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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to Career Tools. This is Sarah and I'm Mark. Today's podcast, Results and Relationships, part one of two.
- [00:10]
B
As always, our content has been crafted by humans, and we're now certified by Proudly Human. The questions this cast answers are, what are the two most important objectives early in my career? Why do results matter? And why do relationships matter?
- [00:26]
A
If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. Ever feel like your ideas get ignored while someone else says the exact same thing and gets applause for it? That's a communication style problem and it's fixable. The Effective Communicator conference teaches you to understand how others receive information and how to present yourself in a way that resonates. Individual seats and organizational options are available. Visit us at manager-tools.com for forward/ecc. Mark, today's cast is a good one. We're going to talk about our most fundamental career advice that is getting results and building relationships.
- [01:12]
B
Yeah, it literally is foundational. It should have been cast one in career tools. If you haven't been listening for 21 years, you wouldn't know this, but in the very beginning, Mander Tools came out, started in 2005, and we started getting a lot of requests for career guidance. Now, because I had been a recruiter before and people were asking me questions on the forums and so on, I was answering them. But we realized there's a real demand for career guidance because companies weren't managing people's careers anymore, Right. So after, I think about a year, so it would have been mid-2006, I think, may have been sooner than that, we started doing manager cast three weeks a month and a career cast once a month because there were so many questions, more questions about careers than there was about management. And this is during the time when we were putting out stuff about one on ones and feedback and coaching and delegation and performance reviews and everything. So clearly careers were of interest to people. Later, in 2008, when the financial crisis hit, we broke Career Tools off into its own cast. Right. In order to address that. But in the very beginning, we. We were simply answering questions that people were putting to us. And I did not have a plan. I did not lay out all the foundational stuff. So finally, when Wendy came on board 18 years ago, we sat down and we said, well, we need to do some of the foundational stuff first. And that's when results and relationships came out.
- [02:45]
A
Yeah, that's exactly it, folks. This is the most fundamental guidance that we could give you about your career. And really, in short, I mean, if you want the bottom line up front of this podcast and you want to listen to the rest, it is get results and build relationships. Because without results, you're never going to be successful, you're never going to get promoted, you're going to be struggled to keep a job. And companies don't just keep staff who don't achieve a minimum standard of results, but getting results, it's by itself, it's not enough. That is, there are a lot of technically really bright people who get tons of great results but also don't have great careers. And it's because building relationships is the second crucial building block of great careers.
- [03:34]
B
And if you're listening to this and you're thinking, well, I'm really good at results, but I don't really think relationships are that big a deal. Roll the dice, brother, sister, roll the dice. Just be that person that doesn't know anybody, doesn't care about people, and only uses people for their own ends. Even though you're a polite person, I'm not suggesting you're rude, I won't say a bad word about you. But there's an entire book called the no Blank Rule, and it's about people who are really bad people. And go ahead, if you just want to be a results person, go ahead and try. And if you are a genius, an Elon Musk, a Steve Jobs, a Larry Ellison at Bill Gates, you know what? Don't worry about relationships at all. And you know, I happened to mention some technical people. Larry Ellison's the founder of Oracle, and Bill Gates is obviously the founder of Microsoft, and Steve Jobs is the founder of Apple. But there are plenty of people in the banking world, in the industrial world and so on who are famous for they don't give a darn. Sorry, I was about to say a bad word there about people. And you know, if you're starting your own company, you don't have to care. If your product is that good, you don't have to care. The problem is, for 99.99999999%, I think that's like six sigma there. It matters.
- [04:54]
A
It matters. Yeah. And most of us are not. We're not Steve Jobs, I'm not Bill Gates. They matter.
- [05:00]
B
Yeah. And the fact is that if people don't like you, you won't be able to persuade them and you think you're right and you'll keep talking about logic and they won't do what you want them to do. And if you don't have role power over them, they're not going to do it, and you will be unable to get things done. Once you get any level above individual contributor. In fact, even at individual contributor level, people won't come talk to you. I tell people all the time that there are three types of power in organizations. There's role power, there's relationship power, and there's expertise power. And a lot of people, they seize on the expertise power, Sarah. And here's what's funny about that. They think expertise is their definition of I'm a very smart person. That's not the definition of expertise power. The definition of expertise power is you are exceptionally knowledgeable about something, so much so that other people come to you to ask for guidance. They then implement your guidance. It works. And they tell other people that you're available to them. If you're a jerk because you haven't built relationships, they won't come talk to you. And it won't matter that you're a PhD. It won't matter that you're a Nobel Prize winner, and, well, maybe for a Nobel Prize winner, but it won't matter that you're the smartest person in the room. Nobody likes you.
- [06:18]
A
Yeah. And, I mean, we have a whole podcast about it, right? The three types of power, which folks we will link to at the bottom of this podcast so you can get a better sense of what Mark's talking about.
- [06:27]
B
This.
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A
This expertise power. But, yeah, to your point, just hanging your hat on, I'm an expert. Unless other people see you as an expert, it doesn't matter if you're an expert. In a vacuum. Dude, no one cares. Yeah, no one cares. And if no one cares, your smarts are completely going to waste.
- [06:45]
B
It's actually even worse if you think you're super smart and nobody else cares enough and doesn't come ask you and you start getting arrogant about it, because that will destroy relationships. You'll go from zero to a negative number, and then people will actively thwart you. They won't just not work with you. They'll actively thwart you because they don't want to work with you.
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A
Because they don't want to work with you. And we've all seen that before. I mean, my. I know I have in my career for sure.
- [07:11]
B
Yeah. Okay, so our outline is really simple. This time. We only have two items, and they are get results and build relationships. So, Sarah, start us off with get results.
- [07:22]
A
So, folks, there is nothing more important than getting results at work when it comes down to it. All of the lines of code you produce, all of the contracts you sign, all of the accounts that you bring in, all of the customer service you deliver is just part in the exchange that we make. I mean, the company pays us. And in the response to that, or what we owe the company in return then is the results we produce. At its very most basic, that's the agreement that we make when we go to work for a company. But there's also results and then there's results and.
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B
Exactly.
- [08:01]
A
There's a level at which you won't get fired and there's a level at which you will get ahead. And if you want to progress, which we assume folks listening to this do, I mean, this podcast itself is for people just starting their career. We assume you want to go beyond that. You don't want to just stay at that level forever. You want to progress. And if you want to progress, you need to get results to do it.
- [08:27]
B
Yeah. Now look, one time, Thomas Edison, famous inventor, American inventor, a reporter was there interviewing him and he says, you don't have any results. And Edison looked around and said, look at all these things that don't work. Those are results too. So our point is, just because you get a result, because there's an outcome from your work, doesn't mean your work is good. We want you to beat the standard. That's what will help you keep your job. Now, the first part of getting results, true results, sustainable results. Right. Results that will serve you well.
- [09:03]
A
Yeah. Above just keeping the lights on.
- [09:07]
B
Yeah. Is understanding what the definition of sustainable results is. In some roles, it's easy. Right. Sales roles tend to have financial or numerical targets. I have always thought, having started my corporate career in sales, that sales, even though sales is sort of not respected in other parts of the company because it's external and it's not terribly technical or it's not terribly difficult to understand,
- [09:35]
A
it's ill defined by people in an organization. They see it as some sort of fluff that you can't grasp.
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B
Yeah. And all the salespeople care about is making their number. But that's the beauty of having a results driven job.
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A
Exactly. You always know in sales what your target is. Always.
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B
And if you're in sales, you know what the minimum is, you know what the average is, and you know what the outsize results are as well. The levels required to do outsize results. If you're struggling right now to understand what counts for great results in your role, as a general rule, we would suggest you think about quality time and cost. It's really common to see a diagram with those three areas as the points of an equilateral triangle. And it's said that on any project you can have any two. So you can have high quality and you can have it fast, but it's going to be really expensive.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Or you can have low quality and you can have it fast, or you can have it fast and you can have it cheap, but that's going to be low quality. Or you can have. What is it? You can have it fast and you could have it high quality, but that's going to be enormously expensive. Right. So any two of the three kind of thing. It's common to see a diagram like that. Right. And so you can have two out of the three. You could have a low cost, high quality project, but that's going to take forever. And those are the kind of things we want you thinking about when you analyze your role. Now, there's a whole lot more we have to say about how to figure out results. And in fact, we have a manager tools cast called how to get your results from your boss. And we might as well release it or link to it in this cast, Sarah, because it's a process by which you go and talk to your boss. Now, it's usually for managers to talk to senior managers, directors and so on, but an individual, individual contributor could absolutely use that cast to talk to their boss about, hey, here's what I think my job is. Can you give me your insight? Because what you don't want to do is go into your boss's office and say, I need you to explain to me what the results are you want from me. Because your boss may not have thought it through. And now you both are in a conversation where neither one of you have an answer. And now you've made your boss look bad. And since you've been doing the job, hopefully for a little while, maybe it's only a couple of months, then you could say, okay, here's what I think it is. And then I need some help. I want you to give me some guidance about whether I should be going north or northwest or northeast based on what I've been working on. And people don't do this. And then they're surprised.
- [12:12]
A
Yeah, exactly. Now, folks, to take us back to the the conversation that Mark had previously began about the diagram. Exactly. There's time, there's quality, and there's cost. The reason that that diagram is so often used, is so often thought about is because those are the three success factors in any endeavor. If the work you produce doesn't meet the cost, quality, or time targets, it wasn't a success. Even as an order processor, in your very first role, you will have a quality and time target and those are linked to cost. So if it takes you too long with each order and you only produce, let's say, 50, when they expect 100 produced over that course of time, the company will then have to pay a second resource to keep up the standard delivery of those orders, which is an additional cost. So you can see why those three different metrics are important. It's company has an expectation around those three items, so you can use those three items to get your own goals in your role.
- [13:22]
B
Yeah, in. In my estimation right now, younger professionals, we're recording this in 2026. We're updating the original cast, which is, it's got to be 18 years old or 17 years old. One of the things I see is people are saying, well, I want to feel psychologically safe in my workplace, and if you ask me for a hundred, but I can only do 50, then you're doing some sort of psychological harm to me. And what people don't understand is companies don't intend for you to be uncomfortable. On the other hand, the company very likely has a very good idea of what an average person can do in the job. And they're not saying for the average person, if they knew the average person can do 75, they're not going to set the goal at 200.
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A
Right.
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B
They're not. Or otherwise they're going to have massive turnover and that's very expensive. Hiring is expensive, recruiting is expensive and so on. They're not going to do that. So you can assume that the standards the company has are reasonable, even if they worry you when you're first starting out. So that worry you're feeling is not actually psychological harm, it's just performance stress, which is actually good because we've talked for, we've talked for two decades now that the optimum level of human performance is slightly above what you think your best ability is. You want to go from eustress, which is happy stress, and I feel good about my job, into a little bit of distress to push you, to make you better. And so you don't want to think, well, I figured out what the cost, time and quality standards are, and I don't think they're fair because believe me, your company knows what it has to do to satisfy its customers. A product or service that your company sells, that it sells in the marketplace. Well, think of it this way, I'll just make it simple. Suppose your products or services are Priced at a hundred dollars. But your customers don't think they're worth that. They're not going to buy it. What happens to a company when they have products and services that nobody buys? They go out of business. Well, the company has figured out that in order to be profitable, in order to be successful, in order to grow, which is what all companies want, they figured out that they need to have this many people doing this much stuff at this high quality, at this much of a cost. It's very straightforward. They didn't make it up. It's not. It's not draconian what they figured out. And you've got to figure it out for yourself. Now, you might say to us, I sure think my boss should have sat me down. And you're right. A lot of manager tools, managers will. They'll sit down with you and they'll say, this is what your job is. Here's what's required, here's how you do it, here are the steps, here are the people you can go to, and so on. And that's because they figured out the math of how many of these things they need to produce by this many people in order to make the product profitable at a price that customers will buy. And I hear all the time about people saying, well, it's okay. My big company had a loss last quarter, but it'll be okay. No, that's not okay. That causes layoffs, and it's could be the winning of a recession, which could be even more layoffs. And companies have to adjust that kind of thing because the company has to produce outsized results as well, because there are competitors. And as the old saying goes in Texas, we don't want everything. We just want what's ours and what's next to ours. Meaning your competitors don't want all of your customers. They just want some of them right now, and later they'll be back for more, some of them. And so the math probably works so that the standards for your job are reasonable. But if you don't know what the standards are, it's completely reasonable to try to figure them out. And then go to your boss and say, here's what I think. And again, I encourage you to listen to how to get your goals from your boss.
- [17:01]
A
But in the meantime, folks, what we would say is in your role, work out what the quality, time and cost targets are. You should be able to figure them out with some of the information that you've got around you and try and beat them. You can't go too fast because quality is going to suffer. You can't work tons of overtime because that's going to cost more. And you need to think about how you can do your job most efficiently in order to get the best cost, quality and time result possible. So try and work it out for yourself. I mean, you, you, you see what, how many hours are in a day. You see how much work exists. You have all the tools that you need to start figuring these things out based upon the perspective you've got today. You don't necessarily have to go to your boss and ask them. And that, as you'll see in that podcast, is a time consuming process. In order to even do that, what you'll need to do is think through the job itself and make some recommendations. It's not just going to Mark's point earlier, pat in hand, tell me what my goals are. You're going to have to work them out. So you're going to have to use this process to work them out to
- [18:06]
B
at least have some. I think this is what it is. Am I right?
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A
Exactly.
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B
Yeah. And by the way, Sarah said you need to think about how you can do your job most efficiently. Now notice the standard is efficiency and of course, quality along with that. If the most efficient way is not the way you like doing it, you don't get to say, I like doing it this way. I know it keeps me from meeting my cost, quality and time standards, but this is safer for me, this is better for me. I like it this way. Unfortunately, that's now not how organizations are structured. Everybody has to do some parts of their job that are not their favored way of doing things. You know, I wish all meetings were 15 minutes long, but they're not. And so I go to meetings sometimes that are two and three and four and five hours long. Now, what about jobs where you don't have consistent work? Right. For every assignment you're given, you need to know what result is expected, when it's due, and what the reporting requirements are. When you're first assigned to work, have a conversation with the person assigning it and understand what they're expecting, when they need it, how they'd like you to report completion, what the quality standard is, so on, how much time they think it will take, what the deadlines are. You know, we say we talk all the time that you cannot assign. You're not actually assigning work to somebody unless you actually give them a deadline.
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A
Yeah, but so few managers do it. So few managers do it.
- [19:33]
B
Yeah. And then they thought it should be done. The person they Gave the work to, doesn't know that it was due then. And so the manager says, are you done? It says, no, I didn't know when it was supposed to be done. So I've been working on some of the stuff. Well, I need it right now. And now we've got a problem. Some bosses will give you chapter and verse everything you need without prompting. Other bosses will give you the most vague instructions and expect you to work it out. Neither one is wrong. You might prefer one or the other, but neither one is wrong. Okay? If you have one of those bosses, stop asking for more information as soon as she shows any signs of irritation. If you need more detail than she is prepared to give. And this does happen, and it's a knock on your manager, but it is what it is. Okay? Use what you have, give it your best guess, and then report early. Okay. Do a bit of the work and go back to your boss and say, is this what you're looking for? Many of us learned much later that sometimes bosses are vague because they don't actually know what they want. Once they have something, they can say, yes, but I want it in red or no, it should be square or no, I wanted an Excel file and not a table in word. Totally reasonable. And maybe they should have known it, but they didn't. And now they've seen what you gave them and said, no, I want it differently.
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A
Yeah. You know, Mark, when I. I think I may have told you this story before, when I worked at the university, I worked for Trevor woods, who some of you will know in our community, in fact, Trevor.
- [21:12]
B
A legend.
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A
A legend, exactly. Trevor is the CEO of Purely Human, and we are Purely Human certified. And you'll hear that at the beginning of each of our podcasts. But that is Trevor. And Trevor used to get me to write all of his interdepartmental emails, like his. His large announcement type emails. And I wrote, I'm gonna say 15 of them for him, and every single time, he would send out an email that was so, so different as to be unrecognizable to me as the email I sent him initially. Yeah. And eventually I went to him and I'm like, okay, so what's the deal here? I don't know why you're getting me to write these emails if you're not going to use the email I wrote. And he responded by saying, well, Sarah, that's not it at all. They're super helpful. I just didn't know what I wanted to see until I saw what I didn't want.
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B
There you go.
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A
Which for me, folks, as a high D, I was like, okay, I totally get it. I'm like, why didn't you just say that at the beginning? I've been paying all this. All this attention to spelling and grammar. This is idiotic. Now, I can see how some other profiles would have taken offense to that. But, I mean, I was like, okay, perfect, wonderful. I'm just giving you draft one so that you can kind of spitball perfect. And that's kind of the same idea here.
- [22:22]
B
And do whatever you need to do with it after that boss. Trevor, it's fine. And I'm just giving you something to work on. And by the way, some people would actually go, oh, why is he not using mine? Well, because he really didn't know.
- [22:33]
A
He really didn't know until he saw it. And he's like, ooh, okay, definitely. Now I know what I want to see because I saw what I didn't want. That's exactly it. It's that same kind of concept. Folks, don't be offended by. Don't be hurt by the fact that you didn't come up with the first thing your boss wanted.
- [22:51]
B
Yeah. You know, this brings up something really interesting, Sarah, we did a cast in Exact Tools. Now, if you're listening to Career Tools, we hope you also are an Exact Tools licensee. But in Exact Tools, we did a cast called the Hidden Unseen or the New Unseen Mode of Failure for Executives. When you get to the executive level, you start getting less guidance from.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And you're going to be told, hey, here's where you have to go. Go do it, and I don't have time. And in fact, it should be that they would give you more guidance. But people are worried about people above them and worried about their own goals. And they expect you, if you're a senior manager or director, to be able to make your own decisions. Unfortunately, if you've been given a very tight box to play in, certainly as an individual contributor, less so as a manager, but maybe even still as a senior manager. When you get to director, senior director, something like that, you're going to have to choose your path without your boss really caring what your path is, because they don't do what you do. They might have a portfolio of five different managers doing five different things, and you're going to have to choose. And you might choose right but not deliver, which everyone gets that, but you might choose wrong, and it wouldn't matter what you did. You're not going to be able to deliver, and it was the choice you made, the path you took, that was wrong. And your boss will say that, well, you took the wrong path. And unfortunately, you have to be able to choose your own path. This is the same thing at a smaller scale, right? You're going to be asked to do some stuff that you're not going to have clear expectations on. And yes, you can ask, but don't piss off your boss. And you can ask and try to get some guidance. And then guess what? You're going to have to choose. And I will tell you. The single biggest mistake you can make is to think. I must avoid failure, because that will keep you. In fact, we need to do a podcast for all three podcasts. Exec Tools, Manage Tools, and Career Tools. And I call it the Donut Minefield. It's a leadership exercise where you put somebody and they give them 30 people to lead and you put them in the middle of a donut. The Donut is a minefield. And you tell them you have to get out of the minefield to the top of this ridgeline before noon in order to help your company or your unit defend some ground. You don't know where the mines are and you have to live. So you have two choices. You can stay inside the minefield and of course you'll live, but you'll fail the mission because you won't have done anything. Or you can take some risks. You can try to find the mines. You could potentially lose some people, but you could ultimately get out. Now, you may not lose people or you may lose people. You don't know how thick the mines are or anything else. That's the situation. People find them in. And too many individual contributors simply say, oh, I'm going to stay here. I don't know what the boss wants me to do. I'm afraid I'm going to be wrong. I'm afraid I'm going to step on a mine and it's going to hurt my career. I can assure you, folks, that is not what will get you in trouble. If you choose to stay inside, that is not what will get you success. Okay? Ultimately, you will be seen as somebody who's not willing to take risks, not willing to trust themselves. So you have to be willing to venture into the minefield. You have to be willing to be wrong. And in Trevor's example, Sarah was wrong. But it didn't matter. He just needed to see something to start with so he could edit it and get it into a place he wanted to be. That's a great example. Now, one of the skills you'll have learned in school, which can be useful to you in your working life, is tracking assignments. You did that all the time in school, of course. And it doesn't really matter what system you use. And to tell you the truth, Sarah and I were just talking about this the other day, about how we keep track of our tasks. And we both do something that all of the official task management systems people, geniuses, software people, say you should not do, which is we put our tasks on our calendar. Sarah has a personal calendar, I have a marked tasks calendar, and it's a different color. And I have things that I have to get done on a given day or a given week and somebody could step on that, but then I know I have to do it, so I move it to a different time. But you know how to track your own assignment. There's no particularly right way. Again, it doesn't matter what system you use, but keeping track of what you need to do, when it's due, and who and how you need to report it is absolutely vital. Yes, anytime your boss comes to you and say, what's the status? You should know the status of your work, because the work you do is part of a larger system that delivers value to customers. And you therefore have to be able to tell other people in the company what the status of your work is at any given time. And not 0 or 100%, but 50% or 80% or, hey, it's Tuesday, I'll have it to you by Wednesday at 2 o', clock, or I'll have it to you by Wednesday at 10 o'.
- [27:38]
A
Clock.
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B
Other people need to know that because it takes many different people in order to put together the products and services that your company ultimately sells. Now, obviously, if you've got a system and it works for you, use it. And don't be swayed by somebody who says, oh, your system's dumb. You should try my digital system. Oh, you should try this work management software. Oh, we've tried them all. They're nothing. They're. And it's just another thing to check. And I'm already checking email and Slack and text messages and my calendar, and now you want me to go to a task manager and the tasks aren't really aligned with my calendar particularly. So whatever you want to do, if you want to use some software, that's great and you'll have some time learning that software and that's fine. But that system has to support you so that you always know the status of your work and you always know when you're creating risk for yourself that you're not going to meet a deadline. And deadlines come under one of the three, which is time, Right? And just make sure that whatever you do, you're meeting your commitments, because your commitments surely are part of your results.
- [28:42]
A
Absolutely. And folks, while we're at it, don't just track your commitments, the things that you need to get done also track your future work and your successes. In many companies, reviews are carried out annually, which has all sorts of problems, not least of which is that it's really hard to remember in December what you did in January. But nonetheless, if your boss doesn't ask you to track your successes, do it anyway. If your boss doesn't track your successes on your behalf, assume that will be the case and make sure that you do. You, you want to make sure that you have tracked all of your successes in the last year, because you can't assume someone else will be doing so. And you need to know that for review time for your resume. Career the career management document. Oh, what's the podcast called, Mark?
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B
Systematic Career Documentation.
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A
Systematic Career Documentation. If you've not listened to that one, listen to it, folks. And that's a great place to be tracking and collecting those results. Leadership credibility doesn't come with the title. It's built through consistent behaviors over the course of time. And most professionals wait until they're already managing people to start building it. And that, my friends, is too late. The Effective Manager Conference teaches you the foundational habits that make people want to follow you long before you have a formal team. One focused day, proven tools and a plan that you can put into work starting on Monday. Individual seats are available both virtually and in person. Visit us@manager-tools.com EMC
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B
Is this the time where I can share the story about Thomas Cunningham?
- [30:26]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Do it.
- [30:28]
B
Okay, so folks, if you don't know him, Thomas Cunningham is a longtime, beloved member of the Manager Tools community. He is the director of finance at the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer center at the University of California, San Francisco. They've been a client of ours for many years. Thomas is a wonderful guy. Andrea, his number two, Andrew Scaffold, is just a delightful person and a total rock star in terms of making things happen. And Thomas texted me, we played golf together because we only live a couple hours apart from him and we know his family well and so on. And Thomas texted me and mentioned about Systematic Career Documentation, which was a Career Tools cast. He said that when he does onboarding for his new hires and he's got a 250 person organization, but he visits with each person and he has a few bullet points that he covers with them. And he says one of the things he wants them to do is keep track of their results and to capture them somewhere. And you know, think of it as a brag list if you want. Right. And the reason why you need to do that is so that at the end of the year at your review, you will be able to write your own review and, and tell your boss about all the things. Generally, most companies require you to provide a self review to your boss, but if you haven't been keeping track, then you won't have. You'll have an empty ledger book when it comes time to tout yourself a little bit to your boss. And so when he was talking about results and results from relationships and so on, he said, hey, now's the time. Start worrying about your results. Not only because it helps you at the end of the year, but also because you can start filling your resume or what we call your career management document, which is the, the longer document that you then pull from for your ultimate resume if you're going to go somewhere else.
- [32:24]
A
Yeah, that's exactly it.
- [32:26]
B
Now look, folks, sometimes we all struggle to get the results we want. Although I would tell you, embrace the struggle. It's okay. You want to be struggling a little bit because that means you're growing. Or we struggle to understand the instructions that we're given or how to deal with someone in another department or how to approach a certain situation. Okay, it's okay. It's normal when you look around at other people's faces and you think that look on their face is telling you they're squared away. And I'm not. No, they're dealing with the same stuff you're dealing with. Okay. You're swimming in the same pond they are, and they're just as worried about the same things as you are. It's okay. Especially earlier in your career, the embarrassment of not knowing what to do can prevent you asking for help. Okay? It can. It did me when I was a lieutenant in the army. And every year at West Point they told me, ask questions, ask questions, ask questions. And then we all looked and laughed at the new guy who was asking a bunch of dumb questions, but he learned a lot faster than we did. But please don't be afraid to ask for help. And if you're in an organization that when you ask for help, they laugh at you, find a different organization. It's far better to not spend time, money and energy doing the wrong thing and suffer embarrassment later than it is to be potentially embarrassed a little bit about asking something that you think that everybody else knows. But I remember one time asking a question at Procter and Gamble and the room went very quiet. And I thought it went quiet because everybody else didn't think I should ask that question. But in fact, the reason it went quiet is everybody was desperate to hear the answer because everybody was thinking the same thing as sales reps. We didn't know what they were telling us to do. The faster you learn that not knowing and asking questions is okay, the faster your career will progress.
- [34:23]
A
Thank you so much for joining us, folks. Join us again next week as we continue this topic. Now, help us help others and tell all your friends. And of course, follow rate and review our podcasts. And remember, five stars only.
- [34:36]
B
Five stars only, please. Sam.