The 3 Skills You Need to Succeed in Your Career and Business
Master these skills to get ahead and survive any crisis.
WE need to deal with the truth.
The world is either in a recession or heading towards one.
The of a CNBC article said the U.S. is in a ‘medically induced coma’.
33.5 million people in the United States filed for unemployment in the last 7 weeks. That is about 18.6% of the total workforce. 7.5 million small businesses are at risk of closing.
The IMF is projecting global growth to fall to -3% and is expecting the world economy to experience the worst recession since the Great Depression.
At one point those 33.5 million people will need to work again. And they will all be competing for the same jobs. It will be an employer’s market. The war for talent will be shunted, for a time. The businesses still able to hire will only employ those individuals with the right skillset and means to improve their bottomline, attract other talent, and establish new business.
You can’t control the economy but you can control your skills. — Tim Denning
Most of the 33.5 million will do another reiteration of their resume. Only a small percentage will learn the skills necessary to improve their careers, businesses, and lives.
There are three specific skills you need to compete and succeed in every recession, depression, or whatever else happens during and after a pandemic.
Every leader needs them in their toolbox. More importantly, you need them.
Forward Thinking
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now. –Chinese Proverb.
What do Blockbuster Video, Kodak, and Borders Books have in common? None of them survived the crisis which threatened all their businesses.
Blockbuster had an opportunity to buy Netflix for $50 million. Today Netflix has over 50 million subscribers while there is only one Blockbuster left in the world. It’s in Bend, Oregon.
Kodak invented the digital camera but decided to stay focused on photo printing. It went bankrupt in 2012 and today everyone takes a selfie with a cell phone.
Borders Books was a 40-year business before Amazon, e-readers, and other online retailers made the company obsolete.
When faced with challenges to their business model, these companies dug deep into their belief system and refused to change. Forward thinking leaders do not stay mired in the past and reliving past successes.
Forward thinking is a high-level skill which incorporates vision with unconventional thinking.
Forward thinking is a leader’s greatest tool when dealing with a crisis. The best way to manage a crisis is to prepare for it before it happens.
One aspect of good leadership is recognizing the sea of change coming on the horizon before it affects your life, business, and community. It’s not easy to anticipate change. It means developing new and relevant skills, learning from failure, and having the humility to listen to experts.
A forward-thinking leader must be self-aware. In a May 2012 article written in the MIT Sloan Management Review, How to Become a Better Leader, authors Ginka Toegel and Jean-Louis Barsoux surveyed 75 members of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council. The majority believed self-awareness was the most important capability a leader should develop.
Forward thinking anticipates threats to your career, business, finances, and home.
No one could have predicted a virus named COVID-19 will appear in China and spread throughout the world, but Dr. Michael Osterholm, infectious disease epidemiologist, warned for over a decade the United States is not prepared to deal with a pandemic.
Becoming a forward Thinker
Learn from past mistakes but don’t dwell on them
Don’t carry excess baggage from your past. Take the lessons from your failures and turn them into successes.
Forward thinking leaders are self-aware.
Ask yourself these two questions:
- Where are you weak?
- Where are you strong?
If your job is more analytically driven than it was 5 years ago, then take classes in data science. Learn new hard skills like coding, software architecture, or project management.
Forward thinking leaders do not discard an idea because it might contradict their worldview or business model. They are self-aware and more open to opportunity.
4 Actions You Can Take Right Now to be a Forward Thinker
- Update your LinkedIn profile. It should not read like your resume. Customize your URL. Get a new, more professional picture. Write a headline that stands out and is more searchable. If you need help, connect with me on LinkedIn and tell me you read my article on Medium. I’ll do what I can.
- Get a personal website highlighting your unique value proposition. Set up a blog showcasing your skills and how they can help your customers overcome their challenges. Write about your customer’s or prospective employer’s pain over and over. Remember you are the solution.
- Write about your expertise on Medium, LinkedIn, or any other platform. Everyone is an expert at something. Share your expertise. Share solutions. And remember, You Are the Solution.
- Write a book. Find your clients’ three biggest problems, show the challenges they face, give examples, offer a solution, and ask past clients to endorse you. Send a copy to every prospect and then offer a more in-depth solution.
Anticipate threats
In the final analysis, forward thinking is you searching for new opportunities and preparing for crises.
Michael Osterholm wrote in an August 13, 2009 article for the Center for Disease Research and Policy that it is impossible to accurately predict the severity of a pandemic. Your guiding principle must remain the following: Expect the unexpected.
Turn Crisis into Opportunity
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before. — Rahm Emanuel
Finding opportunity in adversity is the hallmark skill of great men and women. This trait defines careers. From it, more millionaires and billionaires are created than any other skill.
Real leaders use crises as an opportunity to align communities, families, businesses, and countries in one direction, where each person is working on and part of the solution.
When you are confronted with a crisis, especially in a recession or pandemic, use that moment to incentivize change, to establish new behaviors and habits, learn new skills (like the ones you’re reading now), and open new markets.
An article written on Brookings Institute website shows a crisis yields certain advantages you cannot obtain in any other moment.
During a crisis, incentives and motivations change, potentially leading to new cooperative behaviors and even to the creation of new systems or structures. Crises can get the collective adrenaline flowing, focusing minds to solve the problem at hand.
An example of finding an opportunity in a crisis
Six years ago, a friend was recruited to be the warranty manager for a manufacturing company in Southern California. It was a step up in her career and she was excited for it. It went great for awhile until a year later when the company filed for bankruptcy.
My friend wanted to find another job but had one problem — her daughter had cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy. She did not want to change health insurance during treatment.
One day while walking through their warehouse she saw that several of the production technicians were throwing away perfectly good parts. The company did not have a parts business so any excess material was thrown away.
She asked the techs to save the parts for her while she called her customers to see if they would buy the parts from her. By the end of the day, my friend sold every part that was going to be thrown away.
In the middle of a bankruptcy, when her company had no cash flow coming in, my friend sold old parts to her customers at a 300% mark up. The next day she went back to the warehouse to see if there were any more parts she could sell. Five years later, my friend still leads her company’s warranty departments along with a multimillion-dollar parts business.
A crisis is an opportunity to reinvent yourself
4 Ways to Find Opportunity
- Define the Crisis. Recognize what is or is not a crisis. How does it affect you and your business?
- Identify the greatest need presented by the crisis and find a way to fill it. During the pandemic clothing manufacturers making face masks and personal protection equipment, GM is manufacturing ventilators, distilleries are making hand sanitizers, restaurants are becoming local grocery stores. Be willing to innovate and experiment. Find the need and pivot towards it.
- Your Problem is another person’s treasure. My friend turned literal trash into a million dollar business for her company. What is your trash worth?
- List your challenges. If you have a problem, chances are 10 million other people have the same problem. Solve your two most pressing challenges and then sell the solution. Post an article on Medium and LinkedIn detailing how you did it.
The philosopher Karl Popper once said,
“All life is problem solving.”
Do you want to succeed in a recession? Do you want your resume or business to stand out? Become a problem solver.
Build a Community
My favorite leadership quote is a reminder to recognize the difference between leading and someone knowing my name.
If no one is following you, are you leading or just taking a walk?
The greatest leaders build communities.
A community is not a place or an organization. Communities are about people and relationships. It is a profound feeling of belonging where individuals or groups have the capacity to affect change within and outside the communal environment.
In 2008, Kevin Kelly wrote 1000 True Fans and revised the article again in Tim Ferriss’s book Tool of Titans. Kelly defines a true fan as a fan that will buy anything you produce and will go to extreme lengths to see you or purchase your next product.
A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. — Kevin Kelly
Building a community goes beyond fandom. Fans are, by definition, selfish. They are in it for themselves.
A community is vision oriented and tribal. It adheres to a code or mission, cares about the welfare of its members and the continued success of the group — with or without the leader.
Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, calls this Level 5 leadership. Level 5 leaders are ambitious, but their ambition is “first and foremost for the cause”.
Communities are self-growing. They continue with or without the cult of personality which typically follows a leader. A community is legacy building.
Today, building a community requires the ability to write well. It starts with growing an online presence of followers who over time become fans willing to go to extreme lengths to see you or buy what you have to sell.
The Difference Between Followers, Fans, and a Community
- Followers are people who read your posts with interests. You change the way they think and feel. There is value with this skillset.
- Fans are customers. You can make a good living or become rich with fans.
- A community develops leaders, creates legacies and generational wealth. It lasts beyond the influence of the founder.
4 Paths to Building a Community
- Have a cause. And then write about it. Tim Flannery, founder of Startup Climbing and venture partner at Pilot Mountain Ventures, wrote in a 2015 HuffPost article the #1 Rule for building a community — Just Do Something. Build a community around ideas. And not just yours.
- Write to influence. Most bloggers write to persuade and sell. Influence goes beyond selling. When you persuade you are right once. Influence is leadership. With influence you can create a tribe to take up your cause. The tribe becomes both your customer and sales team.
- It starts with 1000 fans. The number is arbitrary. You need fans who are willing to buy your products/services, and even more important, your ideas. A product becomes obsolete over time. A service can be redundant. Ideas are forever. They are hard to kill. Sell an idea. Grow a cause. Have a mission.
- Network, recruit, and develop leaders. Build a tribe of influencers. Each one evangelizing your cause — their cause. The influence of the community will grow exponentially. To achieve this result, you will need to network with change agents and recruit them to your cause. This requires you learn how to sell and negotiate.
Community Building Takes Time
You can equate creating a community to the growth of a bamboo tree. The first four years you see very little or no growth. Then in the fifth year, the little bamboo shoot grows 90 feet. In the beginning, a community takes a lot of watering, a lot of love, and then out of nowhere it grows and never stops. Medium was like that. So was Facebook, Tiny Buddha, and Apple.
Build a Community Within a Community
A shortcut to starting a community is to find and join an organization whose cause aligns with your own. The fastest way to increase your influence is to give value to others. Medium is perhaps the best example of that. You bring two ways in Medium.
First, you write an article that will (you and I both hope) will change the reader’s life.
Second, you read and follow other writers.
The publication in that Medium that embodies collaboration, value, and wanting success for its followers is ILLUMINATION. Dr Mehmet Yildiz founded ILLUMINATION. His goal was to give writers a home where they can feel safe, wanted, meet and work with other authors, to grow and a following of their own. The community he built has grown to 7000+ Followers in 7 Weeks.
In the process, many great women and men have joined the Illumination cause. One word at a time, they are changing the world.
Writers Who Are Building a Community Within a Community
Dr Ron Pol, Paul Myers MBA, Roz Warren, Tim Denning, Todd Lankford, Salam Khan, Amy Marley, Carolyn Riker, Helen Cassidy Page, Rakia Ben Sassi, Tree Langdon ♾️, Desiree Driesenaar, Priyanka Srivastava, Robert Locke, 🦄 Chris Hedges, Mary Holden, Joe Luca, Shin Jie Yong, Brian E. Wish, PhD, Sylvia Love Johnson, Jennifer Geer, Sana Rose, JeffHerring.com, Jeffery Keefer, Maïa Belart, Jill Reid, Dr. David Martin, Jessica Alfaqih, Jill Ebstein, Gabriela Rosales, Holly Jahangiri, Sherry McGuinn, Jessica Cote, Carolyn Riker, Anchal Sood, PhD, Jody McAlister, Vincent Van Patten, Kevin Buddaeus, Terri DelCampo-Nelson, Terry Mansfield, Simran Kankas, Deborah Barchi, Nicole Linke, Melanie Ehrenkranz, Edie Tuck, Zsanyla Cabansag, Rui Carreira, Dipti Pande, Emme Beckett, Deborah Horton, Chris Johnson, Dr. Joanne Weidhaas, MD, PhD, MSM, Vivi Ambelioti, Mohamed El-Masry, Tim Ebl, Lucie Switalski, Jamie McIntosh, René Junge, Kira Dawn, R Tsambounieri Talarantas, Riku Arikiri, Gurpreet Dhariwal, Zsanyla Cabansag, Francine Fallara
This is just a small sample. Why don’t you join them.
Do you need to develop all three skills to be successful? No, but imagine if you did.
Start with one skill. Write to influence. Build a following that grows into 1000 fans. Find opportunity in adversity. Become a problem solver. Look to recognize and prepare for a crisis before it lands on your front door. Create a life, career, or business that expects the unexpected, and get paid for it.
What would your life be like if you became a market leader in just one of those skills? Master one or more of these skills, and find out.
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The past 20 years I recruited the top 1% of talent across many industries and set up partnerships with technology companies. I know how to make candidates and businesses stand out from the competition. If you need help with your resume, business, or finding a way to brag, connect with me on LinkedIn. Mention this article.