The Invisible Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘Strategic planning’

What are your thoughts on having experience? What does it mean to you to have experience? Are there situations where having experience is either a blessing or a curse? How do you define experience?

According to AudioEnglish.net, experience means:

The accumulation of knowledge or skill that results from direct participation in events or activities…

Go or live through

Have firsthand knowledge of states, situations, emotions, or sensations

Having experience is very important, but it isn’t everything. If we use the definition above which centers on the accumulation of knowledge, there will be instances where a certain experience is required, which you do not possess, but you do have the skills required to do the job. In this situation, transferring your skills may be enough.

What to do if you do not have the required experience for a job

Let’s say that there is a job that you would like to have, but you feel like you do not have the experience required to apply.

• Forget about the job title and hone in on the skills that are required
• Take an inventory of your skills
• Conduct a personal SWOT Analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (Refer to the post “When Was the Last Time You Conducted a Personal SWOT Analysis“
• Align your skills with those of the job, how do they match up?
• From the results of the SWOT Analysis, what unique strengths do you possess that would give you an advantage? What opportunities exist that are relevant to the job?
• If you find that you have more than 50 percent of the requirements for the job go for it and apply

Let’s say there is an unrelated field that you would like to transition into, how do you go about making the change?

• Look at the skills that are required for this field, align them with the skills that you have, work on acquiring those skills needed to close the gap. You can close the gap by:
  • Volunteering in the field that you are interested in, to acquire the new skills
  • Getting a mentor or coach who will work with you to acquire those skills
  • Reading books or observing people using those skills

And most importantly, when you are BUILDING your experience, make sure that you are HAVING an experience, because that means you are LIVING.

What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right side) by email or RSS Feed.

Photo Credit: Yahoo via Apture

Spending the time to do quality work and build a good reputation matters. Over a year ago, I interviewed Bob Fugere who was hired as an Interim Executive Director for a Non-governmental Organization. The interview drives home the point that a good reputation matters, what do you think?

Interview With Dr. Robert Fugere, Consultant

Challenge: I had been managing and advising Canadian and international NGOs for more than twenty five years until I retired, but my most challenging assignment came when I offered to be the six-month interim Executive Director for a local environmental group.

This group had a seventeen year history of excellent secondary research, good neighbourhood projects, and most of all, effective lobbying of city councillors. A bookkeeper and canvass manager (with five contract street fund-raisers) were the support staff; most of the content work over the past seven years had been carried out by four campaigners.

I knew when I started that two of these campaigners had just moved on to better positions elsewhere and the third one -whom I was replacing- was going off on maternity leave. My assignment from the Board was to “hold the fort and prepare for a strategic planning process”.

Within six weeks, I discovered that our $500,000 budget seemed to be overspent by $100,000. After two months the remaining senior campaigner informed me that he was leaving to run in the municipal election.

That left me with one part-time replacement campaigner, two challenging reports to prepare for our major donors, and a lot of sleepless nights, trying to figure out what to do to keep this noble but battered ship afloat. There were only three options to put to the Board:

1. Borrow some staff from other NGOs;
2. Set up an emergency fund-raising campaign;
3. Or quietly close the shop.

Resolution: I leaned toward the last option. That Board meeting was crucial. Two canvassers pledged to increase their door-knocking for the next three months. One Board member from the labour unions declared that this NGO’s work was so crucial for its worker/members that they would put up a line-of-credit loan to see us through the next six months.

Those votes of confidence were enough to permit the hiring part-time of two experienced campaigners who helped prepare two successful grant submissions and the raising of $20,000 from a few key friends who also valued the work we had done.

Lessons Learned

1. In my NGO management classes, I had long taught that our major asset as NGOs was the quality of the work we did, and this experience had proven that thesis
2. The excellent work this NGO had done over many years had built its reputation -and its acknowledged presence- in Toronto’s civil society, so that even with an almost complete turnover of staff, it still merited others’ support. It was this reputation, not the salary level, that attracted the new campaigners, that garnered the unions’ support
3. For me personally, I saw how important it could be to maintain an open, fully-informed and calm hand on the tiller when the seas run high. Though I couldn’t provide either the money or the technical environmental knowledge required, the staff, the Board and the donors all needed to sense that a trusted person would provide the information and maturity to bring each of their partial contributions to a common result

Formula for Success

Good quality work builds your reputation which is a major asset.

If you were in Bob’s position, what would you have done different, and why? Let’s keep the conversation going, I value your comments.

Interview With Jim Love, Partner, Performance Advantage

This interview was first published in the November 2006issue of my newsletter Ambeck Edge, but learning from the mistakes of thers is important so that we do not have to make those same mistakes.

Avil Beckford: Describe a business challenge you had and how you resolved it?

Jim Love: The key challenge for me was to grow the business beyond just me, and an idea. This is a huge challenge for entrepreneurs.

Resolution: I made many mistakes. One mistake was panicking and saying that I had to bring other people into the business. I didn’t handle this process as well as I could have, and one classic example was bringing in salespeople who couldn’t or didn’t sell. I expanded too rapidly and hired people who I shouldn’t have. I did all the right things to resolve the challenge, but I didn’t do them well. The renaming of the company from True North to Performance Advantage reflected a crisis point that we hit and I had to fix that. Now I have expanded much more cautiously with much more deliberateness. I have two partners in the business and we have a selection of consultants. We were more rigorous in the selection process.

A key thing, which helped me, was to take my own advice, the advice that I give to my clients. I did a plan and looked at some of the metrics in my business. I looked at where we wanted to go and that took me a long time to complete, which gave me a newfound respect for why some companies do not want to do strategic planning. In the planning I looked at what types of people and revenue we wanted to attract, and how they fit together. Now I know what I want, and I am aware of what offers to take and which to leave on the table.

AB: What lessons did you learn in the process?

JL: Lessons Learned:

1. It’s important to understand how your business runs at every level – from the strategic to the operational
2. Know what you’re passionate about, know what you can do that can beat the world, and know what metrics drive your business. The better I got at doing this, the better I became at solving crises and not just the challenge I talked about
3. Business success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent discipline. You have to work in pursuit of your goal
4. You have to plan for strategic success and follow the plan. Stop worrying about the attributes that you don’t have and start exploiting the things that you do well, recognizing the places where you don’t want to go
5. Be able to be true to your moral compass

AB: In your opinion, what is the formula for success?

JL: “To thine own self be true” by William Shakespeare sums up the formula for success. To me, it is to know who you are, what you want, what you are passionate about, take the time to plan for it and celebrate milestones along the way, and NEVER deviate from your moral compass.

Excerpt November 2006 Ambeck Edge