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Working with an Executive Search Firm, Step II: Creating a Compelling Career Narrative

Preparation is important for successfully working with a search firm. That includes a strong, updated vita that shows your experience, skills, main accomplishments, and demonstrated results across a range of positions.

Preparation also means helping someone who knows nothing about you to understand what that vita  means to (and about) you, your past institutions, and your potential new employer. You do that by preparing a clear and compelling career narrative about what you have done and how that illustrates key strengths and accomplishments. Use the arc of your story to make sure you introduce issues, establish context, and emphasize experiences of which you are proud. Having your story prepared also helps you answer, with poise, open ended questions like, “tell me about yourself.”

A good, clear storyline quickly conveys a full and accurate portrait of your accomplishments and potential. It is also more memorable than a list of jobs and positions. The search consultant will have studied your vita before you meet or talk via phone (or will have been updated by someone who has). It’s up to you to bring that vita to life: convey who you are, what makes you tick, and what you do best.

It’s tempting when working with a search firm to only discuss your strengths. Certainly you want to begin  there and demonstrate how past experiences have built the skills and strengths relevant to the job you seek. But don’t stop there – unless your flat side or things you dislike aren’t relevant to the work you are exploring (or you want to talk yourself into a job that may not be right for your experience, interests, or temperament).

Working successfully with a search consultant is not a simple selling contest. It’s developing a relationship of mutual trust that benefits your both. For that, you will want to find an opportunity to identify new areas that you are excited to master or discuss your confidence in tackling new areas of interest or responsibility.

Job searches are all about fit: finding the place that values and uses the skills, talents, and experiences that you bring. Search consultants seek to identify that “fit” as well: they succeed when they find individuals who can and will succeed in the job (or they will have to redo the search for their client at their own expense). 

Not all jobs and organizations are created equal: the work and work life that goes with a titled position in one institution can be very different from that at another. Jobs that look perfect on the surface may come with unusual expectations, complex histories, or organizational cultures that are incompatible with your values and preferences. A good relationship with a search firm can help you find that out – and give you to confidence to say no to offers that are less than perfect because a better one is just around the corner. 

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Working with an Executive Search Firm, Step I: Establishing a Relationship

If you are (or anticipate) looking for a leadership position, especially in higher ed, you need skills working with an executive search firm. Even if you’ve used one to recruit talent to your institution, it’s completely different being on the other side of the search. The next series of blogs will explore the issues.

First, everyone with good experience under their belt and with career aspirations should cultivate a relationship with a few of the major search firms in their field. How?

Get introduced to a senior partner through a colleague. A simple email introduction offers opportunity to begin a relationship, send a vita, and get into the firm’s database. Have a well-written vita that captures what you’ve done and its impact.

Or look on websites to see who those partners are and reach out with an email or call. If you’ve been around an industry for awhile, you may already know someone. Partner bios will tell their areas of focus.

If you have a geographic area of interest, find out who handles that region and start there. Suggest a coffee or a quick meeting, for example, when you’ll be in town for a conference or event. Plan ahead. By the nature of the business, search firm people spend their lives on planes, on the phone, or in meetings. 

You don’t need to be looking for a job to reach out. If you’re beginning to outgrow your current job or are unsure of how to get where you want to eventually be, say so. Search consultants know the questions to ask about what you’ve done and what you want. A conversation like this is clarifying for career planning.

And since search firm folks have great interpersonal skills, they are enjoyable people to be with and can become trusted colleagues. When offered a job, for example, I got objective advice from two colleagues at firms that were not conducting the search, by running the opportunity by each for a “hey, what do you know that I should know or consider?” I got information I needed to make the right decision.      

NOTE: Feel comfortable contacting search firms. You are doing them a favor, and they are predisposed to want to learn about you. Remember, an executive search firm is like a yenta. Both want to be ready, having identified as many possible partners as possible, to facilitate a good match for a specific opportunity when it comes along.

IMPORTANT: As in any relationship, there are people you hit it off with quickly and those you don’t. If the chemistry is good with a partner in your call, don’t push it. Ask if s/he has recommendations for someone else you should introduce yourself. Or wait a few months, look down the list, and try someone else.

Your fit and comfort with your contact partners are key. They have to like and trust you and vice versa. Your future rests in your ability to be honest about who you are, what you do well, and what you don’t.

Equally important, your future depends on their abilities to understand you as a person and a professional, remember you, and present your case (wrinkles and all) to organizations that can be right for you.

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Effective Thinking 101

If leading, first and foremost, requires clarity of thought about what’s going on and what we need to do about it, how do we make people better thinkers?  Slower in their natural inclinations toward snap judgments that may be wrong or incomplete? More aware of the evidence that underpins their conclusions? More open to soliciting essential information from others and flexible in responding to it? 

A colleague’s recent book, The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking (by Edward Burger and Michael Starbird), gave me a great idea. Subject yourself to the “How Do I Know?” test.

Simply stop when asserting a position and ask yourself the question “how do I know that?” If you can, take a few minutes to jot down your answers to questions like, What evidence am I using? What’s the source of my opinion? How long have I held this belief? Look at what you’ve written. You may be surprised to find yourself on shakier ground than you expect.

Try the “How Do I Know?” test regularly and often – make it a fun game for a few weeks to develop a new habit of the mind. Try it in the quiet of your home. While out shopping. When listening to the evening news. Use the “How do I know?” question to stimulate interesting conversation with friends or to determine subjects you want to learn more about.

Becoming a more mindful and deeper thinker is a first step in developing capacities essential for leadership success.

Want to take the exercise one step further? Try it in the midst of a disagreement with another. Take a break in the action and ask yourself, “How do I know what I’m so strongly defending?”  Get riskier: ask and answer the question publically, and ask your partner in disagreement to talk about the same.

“It’s not what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you do know that ain’t so.” Will Rogers or Mark Twain or someone else (Burger and Starbird, p.38)

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What makes leading so difficult?

The hardest part of leadership is knowing what’s really going on. We can’t bring people together to solve a problem or advance a goal if we don’t have shared understanding of what’s happening and what to do about it.  

Humans have a strong need to believe that what they understand and see is exactly how the world is. That means we are often clueless about how much what looks like Truth to us is really personal interpretation of what’s going on. It’s as if we are predisposed by Mother Nature to not know how much we don’t know. Why?

Human limits: We can attend to only a limited amount of information and experiences available. And our values, education, experience, cognitive capacities, physical abilities, and developmental limitations influence what we see. We register some things, ignore others, and draw conclusions. All this occurs quickly and outside of awareness.

The result: what leaders see and think can seem more like Truth and the way the world really is than the individual creations and interpretations that they are. The tacit nature of all this can blind leaders to gaps and inaccuracies. It also leaves little incentive for them to question their interpretations or retrace any of their steps from data selection through decisions about appropriate action.

Human need for certainty: We’d never be able to act if we had to think all the time about what we are missing. The big problem is when people create explanations of what things mean and assume that others either see things the same way or, if they don’t, are wrong. Here is the basis for conflict and confusion. 

From thought to action: People’s personal interpretations are prescriptions for how they and others should respond. If we see our unit’s budget problem as over-spending, we’ll cut expenses. If we see inadequate allocations, we’ll lobby for more. If we sense embezzlement, we’ll call the cops. You see the ease and the potential complications in all this. We’re often off and running before we’re even sure where we should be heading.

“We carve out order by leaving the disorderly parts out,” concluded eminent psychologist William James. How do we remind ourselves that this is what we are doing?

Successful leaders bring habits of the mind that make them deliberate information gathers who work to understand a situation from multiple perspectives. They respect the need for action, but know that the right response is better than a quick wrong response. They build relationships that enable others to feel safe  disagreeing with them. They listen to what other’s tell them and work to confirm (or disconfirm) the accuracy of their perceptions. They test interpretations and experiment with solutions.  

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5 Strategies to Avoid Adaptation Burnout

I’ve been meeting this week with a group of academic library leaders. In the course of our discussions, someone mentioned the difficulties of living in a world of constant turmoil in which leaders are expected to engage in non-stop change and change management. 

The result – adaptation burnout: the psychological (and physical) exhaustion that comes from the continued challenging of what we know, do, and believe.  I knew he was right. We regularly talk about the resistance and human tendency to “hold on” that makes change difficult. Adaptation burnout, however, rarely makes it on the radar screen. It should. 

Humans are creatures of habit, and it’s the patterns in our daily lives that enable us to function with an economy of energy and effort. Disrupt that, and the investment required for even simple actions escalates. Keep upping the ante with more and more change, and no surprise: we’re not just tired, but stretched to our human limits to take on anything more, anything new. The resulting burnout manifests itself in disrupted relationships, health concerns, and loss of pleasure in work and play.

As leaders, it’s our duty to manage the rate and pace of change so as not to overload the system or the individuals who work in it. It is also important to support and protect ourselves.

It is tempting for leaders to try to ignore the personal costs of our work. We feel pressures to produce, and the demands of the situation often keep us attending more to others’ needs than our own. 

Conceptions of heroic leadership – commonly accepted myths of the solitary superhero whose brilliance and strength save the day – seduce us into stoic acceptance of the added pressures and responsibilities. But leaders, after all, are only human.  What can protect and support leaders in their demanding work?

In Chapter 12 of Reframing Academic Leadership, Lee Bolman and I suggest five strategies. How would you rank yourself on each?  

1. managing boundaries between self-other, personal-professional, self-work role, and leader-follower.

2. proactively attending to health and stress management

3. seeking life balance in meeting the diverse needs of mind, body, and soul 

4. finding respite and sanctuary for perspective and rejuvenation: the beauty and recuperative power of the arts make them obvious choices

5. enhancing resilience skills: recognizing that we grow stronger in the face of challenge enables us to bounce back more quickly in the face of setbacks.