career advcie

My new career success coach book Success Tweets: 140 Bits of Common Sense Career Success Advice, All in 140 Characters or Less is turning out to be quite a hit.  Over 1,000 people have downloaded the free eBook version and several people have purchased multiple copies of the hard copy book.  I think it’s a great addition to my career advice writings.  Go to www.SuccessTweets.com to get a .pdf of Success Tweets for free. 

If you want to purchase a hard copy for yourself – or two or three to give to friends, associates, people you mentor, people you manage, your kids, your grandkids – go to Amazon.com or send me an email at Bud@BudBilanich.com.  I’ll send you quantity pricing information. 

Today’s career advice comes from Tweet 125…

Get to know yourself.  Use your self knowledge to better understand others and build mutually beneficial relationships with them.

Successful people know themselves, have the ability to build and maintain strong mutually beneficial relationships with others, and are able to resolve conflict in a positive manner.

Today, I’d like to focus on the first point – knowing yourself.  There are quite a few instruments on the market that help you get to know yourself.  I am most familiar with the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the DISC.  Both of these are based on Jungian psychology and provide you with an easy to understand framework for getting to know yourself.

I believe that we can all benefit from gaining a better understanding of ourselves – what turns us on, what turns us off, what motivates us etc.  However, I think that the real benefit is less than knowing yourself than in using the framework to know other people. 

If you understand other people — what turns them on, what turns them off, what motivates them – you are in a better position to build positive, constructive relationships with them.

I’ll use myself as an example.  The MBTI measures preferences along four continuums:

• Extraversion (E) – Introversion (I)
• Sensing (S) – Intuiting (N)
• Thinking (T) – Feeling (F)
• Judging (J) – Perceiving (P)

I am a slight introvert – that means that I get my energy from within, as opposed to extraverts who get their energy from other people.  I prefer a lot of solitary activities: reading, writing, watching movies, riding my bike.  I get recharged by being by myself.  On the other hand, Cathy my wife, is a high extravert.  She gets her energy from being around other people.

She frequently drives me to, and picks me up from, the airport.  When I come home from a trip, I most often want to relax and look out the car window as we drive home.  I’m an introvert.  I recharge my batteries by getting quiet and going within myself.  Cathy is an extravert.  She wants to talk.  She enjoys having me home so we can interact. 

When I get into the car after a trip, I get myself into a conversational mode.  I ask about Cathy, and what she did while I was gone.  I listen to what she has to say.  I tell her about my trip – who I saw and what I did.  I do this because I love her, and want to do my part to make our relationship as strong as it can be.  I use my knowledge of myself, and my knowledge of her to act in a manner that will strengthen our relationship.

Here’s another example.  One of my clients is a strong S and strong J.  I am a strong N and strong P.  He likes things to be very organized and predictable.  I am more comfortable going with the flow. 

One day, I arrived at his office in the late afternoon.  I was going to facilitate a team building session for his leadership team the next day.  He asked me what I planned on doing in our meeting.  I explained it to him verbally. 

He said, “Do you have an agenda?”  I responded that I just told him what I was planning on doing.  He said, “I heard you, but I’d like to see the agenda.”  I told him I had no written agenda.  He was unhappy with this.  So we spent 15 minutes putting what I told him I planned to do in the meeting on paper. 

I was a little frustrated with him.  He was very frustrated with me.  You might think this is pretty silly.  But there is an important lesson here.  He has high needs for structure, and an agenda is a way to structure a meeting.  I am very comfortable having a rough idea of what I’m hoping to do and accomplish in a meeting and then going with the energy in the room as the meeting unfolds.  This works for me – but not my client. 

The career advice here is simple.  He’s the client, I have to adapt my preferred style of leading a meeting to his needs, or I am unlikely to be successful in building a long term, mutually beneficial relationship with him.  It was up to me to recognize our differences and to adapt my behavior to something that will make him comfortable – not the other way around.

The common sense career success coach point here is straightforward.  Successful people understand themselves.  They follow the career advice in Tweet 125 in Success Tweets.  “Get to know yourself.  Use your self knowledge to better understand others and build mutually beneficial relationships with them.”  Successful people use their understanding of themselves to compare and contrast their needs and wants with the people around them.  In this way, they adapt their behavior to the other person – making it easier to build strong relationships.  The next time you run into someone who looks at the world differently from you, see what you can do to adapt your communication style and behavior to his or her style.  If you do this, I guarantee you’ll be on your way to building a better, stronger relationship with that person.

That’s my take on the career advice in Success Tweet 125.  What’s yours?  Please leave a comment sharing your thoughts with us on this topic.  As always, thanks for reading.

Bud