He’s been called a “Personal Branding Guru” by The New York Times and has been featured in over 150 media outlets.

Here’s a post that I originally published on my work blog, but I thought the readers here would benefit from it too. It’s a simple model for thinking about your career growth. With things like a “jobless economic recovery,” careers ending, and a “skills-for-hire” economy, it’s even more important to focus on growth while managing your career. At the end of the day, YOU play the most important role in your career growth – own it.

How can you become a leader in your field?  A colleague shared a link to How to Be a Leader, which I found interesting.  In the article,  Philip E. Agre presents a six step recipe for becoming a leader in your field:

Step 1. Pick an issue.
Step 2. Having chosen your issue, start a project to study it.
Step 3. Find relevant people and talk to them.
Step 4. Pull together what you’ve heard.
Step 5. Circulate the result.
Step 6. Build on your work.

I think the key takeaway is that to be a leader …

I’m a fan of lenses to help me get a better perspective or vantage point. If you’re looking for a job or thinking about your career, you can use Holland’s theory of career choice to help you find a better fit. John L. Holland identified 6 personality and work environment types. According to Holland, if you can match your personality type and your work environment, you can improve your success and satisfaction.

If you’re not good at something, is it a weakness? If you’re good at something, is it a strength? No, it’s not that simple. There’s a difference between natural talents or strengths, and things that you learn over time by building skills and knowledge. There are many things that when you start out, you will be unskilled. That’s not a weakness. I’ll pause right there, to let that sink in. It’s a key concept when you’re trying to figure out your strengths and weaknesses.

I got an email from a GM (General Manager) at Microsoft, who will be giving a presentation at Microsoft on “How To Be an Effective IC (Individual Contributor)” and he’s collecting best practices. Scott Hanselman shared his thoughts and I thought I would share mine. For this post, I attempted to boil down some of the best lessons I’ve learned for myself, that I mentor others, and that I see others put into practice.

Here’s a simple model I’ve been using lately to help some friends think about the infamous passion vs profit question. I actually like to think of it as a passion AND profit … and value question. It really is a simple model, but it helps highlight a couple of key points. For one thing, the saying do what you love, and the money will follow, is misleading.

The 20 percent spike is a distinctive strength. It’s unusually powerful. Using your 20 percent spike generates exponential results. It’s a way to amplify your impact and maximize results. My 20 percent spike is information artistry. I use this skill to create, organize, and share complex information in a simple way. At work, it helps me write more effective books. At home, it helps me learn faster and turn insights into action. From a service standpoint, it helps me unleash the best in others.

One of my favorite training sessions this past year was called “Why Should Anyone Be Lead By You?” One of our exercises was to figure out our unique differentiators by looking at our life experiences. In other words, what unique skills or experiences do we bring to the table, that are relevant for this particular situation? Everybody has a story–hopes, dreams, wins, losses, and lessons learned. We write our stories a page at a time. Ultimately, it’s not how the stories end, but what we carry forward that matters.

Are you in the right career based on your strengths? You can use your strengths as a guide to help you figure out which jobs to test and which jobs to avoid. For example, it’s tough to be in marketing if you’re not a people person. If you like knowledge work, you might find you enjoy software. You can use your strengths as another lens to help you chart your course. If you’ve ever felt like the elf that wanted to be a dentist, take heart that following your strengths improves your chances for success.

I’d like to share some of the insights that others have shared with me over the years about choosing career paths. My favorite insights have always been guiding questions that help me choose my own adventure. In this post, I share the same questions that some of my mentors have given me that have helped me analyze potential jobs, think through career decisions, and pick my paths. What’s interesting about the questions is that not only can you use them to analyze potential opportunities, you can use them to analyze a job you already have. Sometimes the best job, is the one you already have, but you may need to reinvent yourself or your job.

A friend of mine told me a story the other day. I liked his reminder of how your job satisfaction, is more about your perspective, than the job.

It’s Not Your Job …
The story goes like this. As he was walking to his jet, on a picture perfect day, he thought to himself, how boring … one more routine solo flight. Then it hit him. He’s doing a job that other people only dream of. He realized that day and ever since, it’s not your job that determines what you enjoy … it’s what’s between your ears.

You can’t be an expert in all things. However, you can improve your overall effectiveness by rounding out your skills. While it’s good to specialize, knowing the basics in some key areas will help you put your knowledge to work. I’ve found that while it’s important to specialize in some areas, that I get more results by adding other areas to my belt. For example, focusing on business helps me invest my time better. Learning marketing fundamentals helps me get more impact from the work I do.

You need to test your decisions against reality. A lot of decisions might sound good at the time or look good on paper. When the rubber meets the road, you might find there were a lot of assumptions or it simply was a bad idea. Some ideas also become obsolete by the time they’re implemented. To really test your decisions, you need feedback loops that provide first-hand experience. Nothing beats seeing it for yourself. A written report never conveys the same information. I think the key is that first-hand experience includes an emotional aspect that gets lost in translation. It’s that emotional aspect that can be your best gauge of whether something is really working. It’s not that you need to distrust people in their feedback, it’s that you need to distrust communication.

I’m realizing more and more how stories help you drive a point home. It’s one thing to make a point, it’s another for your story to make the point for you. If your ideas aren’t sticking, or you’re not getting buy in, maybe a compelling story is the answer.
Stories at Work
Crafting useful stories is an art, and, now, apparently a science. Srinath pointed me to Stories at Work on 50Lessons.com. The video shares a story about using stories as a catalyst for change and a recipe …

Photo by David Masters
Do you have a favorite set of forcing functions?   A forcing function is any task, activity or event that forces you to take action and produce a result.   If you have areas in your life that you’re finding inertia, try adding some forcing functions to get results.
Slides as Forcing Functions
At Microsoft patterns & practices, one of our forcing functions is building a slide deck.  Building a deck is a forcing function because it forces us to distill the points, close down on issues, identify what …