Jason-
Big, fat, happy congratulations to you and yours on the newest addition to the family. Hope you have all enjoyed some quality nesting time over the past week or so...don't hesitate to slap a picture or two up here so we can get our eyes on the newest anarchist to join the team!
A little radio silence has actually been kind of nice, and I really like what you came back with in #3. It reminded me a little bit of what Gordon MacKenzie says about new employees in his book Orbiting the Giant Hairball. He reminds us that new employees (and I would say young professionals) have a very unique magic as they come into an organization (or a community) with fresh eyes and fresh perspectives. Even though their perspective is especially valuable, our organizations and communities do a lot of things to beat it out of them and get them to look, talk and think exactly like the rest of us. It is important to have no fear if we are to push back on that dynamic and I think that lesson #4 fits very nicely with #3 and our earlier posts on this theme.
Lesson #4 Do Something. Now.
I think that it is important and valuable to network, to spend time getting to know people, to seek out feedback on your ideas and ideals, but too many folks never go beyond that. It is not hard to find a group of folks in a community or an organization that know exactly what should be done to make everything "perfect" and everyone "happy." They know all of the answers. They are passionate about their answers and they will (and do) talk until they are blue in the face. And talk is all they do.
It can be very easy to get bogged down in details, what is allegedly realistic, why you need to "pay your dues" before you can drive change, yadda, yadda, yadda....a little bit of this stuff is important and relevant, but most of it is bullshit. If you wait until you have the perfect plan and everyones support and have paid all of your dues your time will have expired on this planet.
If you see a better way to do something (and if you are awake and alive and paying attention, you do see a better way to do something), take some action. Do something. Now. You will make mistakes. If you do not make any mistakes you are not doing much at all. You will make some mistakes and you will ruffle some feathers and it is all part of the process and it is part of how change happens and how you learn and grow.
Do something. Now. Today. Right now. If you wait too long, you might just become one of those professional talkers that know all of the answers but never do anything.
Rock out a little bit today, it's Friday. And have a good weekend.
-joe
Showing posts with label Young Professional. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Young Professional. Show all posts
Friday, September 11, 2009
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Learned Along the Way #3
Joe,
I apologize for the long period of radio silence. For those who haven't heard, I had a baby last week. My new baby boy, Colton Craig Lauritsen, arrived a week ago today. He and mom are both doing great. We are now into the process of adjusting to life at home with three kids and a dog--real life sneaks right up on you.
I like this path we headed down talking about some of the lessons we learned as young professionals as we worked to improve our communities and companies. So I want to continue down that path a little further.
To refresh, we have talked about Making Big Plans and having Clarity of Purpose so far. I'd like to share another lesson that I think is an important one for young professionals specifically.
3. No Fear.
As a young professional, you possess an advantage you will never have again in your life. That advantage is that as a young professional, the rest of the world expects you to be a little crazy and uncontrollable. There isn't an expectation that you should know better--yet. Once you are further into your career, you are expected to understand "how things work around here" and to follow that norm. But, as a young professional, there is no such expectation.
About ten years ago, you and I were working on an idea for a summit for young professionals in Omaha. As we thought about the event, we realized that we would need a partner with the credibility and resources of a large established organization. We quickly decided that the Chamber of Commerce in Omaha would be a great partner. There would have been a lot of ways to approach the Chamber. Not having any well established connections within the Chamber at the time, we could have called the receptionist at the Chamber and asked who we should talk to. Likely, we would have gotten connected with a member of the chamber staff who (if they took the time to meet with us) would have heard out our idea and buried in a stack of papers on her desk. Instead, we decided to go big. We called the president of the Chamber and asked for a meeting to share our idea with him.
In Omaha, the Chamber of Commerce is a big organization. Since Omaha is a city approaching one million in population, the Chamber is a large, well-funded, political machine. However, we were young and had no fear, so we made the call. And, we got the meeting. In this meeting, we pitched our idea of a young professionals summit. The meeting was the catalyst that led to the creation of a young professionals council at the Chamber (and ultimately the Omaha YP Summit).
The moral of this story is that if we had been fearful to make that phone call to such an important and influential person, we couldn't have made the progress we made as quickly as we did. As young professionals, you can ask tough questions and challenge the status quo. In fact, you are almost expected to do this. YP's are given the opportunity to bring a "new perspective" to our workplaces and communities. Don't squander the opportunity.
Jason
I apologize for the long period of radio silence. For those who haven't heard, I had a baby last week. My new baby boy, Colton Craig Lauritsen, arrived a week ago today. He and mom are both doing great. We are now into the process of adjusting to life at home with three kids and a dog--real life sneaks right up on you.
I like this path we headed down talking about some of the lessons we learned as young professionals as we worked to improve our communities and companies. So I want to continue down that path a little further.
To refresh, we have talked about Making Big Plans and having Clarity of Purpose so far. I'd like to share another lesson that I think is an important one for young professionals specifically.
3. No Fear.
As a young professional, you possess an advantage you will never have again in your life. That advantage is that as a young professional, the rest of the world expects you to be a little crazy and uncontrollable. There isn't an expectation that you should know better--yet. Once you are further into your career, you are expected to understand "how things work around here" and to follow that norm. But, as a young professional, there is no such expectation.
About ten years ago, you and I were working on an idea for a summit for young professionals in Omaha. As we thought about the event, we realized that we would need a partner with the credibility and resources of a large established organization. We quickly decided that the Chamber of Commerce in Omaha would be a great partner. There would have been a lot of ways to approach the Chamber. Not having any well established connections within the Chamber at the time, we could have called the receptionist at the Chamber and asked who we should talk to. Likely, we would have gotten connected with a member of the chamber staff who (if they took the time to meet with us) would have heard out our idea and buried in a stack of papers on her desk. Instead, we decided to go big. We called the president of the Chamber and asked for a meeting to share our idea with him.
In Omaha, the Chamber of Commerce is a big organization. Since Omaha is a city approaching one million in population, the Chamber is a large, well-funded, political machine. However, we were young and had no fear, so we made the call. And, we got the meeting. In this meeting, we pitched our idea of a young professionals summit. The meeting was the catalyst that led to the creation of a young professionals council at the Chamber (and ultimately the Omaha YP Summit).
The moral of this story is that if we had been fearful to make that phone call to such an important and influential person, we couldn't have made the progress we made as quickly as we did. As young professionals, you can ask tough questions and challenge the status quo. In fact, you are almost expected to do this. YP's are given the opportunity to bring a "new perspective" to our workplaces and communities. Don't squander the opportunity.
Jason
Friday, August 21, 2009
Learned Along the Way #2
Jason-
Good stuff. Looking forward to the webinar on Wednesday. My young professional card was taken away from me a couple of years ago, but I absolutely learned some valuable lessons during that period of my life. I will start with this one...
#2: Clarity of Purpose
I think that when you come up with an idea and decide that you are going to "do something" it is very important to be clear on what you want to accomplish and also why you want to accomplish it. When you take something out to the world (an idea, a product, a service, a message) you may not get the response you were hoping for. You may not get any response at all...and that indifference may lead you to believe that your idea, product or message is not of value...especially if you are a young professional / emerging leader and have not taken anything out to the world before. This is why clarity of purpose is important.
Truth be told, people are much better at finding and recognizing what is popular than they are at finding and recognizing what is valuable. In my experience this is regardless of level of education or professional status. If you take something out to the world (an idea, a product, a service, a message) that is new and of real value it is likely that 99.9% of people will not know how to respond initially or they will be confused or resistant to what you are proposing. Staying connected to why you are carrying your particular message or idea can be valuable in fighting through this.
I think that having real clarity on the what and why has proven to be a valuable lesson for me and I think it overlaps nicely with what you said about Making Big Plans.
-joe
Good stuff. Looking forward to the webinar on Wednesday. My young professional card was taken away from me a couple of years ago, but I absolutely learned some valuable lessons during that period of my life. I will start with this one...
#2: Clarity of Purpose
I think that when you come up with an idea and decide that you are going to "do something" it is very important to be clear on what you want to accomplish and also why you want to accomplish it. When you take something out to the world (an idea, a product, a service, a message) you may not get the response you were hoping for. You may not get any response at all...and that indifference may lead you to believe that your idea, product or message is not of value...especially if you are a young professional / emerging leader and have not taken anything out to the world before. This is why clarity of purpose is important.
Truth be told, people are much better at finding and recognizing what is popular than they are at finding and recognizing what is valuable. In my experience this is regardless of level of education or professional status. If you take something out to the world (an idea, a product, a service, a message) that is new and of real value it is likely that 99.9% of people will not know how to respond initially or they will be confused or resistant to what you are proposing. Staying connected to why you are carrying your particular message or idea can be valuable in fighting through this.
I think that having real clarity on the what and why has proven to be a valuable lesson for me and I think it overlaps nicely with what you said about Making Big Plans.
-joe
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Learned Along the Way #1
Joe,
As we've been preparing for our Get Connected Webcast next week with Rebecca Ryan and Next Generation Consulting, it's gotten me thinking about our experience as young professionals. Since between us, we've started or helped start four young professionals organizations over the past 10 years and we both had some early success in our careers, I'm hoping that we learned something along the way.
In the spirit of trying to help others learn from our mistakes and experience so that they might be far more successful than we ever were, I propose this question for the two of us:
As we've been preparing for our Get Connected Webcast next week with Rebecca Ryan and Next Generation Consulting, it's gotten me thinking about our experience as young professionals. Since between us, we've started or helped start four young professionals organizations over the past 10 years and we both had some early success in our careers, I'm hoping that we learned something along the way.
In the spirit of trying to help others learn from our mistakes and experience so that they might be far more successful than we ever were, I propose this question for the two of us:
- What are the most significant things we have learned through our experience as young professionals?
This is a particularly interesting question for me as an HR leader who has the responsibility to develop our next generation of leaders within my organization. I call on my own experiences frequently when coaching others on how to excel and be effective as a YP.
Here is my first offering of lessons learned.
#1: Make Big Plans
I think that this learning was a fairly easy one for us because we were both naturally inclined towards dreaming and defining compelling visions of the future. As young professionals, we had the advantage of both optimism and naivety. It turns out that people love talking about big dreams and plans. As we were founding organizations like Next Generation Omaha, we never talked about starting a networking group but rather we talked about creating an organization that would be "a catalyst to make Omaha a cooler place to live." It wasn't about forming a group, it was about transforming a city. And we had some specific ideas on how we could make it happen.
In my opinion, too many YP groups are being formed today for the sake of having a YP group. The really successful groups have a compelling vision that drives them. The magic of big plans and big dreams is that it compels people around you to think bigger thoughts. Most people want to be a part of something big, they want to make a difference. Engaging them in your vision for the future is important. This lesson has served me well through out my career as a leader because people want to follow a leader who has a clear vision of the future.
Jason
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