Find Your Own Way

Frank Sinatra sang about doing it “My Way.” Finding your own way to do things is important—

important for setting strategy for your organization or setting strategy for your career.  That doesn’t mean you can’t learn lessons from others.  When I first started consulting, someone told me, “Listen to other people’s ideas, try things out, but keep in mind that what works for someone else, may not work for you.  If it doesn’t, alter it or try something different.”

I read something interesting recently in a blog by Steven Spatz, President of BookBaby. He wrote, “Now, you can find all sorts of advice and read the success stories of independent and traditionally published authors. Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, or we’d all be using it and congratulating each other on our mutual good fortune. My advice? Any time you hear a success story, study it, parse it, and pick the elements of the story that resonate and seem applicable to your life and aspirations as an author. Your path won’t look exactly like anyone else’s, but you can take good ideas from a lot of different sources and create your own.”  Sounds an awful lot like the advice I received about consulting.  Bottom line is that we all have to find our own way to success.

In The Manager’s Answer Book we have a section on Creating Your Personal Brand. On page 113 we talk about the importance of being a courageous manager. A courageous manager is comfortable speaking up, especially if they think a mistake is about to be made or the organization may be heading in the wrong direction. They confront situations they think can be improved, and they present alternative options. They advocate for new ideas.  That doesn’t mean they dismiss an option that’s being presented. Rather they approach it in the way that Steven Spatz advises: they study and parse it, take good ideas and use them to shape a path for the organization. 

The same strategy can be applied to managing your career. Talk to other people who’ve been successful managers in your organization, and others, find out what they’ve done. Seek their advice, but don’t assume you have to do everything they did. Their circumstances may have been much different. Study it. Parse it. Pick the elements of their success story that may apply to your journey.

Speaking of finding your own way, Barbara and I are finding ours in the publishing world. We will be self-publishing our next book, They Did What? Unbelievable Tales from the Workplace. We’ve introduced you to Maryanne, the main character, with some stories over the past months. The book is coming out later this year, and we are working with BookBaby to get it printed and distributed. We’ll let you know how things progress.