Karl Edwards presents Working Matters

Category: Working Matters

  • Loving Monday: Try Another Perspective

    The best way to survive a baffling co-worker is to spend a day in their shoes.

    You may come out of the experience positively appreciating them!

    Okay, let’s not get carried away. Difficult people can make work a nightmare. Instead of dreading them, avoiding them or continuing to battle them, what if you tried to see the world through their eyes?

    We’re not saying, excuse their rudeness, laziness, or politicking. We’re suggesting that by understanding someone else’s perspective, you will better be able to engage them creatively and constructively, if not even collaboratively.

    You create for yourself the opportunity to become an expert in what makes someone else tick.

    Since it’s you who wants to “love Mondays,” so to speak, it’s you who needs alternatives to the status quo. Alternatives that you can implement whether or not others participate or respond as you might prefer.

    So try a day in someone else’s shoes and let me know how it goes.

    On your side,

    – Karl

  • 10 Tasks You Can Complete During An American Idol Commercial Break

    IdolI love American Idol, but its commercial breaks are longer than the show itself. If you add the previews (which duplicate most of the content,) there’s time to accomplish quite a bit between segments.

    How do you use all that time?!

    Here’s my list of 10 tasks you can complete during an American Idol commercial break:

    1. Pay the bills.
    2. Give the dog a bath.
    3. Clean out the garage.
    4. Make popcorn… for the neighborhood.
    5. Repair a popped balloon.
    6. Install software on Windows.
    7. Navigate the menu of telephone prompts to get a live person at the phone company.
    8. Replay Obama’s inaugural address.
    9. Explain Twitter to your grandmother.
    10. Delouse a screaming child.

    Those commercials make up a good part of one’s evening. Why just sit there?

    What else belongs on this list?

  • Listen In -> Resume Branding #4: Formatting Your Resume

    Now the time has come to give form to this piece of communication about ourselves we call a resume.

    Do we simply toss together our list of past employment experiences?

    Of course not. We need to use this piece of paper to organize our past experiences in such a way to demonstrate that we’re ready for our next experience.

    We want the past we are moving away from to make a case for the future we want to move toward.

    Can it be done?

    Listen in.

    Don’t miss our Resume Workshop coming up on February 7th in Los Angeles! Register now.
    Catch up on past episodes of Resume Branding here.

  • Utopia or Hell… or just a bit of fun

    insightful-linkHad to pass on this link to 31 Laws of Fun on the Overcoming Bias blog.

    It’s for the quirky lovers of the esoteric among us for whom “fun” and a life worth living are connected at a deeper level than simply having a good time.

    On your side (or you might now wonder),

    – Karl

  • Loving Monday: Duty is Not a Four-Letter Word

    Somewhere along the line, “duty” became a four-letter word. A “bad” word. A negative word.

    Somewhere along the line we associated duty with responsibilities that no one would take on unless forced.

    I‘d like to suggest that “duty” and “privilege” are two sides of the same coin. I’d go so far as to promise that an attitude revolution is waiting for you if you can see your obligations as gifts. Gifts for which the most appropriate response is dedicated engagement.

    To commit to a duty is a promise to complete something out of dedicated engagement.

    Somewhere along the line, though, we lose the “dedicated engagement” part of the equation and end up with only the dry “promise.”

    “I get to” gets reduced to “I have to.” And so our experience is diminished into something no better than a coerced chore.

    In fact, though, we commit to tasks of value. We need a way to remind ourselves of the gift, the privilege, and the value underlying our promise to fulfill a particular duty.

    We need a way to engage with complicated, difficult or nasty components of our commitments that draws on our original rationale for making the commitment in the first place.

    An attitude revolution is waiting for you. Duty may be a four-letter word after all. G – I – F – T.

  • Action Ideas During Recession

    insightful-linkIn this month’s newsletter article we started a series on, “When Crisis Presents Opportunity.“

    This morning I came across this article over at Harvard Business.org entitled, “Four Actions to Survive the Recession and Emerge Triumphant.” How’s that for a title?!

    I really enjoyed Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s insights:

    1. Move while others are distracted.
    2. Announce and own a grand concept.
    3. Get rid of things that have outlived their usefulness.
    4. Concentrate on helping your users, clients or customers succeed.

    It may be more difficult to find or create opportunities during a distressed economy, but the need for new ideas to emerge and the upside for success are greater. Everybody piles into fields that are already successful, exasperating the competition. Few venture to forge new opportunities in struggling areas, so the early entrants become the experts.

    Most important is to remain steadfastly confident in your own value even as you increase your flexibility as to what form its expression might take.

    On your side,

    – Karl

  • Listen In -> Resume Branding #3: What Do We Bring To The Table?

    We bring more to the table than our work experience alone.

    We bring a distinct working style, rich values, personality traits, approaches to leadership, teams, problems, communication, etc.

    The challenge with a resume is communicating who you are given the limitations of a piece of paper.

    How do we then find ways to describe what we bring to the table beyond merely listing past jobs we’ve held?

    Listen in.

    Don’t miss our Resume Workshop coming up on February 7th in Los Angeles! Register now.
    Catch up on past episodes of Resume Branding here.

  • Loving Monday: A Pause to Remember

    I find it intriguing that our means to extend honor is to pause from work.

    Today, we celebrate the life and accomplishments of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Worthy of honor and remembrance he certainly is. He rose to meet the challenges of his time, and we will be forever in his debt.

    As a nation, we extend a working holiday to commemorate these most significant of contributions and causes.

    We pause from our frenetic busyness and the incessant pursuit of wealth to remember who we are and from where we came. We dare not forget at what great price and by which great principles we enjoy our current well-being, security and opportunities.

    When we forget the path down which we came, we will lose the bearings that would guide us forward.

  • Listen In -> Resume Branding #2: What Do We Want?

    With our Resume Workshop coming up on February 7th in Los Angeles, we continue our series on Resume Branding.

    Traditional resumes ask you to list what you have done. They ask, “What have you already done?” But your next job is not a step toward the past. You want to progress forward. You want your next job, not your last job.

    The question, then, becomes, “What do you want?”

    In this week’s show, Claudia and I discuss how to turn this question into a resume. How can we use our work experience to make a case for what we want to do next?

    Listen in.

  • When Crisis Presents Opportunity

    No doubt the news of 700,000 lost jobs can be nerve-wracking. Of course stress levels increase and worries of job security can fill our horizon.

    Maybe you have already lost your job. Maybe your nightmare has become your reality.

    But what if the current crisis were to present an opportunity? What if that opportunity outweighs the trouble and trauma experienced on the way to it? What if something far better lies on the other side of the muck and mire in which we currently find ourselves?

    Do we risk proceeding through the muck, knowing neither its extent nor its resolution? Or do we scramble back to where we were before, reverting to what we knew as safe and secure, (however much we hated our job at the time.)

    What if making our way forward involved three components: some creative re-visioning, some relational research and some intensive effort on our part? Would you choose to go forward? Or back?

    This month we look at the opportunity that may lie in some creative re-visioning of ourselves and our professional contribution.

    The creative re-visioning might be in any of three areas: your role at work, the professional field within which you exercise your role, or you may have an idea that changes how we view or use a product or service altogether.

    Maybe your role needs to change. Expand, focus, involve new skills or new responsibilities. Are you learning continually? Always challenging yourself? Do you try to add value to your role each year?

    Look around the office and ask yourself which roles and/or tasks are attractive to you. Do you admire Mark’s ability to work with others? Do you come up with ideas that you wish you could implement? Is Sarah overwhelmed by a project with which you could help?

    Maybe your skills would be better suited in another professional field. Which of your skills are task-specific and related to your particular job description, and which skills are transferable and applicable anywhere? Knowing how to use a particular contact management/calendar computer program would be an example of the first. Knowing how to make plans, organize events and stay in touch with people is an example of the second.

    Make a list of your transferable skills. Get people who know you to help. Transferable skills are the keys to expanding your opportunities to fields outside your own.

    Finally, maybe you don’t see the world the way others do. Maybe the source of your frustration is at a deeper, more fundamental, even structural level. A more radical change may be in store for you.

    Who would have imagined listening to music in random play lists? Who would have foreseen using a phone for multiple communication and organizational purposes? Maybe you’re like us at Bold Enterprises and foresee a working world where people design for themselves working environments that are worth getting up for and pouring oneself into.

    Maybe this economic crisis is your opportunity to take a step forward.