Before you quit your job

Time to read this post: five minutes

About once a month, I get an email from someone at my company who is confused. They want to change career. They want to get a new job. Sometimes they are just done with work. Almost always they have decided they want their life to be different. But they don't know where to begin. So we get a coffee. We talk about how they feel, what they want, what their plan is. I thought that I would share the two big questions that they tend to grapple with. There are some useful resources and approaches out there and people seem to like them.

Question one: What do I really want to do?
Most of us only have a vague sense of what kind of work would bring us a combination of pleasure, challenge and a sense of meaning. When I ask people over coffee what do they think they want to do they tend to give vague answers. "I'd like to work in finance". "I'd like to get a job in retail". The problem with trying to define yourself by industry is that there is huge variation in job type within a sector. The day-to-day interactions with colleagues, the length of commute, your boss's sense of humour will have much more impact on your levels of enjoyment than the abstract industry it may be part of.

Po Bronson in his book argues that working out what you want to do is actually the wrong question. Instead you need to ask yourself "Who do I want to be?"; "What do I stand for?"; "What values do I want to embody?" Then from that place of being you can then think about doing.

A wise colleague of mine says that when he works with CEOs he gets them to take out a blank sheet of paper. On the left hand side he gets them to write down what they love doing. On the right hand side they write down what they hate doing. He has tried doing this with "what I am good at" on the left and "what I am bad at" on the right - but he says that simply doesn't work. It has to be what you love and hate. For me the things I love would include things like "Being the center of attention when telling a joke; running in forests; working fast to hit a deadline; analyzing data in excel; applying lessons from one academic discipline to another..." These are things that really energize me. So the first step I recommend is to get a clear understanding of what gives you energy and what drains you. This is closely connected to playing to your strengths, understanding what motivates you, what your preferences are.

Practical tools:
1. VIA strengths assessment: go to http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx, login then take the VIA strengths questionnaire
2. buy Strengthsfinder 2.0 by Tom Rath. It will give you a code to do their online test (not as long as VIA)
3. Reflect on your Myers-Briggs type or DISC assessment
4. Write your 'What gives me / drains me of energy' list
5. Ask colleagues & friends how you occur to them. When do they see your eyes light up?
6. Re-read those business school applications
7. Write 100 words about your top 3 life experiences, then the bottom 3. Reflect on what it was about you and situation that made them so exhilarating / poor.

Blah blah blah. Undoubtedly all good stuff. But unfortunately these all rely on uncovering a deep truth about what you value most. But often you don't know what you don't know. How can I tell if I should resign and set up a non-profit when I have never done anything like it. Daniel Gilbert in Stumbling Upon Happiness points out that most off us are terrible at predicting what will make us happy. Hermina Ibarra in Working Identity argues that the classic model of i) think hard about what it is you want to do ii) go and do that is not borne out by people who have successfully changed careers. In fact quite the opposite. Most people who redefined their work and careers began experimenting on the side. "Adults are much more likely to act their way into a new way of being than to think their way into a new way of acting."

This is about starting side projects. When I was doing my MBA I got very interested in Organizational Behavior and Executive Coaching. I decided to become a life coach. I trained with the Coaches Training Institute (picture a twenty six year old British guy and 24 middle-aged women from Iowa sitting in a hotel room in Washington DC for five long weekends). I tried giving coaching to practice clients. It was fine but I found it lonely and missed my teammates and colleagues. Thank goodness I had not yet resigned from my steady job as a strategy consultant.

Now I recommend people "try on a new hat" when they go out. The next time you are at a dinner party and someone utters those dreaded four words ['what do you do?'], don't mumble an apologetic reply about your current boring job. Instead explain your vision for the future. "I'm thinking about starting my own dance studio" or "I plan to be working in digital marketing by the end of the year". The other person will invariably ask you all about these exciting plans and you get the chance to see what it feels like to be a budding entrepreneur. They will ask you questions or offer opinions that will make you consider your plans from a fresh perspective. You will walk away with new questions, new plans and a better sense of where you should be heading.

Question two: How do I find a new job?

OK, you know what energizes you but you don't know where to find the job that fits the bill. Classic job search approaches include: writing your bio/CV/resume, cover letter, interviewing skills, networking, references and the like. Again, this is all good stuff but I have a couple of different views.

If your new job does exist somewhere, it is probably more than one handshake away. As we know, networking is not about who you know but who knows you. I look at my hundreds of LinkedIn connections. About 80% of the list are a variety of former-strategy consultants and friends from my MBA. Now if I do NOT want to end up in the strategy department of a large corporate I need to start thinking about my networks very differently. In fact the impressive networking list may not be much good at all. If I ultimately want to be running an NGO in Africa then I need to start running in very different circles. Which circles do you want to be networking in? What would you need to get involved with? Who should you be getting a coffee with?

Here's some worse news: you're close-to-ideal job probably does not exist. Instead you are going to have to create it. Of all the best parts of my current job, I was not asked to do any of them. Zero. Instead I just started side-projects. As long as I was doing my main job well then nobody seemed to question how I used my spare time. A couple of year’s ago I wrote some training in my spare time on the seven things consultants don’t know about enjoying life. I presented it to a group of five secretaries over pizza one day. I even paid for the pizza. It wasn’t very good to tell the truth. But I kept tweaking it and making it a little better. And word spread. I got asked to present it to larger groups. Now two years later I am now invited to give the presentation all over the world. I love doing it. And now I’m paid to do it. It all starts with experiments on the side. Of course, initially this means more work for you. And that's a barrier for most people. That said it has been one of the most consistent strategies that I have seen other people use to create a role that they love. Normally it takes about six months to see if your side-experiment gets traction. It might be something that your current job morphs into. Or it gives you confidence to break out on your own or with friends.

Let me know if you want to grab a coffee.

PS Many of my ideas are inspired by two books:
A: Working Identity by Hermina Ibarra
Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

B: What shall I do with my life? - Po Bronson
What Should I Do with My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question

There are also classic books out there like "What color is your parachute?" which is perfectly fine, it's just really long / thorough and I can never get past chapter three.
What Color Is Your Parachute? 2010: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers

How to change a habit: the pedometer experiment

Time to read: 3 minutes

Over the years, I have been to more than my fair share of corporate training courses. In general they are mildly interesting with one of two nuggets of information. The real problem is this: despite my best intentions, I rarely do anything differently when I get back to work. I want to. I plan to. But if I’m honest with myself, I always slip back into the old routine. That’s why I’m really interested when something comes along and actually changes my behavior.

I had read that walking 10,000 steps a day was very beneficial to health. Some longitudinal study or other of Harvard Alumni. There’s even a pretty chart about it on the Harvard Health Website showing an asymptotic curve. Walk more, die less. Fair enough.

However there are lots of things that would make me healthier. No beer, no hamburgers, no bacon, no cheese, no fries. I agree with the science. I respect the health columnists who prescribe it. I would like to have more moderation in my life. But I still order a cheeseburger and lager whenever I am in bar. Which is too often.

And then six weeks ago I bought a pedometer and it all changed. It was $25 and had lots of stars and good reviews on Amazon. I popped it in my pocket on Monday morning and set off to work. I live in New York and it’s quite an active lifestyle: you walk to the subway, you walk to grab lunch, you walk home. Sometime I get a cab but normally I’m pounding the street. So at the end of the day I got it out of my pocket and prepared myself to be congratulated. 1,850 steps. Not 8,000 or 5,000, but my entire day was just 1,850 steps. I’ll be honest, it was exceptionally disappointing. This small electronic device was starring at me telling me that I’d failed.

Since that day in September I have changed my daily routine. I now frequent a sandwich shop about ten minutes walk away. Often I walk right down Broadway before jumping on the subway home at Union Square. My wife has one too. We check in during the day to see how we’re doing. It’s ridiculous really.

And I pop it all into a spreadsheet every Sunday night. I’ve average 8,750 a day since September 20th – that was 375,000 steps ago.

So a hundred-fold cheaper and three days shorter than a corporate training seminar. Not bad.

How to save time - Online countdown

Time to read this post: 1 minute

When I use the internet to do some quick research I frequently lose an hour. I start wanting to check a name or date on wikipedia and before I know it I am watching videos on hulu or reading the BBC entertainment news about day time TV shows I have previously not heard of. All this changed about a month ago when I starting using an online countdown.

The idea is simple. Before I embark on a task, I set the countdown for the amount of time I would like the task to take. Or for when I would like the alarm to ring. Want to check out the football scores? OK I set it for 3 minutes. Look up flight times to London? 5 minutes. Status updates on Facebook? 10 minutes. You get the idea. I have found the tool simple and it frequently stops me from getting ridiculously distracted. Sometimes I will deliberately only give myself a couple of minutes for a ten minute task and then race to see if I can get it done.

One of my friends came back to me saying it was one of the simplest, most game-changing techniques that has improved his effectiveness at work. Apparently it is "completely huge".

Now I've taken in a step further and this is what really made the difference for me. I now have the online countdown as my default homepage. It's the first page I see when I open Internet Exporer or Google Chrome. I can't get around it. Before I embark on a mindless journey down interweb rabbit warrens, I pre-agree with myself that it will only last for a few minutes at most.

What you need to do in Internet Explorer (time to action: 30 seconds)

1. Open internet explorer

2. Copy & paste http://www.online-stopwatch.com/online-countdown/ into the URL

3. Go to tools, Internet options then click Use Current

As Stephen Colbert would say, "you're welcome".

Your story in ten sentences

Time to read this post: 1 minute





One Thursday afternoon in November, the former president of Harvard University and noted orator Edward Everett spoke to a large crowd. Critics thought his speech was "erudite, moving, and well-delivered". Given his speech was over 13,000 words, he clearly had a lot to say.

As a former professor in Greek literature, Everett was masterful in his language. After more than two hours at the podium he wrapped up, "But they, I am sure, will join us in saying, as we bid farewell to the dust of these martyr-heroes, that wheresoever throughout the civilized world the accounts of this great warfare are read, and down to the latest period of recorded time, in the glorious annals of our common country, there will be no brighter page than that which relates the Battles of Gettysburg". The year was 1863.

I had never heard of Edward Everett. But I do know Abraham Lincoln, the man who followed him.

In just over two minutes Lincoln delivered what is regarded as one of the finest speeches of all time. It is only 242 words - ten sentences in length. It reminded me of the power of an effective narrative. Fortunately, we don't have to deliver stirring speeches on battlefields at the end of civil wars. But we do need to be heard.

Tough questions

• What is the next conversation, speech or meeting where you would like to be heard? Specifically when is it? Who do you want to be heard by?
• What is it that you want the other person(s) to remember ? What is the one sentence that summarizes it?
• How can you hit that objective by telling a story? Telling an anecdote? Using two minutes rather than two hours to be heard?

Write down your ten sentence narrative. Now.

The Gettysburg address

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate...we can not consecrate...we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

India calling - Virtual assistants

In 2005 I got myself a virtual assistant in India to make my life easier. It was an unmitigated disaster. Four years later and I am trying again. So far so good. This is a posting for those interested in what I outsource and how to do it successfully.

Time to read this post: 4 minutes

Who I use: I signed up with Get Friday on their 10 hours per month package. I considered doing pay as you go but I wanted to force myself to get ten hours of someone else helping me. It's about $10 / hour. There are many other services if you Google "Virtual Assistant" but this was a recommended firm that I trusted. By the way, if you do choose Get Friday and say you are referred by Alan Foster - I'd appreciate it.

Why do it: My wife and I had been to a wedding in Mumbai. We stayed with some friends in Bandra where we had breakfast with the father of our friend. He ran four different businesses and only seemed to work for a few hours a day. When I asked how he did it, he said he just got other people to help make his life easier. He had a man for everything. Why didn't I? I had also read Tim Ferris's Four Hour Work Week and become convinced that getting leverage from someone else was the way to go.

Enter Leo: my virtual assistant's name is Leo and so far it has been a huge success. I send him tasks via email. To give you an idea of what I use him for, here are a selection of the last few weeks:

1. Plan detailed parts of international travel: it was my school reunion in France and I got Leo to find a chateaux for my wife & I to stay the night before. he then found some recommended restaurants en route to our reunion that we could drop by for lunch the next day. He sent us PDF versions of the directions on Google Maps that I could print. On another occassion he summarised the recommendations on where to go in Brussels from the best of the New York Times, Guardian, Lonely Planet, Rough Guide & other sources I had recommended. This last weekend we were at a wedding in Pittsburgh, Leo sent us a summary of where to go, what to see and festivals / events that coincided with our stay. I was really busy at work and it was one less thing to worry about. Afterwards I send him a quick email about what I liked and what was missing from his research. He is extremely eager to learn & improve.

2. Job search: I had been procrastinating about doing research about other companies I might want to work at. Leo did a screen of all the portfolio companies of specific private equity firms in New York, put them into an excel spreadsheet, added descriptions, # of employees and then told me how I knew people at that company through LinkedIn. I have given Leo access to my LinkedIn website. He screened ~500 companies in a few hours - it was a repetitive task I had been avoiding. Well worth it.

3. House hunting: I have Leo regularly reviewing houses for sale near oneline where I live in Brooklyn and he alerts me when one that fits my criteria.

4. Website design & maintenance: my mum recently got her PhD and she wants to have somewhere online where people can come read more about her work and contact her. Get Friday has a team of web designers who can put this together in just a few hours. They are on it right now.

5. Document scanning: I realized that my work at home is cluttered. All my business school notes are in many folders scattered around the floors. Leo has researched places in Brooklyn where I can send the folders, get them scanned in onto CD-Rom and then recycle the originals.

6. Speech planning: I recently had a speech to give in London on stress management. I didn't know that much about the subject. Leo scoured the web and even watched a one hour video on TED lectures which he summarized into one document for me.

7. Weekly check-in email: I have Leo send me a weekly checkin email every Monday morning asking me about things I am trying to track each week. Stuff like how many times did I go to the gym, did I speak with my sister, did I use my strengths in a new way? I have 7 set questions that I track. Stuff I mean to do but without someone else hounding me I am likely to fall out of the habit. I had tried getting a Life Coach but I find this new method much more cost effective.

In the future I plan to have Leo do much more of our online shopping for us (he doesn't have my credit card details but their billing team does so it is secure). Down the line I can imagine him & his colleagues helping me run an online business.

Tips: if you do go down this route one of the most important things I have learned is how to request a task. I now always describe a task in 5 parts

a) goal: here is what I am trying to achieve (so he understands my overall intent, he might spot a faster way to do it or know another customer who had a similar request).

b) suggested approach: include your ideas for how he might do it. what sources would you recommend (e.g. if you are looking for a hotel do you want a chain where you have a loyalty card(e.g. Starwood) or a boutique hotel located downtown). Without your advice your assistant may assume you want the same as their other customer who has terrible taste.

c) format: do you want it in an email, to give you a call, in a word document, PDF etc

d) max time to spend: without guidance your assistant might spend five hours on something that you meant for them only to take fivee minutes. Sometimes I say "please work on this for 30minutes then email me and send an estimate for the total time you think it will take"

e) deadline: help them prioritize. sometimes I want it by end of day, sometime end of the week is fine. normally he will complete any task within 24 hours

Real example from last week:

"Leo, we are going to a wedding in Pittsburgh, USA this Friday for the weekend. We are looking for advice on things to do during the day on Saturday. Please could you do a search online (including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal) and see if there are recommended activities and good travel articles (e.g. good restaurants for Saturday lunchtime in central Pittsburgh); museums; anything else. Please could you summarise into a Word document.
Time to spend on this (max 30 minutes)

Deadline end of day Wednesday August 26th

Thanks, Alan"

So that's where I am right now. Still trying out new approaches but it's working out much better than my experiment in 2005.

PS One of my colleagues also uses Get Friday and has his VA (Virtual Assistant) look at match.com to look for suitable dates. They have had sessions over the phone to make sure the assistants understands his tastes in New York thrity something women...

Tough questions:

What are the repeatable tasks that bore you and someone else could help with?

What have you always dreamed of doing if only you had a bit more time to think about it?

6 powerful questions to ask at job interviews

Time to read this post: 4 minutes

What you won't read in "What color is your parachute"

I gave a talk in March of this year at the Wharton School on "Applied Happiness - Building the Positive Organization". I shared the six questions that almost nobody asks when applying for a job. I believe these simple questions are critical to understand whether or not you are suited for it. Kathyn Britton wrote up my talk on Positive Psychology News Daily. Here is an exerpt:

"1. Who will I learn from and how?
Is career development outsourced to training companies that know little about the specific environment? Does the company tell employees “You’re responsible for your own career,” avoiding involvement?
Or does the employer have a mentoring culture where more experienced people gracefully accept the responsibility of helping new people develop? Does it have a peer learning model where people are expected to take time to help each other learn? Do managers share the responsibility for career development with employees? Is mentoring ever tipped upside-down so that senior people learn new skills, such as computer proficiency, from younger people?
Jane Dutton describes a related key strategy, task enablement that can involve teaching, designing tasks effectively, advocating, and accommodating individual differences. Some of the references below explore the value of mentoring to the workplace, mentor, and protegé.

Who is held up as a hero here? What for?
Bandura’s serial dramas are based on the theory that people learn from role models whose behavior they wish to emulate. In similar fashion, workplace culture is conveyed to new members through the stories of its heroes. What behaviors are valued here? Are those behaviors that you wish to emulate?
Are the heroes people who deliver on very aggressive commitments, no matter what — even if people leave their organizations burned out and demoralized? Or are the heroes people well known for collaborating and bringing opposing sides together?
Are heroes always individuals, or are particular teams held up as examples because of the ways they’ve pulled together?

3. How do you resolve conflict here?

There will be disagreements in any work environment. So how do they get resolved? Are corrosive, threatening behaviors tolerated? Or are there procedures for giving everybody a voice but coming to agreement, either through explained decision-making or consensus?
Dutton, Frost, Glendinning, Sutton, and others write about corrosive workplaces where bullying is tolerated. According to Pearson, Andersson, and Wegner, people who instigated incivility were three times as likely to have more power than their targets than to be peers or subordinates.
This is the question that Janet most wished that she had asked in her last interview.

4. How willing are people to help each other?
Are people pitted against each other in job evaluations so that there is a feeling that helping someone else will put a person at a disadvantage? Or is helping others both valued and expected? How is work divided up? Are people given assignments and expected to complete them by themselves? Justin Berg suggests that the Job Crafting Exercise could be used by a team to divide up work so that people spend more time with tasks that line up with their strengths, motivations, and passions. How much flexibility is there for people to divide work and swap tasks?

5. How do you celebrate what’s working?
It is so easy for organizations to focus on problems and negative events and then take victories, large and small, for granted. Gable and colleagues have demonstrated that people get much more benefit out of positive events when they take time to talk them over with trusted others who respond actively and constructively. At an organizational level, do people have an opportunity to capitalize on achievements?
Are questions asked that highlight what’s working?
Alan mentioned that people in his company became much more willing to fill in employee surveys when the first question changed from “What is going wrong on your project?” to “What is going well on your project?

6. What keeps you going when things get stressful?
Fear or a sense of purpose? Competition or comradeship?

This article is © 2009 PositivePsychologyNews.com. The original article was authored by Kathryn Britton on April 7, 2009, and can be seen here. To join the discussion about this article, click here."

Picture from Flickr

Four questions away from death

Time to read this post: 3 minutes

At the peak of the last tech boom in 2001 many of my friends were dizzy with how rich they were about to be. One friend went to run an online furniture company (www.warbrobesandbathroommats.com or something). I felt unadventurous and not a little stupid as I didn't 'get' the new web paradigm where their projected losses and low revenue streams were going to make them millions. At the time I was a young business consultant working for a mining company in the north of England. Apparently at the age of 24 with no background in Engineering, I was our firm's tunneling expert. I would go underground (yes literally 800 meters underground) with the miners and help them work out how to improve their underground productivity. We would have lengthy conversations about roof bolting and their preferred types of glue (or bolt resin as it was called). We would play squash together in the evenings, at one point the whole mining team went on the Atkins diet and I joined them. Years later I would somehow become a key advisor as the mining roof bolt expert for a large Private Equity deal. I remember questioning the value of my esoteric knowledge.

Alain de Botton in his excellent new book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, goes on a philosophical quest to understand the way business works today and celebrates the world of esoteric knowledge and, by extension, roof bolt resin experts everywhere. He traces the supermarket supply chain: from illiterate tuna-bashing fisherman in the Indian ocean all the way through distribution centers, logistics hubs, supermarket aisles to the home of 8 year old Andy who pushes his fish around his plate. Andy was not aware let alone appreciative of what it has taken to get his evening meal ready for him. He tracks electricity power lines through suburban London. He shadows tax accountants communiting from Kent. He interviews biscuit production design managers in Belgium. Mainly he questions how we can find meaning in our work today.

Our world has benefited from Ricardo's comparative advantage. Very few of us become farmers, or bakers or any other easy to understand profession you might find in a children's storybook. Instead we become Strategic Brand Managers, Logistics supply analysts and many other eclectic names that even our parents struggle to understand.

De Botton ponders how many workers have become separated from the meaning of their work. Separated from the moment a customer delights in their manufacted chocalate bar. Separated from seeing the banking analyst login to his corporate intranet. Seperated from seeing any benefit from the little differences each of us hope to make in the short time we are around on this planet.

Perhaps work is just there to keep us busy before we die. After all, explains De Botton, we are all only about four questions away from death. If we stop to question why we are actually rushing to this next meeting? Why this meeting will make any difference in the shaping the future of this organization? Whether this organization will make any notable impact on the future direction of the planet? Whether anyone will remember anything I ever do at all?

Should we learn to embrace this tragic view of life? Or can we train our minds to marvel at the beauty of logistics centers, airport carparks and corporate intranet home pages? Or to accept that how we experience the present is not how we will remember it; like Susan Sontag said "Just wait until now becomes then. You'll see how happy we were."

We could all do far worse than reading The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

Tough questions

How close are you in your organisation to where meaning is created?

How does your organization try bring the stories that create belonging and meaning to the employees?

What can you do to remind yourself of the difference you make?