Confusion is Sending You a Friendly Message

Particularly as a young man, I felt a need to be sure of myself and strident and to walk with conviction.

I see many people in their 20's these days with a similar attitude. I refer to it as 'Young Man's disease" which, of course, is an omage to my own history.

However through the years, some important people have encouraged me to prize clarity over progress and over action. And for me, clarity takes time.

I can't overstate how many decisions I've made in my life where I've substituted desire for clarity or truth for clarity or guilt for clarity. All of those can be incredibly destructive in the wrong situation. And each tends to minimize or eliminate other important points of view.

And there is the danger. When one does not have the necessary professional or personal experience to make certain decisions or deal with challenging circumstances, one tends to substitute the natural confusion that can normally exists with ego, false confidence and defensiveness. And unfortuneately that leads to many minor disasters and some not so minor.

So the math here reads like this:  Move too slow and it may cost you something, move too fast and it could cost you almost everything (paraphrasing Brant Bryan; yeah, I didn't listen to him).  But if you want to know when to move, decide, take action, then you will have to cultivate a discipline which leads you to clarity; and this will take time.

What Makes a Difference?

I'm constantly haunted by this: don't mistake the urgent for the needed, the activity for the value, the short term for the future, intensity for commitment.

We see it in day to day work.

If we're busy, then we often think it is a good day. And emtionally, that's certainly better for most of us than not being busy. But if you put enough low-value, reactive days together, one finds that very little real progress is being made. And it can be demoralizing.

If you look at your business or career and realize that you are doing the exact same thing you were doing five years ago, then you better be a professional whose market isn't changing or whose expertise doesn't require evolving (yeah, I know there isn't one).

On the other hand if you are like me and not independently wealthy, then you have to take the time to review what you are doing, how you are doing it and how you can truly make a difference for the people you work for and the people who work for you.

Its there; that difference to make is there. And I assure you that you are sharp enough to see it and move that direction. Just give yourself a chance. Because the math is clear; either we find a way to evolve and make a differnce or guess what? We just don't really matter. And that's usually not acceptable to our firm or to our own conscience.

If you need one, here's a starting point. In the next one-on-one meeting ask the person what would make a difference in their professional life. Explore it together.

Want an easier professional ride? Know Thyself

Make it easy for yourself. Be clear on what you bring to the table and what you have yet to develop.

You have some very specific experiences that make you a valuable contributor. Do enough thinking, talking to someone who knows you, writing your list of accomplishments (real things; not puffery) and then use these as your filter to understand where you fit.

Doesn't mean you won't be learning new things and having new experiences. (For most of my career I defined that equation as growth and used it to measure the value of my current job.)

But the point is to know when to be aggressive with your opinions (based on your experience; and please express it that way) and when to listen, observe and learn.

The math here is to always be aggressive with your efforts; just know when you have something to say and when you don't. Check your experience list and you'll know.

Building social media relationships requires multiple access points

For many practioners of social media marketing, a frustration level is often reached as they find their efforts going unrewarded in terms of recognition, interaction, and in the end, no new relationships.

This problem is as old as marketing itself. And for those who feel challenged, Sales Media Marketing Magazine recently ran a piece I wrote for them which provided a simple case study of how its been done over the years. My aim was to get us to focus on the listener, not the tools nor ourselves and consider what is needed to provide a continuum of access points for potential listeners.

Here it is; see what you think:
Building social media relationships requires multiple access points: From Social Media Magazine:

The Evolution of Legal Marketing

The more things change, the more they stay the same? Yes and certainly no.

I actually find cycles to be a bit more helpful in understanding the way things are working at any moment in time. Businesses, relationships, organizations go through predictable cycles given their internal and external challenges and goals.

Anywho, HubbardOne was foolish enough to ask me to talk about where I think law firm marketing / business development organizations are for 2011. Here's my thoughts:



One says a lot of stuff. But for me an organization's ability to say 'yes' to big strategic ideas which can make a difference (and most of the time have no historical basis in the organization) may be the most important attribute to have for 2011.

Oh and the more you say yes to these, the fewer resources you have to do lower value, legacy activity (certainly there is high value, legacy activity that you do as well). Gives you an inherent tool for saying 'no': 'no, we don't have any budget for that'; 'no, the Board has told us to concentrate our people resources over here instead'.

Hope your 2011 is starting off well and you are getting to 'yes' on some things that will make a difference.

Which mistake are you more comfortable with?

We often have great leadership and management choices these days. We research the options, calculate the potential returns, try to understand the downstream implications to each decision, identify the risks associated with each and then . . . we have to decide:

What's the best decision to make?

Here's a little tool that often works for me.

While I'm looking at what's most likely to succeed or sometimes even which option is more likely to get executed, I find that no real certainty emerges. In many of these day-to-day decisions I ask the following question:

If both of these are a mistake, which mistake am I more comfortable with?

In other words, and not to be pessimistic, but if this turns into a failure or a mistake, which would I be most comfortable with?

For me, if I'm going to lose in a situation, I would like to do it on my own terms. Sometimes that's about minimizing human damage, sometimes its about cultural pain and sometimes its about just wanting to aim high. But in any case, if there is a problem I know I have to stand up and take whatever fallout there may be (most times the winners have plenty of people with deserved credit; but the buck stops with me on the losers).

So given that I'm playing for big wins knowing sometimes the alternative will happen and I'll need to shine the light directly on myself, then I'll choose the option which I will feel best about failing at.

Sure I probably need more therapy and know that this isn't for all decisions, but sometimes the math dictates that the potential realities of a decision must be faced before the eventual outcome. When I choose using this basis, I find that I can be more aggressive, I am more at peace and I am much less concerned about things not working out.

There are few people, managers or otherwise, who are more impactful on their situations, than those people who are not afraid to fail. This may help with that.

Don't Waste Your Sophistication

What is it that you truly understand? What core decisions about your business or your life have you made? Can you describe to an outsider what your business or department is all about (and I hope you are happy with that)?

I ask these questions because if you have clear answers to these questions, then the rest of your decisions should be much simpler. Note: I'm not saying without pain, but simpler.

The British have a saying that goes something like, 'he was too smart by half'. Its what I'm getting at.

For many of us, we've made decisions, we've learned great lessons; the rest is persistance and perseverance. Those are the traits that make all the difference once the direction is set.

And sophistication? That ability to see the nuance and understand the implication and develop the complexity? Its great to use a mentor/coach or your own experience to work through the thought, plan or idea. But once it's been done, get on with it. Execute and learn.

I can remember a proposal I worked on for a Big 4 consulting group. We started with a core team and put the proposal together. Then the 'powers that be' brought in more experts to review and contribute . . .they did this over and over again for a two week period. Over that period we changed/evolved the proposal 3 times a day. By the end of the process, we had over 30 different versions (I remember putting in my hours for those two weeks: 205 hours.) At the end of the iteration hell, on my own, I looked at the versions from the beginning to the end and you know what? I suspect you guessed it.

The last version was uncannily similar to the very first version. And you could track the evolution from human to simian to ape to simian and back to human. Scary.

So the arithmetic here comes down to this: use your sophistication to set your direction and then move as aggressively as you can. Don't suffer sophisticates or doubters lightly. And learn as you go. You'll run rings around the competition and your team will have a lot of fun.