I have a different approach!

What makes you unique should be something so central to your value proposition that you MUST know what that is. This concept does not just apply to fresh graduates, but to everyone who is managing their career or life, in this job market or not! If you do not know (and this is the norm) what your uniqueness is, then you must discover what that is, own it, and learn how to verbalize it in a compelling way on your résumé with supreme confidence. So, how do you find out your unique gifts and how do you build a credible value proposition that is the centerpiece of your résumé?

Our uniqueness stems from our innate gifts that allow us to do things in ways that clearly differentiate us from others. I call those gifts our genius. The dictionary definition of genius is, the tutelary or attendant spirit in classical pagan belief allotted to every person at birth, or to a place, institution, etc. that gives it special powers and protection. So, there is both, good genius (A Picasso) and evil genius (A Charles Manson) as either of the two mutually opposed spirits or angels supposed to attend each person. Hence, genius is a person or thing that powerfully influences another with the power of this spirit. Talent, on the other hand, is something that evolves from applying efforts to grow in a particular way (musical talent, artistic talent, etc.).

In this blog we are going to explore how to discover your genius and how to verbalize it in your message to differentiate yourself in a crowded market. I call it your verbal brand. Since your genius is a tutelary spirit that is always present to protect you, it allows you to create outcomes that have an immediate Aha! to it. It is this Aha! that gives us the window to discover our own genius.

So, how do we uncover our genius, given this genius and its Aha! connection?

One way is to reflect back in your various past efforts that have resulted in outcomes that created those Aha!s. You do not need to ask others what they were, but you know within yourself that when you worked on something and created an outcome that there was that inescapable Aha! Once you are able to see these episodes clearly, then you can classify them in different categories and find a way to verbalize them. This is how you verbalize your genius. Your genius is thus a cluster of a few unique skills that are crisply verbalized to appeal to the reader.

When these unique skills are showcased on your résumé, they must be packaged to align with your intended job pursuits. So, having a way to artfully verbalize these unique skills, torqued in the direction of the job’s needs is the important first step in building a strongly branded résumé. The reader of your résumé can now relate to how you create value in the context that they are looking for, because now it becomes manifestly obvious to this reader. All of this can sound simple, but it is not easy!

Why?

We live with our genius every day. So, to step back and to look at how we create those Aha!s in our everyday pursuits is something that needs special effort to objectify it in ways that becomes easily owned and communicated. One way is to write stories of our accomplishments in a detailed format. In one of my previous blogs I talked about your leadership narrative (So, What is Your Leadership Narrative, blog of July 18). We must learn how to narrate our story of a leadership success. Once that story is verbalized it is much easier to extract your genius from that story so that you can own it. This is the hard part of the entire process. Because we live with our genius every day it is hard for us to see it. It is these stories or leadership narratives that allow us to peek into that window to give us the insights we need about verbalizing our genius.

Most spend a few hours crafting their résumé to look pretty and to capture their stints, sometimes even their accomplishments. Many often seek the help of a professional résumé writer to make their résumé more presentable. No amount of money you can pay to such a writer will get you that insight about your own genius unless you do your own story telling and go through this trouble to extracting your genius as we discussed here. Writing a genius-based résumé is much harder and takes much longer. But, once this process is conquered your verbal branding will be much stronger and highly differentiated. Once you own this outcome you do not have to rely on others, including your mother, to tell you what your genius is!

Good luck!

This blog upends that admonition and makes a case for you to be happy where you are, but to be impatient about the change that you want to make, first starting with yourself!

In this context one of my clients recently came to see me and to tell me how bad her manager was and how there was no growth opportunity in her group. She also surmised that despite being a part of a high-visibility group at this blockbuster company, there was no place to grow. Her company had broken every sales record in the past decade and its stock had taken an over twenty-fold hike in the same period.

After exploring further we both quickly realized that the change that she was seeking was not needed from the outside (a promotion, a new assignment, new co-workers), but from within her own self. This is where one of the Gandhi’s famous quotes about change hits home, Be the change in the world that you wish to see!

Within the span of our session we both realized that, yes, she was getting bored with her routine at work and not having any challenges to conquer in the way her work was structured. Her boss, who was a strict command-and-control micro-manager, further compounded this. So, she started losing patience and was increasingly feeling unhappy about her job and about her overall situation. She was beginning to question her career choice.

After some discussion we agreed that if she now made a change to her external environment (new job, new assignment, new boss) then she is likely to repeat this pattern after that new environment became a routine once again, just as the current one did. Without changing her basic view of how she deals with her environment and reframing it, we both agreed that there was no sense in making a change in her external environment. So, we agreed to the following plan, which was both practical and was driven by her own desire to change, not by some outside agent that would want her to be patient to see that change. The strategy was to create and find happiness within her own environment by making a change, but to make the necessary change on her own terms, not someone else’s:

1. Identify top three development needs that she could pursue on her own to improve her overall effectiveness as a professional, who is getting ready for a higher leadership responsibility. She identified those three areas as: Better communication, improving her own work environment, and connecting with new people.
   • For improving her communication she agreed to join the local Toastmasters club and actively participate to learn good communication skills.
   • For improving her work environment, she agreed to make a list of special projects that would help those working in her group to improve their productivity and output. She was confident that once her manager saw that list that he would suggest the priorities in which she should prosecute those projects and support her pursuits. Since this was work beyond her assigned duties, she could pace it as time allowed and as her own interests drove the effort.
   • Since she felt stagnant with the friends that surrounded her, she agreed to make new friends by frequently visiting the company cafeteria during lunch, instead of eating alone every day at her desk. She also agreed to be open to connecting with those attending her Toastmasters group to expand her circle of friends.
2. Start writing stories of her accomplishments for her résumé to realize how much she had contributed to the success of her team and her organization. Her current résumé showed many bullets in a very dry, factual, and transactional way. They lacked any juicy story that excited and intrigued its reader. By moving the focus from writing a one-line bullet for each task, to writing a short story (3-4 lines of leadership narrative) would create a new energy around her message. Having such a résumé would invigorate her to undertake even bigger tasks to pursue what is listed in #1b, above. These tasks would now also provide further ammunition for her résumé, making it even more powerful.
3. Change the mode of working on a task in her current role from mere order taking to proactively seeking the assignments that added value to her organization. This was going to require more insight and initiative, but she agreed to this mode of taking on new tasks.
4. Provide mentoring and guidance to those in her group that would benefit from it. Even though she had no one reporting to her, her natural inclination was to share her expertise and to make things better; the very reason she came to seek my advice. Taking that a step further, if she could mentor more junior members in her team her role would become more valuable to the manager, the team, and the organization.
5. Send emails to the manager reporting the progress on special projects and seeking his guidance in critical areas. This would keep her both visible to her manager and on a growth track.

We often surrender our plight to many external forces as this client did. If she had changed her job or transferred to another group or company, without making the changes to her own style of working, in just a few years, we could have had another conversation, very similar to the one that started this chain, because nothing fundamentally was changed. When you start the change from within, the change you really seek comes naturally and a lot sooner than you realize. Here, now, you are in charge!

So, find happiness where you are and be impatient with the rate of change, by first starting the change within yourself.

Good luck!

Most prospects and some clients often approach me and ask why they are not able to get any upward movement in their careers. Those out of work think that it is the job market, those stuck in their careers think that it is the internal politics, and others simply wait for their manager to promote them when the timing is right! In the last instance, frequently, their manager goes away in a year or so and that cycle begins all over again, often thwarted by the new manager’s bringing their own protégé with them!

In most cases the simple reason for this cycle of hard work, promises of advancement, and new manager (or being suddenly laid-off) continues and many professionals surrender to this reality by blaming everything external to their plight: bad economy, cutbacks, bad manager, too much politics, and bad timing! Although some of their reasoning has merit, most get sidelined for reasons entirely created by their own handling of their career and how they project their message of leadership through their work, résumé, and their everyday behaviors at work.

Let me explain:

As an employee of your company you have an obligation to create value for your company and grow in the process. This growth, in turn, creates greater value for your company, creating a virtuous cycle. This does not mean that you must get increasingly more challenging tasks or greater responsibility to demonstrate your potential. What it does mean, however, is that you show initiative in understanding your own mission for continually creating greater value for your group, department, the organization, and ultimately, your company. This requires that you not merely take orders from your manager to comply with each order, but that you show initiative to descry what is not happening around you and find avenues to make that happen. This undone or ignored work must connect to improving the customer experience, making things better in your own organization, or advancing the state of knowledge in your area of work. This is what leadership is and this is what one is expected to do; not just do the work from your Job Description!

Now, once you are able to change your mindset to understand your responsibility to create greater value for your organization, that accomplishment must be presented in a narrative that captures your leadership and shows how you think, how you find opportunities, and how you deliver value above and beyond your mission. This, now, becomes your leadership narrative. Without this leadership narrative, you are just a cog in the wheel and are there at your place of work for a paycheck!  Looking at the above definition of “narrative,”  having this story with a constant thread of insightful actions stemming from how you see your work, not as merely following orders your manager gives, but as an endless mission of creating increasingly greater value to please the customer (or to please yourself if you do not have a direct customer connection).

So, what are some of the behaviors you must embrace to be able to showcase your leadership narrative in your own everyday work? Here are some suggestions:

1. Understand what business your company is in and how that translates into the work that your immediate work group does. Find out how what you can do makes a difference to the end user or customer. The answer to this question may not always come as doing more work faster, but as doing different work differently! Find a greater purpose in your own area of work.
2. Look at what you do and find out new avenues to do that work. Look at the workflow and see how the input and the output from where you sit affect those at the two ends of the mini-supply chain. Reach out on both sides and see if you can optimize that loop.
3. See what your group is struggling with in everyday work. If it requires a new process, take it on as an assignment; if it entails approaching someone higher-up to get them to rethink what has already been decided, then learn how to get your point across and influence their thinking to make a change; if it is miscommunication between groups find out ways to create a better communication process. The opportunities are endless!
4. When looking for opportunities for improvement start with the ones that affect what you do the most. That way you can claim a bullet about that in your résumé. A bullet that reads, Discovering that analyzing field failure data took too long to incorporate that into the ongoing design improvements for the next product release, decided to go to the source and gave Field Engineers an online method of capturing data, eliminating the paper entries, and making each entry available in real-time, will put a shine on your otherwise dull résumé! Similar bullets with such stories will now make up for a strong leadership narrative.
5. One way to motivate your actions is to foreordain a bullet on your résumé and then take on that task to honor your commitment to yourself.
6. Frequently meet with your manager and review your “above-and-beyond” contributions, so that they are aware of your value. Also, send out an email to those that matter touting your accomplishments. If such emails are written in recognition of the work others did to support your cause it becomes politically more acceptable and those who helped you will get due credit in the management’s eyes. Remember, the real hero here is YOU!
7. Compare your résumé with those of your peers (especially those seen as stars) and see how your narrative compares with theirs. If you cannot compete with their formidable, raw talent and the depth of their technical contribution, trump them with your perspicacious business outlook and value added to it by improving how things happen! If you do not have access to their résumé, looking up their LinkedIn Profile can be an acceptable proxy to this. Always keep your LinkedIn Profile current.
8. Look for the job description for next level of promotion and try to bring that language in your résumé as you do your current job. It is much easier for your manager to champion you if you are already performing at a level where the opening lies or can be created to accommodate your desire to get promoted.
9. Always keep yourself marketable and become a passive candidate. Manage your LinkedIn Profile and spruce it up with strong Recommendations from those that matter.
10. Do not get too attached to your own job. If you follow this approach you’ll become highly marketable as you do your everyday work, without even having to look for another job to get yourself promoted!

Good luck!

So, regardless of your current status what are some of the mistakes to avoid in conducting a productive job search? Here is a list that I have compiled directly from my experience working with clients during the past year. Not all clients sought my advice from the get-go; many experiences came out of their frustration from being out of work too long, or for getting stuck in a particular stage of the hiring process—many interviews but no offer!

1. A Generalized Résumé: Many take the easy way out by creating a generalized message for various job categories that they can pursue. Each category of jobs must have a unique résumé that showcases your value in the strongest way you can articulate. Do not insert factitious words in the Keywords section of your résumé just to get past the screening. It is best to have the Keywords as a part of your narrative throughout your résumé. Also, use variants of the same words to get through this screening process: Project Management, Program Management, and Project Lead, as an example.
2. A Mundane Cover Letter: I strongly recommend writing a cover letter when applying for an “A” job or company. The most common mistake applicants make is to repeat what is in their résumé and the job description to make it easier to submit the cover letter. A cover letter must show some deep and studied insights about the job, the company, and the challenge it faces in today’s environment. This takes time and is not always easy.
3. A Shotgun Campaign: This is where you respond to any job that remotely corresponds to what you do with a generic résumé, hoping someone will call you. Your campaign must be well designed with a clear understanding of who the “A,” “B,” and “C” targets are.
4. Not Following-up: If you are responding to an “A” target with a great message (résumé and cover letter) find ways to get your message in front of the hiring manager through some clever means. Find a friend or someone (do they get a referral bonus?) who can do that for you and then get the hiring manager’s name to call for a follow-up. I have written extensively in my blogs (and YouTube postings) about how to follow-up without coming across as a stalker. Use these methods.
5. Unprepared Interviews: Most go through these interviews only occasionally in their careers. So, do not assume that you can finesse them without good practice and some coaching. Find someone to video record you doing an interview and catch your own mistakes as you watch yourself on the screen.
6. Acting Anxious/Desperate: Being out of work is difficult, so any chance to face an interview is a tempting opportunity to hurry-up the process and to get to the offer stage. Ease-up and show your confidence in how you come across. It is quite easy to sense the anxiety and desperation even though you may do your best to stifle it. Certain degree of being nervous is normal, but do not let that translate into any other behavior that will not serve you!
7. Discussing Salary/Title Prematurely: If the interview train is gathering speed, do not rush to discuss salary or title until they are ready to do so. Here again, do not throw out a number to show them your confidence or value (as you see it). Once the interview screening is coming to an end the question of salary will come up. This also means that they are ready to move to an offer stage. Here it is best to first find out what role (title) you would be playing in the new job. Then asking about the range for that job is a good start. DO NOT ever lie about your current salary, but negotiate what you want in the new job, based on the value you create.
8. Not Sending Thank-you Notes: Sending these notes (email or otherwise) allows you an opportunity to clear up any misapprehension that may come out of the interview discussion. Also, very few people know how to write impactful notes, so if you can write a good thank-you note, it is one more arrow in your quiver!
9. Abandoning Your Campaign: This is the most detrimental step to concluding your campaign successfully. The best strategy is to organize your campaign so that you have three-four targets where you are interviewing during your final stages of the campaign. With this approach you can easily parlay the advanced stage of one target into generating action with others. Without this strategy you are at the mercy of their timeline. I cannot tell you how many times clients abandoned all other efforts, once one target moved rapidly through the interview process and then nothing happened for a long time. This is where you can leverage the action you have on other fronts into where you want to get your job offer. Repeatedly calling the hiring manager/recruiter rapidly erodes your desirability as a candidate and makes you look that much more desperate.
10. Not Negotiating the Package: When you have managed your campaign well, you should have action on multiple fronts and several offers in a short window. You must learn how to negotiate to get what you want regardless of the economy. It never hurts to ask if there is any room for negotiation. Not doing so will compromise your own value in the minds of your prospect employer.

It is not easy being out and looking for a job in any job market. Even if you have a job and are looking for a better opportunity the suggestions above apply equally!

Good luck!

A man was walking by. He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat. He then took the sign, turned it around, and wrote some words. He put the sign back so that everyone who walked by would see the new words.

Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy.

That afternoon the man who had changed the sign came to see how things were. The boy recognized his footsteps and asked, “Were you the one who changed my sign this morning? What did you write?

The man said, “I only wrote the truth. I said what you said but in a different way.” I wrote: “Today is a beautiful day but I cannot see it.”

Both signs told people that the boy was blind. But the first sign simply and factually said that the sign’s holder was blind. The second sign told people that they were so lucky not to be blind.

Should we be surprised that the second sign was more effective?

The reason that it was effective and got different results because that change in message moved passers-by to act from their hearts and not from their brains. Facts merely appeal to the brain as to their veracity. Most decisions come from the heart!

Moral:

Be creative. Be innovative. Think differently and positively. Appeal to people’s hearts through their minds!

As a career coach I see the same mindset that professionals carry when they create their marketing message. It is steeped in factual data about their accomplishments and about how great they are at what they do. What they fail to see is how what they are stating as facts affects the reader, a decision maker, in how they respond to their message.

In the above story the change in the direction of the message, from “me” to “you,” made all the difference in the outcome. Not only that, it made passers-by even feel good about their generosity!

The same is true about any message you create about yourself that you want to result in some benefit to you. To achieve that goal you must first see the benefit others get from what you are offering. So, in the case of your résumé if you move the message from “me centric” to “reader centric” by finding their pain and then their gain by their engaging you, you will have a response very similar to what that blind boy experienced at the end of that fateful day!

Enjoy this beautiful day!

When the question comes to marketing themselves, the most common refrain is that their resume does not get any attention or responses from their targets where they have sent it for consideration. When I ask them how they have constructed their message, I get puzzled looks and many sheepishly admit that they have merely documented what they have done in their jobs that they held to create a chronology of their past. By doing so, they have resigned themselves to continuing their past, albeit perhaps in a new role.

Herein lies the problem!

When the job market gets tighter hiring managers are looking for someone who can bring a new set of eyes and skills to the open jobs. Sometimes, the jobs do not even have to be open for you to be considered for a position. How? Not all jobs are identified in any company and many do not even know how they could structure new positions in a dynamic and uncertain economy to position themselves better. Here, you can define something that a company may be interested in and present it as an opportunity that the company can pursue to its advantage!

To be able to get such attention you MUST craft a message that is more than merely documenting your past and compiling an inventory of your chronological assignments in the past jobs. In fact, sometimes what you have merely done in the past can get in the way of your advancing yourself in a beneficial way.

How?

Unless you can show that you are much more than your past assignments you are consigned to the fate of all those who treat their resumes as merely a vehicle to document your past. This means that you want your future to be an extension of your past.

If you are lucky!

Why not command your own future with a message that is forward looking and that excites the reader to consider you as someone who is positioned differently from everyone else?

How is this possible?

The most dramatic example of this possibility is what Barrack Obama has done in his campaign. Here is a person who has barely got into his first Senate term, with little or no political experience, someone who has never drafted any significant legislation, who is from a minority community, who has admitted to using drugs, who has never served in armed forces, whose name raises doubts in some people’s minds about his origins and loyalties, and who has never had any executive experience. He systematically starts his campaign to run for the highest office in the country. With his current momentum I would not be surprised if he becomes our next president.

How did he do it?

1. By focusing on the future and capturing people’s imagination. If he had relied merely on his resume (his past) he would not have got even to the first base!
2. He told his story through his books and speeches. You can do that, too! Instead of writing dry bullets on your resume about what you boss told you to do and how you did it, tell your reader why you did what you did and how well you did it (a story of your leadership)
3. Be persistent. Keep your message on target and do not waver from it. Capture the readers’ imagination by telling stories about your leadership and by showing what you can do that others cannot
4. Separate your resume from your message (Barrack is the best example of this) and separate what you did from who you are. The resume is not about what you did but it is about the message that you want to send as to who you are!
5. Be authentic in all that you convey and project. Without that authenticity all you have is a “campaign promise.”
6. Keep tinkering. Keep your message fresh and relevant. Keep trying to gather feedback and update your message.
7. Synchronize your message: your resume, your cover letter, your campaign, and your actions must all be in synch for others to believe in you!

No matter how tough the job market is there are always jobs and there are always opportunities that companies are trying to exploit. In fact, in tough times there are more opportunities than most realize!

Now go and conquer them!

It is better to sleep on things beforehand than to lie awake about them

afterwards. -Baltasar Gracian, philosopher and writer (1601-1658)

As a career coach I routinely work with clients to make their resumes more presentable. In the process I am often surprised by the number of clients who want to misstate facts or who want to present an outright lie.

Having worked with over 3,500 clients I can say with some experience that those who are tempted to misstate facts are tempted by their desire to match what the job descriptions asks for that they cannot provide. Most common temptations are previous job titles, accomplishments, and oh, the mother of them all, college degrees!

What most do not realize is that checking facts is easy in this Googlized world! Also, people you do not even suspect as possibly fact providers can be working at your prospect employer and they can quickly spot a phony. What most do not realize is that telling truth in ways that serves a situation is far more valuable to you than lying about it in ways that can be a gottcha later! Despite this, nearly 40% of applicants lie on their resumes. And, this goes all the way up to the CEO resumes. Who can forget how Radio Shack had to fire its CEO a few years back because he had lied on his resume. Stories of high-level cheats abound in the corporate world!

It is much easier to state the facts and get in for an interview than to spend sleepless nights wondering about when you are going to get caught in your new job for having lied on your resume, as the quote at the head of this blog admonishes.

In one case, a client of mine brought me a job opening at a major defense contractor. The job required a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and at least 10 years’ experience. My client had a stellar record in all the areas that they had listed in the job description, except that he only had the Master’s degree (from Stanford!). So, he sheepishly told me that he was going to put that he had a Ph.D. from Stanford and send his response, despite my admonition that such things could be easily checked.

He came back the next day and agreed that it would be wrong to do this and that if he were caught (I guaranteed it!) that would be a black mark against him or worse! So, he asked how he could get through the computerized screening process without meeting the job requirements. I suggested to him that the computer was going to look for a “Ph.D. in the resume under “Education,” so why not state the degree he already had and write “no Ph.D.” He liked the idea and we submitted his response with the truthful resume and a cover letter that highlighted why he would be a great candidate!

Viola!

He got a call for a telephone interview and soon he was invited to a round of interviews. Not once was he asked about his not having a Ph.D. during the interviews. He ended up not getting the job, not because he was not qualified, but because he was not able to qualify for the rigors of the screening process for his security clearance, which this job required.

The moral of the story: Avoid any lies on your resume. It is easy to catch them. Instead, tell the truth in ways that positions you favorably and sleep well at night!

Whenever I mention to my clients, who are going after open jobs, to write cover letters in their response I get incredulous looks and an insinuation that I am hopelessly out of date and impractical. Why? They have heard from many recruiters that cover letters are a waste of time because no one reads them!

Wrong!

Yes, recruiters see thousands of resumes and their job is to winnow the stack to a few and present them to the hiring manager for further action. Typically, recruiters spend from three to 20 seconds scanning a resume and then making a decision about the resume. A cover letter takes time away from this. Beside, most (90% of the applicants) do not know the real function of a cover letter and how much impact it can make in the hiring manager’s mind about your candidacy.

In all my writings about resume design I categorically state that a resume is not about you, rather, it is about how what you have to offer aligns with the job that you are pursuing. If the resume is about the job, then the cover letter must be about the company and the hiring manager’s pain!

Right on!

Most applicants, typically, summarize their credentials in the top part of the cover letter and in the bottom, they copy and paste the key attributes from the job description. The final line in the letter is typically a claim of how well-matched the two narratives are and hence their qualifications for the job!

Only a fool would fall for this trick. To make a cover letter mean anything to the reader (the hiring manager) it must have the following elements:

1. A clear statement of what you bring to the job and why that is going to be important to the hiring manager
2. A clear understanding of the state of the industry, the company, and the specific pain points of the department where you would be hired. How can one get all this information? If you are on top of what is going on in your own area of expertise the first two items are not that difficult to glean from the research that you can do. Now, for the specific hiring manager’s pain you must make some inferences from the available information and by talking to your network embedded in the company. All you need to make is a plausibility argument, not a forensic one!
3. In your letter you must clearly show that you understand these three vital elements and that you will deliver on your promise to eliminate the hiring manager’s pain if they hired you. It is that simple.
4. The entire package must be delivered to the hiring manager by some unusual means, in addition to the regular channels (responding on the company’s Website). Sending a package by US Mail or by overnight courier usually does the trick.
5. You MUST follow-up in a week by calling the hiring manager!

A Cover letter is much like a closing argument a lawyer makes to the court before his case goes to the jury. It is the message that goes with each juror into the jury room and the one that carries most impact because of its freshness and the conviction it presents about your take on the case. Without that passion and conviction any closing argument will ring hollow!

If you are serious about a job opportunity you must send a great resume with an equally worthy cover letter and rest your case!

Good luck!

“Your reach should be greater than your grasp.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson

You do not have to go far to realize that the job market today is really tough these days! What makes it even tougher for those who are already out and looking and for those who are on the verge of a layoff is that they see no hope for them to overcome their plight because there are fewer and fewer jobs of the kind that they did before. They are scared to try something else, either because they do not know how to create a message that allows them to launch a credible campaign in a new direction, or that they are simply out of ideas!

Traditional résumés are constructed using deductive reasoning. It is iron-clad by virtue of its logical power. It is also historical, so no one can doubt your veracity, unless you chose to overtly lie to get away with something just to claim what you do not deserve. In my experience with nearly 4,000 clients across the globe in a variety of situations is that most underestimate their worth and overestimate their value! This statement looks like a contradiction, but let me explain:

Our worth is what we are capable of doing (“reach” in the Emerson quote, above). Whereas our value is what we can transactionally extract when engaged in what we typically do (our “grasp.”). For example, working in our jobs we often believe (and feel) that we can do a much better job than what our boss is doing. We also believe that we deserve a much bigger raise for our contributions at work. This is our dented sense of proprioception about ourselves that prompts us to believe that our value is much greater than it is as perceived by others or than how it is rewarded. Emerson also wrote: We judge ourselves by what we are capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done! This is normal and many of us spend agonizing hours brooding over how undervalued we are because of this very fact! We go through all kinds of contortions to get a measly one percent higher raise than the next guy!

Worth, on the other hand is something that is intrinsic to us and it reflects what we can be if we reach out and apply ourselves in different and unusual ways. In the context of your transactional engagement (such as you current or previous job) it requires a different mindset for you to leap into a position that allows you to apply yourself in a new direction. Such a campaign requires a message that is different from what your typical résumé conveys.

How can one do this?

Well, you do not have to go far to see how this is done. Candidate Barack Obama successfully overcame his résumé to craft a message that got him the job he was after. To develop a message that is different from your résumé requires an inductive résumé (my phrase). An inductive résumé creates a forward looking message that takes you from the known to the unknown; quite a change from the linear, deductive résumé that everyone is used to and knows how to do well!

An inductive résumé is what can propel you in a new direction in this market. Despite its gloom and doom the current job market is rife with interesting, even exciting, possibilities. All you have to do is show a target employer (of your choosing) what is not happening for them in the realm that you have interest in and how you can make it happen for them. This requires some research, some fortitude and enormous self-confidence to pull it off. As a career coach I have done this myself five times (this is my fifth career) and have done this for my clients nearly 4,000 times across the globe. These are my proof points. If you do not believe these, go to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, DC and have a session with Barack himself!

Making an inductive leap requires the following elements:

A clear vision of what you want to do

Owning your genius that allows you to craft a verbal message that translates what you have done into what you can do

A few compelling stories that link your genius (Unique Skills) to your achievements in a direction that makes your claim of value creation in a new direction credible

A campaign that is highly targeted and moxy that is second to none!

Good luck!

As up-and-coming managers seek increasingly higher titles and responsibilities in their ongoing career growth, how they present their value proposition to the prospect employer becomes increasingly important. A resume is your proxy in a job search, and, regardless of how your connections help you get in to see the decision makers, it is your resume that establishes your credentials. True, a senior executive can bring you in because someone has recommended you or that they know you personally. Nevertheless, once you walk away from that encounter your resume that you leave behind is what is circulated for further review and actions. If it does not project the right message, you may not be able to sustain the welcome that was accorded by those whom you knew!

So, what makes the message on an executive resume stand out and what projects that je ne sais quoi that everyone is looking for? Well, the answer is simple, and, yet, it is elusive for most.

One thing for sure that is a “maker” in an executive resume is the progression of responsibilities and accomplishments in the specific area of your expertise. For example, if you want to be a senior executive at a retail conglomerate, you must show progressively greater span of responsibilities and accomplishments in the retail space. At very senior levels, e.g., CEO, this matters less. But, for most senor executives specific vertical experience in an industry is central to moving ahead.

The “breaker,” then, is the inability to build consensus and relationships across broad constituencies. A single ‘breaker” can negate many “makers’ for moving ahead in an executive selection process. One major breaker for senior executives is their “soft skills.”

So, what are soft skills?

Soft skills is a phrase that some HR person concocted in the late ‘70s to describe attributes that round out leadership skills of those who are otherwise technically very proficient (It is probably the same person who came up with the word empowerment, a little later!). Most leaders (managers and executives) grow in their careers by parlaying their technical expertise in an area into becoming a people manager. Here, technical implies the subject matter in which they are an expert (SME). SMEs can be in any field, not just in  technology, as is often mistakenly perceived. You can be an SME in corporate law, forensic testing, or a language, etc. As they grow in this role as an SME, they realize that the skills that they practiced to be a top technical contributor are very different from the ones that make them a top manager. To be a good leader and a manager of resources you must learn how to inspire others to achieve results. In its original framing, whoever conceived the idea of soft skills envisioned them as a disparate layer of attributes that round out one’s leadership capabilities. Although this may be true to certain extent, a true leader accomplishes what they set out to do by integrating their technical and soft skills in an intertwined way. They are not separable. If you try too hard to portray your soft skills (through affect), especially during the screening process, you can undermine your leadership force and come across as a weak leader.

What are some of the soft skills that are important in a leader’s role and as a manager? The following list may provide a glimpse:

1. Quickly grasping the gravity of a situation (also known as lateral thinking)
2. Being a visionary
3. Leading/Inspiring teams
4. Crisis management
5. Public speaking
6. Being approachable
7. Having composure
8. Ethics and values
9. Respect for other
10. Empathy
11. Integrity
12. Listening skills
13. Conflict management
14. Morale building
15. Decision-making
16. Critical thinking

Although this is not an exhaustive list of soft skills, they represent a good sampling.

In a resume it may be fatuous for you to present yourself as a “Highly ethical and moral leader with great conflict-management and decision-making skills who respects others and treats them as true equals regardless of their age, sex, race, and accent.” However, it may be entirely apt to tell several stories that reflect leadership achievements, which would not be possible without these soft skills and which are anchored to your Unique Skills.

For example, this resume bullet tells a great deal about a leader who can deliver: Was recruited to turn around a foundering project with key team members leaving and the customer threatening legal action. Discovered that the original project was ill conceived, without specific deliverables. Met with the customer and redefined project, re-scoped entire effort, regrouped team, and led the new effort to completion, exceeding customer expectations.

Such a bullet, although a bit longer than its traditional counterpart, (Delivered a critical project on time), speaks volumes about a leader’s true capabilities: hard skills, soft skills, political skills, and each of the 16 listed items above and then some, when anchored to a Unique Skill(s) and placed on a resume! Traditional resume writers exhort their clients to write about their soft skills because they do not know how to present their clients’ leadership stories that embody their entire suite of valuable skills. In such cases, a listing of mere “soft skills” looks almost gratuitous and inapt.

To continue the above illustration, a relevant Unique Skill can be Inspire Teams: Re-ignite demoralized and dysfunctional teams by providing hands-on leadership and establishing accountabilities. Build new teams from the ground-up and inspire them to achieve unprecedented outcomes.

So, what is the take away from this article? If you are positioning yourself as an executive through your resume, make sure that you have a good assortment of stories that provide a glimpse into your leadership window from different perspectives and that capture different aspects of your hard and soft skills. Writing such stories in a concise, compelling, and intriguing way, of course, requires a skill that is worth developing.