Career Transition: WHEN IS IT TIME TO ADAPT YOUR STYLE FOR GREATER SUCCESS?

Bruce Hazen, MS
Three Questions Consulting
www.threequestionsconsulting.com
bruce@threequestionsconsulting.com
503-280-0151
Bruce is a career and management coach working with professionals who are at career crossroads and wanting answers and action strategies for one or more of The Three Career Questions:

1. When is it time to move up?
2. When is it time to move out?
3. When is it time to adapt my style for greater success?

WHEN IS IT TIME TO ADAPT YOUR STYLE FOR GREATER SUCCESS?
This is the third and final question to be answered in the Three Questions cycle of career management. See my other blogs on this website, under my name, if you missed the first two. This question focuses on professional development and makes it your responsibility to understand success as both you and your organization define it and to understand the work-styles that drive it.

Your success is not just about what you know how to do. It’s also how you work and how you create “fit” with your job, boss, team, organization and customers. If we’re experiencing “success” it’s because we’ve matched our skills and style of delivery to the needs and culture of our work and to its customers.
We are a success because of our K.I.S.S.A.
KNOWLEDGE ….
powered by INTERESTS….
enabled by SKILLS ….
delivered with the right STYLE….
that results in the ABILITY to deliver work results.

But there is a hidden land mine that professionals keep stepping on. Stepping on any land mine is a career limiting event, but there is an insidious land mine that many step on (repeatedly) in their quest for good career fit with their work.
They over-focus on skill alone and miss the power of “skyle”(skill+style).
Skyle = where skill joins with your style of delivering the skill. [Warning: it’s not always pretty].

Knowing this, we can start to take greater control of our style at work. But taking control requires a couple of things first:
1. Feedback. You need accurate feedback, from people who are upstream and downstream from you in the organization (your “suppliers” and “customers”), to help you know how your skyle is actually perceived by others?
2. Insight. It’s important to interpret this feedback as perceptions that you must deal with. It’s not the absolute truth about you, so don’t get hung up about that. But you must leverage your understanding and insights about these perceptions for modifications you can make to your skyle.
3. Action strategies. You’ll find some skyles that are fine just the way they are. Sustain them. You’ll find others that are really getting in the way of your success. You may need help identifying new approaches and specific behaviors to stop or start doing. Find a coach who can be objective and creative in designing new behavioral approaches.

The point is to take responsibility for modifying your style of delivering your skills to maximize your effectiveness in any job. It’s about developing vs. defending your Self. Simply sticking with your traditional way of doing things can devolve into defending your personal borders against the natural forces of change. And we all know about how effective resisting change turns out to be.