Cool Down (27 page)

The solution comes not from learning how to fight fires more quickly, but from careful planning and communication with the appropriate stakeholders. Since firefighting is perceived to be about dealing reactively to a situation that is unfolding right now, the challenge I set to people is to anticipate and ideally prepare for fires before they happen. That way, the crisis tasks become part of the norm, rather than an unwelcome intrusion into an overloaded schedule. The key to crisis preparation is threefold:

That is the challenge that I set for my clients, and it is the same one I ask of you:

As Stanley Bing writes in his excellent book
Throwing the Elephant
, the onus may very well be upon you to influence the boss's actions, to schedule this “managing-up meeting,” and to create its agenda.
⁴
You will have to decide when and how the meeting will be held, taking into consideration your manager's schedule and personality type. For example, some managers are attracted to regularly scheduled meetings, maybe at 8:00 a.m. every second Monday. Others may be less attracted to that type of structure, but will react well to a quick chat in the kitchenette or in the elevator. It may be up to you to schedule and strategize these meetings, to feed your manager the information you need to impart, and to extract from her the information you need to have. As Bing suggests, it's up to you to look after your manager in the interest of proactive time management and to avoid future fires.

Managing up is not just about dealing with immediate crises, either. Those who spend their entire day with their nose to the grindstone are not necessarily the ones who will advance as far as they could. Part of the success that comes when managing up is combined with
cooling down
comes from being shrewd enough to see what and who is out there, and then to strategically make your presence known. Kathleen Reardon puts it this way:

Time spent in a strategic huddle with one's manager is an opportunity for self-promotion as much as it is for dealing with immediacies. This goes back to the concept of selling, in Chapter 7. What does your manager know about your current achievements? Your aspirations? Your ideas for innovation? You may have told him a year or more ago, but a year is a long time. It's up to you to set up such a meeting, to schedule the agenda, and to identify the objectives.

Remember also to put yourself in your customer's shoes—your customer in this case being your manager. Is the act of scheduling a strategic managing-up meeting with him really an unwelcome intrusion? Or might he see it as proof of your potential for more responsible assignments? By contrast, if you were to choose not to “bother” him in this way, would that leave him in peace, or would it demonstrate a lack of initiative on your part? Here again is the value inherent in
cooling down
: It's not just about the time required to have a meeting—it's also about the strategic assessment of the implications of having or not having such a meeting. Going through this process will have a great impact on your future.

These four concepts—internal networking, having a mentor, being a mentor, and managing up—all require time and acceptance of the value of
cooling down
. I try to ask people to think about the tithing example once again. Traditional tithing, in the religious context requested that 10 percent of a person's income be given over to their church. Could you assign 10 percent of your workweek to these types of activities? Probably not, because your calendar at this moment is likely already full. So let's quantify your workload a little, just like a project manager would: How many hours on average do you put in at the office, not counting work that you take home (which you shouldn't do anyway)? This number of hours might be available to you if you have been practicing the strategies in the “How to
Cool Down
” segments at the end of each chapter, specifically, in this case, Chapter 1. The higher the number of hours you admit to working, the more you need to put 10 percent away for mentoring, networking, and managing up. If you work a 40- to 45-hour week, then you should spend four hours, or 50 minutes a day on maintaining your career.

Too busy to contemplate that? Perhaps the lunch hour could be your salvation. Keith Ferrazzi is a great proponent of lunchtime networking. In his book,
Never Eat Alone,
he demonstrates just how valuable it is to allow the time to identify and connect with people, not just any people, even though everyone we meet has connections to other people, but, specifically to what he calls “super-connectors,” those people who are hubs in the network of survival:

Your 50 minutes of career management could unfold like this:

Careers are dynamic. The progress of a career is seldom linear and predictable. Careers have a life of their own, just like companies do. It's hard to picture companies as mortal, but they are. They eventually die, or they get eaten (bought up) by someone else. The average life expectancy of a multinational Fortune 500 company is now between 40 and 50 years. “A full one-third of the companies listed in the 1970 Fortune 500, for instance, had vanished by 1983—acquired, merged, or broken to pieces. Human beings have learned to survive, on average, for 75 years or more, but there are very few companies that are that old and flourishing.”
⁷

With such instability comes an absolute need to pave your own path and to hunt down your own destiny, whether your preferred stomping grounds are within the walls of your current organization, or out there, in the wilds of commerce or entrepreneurship. And this applies whether you consider yourself to be a go-getter entrepreneurial type, or a quieter craftsperson. There comes a time in many a professional's life when she recognizes the true value of networking, and that is usually the day just after she has been let go, or downsized, or depending on how you look at it, “rightsized” from her employer. I have worked with many people in this situation over the years and have observed and empathized with them as they sat, shell-shocked and paralyzed, suddenly seeing themselves as a PWI: a person without identity. In North America, as with much of the business-oriented world, we define ourselves by our work. It's very difficult to maintain the flow of a conversation in a social situation without quickly coming to the phrase, “So what do you do?”

The moment the axe falls, unless a person is well prepared, shock and stress override everything, and depression is quick to follow. To have met this person just a month or so before he was aware of his fate, he would most likely have appeared very busy—too busy with the work of the day to entertain the notion of networking events or mentorship. He was probably grabbing a quick sandwich over the keyboard but had no time for anything purely social.

Once again the speed of the present distorts clear vision into the future. Strategy is overruled by the immediate. It's difficult, when a person's mind is busy processing three, four, or five simultaneous urgencies, to reflect on the strategic value of networking, since its value cannot always be quantified on some intellectual balance sheet. Its payoff might occur somewhere in the months and years to come in ways not immediately imaginable or predictable. When faced with another high-speed day, a networking event is a sheer impossibility: Seen through the tunnel vision of the daily To-Do List it appears as a frivolous waste of an hour—an hour that (it seems) could be better spent clearing off an extra task or two. And that's where the problem starts to fester. In the trapeze act that is your career, your personal network represents one of the two ropes that hold up the bar on which you swing. When paired with the other rope, representing your talents and experience, you have the tools to keep moving. But if one should fail, the show is over.

There are many great books out there that teach great things about networking—why it is important and how to do it—so I will restrict my comments to talking specifically about how
cool
beats fast in this vital area of career management. Quite simply, speed networking doesn't work terribly well. When busy people find themselves at an event such as a Chamber of Commerce meeting where networking is the primary reason for being there, or at an association lunch event where networking is the unspoken reason for being there, they can easily become overwhelmed at the prospect of choosing which people to connect with, how many is the right number, and whether it is of any use at all. An easy rule of thumb is three. Three new people. Any more than that and networking becomes too hard to manage. But it is easy to move to three different conversations during a one-hour event or during the breaks of longer functions. Just set yourself a time limit, of perhaps 10 minutes for each conversation, and then move on. The magic number three has been used for thousands of years as the truly functional collection of people, and it applies to meeting new people too. Aim for three. It makes the challenge of meeting new people less onerous, and you will remember each of them better.

This is a fundamental rule of positive networking, but very often a person's name can go skipping out of our memory because it's new to us. This leaves people in an awkward or at least less-impressive situation at the close of the conversation. The secret to easily remembering names is in word association: Creatively connect a person's physical resemblance or a feature of their appearance such as clothing or hairstyle to a word or person from your past. There's no real magic to it; it just takes a prepared,
cool
mind. If a person's name starts with F, such as Francis, and she wears glasses, you might be able to associate
F
rances with
F
rames. A bald-headed man called Mike might remind you of a microphone. A person with black hair whose name is Cameron might remind you of the black case of a camera. Anyone can train themselves to remember three names, at least, during a social situation, but the mind must be open to and primed for the opportunity by not being overrun by thoughts and speed during the social function. When the opportunity presents itself, you must slow down just enough to silently and discreetly commit this name to memory by way of this word-association technique. The speed of reaction that is the hallmark of a social introduction must be replaced by
slow
. In return you will be able to add polish to the relationship, concluding it with the most impressive, memorable, and noteworthy words in the English language: the name of the person to whom you are speaking.