Personal Development Plan Redux

 

I harp on goals and plans with my team. Without them, on a project basis, we are toast. Without them, on a personal basis, we might be okay, but perhaps coasting along without an objective. With them, we can suddenly frame success, determine present and desired states, and develop action plans for achieving the stated success criteria.

As a recap of previous rants on this subject, I recommend planning your future, obtaining coaching where needed, and getting a mentor (or three). As a follow-up comment to the mentoring, you don’t have to have a formal mentor relationship. Someone might be successful in what you want to be doing, and just listening to them or perhaps emulating them (no blatant weirdness please) is the mentoring you needed.

Sometimes a mentor can be a formal top-down thing; but in general, a somewhat less rigid arrangement works better. For the last six months or so, I have had a very-less-formal mentor. There has never been anything in writing or verbal that would have established a mentor relationship. But she is.

She has the unique ability to synthesize information into a coherent conclusion and then present verbally off the top of her head. Or so it seems. Maybe she is practicing late at night for those random occasions.

At any rate, just getting to listen to her is a learning experience. She demonstrates skills that I have never mastered. Maybe one day. But there’s more! Sort of like the infomercial – BUT WAIT!

For my edification, for the same price of admission as before, we also get other pearls of wisdom that make you sit back and think. Sometimes that is good, sometimes it is a catalyst that you have been searching for and never realized it. Other times it points out something that maybe you should consider revisiting. The other day, here came this one.

Mindtools dot com. An interesting site to say the least. The specific item that brought me here was informative, instructive, and timely. But in poking around this resource, I found this little slice of goodness that ties in nicely to your needs to plan your future: Personal Development Plan - Mind Tools.

The current problem with this recommendation is that now Mindtools.com would like you to pay for what was once free – but I get it. OTOH, 20 pieces of government coinage is not that big of an investment in your future.

While I am waiting for you to breeze through 27 pages that can predict your future, allow me to observe that we are getting close to the midpoint of year – a perfect time to be looking at a goals and objectives review; work and personal must be in balance and if you follow my mantra, people should have to really know you to tell the difference.

OK, hopefully you have taken a few moments to peruse that planning guide. Furthermore, I hope that you realize that you can use the same techniques with your customer’s projects. Benjamin Franklin, is credited with: “Failing to plan is planning to fail” and that is certainly true in my experience. This tool could be the one thing that creates a tipping point and helps you achieve your goals.

YMMV

Cat Box

 

It is Saturday morning and I am doing cat box duty. Oy vay. But it must be done, or the house will smell like, well, a cat box. So, there I am digging and scraping, sifting and dumping. A thoroughly enjoyable task, yes?

But it struck me that either I did my chore to the best of my ability or the house will start to compete for Outhouse of the Month. Not the desired outcome. Short term, no one, not even the SO, will ever know I cut corners, or that I did less than complete work. Conceivably, I could take shortcuts for a goodly while before my poor work gets noticed.

You have to know how my two active brain cells work. While one of them is doing the scooper duty, the other one started comparing my cat box to our work with customers. Have I been doing my best work with my customers? Internal and external?

The sales team reaches out – do I give them everything I have regardless of probable outcome? Does my pre-sales effort reflect the best face to the customer with whom we would like to work? When I am doing a project are the outcomes short of expectations or do I exceed the minimums just because it is the right thing? Will my efforts result in the customer talking about CDW in a positive manner the next time they have a peer ask how things are going?

A long time ago (…in a galaxy far, far away…) I learned that integrity is the most important leadership trait. Do what you say you are going to do, do it to the best of your ability and knowledge, give credit where credit is due, and always seek to improve – both personally and professionally.

Like it or not, we are all leaders in some fashion. I have official things that I am tasked with – do I accomplish those tasks with my best effort? As a leader, do I give the subordinate co-worker my finest? Part of being a leader is following. Do I give my manager and dotted line managers everything they need and then some? What about my peers? When they ask for help, do I blow them off or do I do everything I can to help?

On delivery projects, we are expected to lead the team both from a technical and a business perspective. Do you treat that customer’s environment like it is your own? Did everything you did with your project reflect your absolute best work? When you saw something that you would correct, did you bring attention to it and offer solutions? Would you be willing to accept your work if you were the recipient of that work?

And here is the bottom line: Much like the cat box, if you do less than your best, sooner or later something is going to stink. I much prefer good smells.