Focusing On Your Success

Welcome to the first installment of Your Way Up. First, let me explain the goal of the column and its targeted readership. Then, I’ll offer some insights into my perspectives on your success as well as some of the topics to be covered in the weeks ahead.

The goal of this column is your success—period. Whether you are running a company or running to find a company in which to thrive as a professional, I will help you fit the pieces of the puzzle to your own individual success together.

Your Way Up is not about jargon, trends, or the latest theories on career management and leadership. It is the distillate of my observations on success and failure in many careers and businesses in which I have been involved (including my own) over the past twenty-five years. Your Way Up is about the common sense discovery, development and leveraging of strengths that will empower individuals—those who are led as well as those who lead—to achieve their potential.

Common sense, in fact, is a concept to which I will refer frequently in Your Way Up. More and more people I talk with today realize the importance of common sense as a foundation to thought, analysis, planning, life and business. What many don’t have, though, is a framework or reference point of common sense with which to approach these things in today’s world and that’s where this column comes in. Your Way Up is an updated version of common sense perspectives that are needed to address the challenges and opportunities of the 21st Century. It is an ongoing look at the cause and effect relationships of what people do, think, say, wear, read, write and how they act that separates the winners from the losers in life and in business.

The past twenty-five years of my career have been spent as a consultant to Boards of Directors, CEOs, and senior managers helping them select the right leaders and team members needed to build successful businesses in the face of a variety of challenges such as start-ups, ramp-ups, turn-arounds, new strategy implementations, mergers, acquisitions, new market entries, and downsizings (not to mention the changes in economic cycles over the past twenty-five years). My clients have ranged in size from Fortune 500 companies such as Boeing, Emerson, and Sempra Energy all the way down to early-stage small companies with little more than an idea and a dream of the future. Geographically my clients have been in Asia, Europe, and the United States. I have run my own small boutique firm, and later in my career, I was a partner in the world’s largest and, according to the Wall Street Journal, the most respected retained executive search firm at the time, Heidrick & Struggles.

Many of my clients became friends over the years, and, as a result, a great deal of my time was spent coaching them, as well as the subordinates and peers they would refer to me, to help create, define, and implement their own strategies for success.

The common thread in all these interactions, in all economic cycles of the past twenty- five years and in all geographies, was that people wanted to find the straightest path from where they were to where they wanted to be. That will also be a common thread in this column—helping you find the straightest path to success for you and for your company.

Here are some basics to my approach:

• Businesses need employees and employees need businesses. But, to be more specific: successful businesses need successful employees and successful employees need successful businesses in which to gain experience and build fulfilling careers.
• The first issue is how do they find each other? The best way for that to happen is for both to fully understand what the other is looking for and why and how they can help each other achieve their respective goals—knowledge is power, right? So, every week Your Way Up will take a specific viewpoint: the employer’s or the employee’s. The more people know about each other’s expectations and why those expectations are important the easier it becomes to meet them, and then what happens is that the general level of discourse in the marketplace begins to rise—people get on the same page. What are you looking for—an employer or an employee; a promotion or someone to promote; a new challenge or someone to take charge of a challenging situation; success or someone who is successful? Whichever it is I’ll cover it and show you the straightest path to getting it.
• The next issue is where do you go from here? You’ve got the team, everybody’s happy, but what are the critical challenges you’re likely to face as an organization in getting from where you are to where you want to be? In this series I will interview a variety of sources, successful international executives, prominent consultants, and star performers, who will discuss common mistakes, issues, challenges, and hidden opportunities that leaders of businesses, like yours, have faced and how they have successfully dealt with them. These articles will provide employers with answers and employees with insights about how they can become more valuable.

My intention is to make this column conversational, crisp and straight-forward—identifying issues and points of interest and cutting to the chase. I am direct—sometimes blunt—but my message is all about empowerment, human potential and continuous improvement, which are the key elements to your success.

This column is not only meant to inform and guide but to motivate and to create an intelligent, informed dialogue between the two most critical elements of success for any enterprise: those who lead and those who follow.

Earlier, I mentioned wanting to give you some insight into how I think. Here’s an important one: When it comes to success there are three types of people—those who watch things happen, those who make things happen, and those who wonder what happened. The people who will read this column are the ones who want to make things happen.

In my next column I will cover some time-proven techniques for finding the perfect job whether it’s your first one or it’s the next step in your career. In the meantime, though, here’s a preview of some of the columns I’m working on for the weeks ahead:

• How to differentiate yourself in a competitive marketplace
• Interviewing: How to identify top performers
• Three critical things to accomplish when being interviewed
• Three critical things to find out about someone in an interview
• The most common mistakes people make in interviews
• Failure: Your key to success?
• The Unwritten Resume: The real you others see
• How to recruit top talent
• How to evaluate an offer of employment: Is it right for you?
• Checking references: Adding value and averting disaster
• Business etiquette and manners: the hard impact of globalization’s softer side

In closing, I would also like to hear from you. I would like this column to be a dialogue with the readers of Hospodarske Noviny, so please let me know what specific questions you have, topics you would like me to address or any comments you would like to make about the column.

I wish you much success!