003 Ed Evarts of Evarts Coaching on Visibility and Value

Career Tips & Trends with Tom McDonough & Deborah Burkholder

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Today’s Show

The theme of today’s show and our interview with Ed Evarts is around visibility and value — And the importance of working in a purposeful way to be more visible in your organization and your industry. This is important whether you’re:

• currently employed
• in transition
• or looking for potential clients

Ed is practice leader at Evarts Coaching. Evarts Coaching focuses on leadership development with mid- to senior-level executives and their teams inspired by his own leadership experience working in corporate environments. Ed talks about the importance of being visible and offering value in your organizations and offers some practical tips.

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In The News:

Veterans are returning home and looking to return to the civilian workforce. One of the challenges they have is translating military experience into civilian skills.

The Department of Defense has a Dictionary of Military Terms: http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/dod_dictionary/ that can be helpful. And we can help as friends, colleagues, coaches and employers by learning and understanding a little bit about their language and world.

Another great resource is O*NET, an online program with information on hundreds of occupations. O*Net also has applications for exploring and searching occupations. It is such a rich resource, we connect with O*Net in Appia. The site is http://www.onetonline.org/ – check out “my next move” for veterans.

Though the nuance and context is unique, the problem is the same for all job seekers, how do you translate your skills and tell your story in the language of your future employer.

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Interview

Interview with Ed Evarts of Evarts Coaching…

Deborah Burkholder: Tom and I invited Ed Evarts, practice leader at Evarts Coaching to join us today. As we seek to support you, our listeners, in your life and career aspirations, we think you’ll find Ed’s tips for managing career options by providing value and being visible, both very practical and will take away at least one idea you’ll want to implement today. Evarts Coaching focuses on leadership development with mid to senior level executives and their teams and was inspired by his own leadership experience working in corporate environments.

Welcome Ed, to Appia’s Career Tips and Trends

Ed Evarts: Thanks Deb and Tom, it’s great to be here.

Tom McDonough: Yes, great to have you.

Deborah: We’ve gotten to know Ed from his leadership roles in the coaching community. One of his articles on the importance of networking to stay and grow particularly resonated with the skills and mindset we are seeing as important new trends in how people think about their careers. We talk about it in terms of the importance of relationships and reputation. Ed frames it as visibility and value.

Ed, why is raising your visibility and value so important?

Ed: I think it’s important really for three key reasons. First, Deborah, the pace and frequency of change in the workplace is dramatically increasing. By pace, I mean how quickly individuals are expected to move through a change at work and by frequency, I mean the volume of change events that occurring. So the volume of change events continue to increase and the pace business professionals are expected to navigate through these changes are also increasing. It’s kind of a perfect storm.

This increase in the pace and frequency of change is having a pretty big effect on your ability and your listeners’ abilities to build relationships at work. For example, it was recently reported in fast company that a US worker’s median tenure in their current job is about 4.4 years. The average number of jobs for men in their lifetime is at about 11.4 and the average number of jobs for women in their lifetime is about 10.7. In the midst of all this change, organizational structures, roles, job descriptions, bosses, peers and colleagues change more frequently than any time in modern management history.

The first reason is really this increase in the pace and frequency of change that folks are experiencing in the workplace.

The second reason that raising your visibility and value is important is that organizational transparency is increasing at an exponential rate.

So, what do I mean by organizational transparency?

With the advent of social media, the ways that individuals can find information about you is endless. In addition to popular applications like linkedin, organizations are also starting their own internal linkedin sites, if you will, to better understand the capabilities of talent that exist within their organizations. At the same time, with the advent of social media, you have endless ways to tell the world about yourself.

When I think about it, there was a time, not too long ago, when you wanted to find out who the key leaders were in an organization you either had to spend hours in the library going through a Dunn and Bradstreet notebook or maybe your neighbor had to work there. With this increased organizational transparency, your focus needs to be raising your visibility and value on your terms.

The third thing, quickly, is that raising your visibility and value is important to your listeners is because as business professionals, we either spend no time effectively connecting with others while we are employed, and when we do, we over-invest in classic networking activities which are becoming increasingly outdated and ineffective.

Tom: What prompted you to focus on helping others to raise their visibility and value, Ed?

Ed: As a lifelong human resources and business professional, I’ve been networking my whole life. Like most of you, and the listeners, I have networked for employment, I have networked for affiliation and I network today for business development. When I left my last job I was struck by the number of individuals networking who found themselves, what I call, “unexpectedly unemployed”. The key word there is really “unexpectedly”. Most of these folks were top-notch individuals who received and exceeds expectations on their last performance appraisal, who, what I call, “bled blue” for their organization and often thought they would be the last to go, yet here they were at a networking event because they were in transition.

As I came to know more and more of these individuals and spoke with them, a recurring pattern began to emerge. These individuals spent the majority of their careers, really, as head-down contributors, focused on being a great performer, focused on getting that coveted “exceeds expectations” rating on their performance appraisal and in doing so often times became sequestered in their workstations or offices. These are the folks who were often times unavailable or behind closed doors for most of the workday. Once they picked their heads up they realized that they were not visible in their organization and the value they provided their organization either was absent or unknown. Once they picked their heads up it was often too late…

(interview continues)

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Post Interview

Tom

Ed’s interview reminds me of a recent opinion article in the NY Times online by Thomas Friedman titled Average Is over. Average Is Over

In it he states:
“In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.”

Deb

Wow, Average is Over. This is another reinforcement of needing to excel in your niche and to stand-out. This requires is to get clear on where and how we want to be known.

Tom

I think this is just another way of saying that we need to work in a purposeful way to be visible and communicate our value to our organization and industry.

As we say in our Small Town Rules presentation, it’s all about relationship and reputation.

Relationships develop based on how we are present with people, and I loved Ed’s statement that our reputation is the “echo” left behind when we leave the room.

Resources

In terms of resources I’d like to recommend my Being at You Best exercise. It uses principles of NLP and Mind Mapping to help us connect with our recipe for being at our best. The goal of the exercise, is to connect with two or three things we need in our life on a regular basis, to be at our best. I’ll put a link in the show notes to a previous post where I described the Being at Your Best exercise in detail.

In terms of clarifying and communicating our value, I have several books I’d like to recommend:

• I Could Do Anything, If Only I Knew What It Was, by Barbara Sher
• 48 Days, by Dan Miller
• Book Yourself Solid, by Michael Port

These three books take different approaches to help clarify one’s niche, the work we are meant to do, the people we serve and the problems we solve, and the work we love doing.

*You can support the show by using our amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

You can follow Ed on Twitter @evartscoaching
Ed’s website evartscoaching.com
Network to Stay and Grow by Ed Evarts

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That’s it for this episode of Career Tips & Trends.
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