Just as every leader understands that each assignment is a step in their career, they also need to understand that the same is true for each of their team members. It is sometimes too easy to fall into the trap of complacency when it comes to team members. As a leader you have spent a significant amount of time assembling the best, brightest and most skilled team possible. Your team consistently produces exemplary results. Now you notice that they are leaving, and not just a few at a time but in significant numbers. There is no question about it. You have an attrition problem. Now what? As is usual in business if you are recognizing that you have a problem it probably already is too late. This truly applies to attrition. By the time you recognize that there are more people leaving than would be normally associated with standard career transitions, you will have almost assuredly lost more talent than you want from your team, and more importantly you will have a significant number of additional team members that are probably in one stage or another of their exit process as well. The time to worry about attrition is before it happens. I’ll talk about avoiding attrition later. The question now is what to do about an unwanted attrition issue. Once it starts attrition can and will take on a life of its own.
The key to calming an attrition stampede is to understand on what level the issues of discontent are rooted. Is it a corporate wide issue, a business unit issue, or an individual level issue? Is it based on rumor or actual business performance? Maybe they just don’t like you anymore. Whatever it is that is causing good people to leave faster than you want, you had better find out. I said faster than you want because as I noted above, each assignment is a step in everybody’s career. It is usually not their end point destination. There will always be people transitioning on to their next career step. This is healthy for them and the organization. As with just about everything else in the world today though, too much of a good thing can be bad.
If the issue is deemed to be a corporate wide issue, it will usually be caused by either conflicting or ineffective messages being sent by the corporation’s senior most management. In times of senior management change or poor corporate performance a very clear and concise set of messages regarding strategic directions and plans needs to be openly communicated. Team members understand that change may take time and can usually be patient in order to see the results of the changes, to a point. The more specific the senior management actions and activities that can be identified that are to be taken, the more patient the team can be. However the team will need eventually to be able to see and identify progress against the actions in order to feel secure enough to remain through the period of corporate instability.
If the issue is thought to be on a business unit level, a cause will also need to be identified. Business unit attrition related causes are usually attributable to the business unit performance. If the business unit team believes that the unit has been identified as a troubled or “problem” business, they will try to anticipate senior management actions associated with improving business performance (cost reductions, travel freezes, lay-offs, etc.) and look to transition to other opportunities in other businesses or business units that are not so troubled. Again communicating a clear and concise set of actions for the business may help stem the attrition stampede, but there probably truly is no way to stop this one. People usually like to feel that they are part of a winning team, and in this case they will always look elsewhere if they feel the chances for success on their current team will be limited by the overall team perception or performance.
If the attrition is truly localized into one specific organization then it may be an individual based attrition. This is usually the result of an interpersonal or management technique conflict between the team manager and the team. If it is happening to your specific team you had better be able to look in the mirror and ask yourself the difficult questions regarding you and your relationship to the team. If your role is to try and turn around an underperforming team and you are a change agent, then you can honestly expect that some team members may not be comfortable with the new direction and choose to leave. If you are picking up a new team that has been performing well and they are choosing to leave, then you had better understand those issues quickly. Issues such as frustration or a perceived slight at being passed over in the selection of a new leader can be a generating event in the starting of an attrition wave.
The time to worry about attrition, like forest fires and tooth decay is before it happens. Attrition prevention is far more preferable than having to rapidly implement corrective actions to try and stem the outward flow of talent. Attrition also requires an honest assessment of the issues. Too many times teams will try to equivocate and split hairs as to exactly how the definition, measurement or importance of attrition is to be set. Managers may have a tendency to try and justify higher levels of attrition as acceptable in light of certain factors. They may try to differentiate between attrition of people leaving the group for other groups within the same company and those that leave the company for another company. This direction is normally taken by groups that are suffering from attrition and either cannot or do not have the ability to address the underlying attrition causing issues. Regardless of how it is positioned, attrition is still the unwanted exiting of employees from a defined group or population.
The solution to attrition prevention is very similar to the solution to attrition itself; communication. The difference is that leaders will actually communicate clearly to their teams the challenges in front of them as well as the specific actions that are being put in place and being taken to address them. Managers will usually wait until there is a recognizable attrition issue before communicating. Leaders will be proactive in acknowledging the business issues and position with the team and preparing them for the actions to be taken. In many instances the corrective actions that are outlined to the team may encompass some unpleasant but necessary business activities such as lay-offs and other cost cutting measures. By getting them out into the open early leaders can at least begin to control the realities of what needs to be done and the accompanying rumors (which are almost always worse than the actual truth) can be minimized.
Attrition is expensive in that when people leave they take all that they know and all they have learned with them. They take a proficiency that they have acquired over time that can only be replaced with a similar amount of time and experience. Attrition leaves the remaining team short staffed and over worked (two incremental issues that can add to the underlying attrition causes) while replacements are sought. Attrition reduces the efficiency of the entire team as the replacement is searched for, located, brought on board and then comes up to speed in the needs of the position. Transitions of any type, at the corporate CEO level or the individual contributor all go much smoother when they are anticipated, planned for and executed as opposed to responding to the unexpected exit associated with attrition. The time to plan for and implement an attrition strategy is well before any issues arise, and any attritions starts.
Cost Centers
Throughout history there have always been significant conflicts. The ancient Romans and just about everybody else. The North and the South. The East and the West. Capitalism and Socialism. Yin and Yang. Republicans and Democrats. Dogs and Cats. The list goes on and on. In business the applicable equivalent conflict seems to be between Cost Centers and Profitability. There appear to be two ongoing schools of thought when it comes to business management structures and organizations. There are probably many more than that but for purposes of the time and space that I have here, I am going to impose the writer’s “power of the pen” and focus on the two that have already alluded to, namely cost centers and profitability (and loss). For the most part just about every other organizational structure is a variant or hybrid of these. You will also occasionally see them referred to as “Matrix” management models and “General” management models. A potential disadvantage to this model is that costs end up being the responsibility of a group other than the business group responsible for revenue or profitability. Because the costs are assigned from a shared pool, the cost center, they may or may not be directly linked to the revenue or business activities that the associated costs are supporting. Here costs are in effect “assigned” to rather than directly associated with the revenue they are responsible for generating. So with the lines being drawn and the costs piling up, what do you do? Which structure to implement for the best profitability of the business? As I noted before, businesses like predictability, and there is nothing more predictable than a fixed cost. It may be good or bad, but it is known. And known costs can be planned for and dealt with. When direct costs are associated with and controlled by the business, they can and will become fixed. When multiple business’s costs are lumped together into a “Cost Center” there will always be a question regarding the efficiency and value received by the business for the amount of cost allocated to each business. There will be the incremental cost of the cost center management that must also be allocated and paid for. There will also be less control over the content and growth of those costs in the cost center, unless a budgeted cost arrangement can be put in place between the served businesses and the serving cost center. As I also noted, the arguments in support of cost centers are seductive, but in the reality of their implementation they present multiple issues to the efficient operation of a business. Every effort should be made to find a way to directly attach and fix the costs and decisions about the costs to the revenue and the business that is recognizing the revenue for the most efficient and lowest cost business operation.
There are competing schools of business thought when it comes to costs centers. On one side it is felt that it is easier and more efficient to manage your costs when you group them into one specific organization. The idea here is that if you get your costs into one location that there will be several obvious efficiencies and economies of scale that can be taken advantage of to either reduce costs or at the very least slow their growth. As we all know, reducing costs will help improve profitability and creating cost centers is a very seductive argument for reducing costs.
The other school of thought when it comes to cost centers is that costs should directly be associated with the revenue that they drive. This is the general management model. The idea here is that the revenue, profitability and the costs for a specific business unit should all reside in that specific business unit. In doing this you enable the business unit leader to manage and “fix” his costs in direct proportion to and in association with his revenue in order to achieve his profit objectives.
A potential disadvantage with this model is that some businesses may be too small or may not be far enough along the efficiency curve to endure the incremental costs they require and hence suffer reduced profitability. Because costs are not shared each business unit may in effect be less efficient than they would be if their costs were shared.
Businesses (and business analysts for that matter) like predictability. They like to know in very specific financial terms what they can expect from their businesses. While the Cost Center and the Profitability models both offer certain aspects of predictability it seems that the profitability model offers the best financial predictability. It is only in this model that all specific and applicable costs are known, defined and fixed within the confines of the business. In the Cost Center model costs are allocated according to some predefined algorithm. While the method or algorithm may be fixed, the actual value of the costs that are assigned can vary. Adding another variable into a business’s cost structure increases the unpredictability of its performance.
As an example, assume there is a cost center that allocates its costs based on support requests. If there are three businesses sharing the cost center and one of the three experiences an unexpected increase in its support requests on the cost center, its costs will rise during that period while the other two businesses costs through no action of their own will go down. Conversely if one of the businesses experiences a reduction in support requests its costs will go down while the other two businesses through no action of their own will go up. In this way cost centers can turn fixed costs into variable costs.
Lastly when dealing with cost centers there comes the issue of governance and leadership. In business for the most part we are looking to grow. We want to grow our business, and with it, our responsibilities. When it comes to cost centers we must always ask the cost center leadership to take the contrary approach and reduce the cost center or at the very least limit its growth. In my experience this has seldom been the case with cost centers. If the supported businesses do not have direct control over the cost center growth and costs, they invariably grow at a faster rate than the supported businesses grow.
In the profitability / General Management model all costs directly associated with a particular business are attached to that business. The market doesn’t dictate what costs the business can or will bear. The market dictates what price the business can expect for its good or service. It is then the profitability objectives of the business that dictate what costs the business can bear in the pursuit of the market price. By putting the cost and price controls in the hands of the business owner, instead of separating them into the hands of the cost center owner and the business owner, you will far more regularly get a more efficient and lower cost solution.
There may be questions regarding lost efficiencies, or biases against smaller businesses in this profitability model. These types of businesses may in fact be able to be served by a cost center model, but should be only in a cost center model where fixed amounts of costs are purchased from the cost center by the business. The idea here is that the business must always decide on the amount of cost that it wants or can afford, hence the cost purchase approach to cost centers.
Not My Job
I don’t want it to sound as though I am a continual complainer about today’s business environment and conduct. There are many aspects of it that I appreciate. It is just that I believe that it might be better if what has already been proven to be effective in the business environment were retained and combined with what the best of today has to offer instead of seemingly being discarded and replaced whole cloth. I also understand that despite what just about every media outlet reports and would like us to believe, that the business environment is still a difficult place and probably will be for some time to come. Despite all this and probably more, there is one trend that I have witnessed in the conduct of today’s business that I just don’t seem to be able to get my head around. I don’t understand how anyone can ever respond to a question, request or assignment with the words “It’s not my job.” It seems to me that this phrase has been insidiously creeping into our business lexicon. I have mentioned in the past that it seemed that companies prized employees that had a breadth of experience in that they felt it enabled them to take on new roles and added responsibilities. The difficult business and economic times appears to have taught companies that instead of retaining the generalist who may be capable of performing a great many different functions very well and grow into a multi-dimensional business leader, they may now instead focus on the shorter term and opt for a specialist who may be highly proficient in one particular skill, to the exclusion of the others with somewhat less potential for leadership upside. The equivalent comparison here would be looking at someone who competes in the decathlon, a ten discipline competition, and comparing them to a sprinter who only competes in the one hundred meter sprint. The winner of the decathlon is viewed as the best overall athlete, but today if you need someone to run one hundred meters, you will more than likely choose the sprinter. And tomorrow if you need someone to throw the javelin or clear the bar in the high jump you can replace the sprinter with someone else who better fills those specific needs then. As I said, a much shorter term approach to immediate needs. I am drawing a corollary between the advent of this corporate preference for business specialists and the beginning of the “Not My Job” mentality. It seems only natural that if you were brought in for a single purpose that you might not be knowledgeable of or have the predilection to perform other jobs or assume other responsibilities. As an example, if you are brought in to sell, your single focus now is to get the customer order. It seems that profitability, margins, availability of product, functionality, deliverability, etc, are now reduced in your hierarchy of priorities. They are now someone else’s job. If the people responsible for those functions are not as good at their roles as you are at getting orders, it is quite probable that business profitability as well as customer satisfaction will suffer due to potentially too low prices and undeliverable commitments. However, there will probably be plenty of these somewhat difficult orders. I have also discussed in the past the proliferation of the virtual office and being remotely located in the performance of your role. Prior to the advanced bandwidth and networking capabilities that we enjoy today, functions and businesses were usually collocated within a specific building, floor or area. This face to face interaction gave rise to business terms such as “efficiency” and “synergy”. People physically worked together. This also seemed to be a period of intense creativity and development. There were many magazine articles displaying pictures of people sleeping at their desks in the California Silicon Valley as they were driving to create their new businesses and business models. As we have evolved to a more “virtual” environment we seem to have possibly lost some of the synergy, productivity and interaction that drove many of the new ideas. We may also be seeing the beginning of a corrective movement associated with the virtual office world. In February Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo Issued a directive that all virtual or remote employees in that company need to come into an office to work. She was worried about not only the creativity that was lost when people stopped physically working together, but also the productivity that was lost. We’ll see how this “virtual” reversal goes, but I find it very interesting that a technology and digital bellwether company like Yahoo, a company that was a leader in the new digital age has adopted such a contrary stance to virtual office working. Perhaps it was a different time, but I see it even today in that there seems to be more collaboration and less job responsibility deflection in a face to face meeting than in a conference call. A set of disembodied voices on a conference call do not seem to engender the same kind of commitment that is achieved when people are in the same room. An even greater level of commitment seems to be created when people leave the conference room and know they will need to continue to face their peers in the office area. It seems when you hang up the phone everyone is “gone”. It is easier to say “Not My Job” because you rarely if ever have to face them.
The corollary that I am drawing here is that psychologically it is easier to say things over the phone than it is to say them in person. With the advent of virtual offices and conducting the preponderance of work either by phone or electronic media, we have made it in effect “easier” for people to say “Not My Job”. They get to say it over the phone instead of face to face.
Perhaps it is also the advent of the more matrix oriented business structure that has given rise to the “Not My Job” growth. In the past general management or more hierarchical business structures, when a request was made if it was not already a given job responsibility, it was positioned as the addition of a new job responsibility. In today’s somewhat more matrix and consensus oriented business structures, where there is more functional specificity, as well as far more functional overlap, managers seem to be structurally encouraged to focus on only those activities that fit cleanly within their responsibility definitions.
Instead of having a business structure that promotes the addition and incrementing of new responsibilities, we now have one that encourages ever tighter focus on a specific set of responsibility definitions and processes. The result seems to be more and more “Not My Job” responses.
Despite what the typical business RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) may state, leaders when asked take responsibility. It may not be in their job definition. It may not have been anything that they have done before in the organization. But when they are asked, or when they see a business or performance gap that needs to be filled, they step up. If the requirement is truly outside the bounds of their expertise, they don’t say it’s not their job. They take on the responsibility to find out who has the required expertise and see to it that they get the job done.
There is always a time and a place for pushing back on assignments, but in business now, if a job needs to get done it needs to be everyone’s job to see to it that the job gets done. I think if we heard more “I’ll do that job” and less “It’s not my job” we would make much better progress.
Career Progression
When you look at a career in business you see that it is not a smooth line but a series of steps. Some are upwards, and some are not. The point is that there is movement, maybe not continual, but regular movement. There are always new roles, new responsibilities and new challenges to take on. There is not an exact science on when and where to make your moves and take your steps. There are however a few topics, traits and activities to be aware of when contemplating your career progression. When discussing career progression it isinteresting to note the number of seemingly opposing forces that will act on a career. The first of these dichotomies will be how long or how short each business assignment’s duration is. Many prospective employers or managers like to look at an individual’s past assignment durations to get an idea of how long they may stay in their new role. A history of short assignment durations can indicate a “job hopper”, or someone who is just hopping from role to role. This could be for any number of good or viable reasons, but in general can be seen as a negative. A history of long assignments can also be negatively looked at as someone who may be “too conservative” and either cannot or will not take on new or added responsibilities. There is always the search for the perfect balance between the two extremes. When a business unit or function is not performing to a desired level, it unfortunately seems that all members of that team whether it is justifiable or not will be associated with that poor performance. In most cases like this an organization will look external of that business unit or function for its next leader. These changes of leadership events can be opportunities for leaders outside of the poor performing business, but unless they are in a similar business function this again would seem to run contrary to the previous point I made earlier regarding the apparent single discipline verses multi-discipline experience preference in candidates.
As I have noted in many past articles, I am something of an old school throwback when it comes to business. There was a time where businesses wanted candidates and employees that had a broad background and experience set. This multi-discipline type of background was seen as an indication that the employee or candidate had the capability to be flexible in what they were asked or needed to do as well as were able to take on other and greater responsibilities. The idea here was that businesses were looking for the best overall business “athletes”.
Now it seems that this approach is no longer the case. The business world seems to have evolved to a level of specificity where the search is no longer for the best potential overall athlete, but the best within that specific discipline. This approach now brings into question whether or not it is good to search for or even accept new roles that require a change of discipline. If a business is looking for a marketer, they are now looking for the best marketer available, and more specifically the best marketer in their specific market for their specific product type, not the best athlete who has the capability to not only become the best marketer, but also has the capability to go on and assume roles with greater or broader responsibilities.
While this approach may provide a better short term or immediate return to that specific part of the business, it does tend to generate somewhat more one dimensional (single discipline) career paths and leaders. As leaders hit the senior level positions where they will be required to provide broader leadership, they will have a narrower experience set to draw on. I am not proposing that career discipline changes (Marketing to Finance, or Engineering to Sales, etc.) cannot or should not be made. What I am saying is that the current business climate does not encourage or reward these types of career changes in the same way that they were in the past. It is something to be aware of when contemplating potential changes and progression.
Another aspect of career progression will depend on the relative perception of the business aspect that you are currently in. What I mean here is that if you are associated with a business unit or function that is in relatively high regard, the opportunities for continued career progression in that specific business unit or function, or even other business units or functions can be stronger. As an example, look at Apple. They had been so successful under Steve Jobs leadership that they primarily looked to members of his team to assume the leadership role to assure continuity and continued success. They looked internal.
Either way, there will always be the question of the need for continuity playing against the need for new approaches in a leadership role. Both can be either opportunities for or detriments to career progression. Knowledge of both the business situation and perception of the business will be needed in order to ascertain what or where may be the next career progression opportunity.
Along a similar line here, I have always found that taking on a new approach change of leadership role has been beneficial to my career. I have taken to heart the advice of an executive that I received early in my career when I was pondering just such a move. The executive told me to never be afraid to take on a bad or underperforming business (he actually used the word “catastrophe”). He said that if something is truly in bad shape, that you can’t help but make it better. Across my experience in business, I have found this to be true far more times than not. These types of career moves can result in some of the most challenging of assignments, but in order to achieve the return of career advancement there will need to be the risk of taking on difficult performance objectives.
There are those that consider a proper career progression to be a series of upward movements and assignments with ever increasing responsibilities. This type of progression has not been my experience, nor has it been one that I have seen. There will inevitably be situations that evolve where there will simply be no opportunities for advancement. There may already be several high quality leaders in position and hence no new opportunities. On the opposite side of that equation, there may be several managers in place who may not be supporters of the leadership traits and characteristics that you want to employ. The business may be undergoing a contraction and along with that action there is a reduction in opportunities. For whatever reason there can be an opportunity logjam.
In situations like this it may be time to look for a lateral move instead of waiting to try and make a promotional one. In effect you can try and step around the business impediments to career progress. It may be possible to step outside of an underperforming business unit (where you may be associated with that underperformance) and get into a better performing business unit. Once outside of the poorly performing unit you may become eligible for consideration due to your past experience and knowledge if and when a leadership change is considered there.
Moving laterally in an organization can also provide monetary and earnings opportunities. Better performing business units can receive better bonus opportunities during annual reviews. Moving into sales or into different units within sales can provide better sales and commission opportunities. Some lateral motion for whatever reason should be expected in almost any career progression.
I will come to conclusion here without commenting on where a career progression may slow or even stop. You may be happy where you are and remain at that level of responsibility or you may not. Instead I’ll finish with a few quotes or axioms and let you decide.
Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book The Peter Principle, defined the Peter Principle as that the members of an organization where promotion is based on achievement, success, and merit, will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability. The principle is commonly phrased, “Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence.”
Robert Frost wrote: “By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss, and work twelve hours a day.”
And finally Sloan Wilson said: “Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders.” I suspect and hope that he was writing about our political system, but I thought I would throw that one in as well.
Good luck on your career.
High Maintenance Managers
We all work for someone. Sometimes we work for people that are leaders and create an environment where we can grow and flourish. Sometimes we work for managers that seem to feel it is their responsibility to keep track of our every activity. These are the managers that for whatever reason seem to consider themselves the center of the group’s processes and the core of its activities. They appear to think of each member of the team as to be some sort of appendage or digit to be controlled or told what to do. These managers want to position themselves as the control point and decision making hub of their organization. These are the types of managers that I refer to as High Maintenance Managers. High maintenance managers can present a significant issue to responsible and capable leaders. In addition to managing downward into their team, high maintenance managers also seem to focus on reporting upwards into their management. Most leaders understand that there is a trade-off between how much time and effort is spent getting work done and how much time and effort is spent reporting how much work is getting done. The obvious point here is that the more time that is spent reporting, the less time that is spent actually doing. Most managers do not see this trade-off as an opportunity cost / productivity issue. High maintenance managers seem to thrive in the reporting arena to the point of almost seeming to place a higher priority on the reporting of the work than the actual work accomplished. So how do you deal with a high maintenance manager if you happen to find yourself in one of their group’s? Their demand for awareness and involvement will not go away. Refusing or ignoring their involvement usually only increases their demands to be involved. And as my dad was so fond of telling me, he might not always be right but he (like the high maintenance manager) was always boss.
I once heard it said that “Those who can’t do, teach.” This always intrigued me. Being someone who enjoys and appreciates golf, I looked at some of the professional golfers and their beautiful rhythmic swings for inspiration. They all seem to have swing coaches of one type or another. I always wondered if these swing coaches were capable of creating these great swings in others, why they couldn’t create one for themselves and start winning. It would seem to indicate that there is more to golf than just the physical / mechanical aspect of being able to swing a golf club correctly. Hence, they teach.
I would propose that the business corollary to “Those who can’t do, teach” is “Those who can’t do, report.” It is my experience that high maintenance managers love reports. They love to get them. They love to give them. They want reports from their team members weekly, monthly, ad hoc, you name it. They want project reports. They want progress reports. They want to have meetings and conference calls to discuss their reports. They seem to want to know what everyone is doing, all the time.
They are almost information junkies when it comes to their areas of responsibility. They can’t seem to ever know enough about what is going on. This might be an acceptable situation if the information that is gathered is used for the purpose of directing or affecting the performance of the business. More often than not it is not used this way. High maintenance managers seem to try and gather all the information that is available for the purpose of creating more reports.
High maintenance managers seem to live for the opportunity to present reports on their own and their teams activities. It is not uncommon for these managers to have multiple drafts and even multiple dry runs on presentations and reports that they will be presenting to their reporting structures. They are experts at crafting an activity report (or just about any other type of report) that not only conveys what has been done, but also does it in such a way as to amaze and astound their management with the images, prose and flow of the presentation. It seems how things are said and done are just as important, if not more so than what was actually accomplished.
Contrary to what you might expect it has been my experience that high maintenance managers do not want to make all decisions. They do however want to be involved in all decisions. They will want to understand how the decision was arrived at and the logic that was used. They will ask detailed questions and probe the arcane aspects associated with the decision. There were always a great many “your decision” questions, and they were usually phrased as “I would like to know…” While the high maintenance manager may not make all of the decisions, through this type of process they do in effect control the decision making process.
It might sound as though I have found high maintenance managers to be untrusting of their teams. In all honesty, I really do not believe this to be the case. I think it stems more from the idea that these types of managers are driven by the perception that since they are nominally in charge that they must be in the middle of all that is going on. They must be aware of, understand and try to control all that is going on as it pertains to their realms.
I am not advocating or even saying that leaders are not or should not be aware of their team’s activities. I am saying that good leaders need to provide space for their team members to operate in. Team members should not be fully autonomous, but they do need to have some sense of self direction if they are to grow into the next generation of leaders. The leaders that I have been associated with were good at providing objectives and guidelines. The managers that I have worked for usually provided tasks and instructions.
I have spent a little time describing some of the traits and attributes of high maintenance managers. I am sure there are more. There are other items such as rigorous justifications associated with approval processes. Another favorite of mine is the repeated forwarding, with comments, of just about every email and piece of correspondence that they receive. It seems that since high maintenance managers crave information, they assume everyone else does too.
I have found that there was never any way to satiate the demands of a high maintenance manager, but that there were usually ways to contain them. One of my favorite ways was what I referred to as the preemptive information strike. Since they were information junkies, I found that if I would provide an information set to them prior to them asking for it, I could invariably provide them a less intensive information set and avoid the detailed review.
I also found that I could work to create an information format or structure that again would be less time consuming and information intensive. I would look to try and create a “bulletized” information / feedback format that would enable me to provide the desired information while at the same time creating a jointly agreeable structure that would reduce my reporting time.
I am sure there are other methods for dealing with high maintenance managers. I have only highlighted a couple of tactics that seemed to work for me. High maintenance managers by their nature are demanding of their team members’ time. This is a trait that is difficult to change. Refusing their information and report requests usually only succeeds in having the requests changed to demands. And the demands usually become for ever more intensive detailed information.
High maintenance managers are a fact of business. For whatever reason they have adopted an informational management approach that they believe works for them. Team members will need to understand this and be flexible enough to adapt to this management style. It is difficult if not impossible to get managers of this type to change, but it is possible to find ways of satisfying their demands while at the same time limiting their informational intrusion into the actual conduct of the business. While that may not be the optimal solution it is an effective way of dealing with high maintenance managers, and still accomplishing your goals.
Low Maintenance Employees
I once heard a very senior executive asked what type of employee he appreciated most. I thought his response was most telling. He said: “A low maintenance one.” I didn’t quite understand at the time what he meant, but as I have gone though the various management ranks, I think I might have picked up on it some. I think what the executive meant was that it is not the management of the issues, problems and crises that are the greatest challenge to managers; it is the management of the people that takes the most time and effort. Business is conducted between people. Whether it is providing services to the customer or responding to an executive request, it is individual people that do it. And when individual people interact there can and will be issues. It is my position that in general all employees want to do a good job. They want to succeed in their assignments. They want to advance in their careers. The want to be recognized for their contributions to the progress of the business. The issues start to arise when different employees start to utilize differing approaches to working on and attaining these objectives. There may be some business managers that like and or seek this kind of business activity. Managing the people or managing the process can sometimes be confused with managing the business just as in many instances it can be made to appear that activity can be confused with actually making progress. Most business leaders do not like or seek this type of management situation. He then said that he had not realized that it had indeed been so long since we had communicated, but he had in fact been focusing on the people and issues that required his attention and since I nor the business I was responsible for needed his attention he had not been in contact with me. He went on to say that this was a good thing in that it freed up valuable time for him to focus on other issues that did require his attention.
Any time you start discussing people, the behavior of people and the management of people you can be treading on very thin ice. I am sure there are claxons, sirens and all manner of warning lights flashing in all sorts of Human Resource departments across the web based on the fact someone outside of HR would have the nerve to address this type of topic. Fortunately I am speaking only for myself and from my own experiences so there really isn’t anyone for them to call. If there are truly any issues, I will look forward to the comments.
I have come to interpret the executive’s low maintenance employee response to mean that he prized an employee that did not require, or seek an inordinate amount of his time to manage. It is a key point to understand the two aspects of this issue.
There are employees that due to any number of issues require extra management intervention in order for them to be able to do their jobs. They may be new and untrained and hence need the incremental leadership. They may be “personality challenged” when it comes to working with others and may require incremental intervention and direction. The point is that there are inevitably employees that require more time and attention from leaders than others in order for them to achieve their goals.
On the other side of the management attention coin, there are those employees that actively seek incremental management attention during the normal course of conducting their job functions. They are the employees that always ask questions during any open forum information session. They will continually come in and seek intermediate approval for each incremental step in the solution process to each of their assignments. In short, they like to spend a lot of time in their manager’s office. It may be due to a true sense of insecurity regarding what they have been asked to do, or it may be from a desire to be perceived as more visible in the execution of their duties. Either way it takes up management time.
Business leaders are looking for employees whom they can trust to perform their assignments to the same high level that they themselves would perform it. They are looking for employees that are self motivated and understand that there is a distinct value in their being able to perform their roles without incremental management attention, either required or desired on their part, and without other interpersonal difficulties.
That doesn’t mean that good employees must be prepared to work in isolation of their management. I was once in an assignment where I literally had not had any significant time or interface with my reporting executive in several weeks. We had been extremely busy and successful in the market and had several different projects in various stages of development and completion. Still I had not had any time with him. I scheduled a half hour with him through his administrative assistant for the following week.
The meeting came around and I went into his office. He thanked me for setting up an appointment, as he said most people seemed to just barge in on him when they wanted to talk with him, and he then asked me what my issue was.
I told him that I really didn’t have any issue that I needed to escalate to him, but that it had been several weeks since we had had any communications and that I was just closing the loop. I asked him if there was anything else I needed to be doing on his behalf or for the business. He just looked at me for a few moments.
I then understood. I thanked him for his time and told him I would not take up any more of it. I learned that I didn’t need to have, nor should I seek a lot of feedback or attention and that even if employees don’t need a great deal of supervision or attention it is still a good idea to periodically touch base with them and provide feedback. I think I only used about fifteen minutes of the half hour allotment.
Leaders recognize those employees that go quietly about doing their jobs, and who do the job to the same high standards that the leaders would do them. They appreciate those who do the work and don’t allow any people management issues to reach a point where they require management intervention or time. Leaders know what their team members are doing. They don’t need to be reminded by each team member what that specific team member is doing. They also don’t want to have to solve specific issues for specific team members either.
In business a leader wants an employee that they can trust to execute their responsibilities so that they are where they should be in their job and on their assignments at each appropriate time. They don’t need to be doing things to garner individual incremental attention. They should not be doing things that require individual incremental intervention. If they can perform their roles and duties in a manner that requires only a modicum of management supervision or attention and achieve the assigned goals, they will be sought after, recognized and reward by business leaders.
Procrastination and C. Northcote Parkinson
I was sitting here thinking about what my next topic would be, but I kept putting off getting started. Maybe it was because I just didn’t feel the urgency of writing a new article yet. Some of the topics and articles seem to flow so easily that I begin to think that I might actually be getting the hang of this writing thing. Then others, like this one seem to require significant effort in order to perform their extraction and conversion into cogent thought. When that happens, I do the only logical thing. I procrastinate. The fact that I was just sitting here trying to avoid writing something got me to thinking of the story of John Lennon when he was in the throes of writing the classic Beatles tune “Nowhere Man”: He said that he was “…lying there trying to write a song and was getting nowhere, man” and it hit him. The rest is musical genius and history. If I should ever be so fortunate as to possess one tenth the talent for writing that he had in his little finger, in my entire body I would count myself lucky. None the less it did give rise to my self examination of why I was having any sort of writers block. Think about it. I believe it explains a lot about who we are and why so many of the businesses, and for that matter so many of the political institutions that we have, operate the way they do. It is also probably at least partly responsible for the deadline mentality we seem to have evolved to. If you know that work will expand to fill all available time that it is given, the obvious solution to getting more work done is to provide a deadline that gives less time for each assignment to get done in. I think we are also all familiar with the relationship between procrastination and “cramming”. We learned it early, probably in high school or college. Instead of spending a little time each day studying, we save it all for the last day or two before the exam. Why study every day when we can study really hard at the end and probably get the same result. We seem to have evolved this concept into our working structures now as well. We have even codified it as an accepted method of reducing the time required to compleat our projects. It’s called “Crashing”. We no longer work on our assignments ahead of time, or a little bit each day. Instead we wait till the deadline looms and then try to kick it directly into high gear. I once worked a company where they had evolved a similar culture. They knew that they were excellent at managing in a crisis. The only problem was that they evolved to a point where everything had to be a crisis in order to get anything done. Being in a continual crisis mode does have a tendency to wear out the team. To think of it in sports terms, imagine a football team running their “Two Minute” offense for every play of every game for the entire season. It might work for a while, but the wear and tear on the team will eventually cause them to break down. Gobeli’s Corollary would have us believe that by procrastinating, we would actually end up having to do less work. We seem to believe that doing two days of non-stop hard work is less work than doing an hour or so of less intense work across the term of a two week assignment. That logic just escapes me. For a culture that loves to multi-task while on conference calls, we seem to eschew the opportunity to multi-task on our longer term work assignments. Go figure. So while Parkinson’s Law says that work expands to fill available time and Gobeli’s Corollary says that Procrastination reduces the perceived amount of work needed by reducing available time, there might also be a logical extension here regarding the relative rewards associated with “crisis work” as opposed to doing the same work in an orderly, non-crisis oriented manner. Perhaps the corollary should also incorporate an extended axiom: That would play well with the observation that managers seem to recognize the contributions of fire fighters more so than the same contributions associated with those who perform the same work in non-crisis situations, and also explains why so many people seem to procrastinate in doing their assignments until they approach crisis proportions. It has been my experience that business leaders neither value the work of fire fighters more nor procrastinate to crisis levels. They get the work done on time because they know that they do not need to create crises of their own. There will be enough business issues for them to deal with. Wow. And I got all this because I didn’t yet feel the urgency in having to come up with an article topic and getting written down. I suppose I should also say that I actually had two or three other articles already written, and though I was procrastinating there was probably a good reason why I wasn’t feeling the urgency to get this one done. I guess this early preparation thing can be a two edged sword.
Those of you that know me have often stated that usually I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut. You should be smiling at my difficulty at finding something, in this case the right thing to say.
What I did come up with is that C. Northcote Parkinson, the author of “Parkinson”s Law” was correct when he postulated:
“Work expands to fill available time.”
The logical corollary, which I will modestly dub: “Gobeli’s Corollary” is:
“Procrastination reduces the perceived amount of work done by reducing available time for it to expand into.”
We also see this type of work process with our current federal legislature. They are so good at procrastinating, and have recognized their own predilection for it, that they have had to create their own either artificial or real deadlines in order to get anything done. As a result we seem to be lurching from one crisis (read: deadline) to the next. This process does seem to keep the talking heads on the various news channels happy as they now have a continuous flow of issues to talk about, but is probably not the most efficient way to get things done.
I know I probably sound like a broken record (an interesting allusion since for all intents and purposes records are largely extinct and have been replaced by CDs and MP3s) but I am convinced that a lot of this crisis process is the result of our recognition and reward structures in business. Since we are largely working in “crisis” mode due to looming deadlines, we seek out those who can work well under this kind of pressure. I have referred to them in the past as fire fighters.
These are the “go to” staffs that are relied on to meet the deadline. They receive the recognition and rewards for being able to deliver in the clutch. It seems that those who practice “fire prevention” by taking steps ahead of time to complete their assignments in a non-crisis mode, do not garner as much management attention and perceived respect. The net result is that it doesn’t seem to pay to do the job efficiently and ahead of time. If you want to get noticed, you need a crisis.
And how do you get a crisis? You procrastinate.
“Work becomes more visible to and seems to be more valued by managers as proximity to the deadline grows”
Trade Shows
I don’t know why it has taken me so long to address the topic of trade shows. It must have something to do with the number of them that I have attended and the somewhat painful (read “aching”) memories they engender. I can remember my then excitement at being assigned to attend my first trade show and to man my specific technology aspect of the corporate tradeshow booth. It has been many years, and many many trade shows since that first trade show. For whatever reasons I don’t seem to go to them nearly as often anymore, but that won’t stop me from discussing their usefulness to both the displaying company and attending individuals. Trade shows are really expensive undertakings for businesses. There are registration fees, and floor space rental fees (usually by the square foot), and then there are the costs associated with the creation of the booth or display. If there are live products or demonstrations in the booth there is the cost of that equipment that must be added to the bill. There are the communications and connectivity requirements and costs. There is also the travel and living costs associated with the people who will man the booth as well as the salaries that they are paid while at the show. Finally there is an opportunity cost of what other things you could have been doing with all the money and people that were applied toward attending the trade show.
When you add it all up, like I said it gets very expensive. If you are going to spend that kind of money and commit those kinds of resources, one would expect that there would be a significant return on those investments.
At first I thought attending a trade show as an exhibitor was going to be an interesting business experience. Then I attended one. When I was contemplating the prospect of attending the show I had forgotten that I was going to have to stand on a concrete floor for eight to ten hours a day without the ability to sit down, dealing with the people who came into our booth, who may or may not have been customers or potential customers, or who may or may not have been competitors looking for information, and all the time look like I was enjoying myself. This may be possible for the first day. It is very improbable to do for the entire second day. And darn near impossible to do for almost any part of the third or any subsequent days thereafter.
Then once the exhibit hall is closed for the night you would think that would be the opportunity to rest and recover for the next day’s ten hour booth march. That would be wrong. In most instances there was a corporate hospitality suite that you were expected to spend time in and be available for questions and inputs from executives or the sales team when they actually had a real customer available that wanted to discuss your product. This too could go on for quite a while, but at least there was usually a chair available where you could sit down from time to time. There was also usually food and drinks available, but like when your parents threw a party when you were a kid, it was supposed to be for the guests.
After you had done your time at the hospitality suite, and the crowds had begun to thin out, you could then go back to your hotel room. If you were lucky it was at the same location as the exhibit hall or hospitality suite. More than likely you had to go to another more distant location. You could then look forward to doing it all over again the next day. It was not quite as glamorous as I had initially thought it would be.
In looking at the relative value to the business of attending a trade show, it usually came down to what kind of a show it actually was. If it was an industry forum or association that was sponsoring the show, then the value was basically that of being an opportunity to use the forum as a platform for whatever product or business announcements that the company wanted to make. The actual number of “customers” that attended these shows was minimal and in fact most of the booth traffic was competitors strolling around looking at the competition and collecting each booth’s “trinkets and trash” that were being given away, and the industry press and writers strolling around asking a few questions so as to justify their attendance as well as collecting the trinkets and trash giveaways. The only way that a large exhibitor would be noticed at one of these shows would be if they decided to save the money and not attend. They would then be conspicuous only in their absence.
The more focused trade shows, be it regional or business aspect in nature were those where the exhibitors and attendees had more in common than just being in the same industry, seemed to have a little more value to the business in that the one incremental level more of specificity assures that there are attendees on both the demand and supply side of the trade show topic. These are typically the trade shows where business is actually conducted as opposed to the larger industry shows are basically announcement forums.
The bottom line was that it seemed that the larger the trade show, the less valuable to the company or its customers for business, but more the value for visibility. The smaller the trade shows the better for customers and companies to do business. The question for all companies and large tradeshows is: How valuable is visibility? What can companies now afford to spend just for “being there”? It is interesting to look at the reduction in the number of large technology industry trade shows over the years as companies have come to grips with this question.
For the individuals manning the booths at either of these types of trade shows, the value truly lies in the opportunity to network with people in the same industry. Making contact with suppliers, competitors and customers within both the appropriate technology and market segments may not provide immediate benefits but it will provide them longer term.
It took me a long time to learn this fact. Just trading and collecting business cards is a waste of time and your business cards. If you are going to make the effort to trade business cards, make the effort to follow up and reach out to make contact. It really doesn’t take that much effort. I wish I had learned this fact in time to put it into execution then. I didn’t, and those new contact opportunities were lost.
There is also the opportunity to reestablish connections and relationships with old friends and past business associates. In today’s business environment it seems that more of our friends move on to new opportunities with other companies. While industries may be considered very big, they are in reality reasonably small and tight knit when it comes to relationships. The ability to maintain older contacts and gain new ones has to be the primary value to individuals who attend tradeshows. That, and learning the ability to stand on your feet, smile and try to have intelligent discussions for ten hours at a time.
It’s been a while since I have actually attended or manned a booth at a trade show. It could be said that it has been so long since I have been at one that I might actually look forward to attending one in the future. I didn’t say that was the case. I just said that it could be said. Trade shows are much more work than anybody who has not been to one would believe. They are not the two drink minimum professional equivalent of a fraternity all-nighter that many have believed them to be. Maybe they are for some; it’s just that I never seemed to have the ability or where withal to be able to stand in a booth all day and then go out all night at one of these venues. However by understanding the value to both the business and the individuals who attend the trade show you will be better able to quantify the benefits to both by attending.
Process
If there is one word that should strike fear in the heart of business leaders it should be the word “process”. Please don’t get me wrong. I understand the need for and support the idea of some form and amount of standardization of business conduct. There are efficiencies that can be gained. A certain amount of uniformity of methodology will remove customer variability and should improve satisfaction. I get it. But as the old saying goes: Too much of a good thing is bad, and process is no exception. Simply put processes are defined as a sequence of events. They are a model of the flow of how things should be done in an optimum environment. The idea being that by establishing a process for an aspect of a business you will remove unwanted variance from the way the business operates. Reduced variance should mean more consistent performance and increased efficiency in the business. Consistent performance and increased efficiencies should lead to more satisfied customers and more profitable operation. What’s not to like about that? Process was initially introduced into the manufacturing or production environment, where the variation in the end product produced was an undesirable outcome. The idea was to assure that each product was manufactured the same way with a resulting uniformity in the output. This uniformity of output or outcomes seems to be the driving force behind the drive to apply process science to non-production oriented business functions. If a little bit of process formalization delivers significant returns, then a full scale push toward total business process formalization should be the answer to all our business needs, right? This direction leads you down the path toward higher order, more complex controls and processes, and as many of the old maps would indicate about uncharted territory, “here there be danger”. The problem is that as the process gets more complex in its efforts to be more broadly applicable, it becomes more cumbersome to document, follow and apply. This necessitates a greater process staff whose task it is it to marshal the process to assure that it is being followed. By creating a process staff you are now introducing another drag on the business. The process staff is not focused on achieving the goal. They are focused on how you go about achieving the goal. Incremental staff associated with documenting and implementing the process means incremental costs that must now also be offset by additional process efficiencies before the business improvement driven by the process can contribute in a positive manner to the business performance. We now find ourselves in the position where the law of decreasing returns comes into play. The more we depend on the process for improvement, the more people we must have to support the process. The more people we have supporting the process the more improvement the process must provide in order to overcome the incremental costs associated with the increased number of people supporting the process. Circular logic now ensues. The process gets bigger trying to drive more savings. More people are required to sustain the process. The process has to get even bigger to cover the extra costs of the incremental people. The major issue that I have with processes is that as they evolve and grow and become bigger, more complex and more all encompassing, they have a tendency to become too focused on how things are being done and seem to lose their focus on the objective of what is being done. Business is about getting things done. If you can get more things done, and done right than your competitor you should have a competitive advantage. When you start to expend increasingly greater amounts of resources on how you should get things done as opposed to the quantity of resources focused on actually getting things done you have probably hit the point of decreasing returns for your process investment. The idea of process and process refinement came about when the market was primarily involved in a production and production worker environment. As we have evolved into a knowledge and knowledge worker environment we still seem to be increasingly focused on formulating and formalizing the way we want our knowledge workers to work. We are in effect trying to dictate the way our knowledge workers use their knowledge. This also seems fundamentally flawed to me. Henry Ford ushered in the mass production process when he stated anyone could have a car in any color they wanted, as long as it was black. He built the ultimate no variability process. He built black model A’s. And that worked for a while. Mass production gave way to mass customization in the manufacturing environment. At one point not too very long ago you could buy any combination of features and colors on just about any car model you wanted. It was during this period that a number of car companies started going out of business as their processes, amongst other issues had become too cumbersome to be profitable. The process that worked well for the simple did not hold up as well for the multiplicity of options or the complex. And so the pendulum began to swing back toward far fewer and more simple groups of options or option packages, in order to reduce option complexity. This seems to be the current status of the production process in the automotive industry. It appears that knowledge worker processes are still going through the “mass customization” stage of application. It seems that the processes themselves are becoming more complex in an effort to address the multiplicity of variables that are present in the knowledge worker environment. We are creeping ever closer to potentially strangling ourselves with the very processes that we hoped would be our profitability generating salvation. Processes need to provide guidelines on how to deal with the known as well as unknown in business. They need to have enough specificity to provide direction, but also need to allow those that are working within them the ability to vary and adapt them to the changing needs of the customer, company and environment. One size process cannot fit all unless it is so big and so complex as to be able to handle all variables present in the business. Why would you want to build a process, or a model of how you are to conduct business that is as complicated as the real business is? Processes are supposed to simplify things, not mirror their complexity. We need to keep our processes simple, the staffs associated with them minimal, and allow enough flexibility so that those operating within the process can react and adapt to new situations. Trying to expand the process to work in every instance of business inevitably leads to increased complexity and decreased returns for the effort.
Resumes
A necessary evil in today’s business world is the resume. It is the document where you must distill down all that you have accomplished since high school into no more than two self aggrandizing pages, and yet still be enthralling to the reader. It is one of the few documents on the planet where both form and substance are required, and where lacking either can immediately land it in the trash can. It is a living document which must be continually updated with the latest catch-phrases and Boolean search words to enable its easier location on the web by automated search programs. While being no acknowledged expert in the field, I have been on both the sending and receiving end of a boatload of resumes. I’ll share some of my findings and views.
The color of your resume does not matter, unless you choose a color other than white for your paper or electronic background, and black for your ink. I am not the only one that feels this way. I have checked this one out with some of my recruiter and head-hunter friends. Beige or pastel colored paper will in fact stand out in a stack or resumes. Beige or pastel colored resumes will remain in the resume stack. It’s a professional document for goodness sakes. The only reason that the Declaration of Independence is on yellowed paper is because the paper has aged to that color. Once your resume hits two hundred plus years of age it too can be on yellowed paper, but until then, print it on white paper.
The length of your resume does matter. A one page resume tells people that either you have not tried hard enough to write a viable resume, or that you do not have enough experience or qualifications for the job you are applying for. That would go for any job you were applying for. A three page or longer resume would indicate that you are truly enthralled with your own capabilities and accomplishments to the point where you couldn’t possibly bear to remove even a single event in your life from the document in order to better respect the readers time. Trust me on this. Nobody’s life is so awe inspiring so as to require more than two pages on a resume.
Provide information on your areas of expertise and the things that you actually can do. A historical list of the things you have done is nice, but it won’t get this job done, nor will it get you this job. It is a slight difference in approach and voice in your resume, but providing information on what you know how to do is much more compelling then reciting a list of the places you have been and the things that you did while you were there.
Front load your resume. Provide more detail and information on your most recent assignments and positions. I understand that you have done some really neat stuff twenty plus years ago. I did too. But there is a thing called currency as it relates to your experience. If your best stuff is twenty years old then it is possible that your business skills may be considered out of date.
Tell people what it is that you do. If you are looking for a sales role, then just about everything in your resume should scream sales. There should be few if any sentences in your resume that do not have the word “sales” in them. The more specific you can be about what you do, and what you can do, the more appreciative the reader of your resume will be. The easier that it is for the reader to understand if you are a fit for the position or not, the better it is for everyone, especially you.
Quantify what value you have brought to previous positions and what value you can bring to this position. Value is relatively easy to identify. It is usually represented by an ordinal number, which is preceded by a dollar sign. If you can’t put a number and a dollar sign next to it, it probably isn’t of value. It may seem harsh, but it is the current business environment.
Don’t tell anyone that you led a cross functional team, even if you actually did at one time. Cross functional teams are management speak for some sort of committee that met on a regular basis. Mark Twain described a committee as a life form with at least six legs and no brain. Organizations seem to be increasingly fond of creating them, and people seem to be intent on telling each other that they were either on them or leading them, but I nor anyone else I have ever known has ever seen any value delivered in a quantifiable way to a business from a cross functional team. You are wasting valuable space on your two pages with this one.
Don’t tell anyone that you enabled anything. Leaders don’t enable things. They do things. I understand that enablement is a nice sounding concept. There are very few instances where it has quantifiable business value. You either did it or you didn’t. Please don’t try and convince people that you enabled someone else to do it. At best it sounds lame and at worst it sounds like you are trying to appropriate someone else’s success.
Many resumes like to make mention of the fact that the individual is a “team player”. When reviewing resumes, most hiring managers are not looking for team players. They are looking for stars. In sales they are looking for someone that will bring in orders, preferably boat loads of them. In operations they are looking for someone that will deliver revenue and control costs. Most of the time a team player is not the type of individual that can perform these functions. If you can do extraordinary things, tell people in your resume. Don’t tell them you are a team player.
Have someone else read your resume before you submit it. Most of us are somewhat blind to our own mistakes. We wrote it. We reviewed it. Therefore it should be fine, right? Unfortunately, no. Have someone else read your resume and provide you their opinion. When they do, don’t argue with them. I too have felt that people have missed both the obvious and the nuanced aspects of my resume. I have also come to realize that if they have missed it, probably so will the recruiter and hiring manager miss it. Take the feedback. A resume is a personal item, but it is for public consumption and may need to be adjusted from a specific individual taste.
The two pages that comprise a resume are precious real estate. All of your education, training and experience to date need to be distilled down into those two pages. You need to convey what you are capable of and the value that you can bring to a prospective hiring manager. With that in mind you surely do not want to waste space by relating banalities such as being a team player, enabling others to succeed or were on some sort of aggrandized committee.
As I said, resumes are a necessary evil. They are the convention that businesses use when reviewing potential candidates for positions. Unfortunately they are also the basis for the first in a number of decision criteria and hurdles that are designed to winnow out the perceived unfit or the perceived less competent for the position. Unless you are a Nobel laureate or some other similarly gifted applicant, chances are that your resume will not get you the job. However if your resume is not in the appropriate format and does not contain relevant content it can preclude you from further consideration for the job.