Sander Flaum - Boost Your Career: How to Make an Impact, Get Recognized, and Build the Career You Want

Copyright 2017 by Sander Flaum and Mechele Flaum

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Cover design by Mary Ann Smith

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Print ISBN: 978-1-62153-569-0

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62153-572-0

Printed in the United States of America

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

This book is dedicated to dear friends and true leaders, the late Senator John Glenn, and Annie Glenn, his wonderful wife of seventy-three years.

Contents

Foreword

ONE OF THE MOST VALUABLE PIECES OF career advice I have ever received came from John H. Johnson, an African American businessman in Chicago. You may know him for memorably launching his empirewhich included Ebony and Jet magazinesin his youth in the 1940s with a $500 loan secured by his mothers furniture. He became the first African American to make Forbes magazines list of the four hundred wealthiest Americans. I wanted to meet this guy.

I wanted to hear what advice he would offer to a young person who was starting outas I wasand trying to make it in the career world. His advice was well crafted and succinct.

Just three words: Make yourself indispensable, he said.

Make yourself the first person who comes to your bosss mind when a tough job has to be done. If the structure is not there to fill the need, create it yourself. Detect a need and do your best to fill it, not just well but irreplaceably . Even in hard times, make yourself the last person that your employers would even think about letting go. Johnson did that. He saw a national market of literate and employed African Americans who were not being serviced by the highly segregated media of those timesand he serviced that demand.

The world and its media have changed tremendously since those days. Yet the value of Johnsons adviceMake yourself indispensableto new generations in rapidly changing times is as relevant as ever.

Johnsons advice came back to mind as I was reading this book by Sander Flaum and Mechele Flaum. Boost Your Career aims to help youand meto make ourselves indispensable. It expands and updates the spirit of Johnsons advice in many ways, with pointed advice for those who are wondering where to go from here with their careersand how to get there.

Many people spend years working long hours yet find themselves spinning their wheelspassed over for promotions, recognition, and pay raisesand clueless to the hidden rules that, despite their usefulness, almost never get taught in classrooms.

One of the most important of these ingredients for success is what Sander and Mechele Flaum call meaningful impact projects; these impact projects make a striking difference in an organization in ways that make an employee stand out in the eyes of key stakeholders and fellow employees. Drawing on their many years in business in a variety of high-level rolesplus interviews with dozens of other successful executivesthe Flaums show the best ways to identify opportunities, set goals, and take leadership in projects that will help employees and their organizations achieve those goals.

Impact work, as the Flaums call work that aims to impress those individuals who can help your advancement, has four crucial pillars that the Flaums describe in :

One, determine who your real bossor bosseshappen to be. In most organizations, the lines of real day-to-day influence are not always spelled out on the organizational chart. Closer examination reveals other individuals who may be at your same organizational level or even in another department, yet they exert enough influence that their support is worth pursuing. This chapter tells why.

Two, keep it simple. The simplest changes and innovations often work best. Following this advice will save you from the heartache of exhaustive efforts that bring disappointingly little, if any, reward. This chapter shows how to play to your strengths, avoid wasting time, and work more efficiently.

Three, dont be afraid to change. Its your friend, say the Flaums. Thats easier advice for many of us to believe than to follow. We often dont realize how comfortable our comfort zones have become until change forces us out of them. Get over the shock of change and try to get in front of itso you can take the best advantage of it.

Four, when all those pillars are builtthen you can innovate.

The book takes a deep dive into those four pillars of success and isolates other important commandments for the savvy employee to which we too often pay too little attention, such as:

Leverage your passions.

Set clear expectations.

Consider a timeline to be a promise.

Preserve team synergy.

And theres the always tricky but critical commandment that reminds me of a Kenny Rogers song: Know when to fold.

There are two kinds of people in this world, my father advised. There are the movers and shakers, and there are those who get moved and shaken. The difference between those two classes in todays world is a proper education. This book aims to help you to be a mover and shaker, no matter how much you may have been moved and shaken.

Clarence Page
March 2017

INTRODUCTION

Get the Boost You Need

HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING YOUR BUTT OFF, yet you never receive that promotion, recognition, or pay raise you crave? Maybe you go in early, stay late, and have dedicated years to doing your best. Perhaps youre just starting out in a new position and want to seize every chance to succeed. If you want to launch into the next level of your career, this book is for you.

Dont be the person who works hard but isnt considered leader material. Dont let the corporate culture stand in your way. Dont give in to departmental angst or watch your coworkers magically become the go-to gal or guy instead of you. Yes, skilled people get overlooked in the workplace. Talented people get ignored. Heck, even ambitious people stagnate. If you want to be the one they send in to throw the Hail Mary pass, even the one to call the play, you need to demonstrate that you can do it. You do that by focusing on the right things.