Related posts:

1. 5 Simple Tips to Earn More Respect from Your Manager

I was tagged in one of those blogging memes by buddy Phil Gerbyshak of Slacker Manager and Make it Great. I rarely do these little ditties as they tend to be off-topic for my readers. But, since this is supposed to be 7 facts about myself that you might not know, I thought it would be good additional information about the owner of Cube Rules — and an opportunity to check out some other great sites.

Rules:

• Link to the original tagger(s), and list these rules on my blog.
• Share 7 facts about myself in the post – some random, some weird.
• Tag 7 people at the end of my post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

7 Facts About Me

1. I love being a manager of people. You wouldn’t think so since the point of view of this blog is helping people thrive in a cubicle. But working with great management teams is great for managers and especially for Cubicle Warriors.
2. I’ve worked in business for over 25-years and technology for six more.
3. I’ve now lived in Seattle-land for over five years. Time flies.
4. I grew up next door to my grandparent’s dairy farm. I’ve sheared sheep, fed and milked cows, shoveled cow pies and bailed hay.
5. I am an Amateur Radio operator with the call sign K9JY. Need to post to that site a bit more at K9JY.com.
6. In high school, I went to nationals in forensics (Oratory) and took 13^th place. Debated on the debate team, too.
7. My wife, Kate, won the “You Get It” award for her website. Not exactly a fact about me, but there is that fact that I’m proud of her.

Now the fun part: tagging seven other bloggers to share information about them as well.

How about these cool bloggers!

• Debra Moorhead who writes about creating the life you want at DebraMoorhead.com
• Cali and Jody who write about Results Only Work Environments at CaliandJody.com
• Charles H. Green who writes great articles about why Trust Matters
• Rebecca Thorman who writes about the modern urbanite at Modite
• Dan Erwin who writes at the Dan Erwin blog about learning, development and jobs.
• Nina Simosko writing at NinaSimosko.com about leadership and work
• Rick Saia, one of the team of writers at Pongo Resume

All have written articles that have helped my writing here on Cube Rules. Make sure you visit their sites as well. You won’t be disappointed.

Related posts:

1. 8 Random Facts about Scot Herrick
2. What I Learned From Scot Herrick About Communicating ‘Bad News’
3. Cube Rules Products

Here’s four ways to market your career through blogging:

Build subject matter expertise through blogging

Let’s face it: when you start writing on your site, you start learning more about your subject area. Over the course of 600+ articles in about three years, I’ve learned much more about career management than I would have without the writing discipline of Cube Rules. You naturally learn more about your subject as you search for more ideas to write on your site.

The learning is never-ending – and transparent. I’ve read and written enough about Gen-Y and their careers that when my manager in a team meeting asked “what’s the big deal about Gen-Y and managing them? They are just like all employees, aren’t they?” I listed five reasons they are different right off the top of my head. Given the team and manager reaction, you would have thought I was from Mars. It even surprised me. We don’t fully understand that our subject expertise is a differentiator in the market.

This is not an isolated instance. Through writing about your subject, you will automatically become more of an expert in your subject area.

Build career authority through blogging

As your expertise builds, so does your authority. Authority is different from expertise. Expertise is knowledge of a subject. Authority is where you have distinguished yourself enough that people come to you looking for your opinion on your subject.

Authority builds through blogging as you interact with others on-line, develop articles showing thought leadership on your subject and as others link to your articles.

You strengthen this authority when traditional media sources – the press, television, and other news sites – come to you through your writing on your blog.

If you work more in professional services, such as law, accounting or health care, building authority through your blog can easily prove your expertise and authority in your subject area. This authority draws clients, customers and work that interest you most – in areas where you do your best work.

Blogging builds your Personal Brand

A Personal Brand is what skills, values and expertise you bring to the table for your team, customers and market. Everyone has a Personal Brand, whether you write on-line or not. You traditionally build your Personal Brand through working with your colleagues and customers. This limits the exposure to your Personal Brand without more marketing.

Blogging, on the other hand, shows your Personal Brand to the planet. Blogging also improves your brand perception to others. As you write on your subject matter on your site, search engines such as Google record the subjects and give you higher and higher rankings. When potential clients, customers and hiring managers want to know about you, searching your name or company on Google is often the first place they go. Blogging gives you a better opportunity to show your Personal Brand to others interested in your work.

If you Google Scot Herrick, you will see ten pages of subject matter – almost half of it on content that I have created. And the rest on those other Scott Herrick’s out there that happen to spell their name with two “t’s” on Scott. That subject matter will tell you about my Personal Brand.

Blogging helps you market yourself

Let’s be clear: in a global economy, it is harder to market your skills and services to the people you want to attract. If you are an attorney specializing in technology start-up issues, you won’t find that in the Yellow Pages. If you are an accountant specializing in “small business” – or even a more narrow line of business such as “technology small business” – your marketing effort becomes more difficult.

Even if you are a knowledge worker in a corporation, your skills and performance need marketing.

When you build expertise, authority and promote your personal brand through the writing on your site, your marketing effort becomes simpler. You will naturally attract the people you want to interact with through your site. Becoming an authority on a subject, even a narrow one, will bring like-minded people to your site.

And having your services offered on your site will be the logical next step to see for readers coming to find out about your content.

Conclusion

Blogging to market your career takes effort, no doubt. Only you can evaluate if that commitment is right for you. But if you want to become an expert in a subject, have others search you out for your authoritative opinion, show your best self to the world and market your services, blogging is a great tool.

Blogging can be your career marketing platform. What’s your career marketing platform now?

[Note: This is part of a 4-post initiative to help you get started blogging. Read also "Finding Your Blogging Voice" by Marcelo Calbucci, "How to Set Up a Basic WordPress Blog" by Carolynn Duncan, "15-Rules for Business Blogging" by Ian Lurie and "Marketing Your Career Through Blogging" by Scot Herrick]

Related posts:

1. 30 Career Management Tips — Marketing AND Delivery Support our Personal Brand

——————

Why is it difficult to communicate ‘bad news’?

And when I say ‘bad news’ I mean in the context of ‘things not going to plan’.

We have all been in the position at work where the project is not going to meet the deadline date or be within budget.

Or maybe you have just accidentally deleted one of your bosses’ important documents.

Or at home, you just videoed over your wedding tape with the latest episode of ‘Friends’. Anyone accidentally done that? Anyone purposely done that?

I have been in the position of having to communicate bad news numerous times and I bet you have. We all try to cover it up or resolve it on our own, just so we do not have to tell anyone and no one will ever know.

I remember once working for a company where the ‘rule’ was all annual Performance Reviews had to be conducted and written up by 31 December. Due to other commitments, I could not meet the deadline, however I informed my boss and the HR department I would.

I thought I could catch up once back from the New Year holidays. What is so important about completing them by 31 December anyway?

Little did I know that the Performance Review directly affected individuals pay increases and because I had not completed some, several individuals did not get a pay rise in their January payslip.

That caused a lot of emotion, as you would expect. I was found out and had to explain myself.

Why didn’t I just say, “I’m not going to be able to make 31 December deadline on the Performance Reviews. Is that a problem?” instead of keeping it quiet and thinking I could catch up.

Now some of you are saying, this isn’t ‘bad news’, I know. It was for those who didn’t get a pay rise. But I can understand, if you have your own stories – maybe a multi-million dollar project was going to be one month late and you just can’t inform your boss. That would be bad news.

But this Performance Review example sticks in my mind because it was so stupid of me and I had let down many staff members.

Now when I interviewed Scot Herrick (Creator and Owner of www.cuberules.com) for The Great Successful People Package, it was as if we had known each other for a long time. We had great interaction and Scot shared his experience on such subjects as Change, Staff Management, Relationships, Getting On With Your Boss, Being a New Manager, Managing Bad News, Blogging, Being Indispensable….and more.

Scot shared all his successful and proven ideas and the conversation we had regarding communicating ‘bad news’ really jumped out for me.

Scot sees this as a strength. The fact that you can ask for help and advice when you are ‘up against it’, is a very powerful and respected skill.

He added that you should not only ask for help and advice but also provide your own proposal to overcome the ‘bad news’.

So for instance, the important project you are running is going to be 2 weeks late. Bad times!

However, the project will be implemented to plan, if you have two extra resources or another $10k or could implement a manual workaround. Good times!

As soon as you know there is ‘bad news’, invite and gather the appropriate individuals to a debate and agree a way forward.

So the next time you run into a ‘bad news’ situation don’t hide it and think it will go away. Shout about it and think ‘We can do this if…’

Related posts:

1. Communicating bad news is a job skill
2. 8 Random Facts about Scot Herrick
3. 7 facts about Scot Herrick of Cube Rules

But, times are changing — of course!

There is a growing contingent that believe that in addition to the traditional resume, we should also be using our own web sites to build out a longer, more versatile resume that potential employers will go see. (this is precisely what I will be doing with the Scot Herrick web site — one sidebar devoted to my corporate work and one sidebar devoted to my writing work).

In addition to the web site concept, there is also a push to produce video files (stored on your web site) that will allow you to display your “personal brand.”

New technology, such as You Tube, allow individuals to create videos that can be viewed by “Corporate Earth” or anyone else so inclined to go look at what you have created in your videos.

So we’re all now a multi-media event.

Not a bad idea…but early in implementation.

You can read about videos supplementing traditional resumes at Online Recruitment located in the United Kingdom (yet another example of — it’s a global community now…) where Dan Schawbel describes how Traditional Paper Resumes have Evolved into Multimedia. Dan also writes Personal Branding.

But, the Internet is the Internet. There are perils of just putting a video out there.

Darlene McDaniel outlines a few of the (great) pitfalls of an individual making a video resume. In Tough Questions Great Answers, she takes a quick look at Video Resumes — Who Really Wins?

And it’s not necessarily Cubicle Warriors…

Scot

Related posts:

1. 30 Career Management Tips — Resumes don’t lie
2. Resumes don’t cut it anymore

This also means that there is a need for Cubicle Warriors to establish good relationships with people both inside and outside the company so as to have a good information network about jobs, positions, and projects that could be worked. Some are better than others on this task and, while everyone agrees that they should be maintaining their relationships, I would suggest that there is a vast gap between what is needed and what is being done.

The need for networking got extended a bit with the concept of “Personal Brand Management.” Personal Brand Management essentially says that each of us, as business professionals, need to have a personal brand: what we uniquely bring to the marketplace of available work. And let’s face it: since each of us are competing to be the best person for a particular gig with everyone else on the planet, it makes good sense to have some sort of presence on the Internet that can uniquely explain all of this to potential employers.

Strategy is great, but execution is better for me. How does one go about portraying a personal brand on the Internet? I have a Scot Herrick personal page, but right now it simply points people to this blog and two others that I write for. It doesn’t really provide “Personal Brand Management.” However, that’s the site that should have the brand management baked into the site.

So I’ve been looking for some examples of how to build a personal brand page or two on the Internet. I hit the jackpot when Jason Alba over at JibberJobber posted his monthly You Get It awards for the month of January. In it, he profiles what a good number of people laid off at Jobster have for their personal branding out on the Internet. I’ve visited their sites and am now in the process of figuring out what to do with mine.

In an age of virtual everything, being able to speak with a potential employer and point to a personal branding site makes a lot of sense. Especially since I Google everyone I’m potentially going to hire. Wouldn’t you want that search to hit your personal branding site?

Me too.

Scot

Related posts:

1. 30 Career Management Tips — Marketing AND Delivery Support our Personal Brand
2. Your Personal Brand When You Don’t Have One
3. Personal finance excellence is now a required Cubicle Warrior skill
4. Evaluate Your Personal Brand for Authenticity
5. Paris Hilton Defends Her Personal Brand

Yesterday, I talked about the most critical need of being a Cubicle Warrior as the savings in the bank to cushion a layoff, allowing you to wait for the right next position instead of desperately taking anything that comes along.

Today, we’ll look at the dark secret of career management – performance in your current position counts.

There are widely divergent opinions on people’s job performance. I personally see a lot of people who think their performance walks on water — but the performance there hardly makes a ripple on what’s important to the business.

Here’s the two big reasons for having great job performance:

Good performance prevents layoffs. Sometimes, you are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. More often, you are offered opportunities to be in places where there won’t be a layoff — but if, and only if, your performance in your current job makes your management want to keep you. Without the job performance, you are placing your career in the hands of others who do not have your best interests in mind, only their own. Performing well helps the manager put you into a position where you will do value-added work and stay employed longer. The best position to be in — “I’d never survive without having Scot Herrick on the team.” Managers will go a long way to keep you working for them. But performance counts.

Accomplishments are your gift to future employers. Even if you do get laid off through no fault of your own, every employer will ask you what you accomplished in your last position. Every one. It would be useful if you actually had some accomplishments to enumerate to your future employer.

You see, the person interviewing you is going to try and determine if you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time — or if you really weren’t adding a lot of value to the business. A whiff of not adding value and you won’t be in a position to compete with those already in jobs looking for a change.

That’s not very nice. But it’s accurate and real. Good performance is something to wear like a badge of honor to your current employer — or your future one.

What other reasons are there for good performance?

Scot

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1. Killer SMART Goals for the Cubicle Warrior Released
2. Cubicle Warrior – Networking
3. Cubicle Warrior – Conclusions
4. Why being a Cubicle Warrior gives you an unfair advantage
5. GTD: Cubicle Warrior Perspective