Almostgotit.com

The Wall Street Journal’s online Career Journal  has continued its series of articles called “90 days,” presumably based on Michael Watkins’ bestseller, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels.  Each WSJ column addresses the most critical things to remember in the first days following a major career transition.

There’s lots of terrific cross-pollination here, so if you’re in transition, go ahead and read them all!

• 90 Days: Working Productively As a Telecommuter
• 90 Days: Relocating Overseas? Do Your Homework And Ease Your Way
• 90 Days: Acing Your First Post-College Job
• 90 Days: Working for Yourself Can Have Its Challenges
• 90 Days: Easing Back From Maternity Leave
• 90 Days: Dealing With a PR Crisis Takes Planning and Truth
• 90 Days: Joining a Nonprofit Board Is More Than a Labor of Love

~ For more WSJ “90 Days” articles ~

———
Related Post:

The First 90 Days: Strategic Career Transitions

A few years back, former Harvard Business School Professor Michael Watkins published an international best-seller entitled The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels.

More recently, the Wall Street Journal’s online Career Journal  has been running an excellent series of articles called “90 days.”

In each of these periodic columns, WSJ authors address the most critical things to remember, and steps to take, in the first days and months after making a major career transition.  While I assume WSJ is using Watkins’ book as a model,  “9o day” topics range from “Make the Most of a New Promotion” to “Mobilizing an Unplanned Job Search.”

I’m intrigued, too, by the choice of a “ninety-day” interval.

Ninety days was, in fact, almost exactly the period it took me to establish definitively that my most recent employers were not prepared to make an executive transition.  It really did take about three months for me to run through all my own “critical success strategies” first, to see if there was any way at all to save the dying patient.  There wasn’t. 

Michael Watkins describes getting acquainted with a new organization as being similar to “drinking from a fire hose.”  Yes, that’s exactly what it was like, but I fully expected to move on to the point eventually where the torrent would slow a bit.  It’s very strange to have it come to a complete stop, instead.   

So according to the 90-day model, I’m currently in  a subsequent transitional period which happens to follow immediately upon the prior one, without the traditional break in between.  So what should I do?

‘The trick to a successful transition is not to panic,’ says Doug Matthews, President and CEO of Right Management.’ 

‘The biggest mistake is not a financial one, but a psychological mistake,’ says Andrew Tignanelli, president of Maryland-based financial advisory firm Financial Consualate. ‘People panic. They feel and act devastated.’

Before even thinking about boxing up plants and swiping staplers, find a way to get your personal files out of the office. Fire off a few emails to your personal email account with files attached and export all your contacts.’ (Yes, and thank goodness I learned that trick a couple of jobs ago!)

And maybe most importantly:

Meet your new boss. It’s you. You’re working for yourself for the time being, and the job is all about marketing a promising candidate. Just as you would with any other job, establish a home office space and regular hours of operation.

—————-
Creative Commons Photos by AudreyJm529
—————-

Here are the WSJ “90 day” articles to date:

• 90 Days: You’re the New Boss, Now What?
• 90 Days: Make the most of a new promotion
• 90 Days: Managing your former peers takes effort
• 90 Days: Mobilizing an Unplanned Job Search
• 90 Days: Planning a Move to Your Second Job
• 90 Days: What to do after a Layoff.
• 90 Days: Finesse a Flexible Work Schedule

Dale Carnegie is my flavor of the week.  The Universe dropped him into my lap a couple days ago when my daughter and I were rummaging through the “free bin” at our favorite used book store, where I found his How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job – a perfectly good copy that was rejected by the consignment counter for no apparent reason. 

I do love serendipity so very much, when it happens!

Carnegie suggests we should always start by asking what’s right rather than what’s wrong.   Nevertheless (serendipity being one of your stranger animals) this week also brought me a good column by Mike Gunderloy called What’s wrong with web work?   While it’s already very difficult for any working person with a family to find the right balance, Gunderloy and subsequent commentors (me included!) discuss several problems which are particular to free-lancing and working at home.   Food for thought, indeed. 

Another blog I’ve been enjoying is “The Anti 9-5 Guide: Career advice for women who think outside the cube“  which is published in my home town (Seattle) and sort of makes me wish I could go back and live there just to participate in author Michelle Goodman’s world.  Even if I can’t,  the practical (if slightly anarchical) tone is perfect even as Goodman wisely avoids any temptation to jump into the Mommy Wars.  The “profiles” feature (of Goodman’s “fellow 9-5 expats”) is especially wonderful.

Don’t know yet if these are my peeps, but the journey’s kind of fun. 

I said no to the IT job.

Maybe I’ll blog about it later, but first, I have to hold my fingers in my ears for a while.  See,  the toad people and vinegar-faced ladies are massing on my borders, ready to launch a major attack.  The people under the house are muttering obscenities.  The thugs on my bus are beginning to shift in their seats, stealthily reaching for their weapons.

Photo by Yodi Ann

Drat it all.  I already know everything they want to tell me. 

It may be my last chance, it may mean major financial hardship.  People may think badly of me.  I can already think of several who will think I’m making a mistake.  Let them. 

Yes.  Statistically, women who have stayed home with their children can’t expect to be paid better than this or treated more professionally than this when they go back to work, particularly if they aren’t willing to play the game by starting from rock bottom.

Statistically, women must settle.  In real life, there is no beautiful soundtrack that plays when you make difficult, brave decisions.  There is no audience that gasps with admiration.  There’s not even a guaranteed happy ending.  In real life, bills need to be paid, obligations must be met, and compromises made.  Life plods on.  Very few people would keep working at their current jobs if they won the lottery.

And in real life, you never win the lottery. 

Instead, you learn that the difference between the right and wrong choices is rarely crystal clear.  Usually there are several options, all of them problematic, and all of them with great potential. 

Usually, you just have to do your best and choose.  And this chick chooses not to settle.

——–
Related Posts:
How (not) to interview for a job (this story begins)
Confusion Cookies (this story continues)
Woman vs. Rabbit Hole
Toad People

Sunday, the youth group at church was selling “mums for mom,” so everyone was buying them and giving them to everyone else.  Sweetness. My own mother is 2000 miles away, so I gave a bouquet to the elegant Fasia instead, who has dubbed herself my “African Mother.”  She hugged me as usual, which I love because then I get to spend several hours afterwards smelling like her perfume.

Last year I gave a bouquet to my Neighbor Mother, Betsy.  I couldn’t this time around because she died in February.  She still gave me flowers, though: the pansies which she planted by her driveway last fall are still brightly in bloom.  Her irises were especially beautiful this year too, as were her daffodils and columbine.  Her Lenten roses began to bloom almost as soon as she left us, and one plant has blooms on it yet. 
 

I miss Betsy. 

She surprised us, at first, with her way of walking into our house without knocking.  Neighbors around here used to do that, I guess.  She taught us how to be neighbors, in a world that hardly has them anymore.  We mowed her lawn and she gave our daughter piano lessons in exchange.  Summers, we regularly trouped back and forth between her screened porch and our back patio, laden with potato salad and wine. 

During baseball season, she’d invite our son over to watch our team with her on cable (which we don’t have), and the two of them would share popcorn and shout themselves hoarse.

She didn’t want to live like a sick person.  She laughed raucously, kept up with a million friends, and continued to play with the symphony. 

She wanted to go to a place she remembered in the mountains one last time, so a group of us took her there.  She read us a letter from a friend who’d died of cancer, because the friend had the Words Betsy wanted.  She took off her wig and let us kiss her cute head, and we laughed. Raucously.  We didn’t know she’d only live a few weeks more. 

She died at home.  It worked out.  We took turns staying with her that whole last week, when the night nurse wasn’t there.  And I couldn’t have done that, made all those phone calls, spent all that time, if I’d had a job. 

All this past year, Betsy has been very worried that I didn’t have a job.  She even told me she’d find me one!  I was able hold her hand as she lay on her couch and finally tell her that seemed to be working out, too.

The million friends showed up at her funeral, where YES a few of us even danced.  All the viola players in town seemed to be booked with La bohème that day, but Rachel’s soaring violin was so beautiful it made us cry.  And at the first symphony concert, after Betsy had died, they honored her with an empty chair.

I know it’s a few days late (she’d tease me for that, too) but Happy Mother’s Day, Betsy!

The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?
by Leslie Bennetts
Publisher: Voice  (April 3, 2007)

From Booklist:
Many well-educated American women are giving up the struggle to balance career and motherhood and making the “willfully retrograde choice” of relying on men to support them and their children, Bennetts maintains. Financial dependency can jeopardize women’s futures and those of their children, she warns. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of women as well as sociologists, economists, legal scholars, and other experts, Bennetts lays out the dangers of giving up careers. She looks at how new divorce laws have altered alimony, reducing the likelihood of a lifetime guarantee of support for stay-at-home mothers after divorce. She details the impact of a loss of income on medical and retirement benefits and weighs it against lifelong financial needs. Bennetts encourages women to consider a “fifteen-year paradigm,” viewing their lives beyond the years of motherhood and asking themselves what they want from life when their children are grown and gone. Allowing women to tell their own stories of economic abandonment, Bennetts presents a cautionary tale for women pondering giving up economic independence.  (Vanessa Bush)

Ordinarily, I have no interest in participating in “The Mommy Wars.”  I think women (working at home or not) need all the support we can get, and therefore it is particularly tragic when those who should be the greatest of allies feel the need to turn on each other, instead.

This book, however, has been brought to my attention several times lately, and the things I’ve read about it seem particularly compelling as I reflect on my own current situation and that of several other women I know.  Current alimony laws are, indeed, atrocious (a perversion, no doubt, of the feminist idea that women should now find such patronization unnecessary); women who stay home with children are demonstrably much less able (ever) to catch up financially; and in today’s society, anyone who isn’t heeding the dual American gods of “I am what I do” and “I am what I am paid,” will almost certainly take a major psychological hit somewhere down the line. 

But I also think that this apparently insurmountable conflict of interest between mothers and children need not be as dire as pure statistics (and this book) might make it seem.  For instance, two members of my own family are stay-at-home fathers at the moment (though keeping hands on their respective careers as they do it.)  I also know (because I’ve done it) that it is possible to live well on much less money than the status quo would generally have us believe.  And finally, current statistics indicate that most Americans now will work at more than one career in their lives, starting over at least once,  whether or not they’ve had children in-between. 

So maybe the real story here is about something else, e.g., the mystery of why, in 21st century America, there still are so many women who still are falling down so many holes (?)

I was wrong. It is really important to know the color of your parachute, especially when you are looking for a job! And advice isn’t always a bad thing, either. Also, normally?  It is probably not a good idea to tell other people to shut up.

This is still an experiment. Viral communication is the next big thing, as Seth Godin and others have convinced me, and blogs are at the vanguard. The good news is that the threshold is very low, so it’s very easy to get started. Keeping on, though, is a lot harder than it looks.

My sister once ran a marathon with Joan Benoit. In what other sport can beginning athletes compete with Olympic gold medallists? Blogging is like that. It’s definitely a mixed bag, drawing the exhibitionists and bores right along with the experts and professionals. I have to admit my own first impressions of blogs were pretty dismissive. But as I’ve immersed myself further in the past month, I’ve been floored by the quality of writing, the gorgeous immediacy of the medium, and all the emergent possibilities for its use. Like any other kind of writing, it’s very easy to put words on a (web) page, but very difficult to do it well.

I’d like to do it well. It’s very helpful to read what many successful bloggers have written about the process.

Sort of like, oh, I don’t know, finding a new job?

Both take a lot of time, particularly at the front end, and it usually takes a while to establish the right tone (= parachute) and audience (= employer). Most of the best blogs, like careers, are those which have been heavily and repeatedly reworked, even to the point of starting over. Have you seen all the orphan blogs out there? There’s a reason for that.