Interview With Invisible Mentor Carol McManus, America's LinkedIn Lady
“You want to align yourself with people who believe in you and can see things in you that you don’t see in yourself.” Carol McManus, America’s LinkedIn Lady
Invisible Mentor: Carol McManus, America’s LinkedIn Lady
Company Name: LinkedIn Lady
Website: http://www.linkedinlady.com, http://ywait4success.com/
Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Carol McManus: I’m an entrepreneur. I left the corporate world in 2007 to start a coaching, consulting and leadership development company. I built that company to six figures using social media. My business has moved over to social media expertise and I’m now known as America’s LinkedIn Lady.
Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?
Carol McManus: I’m like most entrepreneurs, I don’t know if there is a typical day, but I do have a routine that I try to follow so I can stay on top of things. My day starts early and I try to deal with paper, emails and even the social media. I try to get all of those things out of the way so I can focus the rest of the day on existing business, networking and developing new businesses, and how that’s split up on any given day depends on the schedule and the calendar. At the end of the week I want to make sure that I’ve allocated enough time for each of those three things.
Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?
Carol McManus: I motivate myself because I’m a goal-driven person, so my motivation is driven by my goals. I stay focused on what I’m trying to achieve, not just monetary goals, but what the income and achievement of those goals is going to do for my life and family. To stay motivated is to keep reminding yourself of why you get up everyday and go to work. My goal summary is on my bulleting board, right in front of my face, I look at it every day. When I achieve a goal I get great satisfaction of being able to cross it off the list, or change the number, or raise the bar a bit. I think it’s that visual reinforcement that keeps me motivated and plus I have my husband who is my biggest supporter and champion and also my nudge. What I mean by that he is also the person who motivates me and if he thinks I’m straying or need a pep talk, then he is right there for me.
Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
Carol McManus: That’s a very hard question because I am not a person who lives with regret. The challenge as a coach, one of the things that I see with people, is that they invest a lot of time and energy trying to reset the clock and change things. And the fact of the matter is you can’t. I’ve had good experiences, bad experiences, challenging experiences, and extraordinary experiences, and all of those led to the totality of who I am now. The honest truth is that I’m not sure I would do anything differently because it wouldn’t have gotten me to where I am now – it would have led me on a different path.
Avil Beckford: What's the most important business or other discovery you've made in the past year?
Carol McManus: I think the most important discovery for me is the fact that in spite of what’s going on in the world, and that’s more economically driven, that statement, than anything else, we as individuals and business people can own and take control of it, and the people who are succeeding, and in fact thriving in this environment are the people who have the right attitude. I always thought I was a positive person and had a good attitude but I never really focused on how much that has served me. I think for me the discovery was how important that was and it caused me to reinforce the need to keep a positive attitude. And I’m not talking Pollyanna with rose-coloured glasses. I’m talking about knowing that in every opportunity there is possibility. If you focus on the possibility, you’re going to end up with a better solution than if you focus on the challenges and the obstacles.
Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them? Carol McManus:
- I think a potential threat to any business is competition so I keep an eye on the competition, but I don’t focus on it. I think it’s more of a peripheral awareness of what other people are doing, how can I learn from that, how can I reposition my business to either respond to it or counter it. So that’s definitely number one.
- I’d be foolish to say that the economy is not a potential threat because we are still in unstable times economically and there are simply things you cannot control. So a potential threat is if it spirals out of control then I would definitely have to retool and adjust.
- I would potentially be the third threat to myself, and I think that’s true for all business people, is that if you take your eye off the ball, you take your eyes off the goals and become complacent, that can be the worst possible thing for your business. You always have to be checking yourself and reinvesting in yourself and recharging your own batteries so you’re always operating at an optimal level.
Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?
Carol McManus: There are a lot of people in the social media space, and there are two things that make me unique. Number One I’m a baby boomer so I’m not of the generation that grew up with electronic in the crib so to speak. They came into my business world and my life much later. It’s a learned skill for me and because it’s a learned skill I think I have a different perspective and appreciation of the technologies that are available to us today. The second piece going back to social media I think what makes me unique against my competitors is that I don’t consider myself to be a point and click approach to social media, I don’t worry about the technology and the tools and the mechanics. There are lots of people who do that better than I do. In fact, I outsource most of that for myself, what I focus on is my business experience. I focus on social media from a strategic standpoint, and when I sit with a client we talk about business goals and marketing message, ideal target client and then talk about how social media can serve that. I don’t recommend for example, that people jump in and start tweeting all day long because if there isn’t a real business objective, and a real direction as to where you want to go, it’s not going to serve your business. I think that’s a different approach than a lot of people in the social media space take.
Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?
Carol McManus: My major challenge in life is to stay focused in the moment. I have been very blessed in my career to have new opportunities offered to me, and I can think of one specific example where I was more focused on something else that was going on, another opportunity, than focusing on the job that was in the moment. This is not only a reflection for myself but also advice for everyone, that whatever your current responsibilities are whether you’re working for yourself or you’re working for somebody else you want to focus on what your responsibility is and do that to your very best ability because it’s through that accomplishment that you will get noticed and promoted, advanced or have new opportunities open up for you. You can’t always be looking at the horizon and at the next shiny object that dangles itself in front of you. You really have to stay focused on the now – the present.
Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.
Carol McManus: My big break came from one of my mentors. I was with one company for 27 years, and again I had a very blessed career, which I’m very grateful for, but this person at an early time in my career really took me under his wings and gave me reflective feedback that I needed to help shape my career, was able to point out skills and possibilities that I didn’t necessarily see in myself, and then became my champion in the organization to open up that door to new opportunities. That was huge for me, so it’s definitely tied to a mentor. At the time he was not my direct line supervisor, but he became my direct line supervisor later on, but we were at different places in the organization but he took an interest in my career and then opened those doors so again, the side piece of advice there is you want to align yourself with people who believe in you and can see things in you that you don’t see in yourself and obviously help to open those doors.
Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?
Carol McManus: One of my biggest failures, you’re only giving me one! I can think of many things that I started and for whatever reason didn’t get to the finish line. And again, there is a bigger lesson here, when I have failed, it was when I failed to follow-through. I am an idea person. I’m a strategist, so I do come up with a lot of cool ideas, some of which in retrospect I should have followed through on, so it’s a general answer to a question. But for the first 10 or 15 years of my career, it was a pattern where I would start something and not get it to the finish line, start something and not get it to the finish line. From that, I consider it to be a collective failure and the lesson is, and this is where goals come in, if you have clear goals and a vision, and you’re laser focused on what it’s going to take to get there, then you’re more likely to put yourself on a path to accomplish it, and take it all the way to the finish line.
Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?
Carol McManus: That’s a personal answer and it’s walking away from my first marriage. It was at a time where there was an age difference between us and we were at different points in our lives, there was nothing horrible, no big custody battles, there was no fighting or bickering like a lot of people go through in a divorce. But it was simply a decision that if we continued on the path that we were on, it was going to end badly, so making that decision in a timely fashion, that this was not going to serve either of us, and walking away from it. It was a very tough decision, but for both of us the best decision that I ever made. Both of us went on to live very happy lives, and we both found new spouses and it ended up having a happy ending. I don’t care what the circumstances are, whether volatile or not volatile, ending a marriage that you made a commitment and went into thinking you were going to live with this person for the rest of your life is not an easy thing, or should be an easy thing to walk away from.
Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?
Carol McManus:
- Where I went to college and what I studied because I went to America University and studied political science which gave me an opportunity throughout college to work on Capitol Hill. It shaped my perspective about the country and politics in general, but it gave me a greater appreciation of not just the fundamentals of democracy, but honestly and truly, how to get things done, and it was a great foundation for my business experience.
- Around that same time, I had the opportunity to go to Woodstock in New York back when the real Woodstock happened, and while I was not of the hippie generation, it was a fluke that I was even there it shaped my life because it was the antithesis of the environment that I had been living in on Capitol Hill with the free form and the music – a total different appreciation for seeing the world on a bigger platform and everything that was tied to it, not just the event Woodstock, but everything that was tied to the movement in the sixties having to do with social consciousness and the protest about the war, really gave me a life path to be able to separate what’s important and what’s really important or what you think is important versus what is important.
- The third would be to sell a small boutique company I had back in the seventies and go into a bigger environment, working in a corporate environment. It was a big departure for me because I grew up in an entrepreneurial family. My early career was very much as an entrepreneur and going into the corporate world totally changed me and shaped my perspective on how I did and saw things, helped me to develop my leadership skills, helped me to see things through various different lenses – through the human resources lens, the financial lens. Now that I have come full circle back to being an entrepreneur again, there is absolutely no question that, that experience makes me a better business person, a better service provider, a better strategist, all of those skills have served me very well.
Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?
Carol McManus: The accomplishment I am proudest of is my most recent venture of claiming that title of America’s LinkedIn Lady. It’s the first time in my adult career, and in my life really, that I have had true personal brand identity, something that I feel I won, that I’m comfortable in, that I feel competent in and that has given me a personal brand. When you spend 27 years in a corporate environment, the identity is not about you, but the company and what’s good for the company. I was very comfortable with that, and it wasn’t that I wasn’t recognized or didn’t have name recognition within the organization, I did. But a very different thing happened when I went out on my own. When people meet me and say, “Oh, you’re America’s LinkedIn Lady.” I have been to events and have people say to me that they came to the event because they heard about me and wanted to hear what I had to say. That is not only flattering but it’s also daunting because it puts a big responsibility on your shoulder. It is definitely something I’m proud of, and it’s something I didn’t plan and aspire to, but the fact that it has happened, I can really enjoy it now.
Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?
Carol McManus: I worked for a company that was owned by an even larger company, a male dominated company, and I was young coming up the corporate ladder, and I had a female mentor who was one of the only women who held senior positions in the company. I sought her out in terms of guiding me about how you compete, get noticed and recognized as a professional when you’re in a male-dominated company. Her advice to this day has served me well. There were several legs to it but basically it was be true to yourself first and foremost, be who you are – don’t try to be overly feminine and don’t try to be overly masculine, just focus on the job at hand and do it to the best of your ability. Unfortunately at the time, because this goes back a few years, women have come a long way, which I’m happy about, and in my small way I was a contributor to move it along this path. But at the time, women had to be better than men at what they did. So if men operated at a 100 percent, we needed to operate at 110 or 120 percent, and do it without malice or feeling guilty, or bitter that people aren’t recognizing you or you’re not getting paid. You just do it and that advice and the guidance she gave me is what opened more doors for me and helped to shape my career because I didn’t try to play the game that other women played in the workplace.
Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?
Carol McManus: The one core message was not to take yourself so damn seriously. And I say that with a big smile on my face because it’s advice that we can all take. Another way to phrase that is don’t believe your own press. What I mean by that is not to be cynical or sceptical about people, you should be proud of your successes, but I think when people let their ego get in the way, when you do get compliments, when you do get awards, when you get promotions, it’s very easy to slip into that pattern in thinking you’re great and have all the answers. None of us do and you can’t operate in the world today, in a family, a business unit, in a company, in a church or any other organization without the support of other people. I have had more than one person share that advice with me, which helped to keep me focused and keep each others focused. You are one person making a contribution and it’s always part of a bigger picture.
Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?
Carol McManus: Always act as though someone is watching. In other words, whatever you’re doing, pretend that you’re on stage and there is an audience in front of you, even surrounding you, who is not necessarily judging, just observing what’s going on. So if you’re always doing your best, being your best, putting your best foot forward, magical things will happen. You don’t have to go out and campaign for them, you don’t have to politic for them, you don’t have to beg for them, and you don’t have to demand them. They will happen, because when people notice you, when you’re at your best is when good things happen.
Read Part II of Carol McManus' Invisible Mentor Interview. What five things have you learned as a result of reading the interview?
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