career guide - Don Huse's Blog

What difference can you make?

In the current economy, companies now seeking or planning to hire employees may want to more closely examine how candidates can immediately contribute. Therefore, you must know and articulate the difference you can make in helping an organization achieve its objectives.

Here are some tips:

• Conduct research into the potential employer's recent business results, sales and earnings forecasts from the company and financial analysts, its management style, and human resources policies.
• Talk with as many people as possible until you can get an accurate assessment of what skills and abilities are most in demand now at the targeted employer, and what its business culture is.
• Communicate how you meet, and exceed, the immediate business needs in all phases of your contact with potential employers - resumes, cover letters, telephone interviews, personal interviews, and follow-up communication.
• Be as specific as possible about how your career achievements demonstrate your ability to help the potential employer right away.
• Demonstrate that you not only have the skills and abilities desired, but also match the company's business culture.

The work to execute these steps will be rewarded as you distinguish yourself from the competition who is either unaware of the importance, or unwilling to make the effort to do this kind of preparation.

Are you overdoing your strengths?

For years we have been hearing about how important it is to discover and maximize our strengths. But is it possible to overdo your strengths with detrimental results?

In a recent HBR article, Stop Overdoing Your Strengths (executive summary here), Robert Kaplan and Robert Kaiser say "more is not always better, and executives lose their jobs when their strengths become weaknesses through overuse."

Kaplan and Kaiser describe the negative impact of overused strengths:

In our research we tested the effects of overused strengths on two aspects of team performance: vitality (defined as morale, engagement, and cohesion) and productivity (quantity and quality of output). We found that taking a strength to an extreme is always detrimental to performance, but even a mild tendency to overdo it can be harmful. Be a little too forceful, for instance, and your team’s output may improve some—but vitality will take a hit, and weakened morale will eventually undercut productivity. Be a little too enabling, and you may shore up vitality—but productivity will suffer over time, which will in turn erode morale. In general, overdoing it hurts your effectiveness just as much as underdoing it.