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Excellent Executive Coaching: Growing Your Business and Enhancing Your Craft.
EEC 409: How Senior Leaders Can Reignite Their Value , with Loren Greiff
00:26:14
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- [00:05]
A
We want a fulfilling work and able to contribute. We also need to generate income for our livelihood. But we are an executive over 40 and we keep hearing we are overqualified. How can we transform our experience and make it relevant in today's market? Let's ask Lauren Greif, an expert career coach, strategist. Welcome to the excellent executive coaching podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Katrina Birous, and today we have a very special person, Lauren Greif. Welcome.
- [00:50]
B
Hello, Dr. Katrina. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here. Thank you for your fantastic work.
- [00:58]
A
Thank you. And you have an important message and I'll start right away. Especially executives over 40 hear the word overqualified in job searches. What does that team really mean? And how can leaders flip it into a strength instead of a setback?
- [01:17]
B
I'm so glad that you started off with this because the term overqualified is overused, right? We, we hear it all the time. But one of the most important things that I want your audience to know is that overqualified is a placeholder for a lot of unspoken fears that a lot of decision makers have about said candidate who may be older. And the top three ones are overqualified could mean I don't see your value. Overqualified is a way of saying we see your tenure, but we don't see your impact. We don't see your value. The second one, with respect to overqualified, is based off of very ill assumption that somehow you're not tech savvy. We don't see you learning out loud. We don't see you using these things that are part of every technical life. We don't see you on LinkedIn. We don't know how you are using other things, even something so everyday and benign like text messaging. So if I don't see you either up leveling or validating your proof of technology, I will default as a decision maker into the assumption that you're not tech savvy. And the last one, which is also politely bogus, is that somehow, some way, you are a flight risk. Somehow somebody has decided for you when you're said to expire. And again, this is based on a very old and outdated assumption because when asked, there are hundreds and hundreds of people that I've spoken to and polls that I've run that say, hey, by the way, I love my work. I have no plans on leaving the workforce, maybe in another 10, 15 years, but that is not on their horizon. And it's nobody else's decision in terms of when it is that you are going to leave. And some of the ways to really augment and flip that script is to talk about the things that you're currently involved in and to show and to also document those levels of agility and adaptability. Those start to send the signals that you're not a been there, done that.
- [03:48]
A
Yes. And so it's also in the way they talk, too. Okay, so now you're really saying, look, get prepared. Document everything you've done and everything you've changed and how you've adapted. But is there also, in the language.
- [04:03]
B
We speak, that dates us 1000%. And I will give you right away the most common telltale sign that you are part of the been there, done that generation and that you are not relevant and that you could be overqualified. This grinds my gears. Here it is. I'm a seasoned executive with 20 years of proven experience. Immediately, immediately. That is like saying something like neato or that's groovy. It had a shelf life and it's long overdue. Seasoned. Please do not use that. That's for steak or other food preparation. Seasoned is not a word that you want to be using because again, it's repetitive, it's redundant. And it also signals that you are just a cut and paste, a copy paste. And with AI, we don't need to invite any more copy and pasting because again, that is not really helping them to see how you are qualified and more so not overqualified. So that is just the number one, please do not do.
- [05:21]
A
Okay, well, good suggestion, Lauren. So let's say somebody has a lot of experience in a certain area which might be thought of as, oh, that's dated. It's all change. So how can they change it in a way that it looks very relevant to the job they're applying to?
- [05:43]
B
This is like a million dollar celebration right here. This question, and the reason why I say that is because all of this accumulated experience has the ability to straddle into what we call tomorrow stories. So every time you are talking about your experience in the past tense, Ed, right, I sold or I led or I built or something, that is indicating that it happened already. I want you to think about how you can translate that into present and tomorrow. If you keep building off of the past tense, ed descriptors and adjectives and all of that kind of stuff, what's going to happen is you're going to be creating your professional obituary. You're going to be essentially putting yourself in the grave of. Of candidates who have already been past Their prime nobody is hiring for has beens. They are hiring for visionary leaders to take us into whatever the future is going to bring.
- [06:58]
A
So give us an example. I'm going to Good for our listeners how they can shift.
- [07:04]
B
Excellent. So first and foremost I want you to look at the projects that you've worked on that have spilled over into an existing current application or execution. So let's just say you were in charge of an RFP that secured a CRM. Now they didn't shut the CRM off when you left. Whatever time and investment that you made in securing that piece of software and it's still being used today, it is still the product of choice or the software of choice that has been able to scale the business and save X amount of time. So please estimate to the best of your abilities the way that your impact is still alive and kicking and then take that assumption and put some level of metric around it. Totally permissible to say approximately X as an aggregated impact. If you just allow the efforts and the actual results to continue and to be able to accumulate. There's nothing dishonest about it. It's still there. What you're doing is helping them understand the longer term value and something that also is in practice and execution for today and going forward.
- [08:40]
A
Very good example. You mentioned that traditional networking only has a 2% success rate. I get to get a job. So what methodology do you propose to have a higher rate?
- [08:56]
B
So I focus a lot of our consultancy and we work with executive and C suiters and we help them land in the hidden job market. And just as a point of reference, the hidden job market is really not so hidden. Right. It accumulates easily 80, 85%, maybe more at the executive level in terms of how people actually land these choice positions. Now networking has been talked about forever. People know that networking is important. But one of the most important features that we focus in on with networking because there's often a lot of resistance around it, people know I often refer to it as the broccoli of business. Right? We know it's good for us. We know it is very nutrient rich, but it's easy to avoid. And so where we really cut through is in helping each and every client understand what is their urgent and expensive problem that they have the unfair advantage to solve. Now what I need to do once I identify what that urgent and expensive problem is and that I have the unfair advantage to solve, is I need to go find their urgent and expensive problem and see how that aligns. So if you're in a Conversation, you got about 30 minutes while you're networking. You have to also remove the rapport building period of time and also, of course, save some room for next steps. So in the middle of that conversation where you're talking about yourself or hopefully they have an understanding that you have understood where they are, whether it be their business or whether it be some other professional challenge that they have now, you have alignment. So I don't want you to ever go into a networking conversation thinking that the objective is to impress, the objective is to align. And I also, again, you've heard this probably on many, many, many different levels. This is one of several conversations. This is not a time to ask if this is a new person. You are planting seeds and so continue to go there and ask them questions that we classify as a 100, 200 or 300 level question. So a throwaway question. So what's a day in the life like at such and such a company? Anybody can ask if you go up through the hierarchy to a 300 level question. Now, it's a question that only you can answer, only this person. So customize your questions and also make sure you know your urgent and expensive problems that you have the unfair advantage to solve.
- [11:59]
A
So you know what I'm going to ask you next? Give us an example.
- [12:03]
B
Yes, of course. Okay, so I'm going to take myself, and I'm glad that you keep asking me that because I get so fired up about talking about these things and it helps me to really put this into practice. Thank you. So I have an urgent and expensive unfair advantage and that is that I'm on a mission to end career victimization. Now, a lot of coaches might not talk about that and, and a lot of people in this space. And there's only 29 million coaches on LinkedIn. So, you know, I don't want to pile myself into this entire, entire batch. So it's urgent. It's urgent because career victimization is costing those who are over 40 a lot of heartache and a lot of delays in their search. So it's urgent because they're looking for a solution fast. Because nobody wants to be in a job search indefinitely. Like nobody wants to be in the dating world indefinitely. It's expensive because every day that goes by, either the severance is draining or your confidence is also dwindling. So it's urgent and expensive. Now, there's more to that urgent, expensive problem. But what I also really want to share for your listeners is if your problem is not urgent, that role is not prioritized. Nobody puts nice to have roles up there and moves quickly on them. So typically the positions that are so important to fill get the most attention. If it's not an expensive problem, then what's going to happen is you could run into overqualified. So if I don't see this as an expensive problem and you're at a high price point, 250350, whatever that is a year and I can find somebody who is less expensive to solve it. Now I'm just going to do what any smart business would do. Hire the person that's well qualified but less, you know, costs less to the company. And if you don't have the unfair advantage, then somebody else is going to get that role. I have an unfair advantage. Not only am I 61 and I've lived through all of this, but all of the strategies and also the methodologies that we use through Portfolio Rocket are seen through these lenses, are seen through this both from my previous recruiter days and also with over 500 executives that we've worked with in the hidden job market to cut that time down about 40%. So that would equal about anywhere between four and seven months on the job search versus about a year for any executive position.
- [14:53]
A
So you've got this wonderful experience. Tell us what is the biggest shifts you've seen in the workplace in the past X amount of years?
- [15:04]
B
There's at least three that I want to bring to mind. The first is much of the generation of older workers and I would say anybody over 40 is operating off of a very old operating system. What I mean by that specifically, and of course I'll give you an example, is that they think that the way to go about a job and looking for a job is to lean into whatever job postings are on LinkedIn or job boards or over rely on recruiters. I will tell you as a former Korn Ferry recruiter, recruiters are not the messiah. They are not there to go above and beyond to run a PR campaign for you. That's not happening and it's especially not happening now. So the first shift is getting away from that passive approach. And I would say that easily 90% of the folks that we, you know, that I meet before they become clients are still doing that. They're still front loading all of their time and efforts into open roles. And the antidote to that is really to move into a far more proactive creator entrepreneurial mindset about how you are running your search. How are you curating your LinkedIn feed, how are you structuring your conversations. What are those urgent and expensive problems you have the unfair advantage to solve? How are you time blocking so that you make sure that there's a flywheel of efforts pointing towards both the companies that are dealing with those urgent and expensive problems and mastering your message from end to end. So, first one, the big, big, big shift is get out of the expectation that somehow, some way, a job posting or a recruiter is the main meal of your search. The second thing, and I hope that we're not going to double dip here, but is really to get off of the belief system that experience is the value that means you're qualified. That equation doesn't hold true anymore. Having 20 years of experience is a timestamp like, so what did you do with it? I need to know that that experience is relevant for today's world. If you continue to talk about your experience and you don't have enough meat on the bones to explain why it matters to me, then I will assume that the experience is collecting dust.
- [18:16]
A
So when you say it, you have to realize what it matters to the person that is interviewing you. You really have to.
- [18:24]
B
Any decision maker. And a decision maker could be somebody that I'm having a new conversation with. I don't know who you're connected with. I don't know where this conversation is going to go. I don't know if putting a post about something that's very relevant in my industry is also going to invite a lot more engagement by way of posing a question. So all of this is connected in seed planting and consistent messages. So you can't fracture your message. Right. If you start fracturing your message, then I really don't know why there's relevance.
- [19:00]
A
No, say fracturing your message. What do you mean by that?
- [19:04]
B
So if I rely on, if I say that I am a chief marketing officer and my emphasis is really on, I'm just going to take it as branding. And my brand on LinkedIn doesn't have a banner, just relies on a title. I'm like, you're not really a chief marketing person with a brand. That's a fracture. That's not consistent. Right. That is splintering the message. Because trained eyes, whether they be recruiters or other decision makers, are only working with the information that you give them. They're taking it right out of the box. They're not trying to go the extra mile. They're too busy. So you're responsible for putting all those dots together.
- [19:53]
A
It also implies that you have to ask, if you can. In a networking event, a lot of questions about what is their biggest challenges so that you can align in your answers.
- [20:05]
B
Yes. And I find that most people expect that a decision maker or even a networker is going to give them the answers to the test. If you're really interested in this company, do the research. You can figure a lot out. I mean, we have so many tools. We have chat, we have perplexity, we have articles, we have LinkedIn, we have podcast galore. We have all this access in YouTube. There's ways to do this to stand out and you could do it fast.
- [20:38]
A
Yes. So definitely make the research. So for leaders who feel invisible despite their accomplishments. So you've given already a lot of practical steps that you recommend concretely, but you must have also clients that are, have lost confidence, that feel that nothing they do has been of any worth, that they've wasted their time because no one is interested in them. So what do you do as a coach?
- [21:11]
B
It's interesting, I think, that there is a lot of second guessing, I guess you could call it, you know, lost confidence or imposter syndrome, and sometimes the feeling of being threatened by either younger generation or just having so much competition in today's market. And this is just as much of an inside job as the outside job is. And so there's many, many, many, many exercises to what gets to the ultimate why or understanding that urgent and expensive problem. But we want to know why you do what you do. Because when all candidates are, you know, candidate A has this level of experience and candidate B does too, they share the same title, they come from the same kind of pedigree. All of these things make them in many ways a parody product. Right. But the differentiator that nobody else can ever take away from you is, is why it is that you do what you do. And the framework that we use for this is understanding what is the key contribution that you're here to make when you leave this place? What is the impact that that contribution has secured? What impact do you want to make? And what is the key contribution that's going to get you there? Because people are not just hiring people to fill a seat. They're hiring for a contribution above and beyond a job description. A job description is cost of entry. And that's not, that's just the scaffolding. If you ask anybody, if they just did a job in their, the job on the job description in their previous role, they're going to be like, no way. I never just did that. So now you really need to read the tea leaves to better understand what other factors are going to allow for you to be able to instill that contribution. You know, do a lot of scraping to get to that. And that's part of our secret sauce, is really being able to help them see it for themselves. You have to feel it and see it for yourself because there'll be many things in the process that will try to knock you off your square. But if you're sure footed, that energy and that confidence is unstoppable. And that's what we're there to do.
- [23:45]
A
Wonderful, Wonderful. My last question as we're coming to the end of the podcast, how has AI affected your business?
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B
Fantastic question. I would say overarchingly it's helped us to grow. And what I mean by that is this is just the next horizon in helping to impart a way for our clients to upskill, cross skill and retool themselves. I cannot as a coach be talking about the impact of today's job search and be calling out outdated career advice. And if we are not practicing how we are helping our clients to be better at practical uses of AI ways in which that they are scaling and of course, how are they applying it within their industry. And so much of what we are doing now is making sure that we provide relevant ChatGPT prompts to help expedite the kinds of research that I'm talking about to be able to really go deep, let's just say with a CEO interview and be able to pluck out the those salient points so that they can align to that in their conversations and in their marketing materials. So all of these things start to create a level of cohesion and of course reduce a lot of that fracturing that I was talking about earlier.
- [25:13]
A
Thank you very much. Where can people get a hold of you, Lauren?
- [25:18]
B
Well, they can definitely find me on LinkedIn, so I'm there a lot. I love LinkedIn. It's been a big part of my life and my career and certainly my clients. So, so I'm on LinkedIn. I also have my own website, portfoliorocket.com and my podcast. And thanks for shouting that out. Career blast in half.
- [25:39]
A
Great Lauren. Thank you so much.
- [25:41]
B
You are so welcome and thank you so much.
- [25:44]
C
Thank you for listening to the excellent executive coaching podcast. You can subscribe to all Future podcasts@excellentexecutivecoaching.com join us each Wednesday to learn more about the latest trends in leadership techniques and bring your coaching to the next level. To learn more about Dr. Burris CEO Mastermind, use the contact form at excellentexecutivecoaching Com.