Author: Mary Ila Ward
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Climbing the Ladder
2 TIPS FOR CLIMBING AND 2 TIPS FOR LEANING YOUR LADDER AGAINST THE RIGHT WALL
In talking to some top performing college students today, I realized that they have what it takes to climb the rungs:
1. You don’t have to give them m&ms to motivate them. They are self-motivated and conscientious. This is a characteristic that employers want. In fact, coupled with IQ, this is the greatest predictor of job performance across all jobs. Here’s some more info on the analogy of the m&ms.
2. They can wait for another marshmallow. They have the ability to delay gratification for something bigger. They can delay income from a job to go to school, or they can delay partying to study or to be able to work to put themselves through school. Here’s some more info on the analogy of the marshmallow.
But as one student asked me when I opened the discussion with “What characteristics do successful people have that others don’t?” He responded, “Well what is your definition of success?”
Smart Kid.
Stephen Covey’s quote in First Things First relates to this:
“Some of us feel empty. We’ve defined happiness solely in terms of professional or financial achievement, and we find that our ‘success’ did not bring us the satisfaction we thought it would. We’ve painstakingly climbed the ‘ladder of success’ rung by rung only to discover as we reached the top rung that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”
If it’s financial success or status that you want, the above to points will serve you well. But if your definition of success is broader than this, where you ladder is leaning is truly important.Here’s two tips for making sure your ladder is on the right wall.
2. Be willing to take risks and learn from failure.
You can only truly get to where you want to be if you define where that is, and it is different for each individual. You can only get to your definition of success if you’re willing to take the risks to get there and to be able to learn from failure along the way.
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Talents: A real life example
Over the last week, I’ve given a lot of thought into which client I should highlight as an example of discovering talents. There have been many, all unique, with so many talents to share. I anticipate using this person as an example throughout the process of describing how you discover yourself and match it to the market, so it has been difficult to pick the “best” one.
With much thought, I’ve decided to make this example personal. No, I’m not going to describe myself and my journey, but I’m not going to use a paying client either. Instead, I’m going to use someone who is more like me in genetics than anyone else on this planet, and someone who I helped before I even realized that career development was even what I wanted to do. Helping Graham, my brother, helped me discern that I wanted to be the go-to person for career help.
Why personal? Because career exploration and decisions are very personal. By describing someone who I have seen grow and mature through this process, I feel as though I can more adequately describe its impact.
So, with all that said, Graham will be my “guinea pig” as I walk you all through a real example the career process.
Graham did the KSAO process for talent identification indicating his top 2-3 strengths in each area:
Knowledge:
Sales and Marketing — Knowledge of principles and methods for showing, promoting, and selling products or services. This includes marketing strategy and tactics, product demonstration, sales techniques, and sales control systems.
I would also add for him: Administration and Management — Knowledge of business and management principles involved in strategic planning, resource allocation, human resources modeling, leadership technique, production methods, and coordination of people and resources.
Skills:
Critical Thinking — Using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problem solving.
Judgment and Decision Making — Considering the relative costs and benefits of potential actions to choose the most appropriate one.
Ability:
Inductive Reasoning — The ability to combine pieces of information to form general rules or conclusions (includes finding a relationship among seemingly unrelated events).
Memorization — The ability to remember information such as words, numbers, pictures, and procedures.
Remember, you can click on the title of each of these to see career matches. What do you think Graham does for a living today? There isn’t a lot of consistency in his career matches based just on this. Stay tuned for next week as we discuss passions and then describe Graham’s passions in relation to our process. If you can’t figure out what he does yet, the pieces will come together over the next few weeks.
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“Mind on, Hands off”
LESSONS ON LEADERSHIP FROM BOB WOODWARD
I had the unique opportunity to hear Bob Woodward, who along with Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate Scandal, speak in a private session to the Blackburn Institute at the University of Alabama. Bob was asked the question, “What advice would you give to students about leadership?”
Instead of giving points on leadership, or even discussing one of the seven Presidents he has interviewed, he told the story of Katharine Graham, owner of the Washington Post. By describing the key points of one of their discussions about the Watergate story he emphasized these key points:
- She was “mind on, hands off”. Meaning she hand her mind on the details of the business but did not micromanage. She turned people loose to do their jobs.
- She knew what business she was in and had a statement of purpose to direct that business. This gave her the ability to take risks and have patience to develop stories that drove her business. She didn’t look at chasing the stock price or correcting issues with the quick fix, instead she focused on doing the business she was in, which she knew would lead to positive results.
- She had a “never, don’t ever tell me never” mentality. Which led to results like Pulitzer prizes and exposing hard truths.
What story of a true leader can you tell?
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Your Talents: What Are You Good At?
The first step in finding your light is to know yourself. The three pieces of knowing yourself involve discovering your talents, passions and values. We’ll start first with identifying your talents. There are many ways to define and identify talents, but for the purpose of career exploration and development, I think they best way to identify your talents is to define them in the way that employers do. After all, the whole point of knowing yourself is so that you can be able to find a career that you enjoy doing so that your light can shine.
KSAOs – Knowledge, Skills, Abilities and Other characteristics- are how most employers define what the need when they go to hire an employee. Here’s a run down of what these four things actually are:
Knowledge – “Degree to which employees have mastered a technical body of material directly involved in the performance of a job.”
Example of knowledge that a high school student might have:
English Language — Knowledge of the structure and content of the English language including the meaning and spelling of words, rules of composition, and grammar.
Skill – “The capacity to perform tasks requiring the use of tools, equipment and machinery.”
Example of a skill that a high school student might have:
Critical Thinking — Using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems.
Ability – “The capacity to carry out physical and mental acts required by a job’s tasks where the involvement of tools, equipment and machinery is not the dominate factor.”
Example of an ability a high school student might have:
Memorization — The ability to remember information such as words, numbers, pictures, and procedures.
Other – “Interests, values, temperaments, and personality attributes that suggest what an employee is likely to do rather than how well an employee can do at peak performance.”
We’ll talk more about the “other” characteristics later when we explore work and life values as well as passions. But some examples of other characteristics employers would want could want and is developed in high school and throughout life would be conscientiousness.
The neat thing about all of these KSAOs is that they are linked by importance and level to job titles through O*Net. You can use this tool to explore a whole list of different KSAOS and then see which job titles come up most frequently for you.
Here is a worksheet – Find Your Point– with a list of KSAOs (as well as other things we’ll be discussion in the weeks to come) Each KSAO listed links to O*Net. Just click them! You can do here this here too with “English Language”, “Critical Thinking” and “Memorization”.
Some simple questions to ask yourself to identify your talents:
- What types of things do people ask me to help them with? Fixing their car, giving a speech, tutoring them in math or English or biology? What are you the go to person for?
- Where are you picked first? The baseball team, the drama club, the school newspaper, the organizer of the volunteer effort?
Next week, I’ll describe how this actually works with a real student I have worked with. Stay tuned!
KSAO Definitions taken from: Job and Work Analysis, Brannick, Levine, and Morgeson