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After teaching for 20 years at MIT's "Career Success Accelerator" class and working as a startup executive, Mark Herschberg has written The Career Toolkit: Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You.
Welcome to SkyeTeam's People First! In this series, we explore the people side of successful business and careers. We all have a story to share, a leadership journey that we are experiencing.
We'll be interviewing authors, business leaders, thought leaders, and people like you to uncover the latest ideas, resources, and tools to help you become more effective at work - and in life. As it turns out, the secret is cultivating winning relationships. Business is personal, and relationships matter!
[Music] welcome to skyeteam's people first with morag barrett welcome to this week's episode of people first and boy do i have a doozy of a conversation for you so listen up because no matter where you are on your career whether you are starting out mid-career or you think you've reached that false summit of success you are going to enjoy listening to my conversation with mark hershberg.
mark is the author of 'the career toolkit. essential skills for success that no one taught you' and thinking back to my earlier career yeah i was just set out into the wild from high school and kind of made it up as we went along so i'm looking forward to the insights.
in addition to the author of the career toolkit he is also the creator of the brain bump app from tracking criminals and terrorists on the dark web and to creating market places and new authentication systems mark has spent his career launching and developing new ventures at startups and fortune 500s and in academia he has over a dozen patents to his name he helped start the undergraduate practice opportunities program dubbed mit's career success accelerator where he teaches annually and we're gonna get some of the goodness from that in this conversation and at mit he received a bs in physics a bs in electrical engineering and computer science and because that wasn't enough a master's in engineering in electrical engineering and computer science focusing on cryptography.
welcome mark to people first
thanks for having me on the show it's my pleasure to be here well that was a fascinating sort of summary of the six foot version i don't know the adult version of mark but i want to start with when you were a little boy was that what you were dreaming of doing what did you want to be when you grew up i think my first desire was firemen which is probably true of most little boys but by age five or six i wanted to be a stockbroker once i understood what the stock market was i said stockbroker that's the plan and that lasted until i was about age nine when i learned about physics and that put me on the path to physics and then in ninth grade learned about computer science so i said physics and computer science and that's how i got here today oh i love that so i too studied physics and applied mathematics at high school i was going to be an engineer my dad was an electrical engineer but ended up in finance so we have something else in common so interesting all right so we're here today to talk about your book the career toolkit so what was the inspiration behind the book
many years ago at mit we had done surveys and found companies are looking for a number of skills leadership networking negotiating team building they want these not just from new college grads not just from mit students or engineers universally they want these skills but no one teaches them and many people don't have them so there's this huge skills gap mit wanted to put together a program to help address this gap i had been working with my own teams trying to upskill them as i was also developing myself and have some content so reached out to mit when i heard they were doing this got involved in creating the program and then teaching there which i've been doing for decades and of course it's not just our students who need this help as i mentioned it's universal so i said how do we reach a larger audience and that ultimately led to the book which is written for a general audience and i love that fact because as i said when i started out my career i was spat out of the high school system straight into work and it was just a case of head down do good quality work keep your nose clean and you're going to be fine there was no real career plan or guidance and you touch there on some of the topics that you cover negotiation and interviewing networking and relationships why do you think it is that we don't or aren't teaching these skills at the level that they're needed to help us to be successful there are historical reasons high school was really designed just to get you off of the farms and into the factories and so it wasn't trying to teach you higher order thinking it's just teaching you the basics to function in a modern world the university system which goes back about 900 years was designed around people who are experts in their field deep experts but if you think about when you get a degree in finance for example and you have your degree and you leave university all that degree says is you have acquired a certain level of knowledge in this discipline it does not say you are good at doing finance or you will be good at working in the field doesn't say you're a good employee it just says you've acquired knowledge because that's all the experts in the field the phds your professors know how to evaluate you on and there are historical reasons why that was okay back then but that doesn't work for today's 21st century workforce okay so you've just said that the today's 21st century workforce and that was the the uh focus of the future-proof workplace that i wrote with dr linda sharkey so i'm curious to know what do you mean by the needs of the 21st century workforce what's different let's think back to mid-century 1950s and you were an accountant for example or a product manager you sat there at your desk and your boss would come along and say here's some work for you and say thank you sir yes sir i'll get right on this you take it out of your inbox you do the work you stick in your outbox and say okay sir what next and you sat there and you were the cog in the machine you did what you were told you just needed to understand accounting or sales or engineering or whatever your particular function was fast forward to the end of the century and what happened middle management got eliminated we saw flattening of the hierarchy back in the 80s and 90s teams became more dynamic teams became multi-disciplinary or multifunctional you're no longer an accountant only working with other accountants now you're working with engineers and product people and sales people and marketing people and we have to engage with them and work with them and come up with solutions that aren't just i did the formula on the whiteboard and the other engineers understand this that's all i need to do so the skills needed for this type of workforce are different it's no longer be that cog it's now trying to figure out not just how to solve the problem but what is the problem we should be solving in the first place and how do i marshal the resources and engage with others to do it and those are not the skills that we are teaching at the university or high school level i love that you're talking my language here because it's the critical thinking and it's tapping into the collective intellect and experiences and expertise of the team that's going to help move us all forward individually and together all right so it feels like common sense to me but for those listening or no matter where they are in their career what's the first step in understanding where am i going or where have i come from and therefore what should i do next well i start off in chapter one creating a career plan now for many people they think oh that means i'm at this job title and i want to get to that job title and that's fine but don't just look at the titles and for those by the way who are independent consultants your title may never change but what you do and how you do it who you are will evolve but beyond the title we know there are different skill sets the type of work you do as an individual contributor let's say as a senior engineer is different than the work that you do and the skills you need as a director of engineering and those skills are different than when you're a senior vp of engineering so we have to recognize that these different jobs have different skills and we have a skills gap most likely between what you're capable of doing today and what you need to do in the future so you need to create a plan and now here's one of the ironies if i said to you here's a really important project you've got two years to get this done think about what you do would you lock yourself in your office and say well i guess i'll just show up to work every day and see if i get done two years and i'll call you in two years and we'll see where i am that's insanity of course any of us know well you create a project plan you create a schedule you create a budget you have check-ins how am i doing what are the risks how do i minimize those risks do i need to adjust my plan we all know how to do this but now imagine it's not a two-year plan but a 20-year plan and it's not just a key project it is everything it is your career and that has project big impact on your life if you need a plan for two years why do you not have one for 20 years yeah so i'm coaching a cto of a technical technology company right now and she was bemoaning to me that you talked there about the different skills needed at the leadership level that her vps were not operating at a leadership level high enough and i actually asked her i said well have you communicated what those expectations are so going back to your comment there about how the skills change as we move through our careers whether i'm the cto communicating down or maybe i'm at the first rung of that career lattice and looking up how do i find out what are the skills and how they shift and change by leadership level the good news is you don't have to guess talk to other people you're not the first to go down this path talk to other people who have been in that role maybe at your company or at other companies talk to people even in different industries hey i'm a director of whatever managing a team for the first time and i might be a director of engineering but some of the challenges of hiring and managing people and communicating expectations a director of marketing or director of finance has those same types of challenges the words might be different the domain might be different but the actual challenge is similar so talk to other people talk to obviously your supervisor talk to your peers from subordinates about what they need if you look at a job description they are generally poorly written the job description simply says here is the knowledge you need and the experience you need and sure that's important but it doesn't get into the teamwork the communication the leadership they might say oh strong communication leadership skills i see this all the time admittedly i used to put that in mind but it doesn't really get into what specifically because the way you lead a team of 10 people who have worked together for the past five years work very well together had a lot of success is different than the way you lead a team that might be 20 people half of them have turned over they're very demoralized and they're distributed that's a very different type of leadership leading an existing product versus a brand new project different types of leadership and so you have to recognize there's no one size fits all and understand what are the specifics for this role so it's being intentional and as much as you said earlier on you need a plan for 20 years it's a plan for 20 years or three years but it's not set in stone it has to be flexible for what is important right now today either for this project or for this person or for this next step in my career that's exactly right and this is what trips people up because they say how do i plan for 20 years well how do you plan for two years you certainly don't know at the start of that project what you're doing on day 568 you have no clue but you can plan out the next 30 or 60 days and then you have placeholders well this is what we'll do the second quarter the third quarter and of course you'll adjust as you go and the same is true for our careers we're going to have a little fuzzier the further out we go and we can adjust but you definitely want more concrete things earlier on and what i recommend is people break down their career into short medium and long-term plans with the short being the most concrete and the later ones being a little fuzzier and obviously much more flexible yeah it was reid hastings i think in his book who is talking about how careers have moved from careers for life if i think about my grandparents or careers at half a dozen companies if i think about my own dad to being much more of a portfolio approach where we arrive and maybe it's six months or a year at this company maybe it's three years that seems like a long luxury but what we're doing is collecting experiences that make us flexible for the future and comes back to the career plan it's not hanging your hat on a a job title 20 years from now because as you and i know many of the job titles around today didn't exist 20 years ago let alone two years ago just a side note that's a common myth and if you read the book the end of jobs by jeff wald he points out that actually the time we spend in jobs has only changed mildly in the last 70 years or so but we have that stereotype because we think about the union jobs worked on the factory floor at general motors for your whole career but in fact they they did actually change jobs more often but one of the challenges we have is that the job that i will have in 10 20 years may not exist today if you think about my own field of cyber security when i graduated college you could work for certain government agencies you could work for big tech which back then was microsoft ibm maybe at t and that was it but now there's a whole bunch of cyber security startups now every small company the dentist office says i have a cyber security problem so the networks themselves were evolving whereas the jobs that existed in 1922 weren't that different than the jobs in 1952. so in the book you've broken your insights into three sections tell us about those the ten skills are broken into these three sections so let's enumerate all of them section one careers so chapter one as we talked about creating and implementing a career plan chapter two working effectively things like managing your manager understanding corporate culture corporate politics chapter three is interviewing now there's lots of content on how to interview as a candidate but many of us have to hire our peers and we get no training whatsoever on how to interview other people so i look at it from both sides the second section leadership and management there's a chapter on leadership and then we look at the people side and the process side of management and those chapters don't apply simply to people with senior titles or people under them they apply to everyone including individual contributors in fact all these chapters do and then the third section interpersonal dynamics covers communications networking negotiations and ethics so i i love the way it's structured and it was inspiring as i read the book and of course that section on networking relationships it's close to my heart so tell us what role have relationships and your network played in your success they've been a huge factor for me it's helped in everything from finding jobs and that's how we first start to think about but also as i've hired other people as i've gotten customers and partners internal networking has been really important to fight some political battles or just be aware of things happening opportunities and threats in the company or in the industry it's helped me when i've gone down unexpected journeys like writing this book i never expected to write a book and when i realized i was writing one the first thing i did was i reached out to a bunch of friends of mine who were authors they were not people in tech but i have a diverse network and they were able to give me guidance your network really you need to think of it like we think of cell phones these days when you think of your cell phone you say oh i don't have to remember things anymore i don't have to tell you what's the fastest land mammal because i'll pull up my cell phone i can find i have access to this whole set of information at my fingertips from my cell phone and you need to think of your network the same way i don't need to know all the answers but i have this network that when i need an answer i can go out and use it so it's interesting you talk there because here we are on stream are recording this podcast of course with the pandemic everybody panic went home kitchen table bedroom whatever we're all working remotely how has working at a distance changed how we need to invest and nurture our professional relationships the pandemic is arguably one of the best things to happen to networking now obviously it's a horrible thing to happen to us globally i wish it didn't but i remember early on everyone said well how can i network oh this is terrible i can't go and talk to people anymore certainly going into that room going to the conference is one way a network but networking is not about collecting business cards and shaking hands it's about building relationships and if you think back to 2017 if i said to a friend of mine i'm based in new york city if i said to a friend of mine in san francisco or in london hey you know it's been a while let's jump on a video chat and catch up so what what do you want to do virtual coffee what now that's we we would only see people in our cities i'd meet up with people in my city or maybe if you traveled to my city i'd see you and so that relationship would usually go fallow and we wouldn't be able to build it but now that's normal i can say hey we haven't talked for a while in fact one of my former students just the other day i usually see here i'm traveling to boston which has been greatly reduced i said let's catch up by video and so we're able to do things and now it's a little more natural so what we've done is extended the reach extended the psychology of our network from our city to globally and that's a great way to continue to build relationships so one of the the patterns i'm seeing with the less experienced leaders the less thoughtful leaders is that they're jumping on the zoom call or the webex or the team's meeting and it's just like mark where are we at what's happening with the project they're not investing as much time in the small draw of how you're doing what's happening with the family and so on is that a pattern that you're hearing from other leaders in your network it is and even goes further as we're looking at hybrid workplaces which by the way at the time of this recording it's still not set in stone for me we're recording this at the end of the summer 2022 and what i've been saying for years if we stick to a hybrid workplace for another maybe about two years or so i think it will become the norm however if we get a recession and we're already starting to see certainly the markets are wavy we haven't seen impact in labor market but imagine we get a big recession and all of a sudden the labor market starts to soften then companies can say okay we do want you back in the office take it or leave it and we can undo what we're doing but let's assume we stick to these hybrid models where we're in the office two three days a week the mentality of a lot of junior managers is okay well in the office you know we have to really be productive you have to get your nose to grindstone cut the water conversations focus on work because you're not here most of the week but in fact it's the opposite it's when we're in the office is when we need to build those relationships and so that is the water cooler conversations and tell me how are your kids doing and what's going on with you because that builds the trust that builds the connection and that's much better in person than remote i can work on that spreadsheet from home just as easily in the office or i can jump on a zoom with you and we can collaborate on the spreadsheet but that water cooler conversation is harder remotely and we need to emphasize that when we're in the office yeah we're encouraging our leaders to have scheduled spontaneity so whether it's friday at four o'clock even if you don't get the person live because of time zones there's at least leave a message that says hey mark i was thinking of you hope you have a great weekend and then looking at the strategic reasons for bringing people into the office because of course there's no point you coming in on a tuesday if everybody else is out of the office and all you're doing is sitting on zoom calls in the office but what we're seeing is that we are being invited in to facilitate those strategic planning meetings or leadership training a reason to bring people together but increasing the opportunities for rekindling those relationships that may have just got a little shallower in the last two years i've been at a company since 2017 and when we fly people together we'd also have our dinners together and that was more social than work we would do fun activities so yes you really have to emphasize and be intentional i'd recommend tools like donut or sup sup disclaimer is written by a friend of mine but i don't have any incentive to recommend it personally these are tools that help you just randomly connect with others in your company that oh we're both in the elevator and we wind up talking to each other those tools help create that spontaneity yeah we've been doing something similar it's like when you're on a call there's 20 people in the room if there's somebody you don't know send them a slack message afterwards just ask for 10 minutes to say hey i saw you in that meeting help me understand how do you fit into the big picture what is it that you do what advice do you have for me and my career within the organization and it's another deposit in that relationship and that networking bank account excellent idea so as you look to the future then and you think about the insights and the ripple effect that the career toolkit is having for leaders at all levels and at all stages of their career what are you most excited for as you look to the future i think we can not just emphasize these skills because we've heard about them for years this is not the first time you've heard networking is important or leadership is important but we can start to shift to really training we're starting to see the university system wake up to the needs of this we're seeing nascent programs i don't think they go far enough but also i think we're going to realize especially after what we've gone through with the pandemic now hybrid workforce companies that for years have been cutting their investment in training are going to re-emphasize this and see this as a differentiator and we're going to see more and more programs within companies trying to elevate these skills in their employees okay so how can people learn more about you and your work and obviously the career toolkit you can go to my website thecareertoolkitbook.com and there you can see where to buy the book you can reach out to me if you want to talk to me if you have questions you want to bring me into your company you can follow me on social media there's new articles i put out every week there's a free companion app to the book that contains a lot of the highlights and will help you learn and retain it that's linked from the website and takes you to apple and iphone where you can download it and there's an entire resources page of free resources to help you develop these skills yourself and in your organization as well as other resources for hiring and career planning all free that's on the resources page and all of this at thecareertoolkitbook.com and i'll make sure all of that information is in the show notes and i re-emphasize go to the careertoolkitbook.com there are so many resources that you can download but of course get the book and read it and better still bring mark in to talk to you and your teams and your organizations and help effect change so as we come to the end of our time together mark what final thoughts do you have for all of us think about the following let's consider you learn a little bit about negotiating and you're 32 years old you have a job offer for 80 000 pounds you've learned to negotiate so before you take it you go up to 81 000 pounds if you do nothing else in your career if you stay in that same job for the next 30 years you just earned yourself with five 10 minutes of negotiating a thousand pounds more for the next 30 years until you retire a little bit of negotiating just got you 30 000 pounds but of course you're not going to stay in the same job you'll have raises your promotions you've got more than a thousand pounds you'll wind up with tens of thousands even hundreds of thousands of pounds more just by learning to be a little bit better at negotiating now here's the big secret we can do the math with negotiations but this applies to leadership to communication to networking no one's gonna say well you're a slightly better leader here's a thousand pounds more but you will stand out you will get the promotion you will get the job and so by getting just a little bit better at any or every one of these skills you can have a massive impact on your careers like compound interest so don't be daunted by saying oh my god there's so much to do work on getting just a little bit better and it's going to have a huge impact on your career mark thank you for joining me on people first i truly appreciate i look forward to future conversations and i wish you ongoing success in your career thank you so much for joining morag today if you enjoyed the show please like and subscribe so you don't miss a thing if you learned something worth sharing share it cultivate your relationships today when you don't need anything before you need something be sure to follow sky team and morag on linkedin facebook twitter and instagram and if you have any ideas about topics we should tackle interviews we should do or if you yourself would like to be on the show drop us a line at info skyteam.com that's skye team.com thanks again for joining us today and remember business is personal and relationships matter we are your allies