My Repeatable Approach for Success

The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from Rise: 3 Practical Steps for Advancing Your Career, Standing Out as a Leader, and Liking Your Life by Patty Azzarello, copyright © 2012. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group. Based on my 80-20 list for careers, these tips look pretty spot on.

It’s not that the unspoken rules of success are any big secret; it’s just that most executives never bother to talk about them or share them in a way that is useful to and doable by others. That’s where this book and the model I have developed come in.

I want to give you big insights that will shape how you think about your work for the rest of your life, and practical ideas for things you can start doing right now that will make a big difference in your success.

In this book I have gathered all the ideas, insights, and necessary actions and provided the context for how it all works together. Success doesn’t come from being good at just one thing. It comes from doing a combination of things on purpose, over time, that all build on each other to create remarkable outcomes. But you have to understand the whole picture to know why each part of it matters.

My approach for success has three parts. I am a pretty plainspoken person, so I call them

• DO Better


• LOOK Better


• CONNECT Better

Big success requires all three—not in isolation or in sequence, but in combination. Missing any one of them is what causes most career stalls or washouts. Without taking some care to make progress on all three, you fall behind—you get stuck.

Here is where you can begin to see why hard work alone doesn’t cut it. The work is only in the DO Better category. If you burn up all your time and energy doing excellent work, you may fail to get recognized (LOOK Better) and fail to build a network of support (CONNECT Better). So your career stalls. You are doing an excellent job of everything that is asked of you but you still get stuck.

Remember, it’s not just about the work.

To add real value to the business, you need to understand what is truly valuable to the business and you need to build a broad network of support so you can deliver significant results in a big and far-reaching enough way.

DO Better

DO Better is about producing exceptional results. DO Better is about working on the right things in the right ways. It’s about rising above the work. DO Better is about freeing yourself from your overwhelming tactical workload and identifying and delivering on the few most critical outcomes—the ones that really count. DO Better is about tuning your job, knowing yourself really well, and putting yourself in situations where you can thrive in your work and accomplish exceptional things. It’s also about how you lead, build trust, delegate, make more time, and build up your energy. Successful people are not burned out and used up. And they are not the ones who were less busy along the way. They deliver remarkable results and leave room to DO even better after that.

LOOK Better

LOOK Better is about standing out. Successful people do their work and produce their results in a way that is meaningful and visible to people that count. They understand which audiences matter most and they communicate with the right people at the right times, in a compelling way.

LOOK Better is about building personal and professional credibility and becoming more relevant with your key stakeholders. People with high credibility get more done because they face fewer obstacles. Successful people are widely known not just for doing their jobs really well, but for the extra value they contribute to the business. They have risen above the work and proven their greater, wider-reaching value to their companies.

CONNECT Better

The most successful people get a lot of help. CONNECT Better is about building a broad base of support for yourself, your team, and your work. As you advance, your focus needs to broaden, not deepen.

Successful people are not isolated in their own world. They build the right networks of mentors, partners, and supporters. They know how to get on “the List” of people who get access to the best opportunities.

It’s not about politics; it’s about effectiveness. Successful people build an “extra team” around them and accomplish big things by working with and through others. The higher you go, the more your value is associated with your network.

It’s Never Too Early to Begin or Too Late to Start

There are no prerequisites, hurdles, or qualifications to using the model. Set your sights on adding more value to the business and start from where you are today.

You Have More Control Than You Think

You need to recognize that it is up to you to make things happen in your career, without counting on standard company and management processes. These days, if anything, the standard company and management processes are set against you!

My approach is all about the things you can control—how to see them and how to act on them. You need to do specific things on purpose in all three areas of DO Better, LOOK Better, and CONNECT Better over time.

For example, working really hard won’t get you anywhere if no one sees what you are doing or if they think it’s irrelevant. Creating a publicity campaign without the results to back it up will backfire. (We all know those people who are managing their publicity instead of doing their jobs, and it’s hard not to wish bad things for them.)

You can’t build a strong network if you are not credible, and you won’t know how to use contributions from your network if you are not focused on doing the most critical few things to move the business forward. It all works together to add value and grow success in your business and career.

The real payoff comes over time—once you feel like you have mastered all three, you set the bar higher—and do them all again. That’s where the “better” comes in.

Comments

[Therman]

While this is good advice, does the book do a good job of breaking these points down for more clarity?
I feel like something's missing that I'm not grasping.

[Old Limey]

The huge variety of occupations make it very difficult to state simple rules that apply very generally.

Even in a single department of a very large company such as the one I worked for there can be different individuals with greatly differing assignments. Personally I feel that books such as this are a big waste of time and money for many people, particularly those that are climbing the technical ladder rather than the management ladder.

The company I worked for had well over 30,000 employees and was the largest employer in Silicon Valley at the height of the Cold War. Employees were scattered over a large area in many different buildings covering design, analysis, test, research, manufacturing, procurement, finance, human resources, information processing etc. on a variety of major defense department projects.

[Jonathan]

Old Limey, any interest in a research project using your market database? JT McGee at MoneyMamba has a theory that would be intersting to test. See the article and then the comments - http://moneymamba.com/stock-picking/

[Shannon-ReadyForZero]

Your words of advice seem so simple at first, but I realized upon reading the descriptions how much they tie together and how much more of all three I could be doing in my daily life! Sometimes I get so caught up in small tasks that I forget about the big picture. Thanks so much for posting this, I'll be referring back to it often!

[Old Limey]

Jonathan:
I don't own or want to own a single stock so there is no motivation for me to spend a lot of time researching groups of stocks. The database I have contains 4,584 stocks and 8,105 funds with daily histories starting from either 9/1/1988 or when the stock was listed if after 9/1/88.

The trouble with buying a few individual stocks is the almost total lack of DIVERSIFICATION. It's difficult enough if you buy 5-6 actively managed sector mutual funds since sectors are also rising and falling all of the time so it still takes a lot of work to first, find some uptrending sectors, and then track their performance every day and decide when you need to trade out of a downtrending sector into one that is uptrending. This is definitely not for novices or anyone with a full time occupation.

A market like the one we are in, that has zigged and zagged and is below where it was 15 months ago, would be disastrous for a beginner to start trading stocks. Currently I own one hi-yield California muni bond mutual fund, everything else is in 20 CDs, 99 groups of muni bonds and 21 groups of corporate bonds yielding a combined average of 5%. That plus two pensions and two SS checks/month makes for a worry free life. I watch the market every day just out of interest but my main investment task these days is reinvesting the CD and Bond interest as it shows up on the 1st. and 15th. of each month for various holdings, which takes all of about 10 minutes for our accounts and those of our three children by using various tools on Fidelity's website. I haven't bought any CDs since 2008 as rates are now too low.

[FMF]

Therman --

Yes, there is much more detail in the book, but maybe not as much as you want/need. Check it out at your library and see if it's right for you.