Interview with Mark A. Herschberg, Author of The Career Toolkit: Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You

By Janice Dru-Bennett

See Resources Here: https://www.thecareertoolkitbook.com/resources

EDITED TRANSCRIPT OF VIDEO INTERVIEW FROM JANUARY 17, 2021:

​JANICE: Hi, it’s Janice Dru-Bennett and today is Sunday, January 17th, 2021. I am so excited to bring guest speaker Mark Herschberg into this recording for YouTube and for the blog. Mark is the author of The Career Toolkit, and he’s been a long-time connection and friend. I’m really excited to have this conversation with him. One, a couple of the things we’ll be discussing is how we met, some of the topics that he covers in his book, such as networking our career paths and how to map that out. Cultural fit and diversity at companies as well as personality differences, leadership, influence, management, and writing a book. Mark, let’s jump right in and start with talking about how we first met. I know you might not remember 100%, but let’s hear your thoughts and I’d be happy to share mine as well.

MARK: So, as I was trying to remember this the other day, and I remember being an advisor to your company, that’s kind of how we first started interacting, but the way we first met I’m thinking it was some event. I can’t remember what that event was.

JANICE: I’m going to jump in and say, we did go to an event together pretty recently. I think it was 2018 or 2019, where I had invited you to that event. We met there, but if I go back and look at all the breadcrumbs from how I meet people, the way I do that is often looking through LinkedIn, because I’ve developed a lot of connections on LinkedIn and every time I meet someone, I usually invite them to connect on LinkedIn. I put a little note there saying, “Hey, this is how we met.” You, I had actually reached out to using LinkedIn with InMail back in February of 2015. So I found that message I sent you by email, by InMail. I had said, my startup is looking for a CTO. I had seen you were a CTO at the time, and we’re also putting together a board of advisors.

I had read your profile and it said, “Don’t cold outreach to me unless you have… So, I actually referred to that. I said you could also talk to the marketing guy at the time and you’re like, “Oh, I’m glad you read my profile, email me and let’s actually meet.” That did turn into an in-person event meeting I put together, and I had done this for almost everyone in that room where were going to evaluate a tech company for developing some software for Inkwhy, which was a startup I had started back in 2011. I brought in these two presenters and put together a board of advisors to give me feedback on how that, whether or not that team would be a good tech team to build out what we’re trying to build for Inkwhy. And I remember at the time, most of the board said, “no, don’t work with these guys.”

We took the advice. We put together a little mini dinner and there were about 20 or 30 people in the room, which was really just the tip in terms of networking. If you reach out and you bring people together and you have an event, I think that’s a great way to initially meet. Since then, we’ve stayed in touch. Like when I moved to Rhode Island, I had met you in New York when I was living in New Jersey. When I moved to Rhode Island, I sent you a message saying, “Hey, I’m doing this event.” Then, when I went back to New York to do an event, I invited you on, gave you a VIP ticket to join. These are all things for how do you stay in touch with someone? So, it’s been 6 years now almost since we first met and now you’ve written a book and we both had, changes in our careers.

I think it’s really exciting to have this conversation with you at this time of your book launch.

MARK: I now certainly remember that first meeting where we were all sitting in a large square, and now I feel better. I remember things spatially. I was trying to place, where did I first run into you? That was the first physical meeting I remember. I’m glad that came through LinkedIn and you’ve done two things in that. That’s such a great example. The first is that when you do connect with someone the first time online, and it might be in your case who is reaching out, or sometimes you might meet someone in person, right? If we did meet at an event and you send that follow-up email putting that information in there, putting in it was great meeting you at this event last week or last night, it helps give that context. You do 6 years later, try to say, how do I know this person?

You can find that reference and they can find it as well? Right. And the second thing you did, this is what my friend, Olivia Fox Cabane, who wrote The Charisma Myth: [How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism], which is a fantastic book, which she recommends as a great networking technique. Whenever you’re part of an organization, there are two kind of subcommittees and it doesn’t have to be a formal committee, but two things to think about, which is how you reach out to people, which is either membership committee or awards committee, right? And these are the ones that reach out and say, we need to engage other people. Now you weren’t in some organization, this was your company, but you were reaching out to engage with the company. It’s a very concrete, “Hey, let’s do this” as opposed to, “I’d just like to get to know you.”

JANICE: Yeah. I remember another person who was at that event, Joan Kuhl. She’s I think written a book [Dig Your Heels In: Navigate Corporate BS and Build the Company You Deserve]. Also, she had mentioned to me, she put together a personal board of advisors. I feel like that concept of reaching out to people who you can help and who can help you. I, it really creates value over time. If you stay in touch and find the right people to connect with.

MARK: Yes. And the other thing. It’s interesting, you talked about, you reached out to me for a CTO role. So, I get lots of inbound messages. Some of them are just utter spam, which is why I have that. I might get some recruiter who says, Oh, look, you use this technology 15 years ago. Want to be some junior developer and this technology. What they’re saying is I didn’t respect you enough to even read through your profile. Right. I don’t want to waste my time. I’d rather waste yours, figuring out if this is worthwhile. That’s why I’ve had to put that in. What, the other thing that happened there when I met you, is it wasn’t right for the CTO position, but the advisory board position. I’ve done that, in a number of cases I look at, I mean, to say more broadly, I look at interviewing as an opportunity to build a network.

You go out and you meet someone, even if it’s not going to be the exact fit today, if someone seems like an interesting person, interesting company what’s worth exploring because jobs are short, careers are long. It gives you the chance to start to build that relationship for the long-term.

JANICE: I absolutely agree with that. I think interviewing for positions, you build relationships and sometimes you might interview for something and it might be like, Oh, I don’t think I’ll ever talk to this person again. In some cases, I’ve interviewed for positions and it’s turned into consulting projects or other relationships that are mentorship related or advisory related. That aren’t that specific job. If that job isn’t a good fit, the interview can often still lead to other great things. So absolutely. I agree with your concept in your book about how you’re always interviewing.

MARK: I’ll share a story years ago, someone, I think I was looking at on Craigslist for startups because years ago that was a good place to find startups. I saw one, I said, Hey, I see you’re looking for software developers. I’m a CTO. Just wondering if you have more senior level roles you’re looking for. They write back and kind of say, “Oh yeah, tell us about your programming because we’re hiring engineers.” No, again, I’m not trying to be a software engineer, senior role. They can say, Oh, well, we have a co-founder doing it, but I said, well, how about, let’s just have a discussion. Maybe you could use an advisor. Right. They weren’t looking for that, like talk my way into it. Or at least to the meeting. We met and they said, “wow, you’ve got a great background. Yes, please be on our advisory board.”

I was on the advisory board there. I got to meet some of the investors later when the company and I built up relationships with the investors, just as these are interesting people, as someone who does startups, I should know lots of investors. Later when the company ran into some trouble, the investors called me and asked me to come on board as the acting COO and then more trouble. And I became the acting CEO. I always joke, I found a CEO position off of Craigslist. Right. And I wasn’t looking for the job. They weren’t looking for it. By keeping yourself open to these possibilities, you can generate opportunity.

JANICE: ...Speaking of Craigslist as a way that’s not common or not thought of to land a high-level position, I think right now there’s a lot of new technologies coming out too that are allowing us to connect. And I just invited you to Clubhouse. That’s been really interesting place to meet new people, make connections, hear advice in real time. I really encourage people to check out clubhouse if they can get an invite, go in and listen to some of the topics that are being discussed. I’ve been developing relationships off of clubhouse to talk about, sales and business development, or even just, mentorship or other types of relationships. It’s always good to kind of keep an eye out on what’s trending. What are the different ways that you could, meet people that aren’t traditional, especially during COVID when we can’t meet people as often, or in person, as we would in the past with, mingling and networking at different, bars or whatever, wherever people that was 20 years ago.

MARK: …I think you pointed out something important, hidden in there that want to make sure we emphasize, which is tools like Clubhouse can introduce you to new people, but of course, whether it’s LinkedIn or Clubhouse or Facebook, you can get those connections, but then you have to build out that relationship. Ideally some of that happens, in-person, it’s a little hard right now, but you can even do just phone calls or one-on-one even if it’s not physically in person, but it’s that it’s not just collecting followers or friends or whatever the term is for the social media does you’re building relationships with people and social media just that’s your Rolodex, but you have to go beyond it.

JANICE: Yeah. It’s not about the vanity metrics. It’s about building the deep relationships. Like we’ve had multiple touch points throughout the last 6 years. I often think of networking a bit like sales, where sometimes people don’t like the term you’re “networking,” you’re “selling” versus you’re building a deep relationship. You’re really trying to get to know people. The selling concept is you have to have at least 12 touch points before someone will buy from you. If you’re, if you want to build trust, that has to be over time with multiple outreaches, inbound, like figuring out ways that you can build a deeper relationship, especially when you’re not seeing someone and moving to Rhode Island, you and I still stayed in touch because we communicated and I, I kept an eye out on when I could, meet you in person again,

MARK: I know you haven’t gotten to the final chapters in the book, but the networking chapter begins with trust because networking is relationships and relationships are trust it. That sleazy networking is the, Oh, Hey, give me your card. Okay. I’m going to call you when I need something. Right. Those are people who are taking, but in any relationship we have, it’s not about what can I get from you? It’s okay. We’re friends and oh, if you need something, yeah. Call me, I’m happy to help you out. Sometimes I might call you. It’s because you’ve built that trust that you can ask for something from the relationship. Right. We think about the people we’re closest to our families are really close long-time friends. We can ask a lot, right? We can ask them to bail us out of jail at three in the morning. You’re not going to do that with someone you just met at a conference two days ago. Right? So over time, we build the trust and we build what we can ask, but we also go in to do this effectively. It’s not simply what we can get. It’s a mentality of how can I help you? How can I give? And that helps to foster that relationship.

JANICE: Yeah. That is a lesson I would love to teach my kids, that it’s not all about getting, it’s also about giving. And, speaking of kids, I think at the book launch we talked about last week, you mentioned this book is for between the ages of 20-ish to 40-ish. I really would love to see my kids start learning these concepts as soon as possible, because I think it’ll help with their careers and life, just understanding how to deal with people and how to build the skills and understand your values. Over time, I think it creates depth of personality and depth of person. The concepts that you really dove deep into… in the book.

MARK: I have two nephews who are about to turn nine, and I’m thinking of ways, the book, of course, we talk about business and companies and startups and things that certainly not a nine-year old, not even a 15- or 16-year-old is going to really want to relate to, but I’m thinking about how do I take some of these concepts and maybe put them in the context that would make more sense to someone in high school or early college. Of course, as you said, we target 20 to 40 and I’ve had lots of people in their forties and fifties, even sixties say, “wow, yes, this is helpful.” I wish I knew this earlier and college students as well, but usually freshmen and sophomores aren’t as focused on where the careers go. They’re just trying to get through a semester, but perhaps creating content, that’s more geared towards that group, but the concepts are the same.

JANICE: Yeah. And it’s interesting. You mentioned high school and back in high school, and you also mentioned this book in the book launch, What Color is Your Parachute? And I remember picking that up at my high school library and reading it from front cover to back cover. I just loved it because I was really thinking, I think since the beginning of my early, exploring what’s the right job for me, what’s the right work for me. I think it started early for me wanting to know that, another book that I read early on in my career is called, color career match, which talks about the Color Q Personalities [Career Match: Connecting Who You Are with What You'll Love to Do and Personality Power] by Shoya Zichy … and I’ve actually partnered with her because I just became a huge fan of the different personalities. My personality is green, red based on her color coding: green, meaning I’m really people focused and red meaning I’m very action-oriented.

The other colors are blue and gold, which are more analytical and more organized. You’re usually either agreeing or a blue in her book. More people focused or more numbers focused, and then you’re either a gold or a red, and it could be 51, 50%, or it could be 80, 20, but you’re either more organized or more action oriented. And I’m very red. At times I can be super messy. That’s kind of understanding people have different personalities and that matched it to careers. My color, green, red extrovert mapped well to a marketing career, and there were other types of positions in there. Halfway through my work, I actually brought Shoya as keynote speaker at a leadership conference on her new book called personality power, which also talked about how different personalities interact differently. I ended up realizing that a lot of my former bosses and managers are, have been gold blue introverts.

The complete opposite of me, and when you’re reporting to someone who’s different, or if your colleague is different from you, how do you speak to them differently? How do you interact with them differently? That’s all, I think, part of that networking process and understanding how to interact with people who might have a very different personality from you. What are your thoughts on that?

MARK: This is something, so I’ve been teaching career skills at MIT for past 20 years at MIT’s career success accelerator. We use the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument, which has a similar mapping and all of these, whether the colors you mentioned, HBDI, Myers-Briggs, DISC, OSHA. Now first there’s controversy. Some people say this is garbage, there’s no support. If you don’t think it’s useful, ignore it the next couple minutes of this conversation, if you do find it useful. I personally do, you can look and you can do what you did, which is say, okay, here’s where I seem to be. One of the things we emphasize this doesn’t say what, you’re good at this, most of these, talk about your preferences, but of course, preferences become habits and habits become strengths. It was helpful to me when I first did this, is I recognized I’m super-analytical.

I’m way off in the analytical quadrant, somewhat process, not good in the other areas, or at least I wasn’t, my preferences were in those areas. I also wasn’t strong, and I recognized, okay, it’s because I liked doing the quantitative stuff. That’s where I focused, but just like I’ve taught myself, I like eating cookies and ice cream, but I knew I had the vegetables. Wasn’t my preference, but okay, I’m going to maybe eat some vegetables said, I should really kind of push myself to do a little more in these other areas. I wasn’t strong to round myself out. I talk about this in chapter two on working effectively and how we engage with others. I get into a deeply in chapter seven communications, because a lot of communications, a lot of these issues, as you pointed out, it’s that we have these stylistic differences, it’s that we have these different mental models.

I would love to just talk about the numbers when I look at a problem, but I know other people they’re going to get bored. I’m going to lose them after 30 seconds. I have to frame the challenges, problem solutions, not just in the quantitative way, I think, but in a frame of reference, that’s more geared to their mental models.

JANICE: Yeah. I love how you started that by saying, if you don’t believe in this skip the next few minutes, because I think there are certain personalities that love talking about personalities, and there are certain ones who just are like that’s BS. It’s, I think it’s about figuring out what are the tools that work for you. What are your preferences? And you don’t have to necessarily believe in personalities. I do think there are patterns that you can recognize in how certain people behave and by understanding those patterns and, responding to behaviors and different perspectives that can help accelerate your career or help you, be able to navigate, the path forward.

MARK: You’re taking the words right out of my career tools, career paths. This is what I love talking about.

JANICE: Yeah. I love your Career Toolkit App as well, which allows you to swipe and kind of ask yourself questions regularly about your career and kind of help keep it at the top of your mind. I also love how you said, it’s about, what are your preferences as they turn into habits as they turn into skills and how do you develop other habits and skills that might support you? And, a lot of times we focus on our strengths with the strengths finders assessment as well. At the same time, some of the things that we’re not as strong at, if we can improve those skills, I loved that, math, example that you gave, where with the rectangle, if you added one side, like the automatic thing in my head, and I’m not analytical, it was the wrong answer. Like where, if you really want to expand your skills, you want to exponentially, you want to increase the short side, not the long side.

MARK: So. Probably give that the example to the listeners. Very basic example, using sixth grade math. This is the only math I put in the book because I’ve wanted to do more, but I knew that’s my preference, not the reader’s preference. Think back to sixth grade, you’ve got a rectangle that’s four by 10, and you have to increase one of the sides by two units to maximize the area. Okay. Which side you increase and the answer is to increase the short side. If you increase the long side from 10 to 12, then you get 12 times four is 48 increasing the short side four to six is six times 10 = 60. Okay. So we’re first like, that’s just math. Great. Why are we doing this? But conceptually, if you think about how this works, when we increase that short side, what we’re doing is we are taking that increase in, amplifying it by that longer side.

Right? So every unit increase in the short side gets amplified by that much bigger side. That’s how we think of our skills. We all have long sides. It might be marketing, it might be chemistry. It might be public speaking or just good with people. Those are our friends. We have our short sides and we all tend to focus on our long sides, right? Especially I think about tech, which is my field. We have to continually invest in learning new technologies, right? Because there’s always something new coming out. I can’t keep writing in COBOL, I’d be way displaced. ? Right So we’ve learned new technologies. If you think about all the time I put into that, I get marginal returns. If we just took of time, if instead of increasing that long side from 10 to 20, I increase it 10 to 18 and put a little effort in that short side, I’m getting better amplify my returns.

Working on the skills that we talked about there, or other skills are going to really help you be stronger and emphasize the skills that you have to be more effective.

JANICE: Yeah. I’m like the opposite where numbers are not my preference, even though I know they’re important. I’ve been setting aside more time to look at financials and numbers and really understand that because I can go out and talk all day, but if dollars aren’t coming in and they’re not going out, then it’s not worth it. Like trying to find that short side and building it or finding other people to help build it. I think that’s always an option as well is building that network that can help support your short side.

MARK: Absolutely. This is how Keith Ferrazzi, who wrote a great book, Never Eat Alone, [Expanded and Updated: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time]. He thinks of his network as this is an extension of me the same way we think of our cell phones. As I don’t have to remember this because my cell phone can look it up. My cell phone can do it for me. That’s how he thinks of his whole network. Whenever he has a problem, someone in his network can go find that solution. To your point, you can say, I’m going to strengthen. There’s probably only so much I can do because there’s other things I need to focus on. If you diversify your network as well. In my case, I don’t just have other engineers who think like me who have connections are tech companies. I have a diverse network with people with different skillsets and different connections. I can rely on them in areas where I’m still not long enough in that side.

JANICE: Yeah. I want to shift our conversation into talking about our career paths. Another concept in your book is mapping out your career. I think I didn’t do this early on in my career and I wish I maybe did, but often I’ve kind of landed positions just as they’ve come, or it hasn’t really been structured. Recently I did an action map, which I did a 30-year plan of where I’d like to be in 30 years, included writing a book somewhere in there possibly, but I’ve always heard if we write it down, you’ll more likely do it. We’d love to hear, like when you created a map for yourself or like what your career path has looked like, how much of it has been coincidental or, falling into your lap versus how much of it has been structured and part of an overall plan.

MARK: I kind of began the concept back in college because I had two majors, a minor and a master’s and trying to fit it all in plus the general requirements and some classes were only taught in the fall and these were pre-recs. I had to map out multiple semesters in advance. Each semester I’d say, okay, what am I taking for next four years more with a graduate program? And then I’d revise it because I’d show up on registration day and discover, Oh, the teacher side, not to teach it. Or these classes are in conflict. I created this plan, but I’d have to every semester revise it. Now when I began my career, I didn’t naturally do that. I would say, really came about when I was in a company. I had been there for roughly two years when the founders had a falling out, which if you do startups, it’s actually far more common than you’d think.

The CTO I was working for said, well, this is my last day. I’m starting a new company. These guys are coming with me. You should too. The other co-founders were saying, Hey, they’re leaving, but some are staying and we’d love for you to stay. And I had a choice. I didn’t have a choice before I’d looked at some jobs. I picked one I’d been here now a couple of years. I thought, well, I need to figure out how to make this choice. How do I know what’s right for me? And so I started thinking about what I wanted. Of course I realized I had more than two choices that were actually many other companies as well. I should really think about what is the evaluation metric for what job is right? And then compare these jobs and others with it. At that point I started thinking, where do I want to go? What do I want to do? And I started thinking longer term the types of problems I, as interested in the roles that align to those types of problems, the skills that I had, the skills that I needed.

So I started to map this out. Of course in the book we show both visually and in the pros, how you can create that plan, starting from what’s your long-term goal, where you want to get to, and then you create a plan that you can back down to where you are today and what those steps are. As you point out, no plan ever works out exactly how we expected from the start. And that’s fine. Just as every semester I had to go and rejigger my plan, any career plan you create should first, it’s going to be a little more concrete, nearer, vaguer, further out, but then on a regular basis, whether it’s a year, maybe quarterly, whatever you’re comfortable with, you want revise that plan. You want to get input from other people you want to check, what have you accomplished? What haven’t you, is it still the goal that you want and do these shifts?

JANICE: I love that. That reminds me back to my freshman year of college, at Princeton where I put up on the wall, this giant, like I mapped out every course, I wanted to do a bill, covered up an entire wall with like eight by 11 sheets. It showed all the courses I wanted to take for all four years. And it was way overloaded. I felt like I was taking six courses in one semester and I was just burning out. I had to change it and drop two classes. Cause it just wasn’t working. Even if you have a vision, once you start working on it, you’ll realize, does it work or should it take longer or should I completely change it or scrap it? Or like you said, has my goal change if I wanted to be president of the United States. I see what it’s really like to be that maybe I don’t want to be POTUS.

MARK: Right So everything, shifts over time and re-evaluating it regularly is a great idea. I do think having that 30 year action map is really helpful for me to think about making decisions. As I get asked to do things or as I’m making choices throughout my career, does it help me get closer to that end goal? So even if it’s not an exact point that I’ve mapped out and it’s coming to me, I can potentially make a decision with a yes or no based on, is it going to move me closer to that larger goal? Is that still my larger goal or is it going to move me toward another goal that I didn’t even think about because of the direction it might take me.

And that’s key. Some people think, well, I don’t know what job I want 20 years from now. And that’s fine. Some people do not. Everyone does. Even if you say, I want to be maybe senior level, I want something that’s engaging. Lots of other people may be working with customers. It doesn’t have to be a title. It can just be, here are some of the activities I want to be doing. I want to manage lots of people or not. I want to be an individual contributor. I want to be customer facing or not. That can start to narrow down where you might be looking. Of course, we can further refine this by talking to people, by reaching out to people and asking, tell me about what you do. What do you like? What don’t you like and gain further clarification. Of course, it was Eisenhower who said, plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

That’s how we know we create these maps that are way more complicated, like the one on your wall and say, okay, maybe this isn’t going to work, but that whole process got you thinking about it. And that was the real value.

JANICE: I love that the plans are worthless, but the planning is everything. I also like the thought about like, yes, there’s this big vision, but you also have to think about where you are now and what really appeals to you. What I found is can be for my team members that I’ve given advice to is one mapping out your time and seeing what, where are you enjoying what you’re doing and what, where are you not enjoying it as one step to assess yourself? and then another step is also to look at job descriptions and no job title, isn’t everything. As you look at the descriptions, think about what appeals to you in that description and come up with your own ideal job description for where you are now or where you potentially want to go. I think that can also help you make decisions about your next role.

Does this kind of map to my ideal position? I’ve done that exercise a few times myself and it’s helped me think through, is this the right role for me or not?

MARK: One of the first questions I ask almost any candidate I hire is what would be your ideal next role, right? Describe to me what do you want? And it’s not about, suck up to me and tell me it’s exactly what we have written. It’s really what’s of interest to you and figuring out if it aligns or not. Something that I talk about in the book, and this is a failure. Many companies do in their job, descriptions and candidates. Don’t always think to do this themselves. When you look at job description, most job descriptions for the same role. Look the same. If you think about a director of marketing job, you’ve got the standard things that a company of a given size, right will vary a hundred-thousand-person company versus a five-person company. For a director of marketing at a hundred-person company, you look at three of them, it’s all kind of the same run.

The social media campaigns maybe could go to some conferences, put out the marketing collateral to support sales. Okay great. That’s standard. You can almost guess that from the title, but depending on the nature of the company, if they’re doing one conference a year versus two, a quarter, if they have robust sales materials for a static product versus dynamically generating lots of new ones, are they heavily doing social media or not? And those are the subtle things. They’ll all those bullet points will be in the job description, but you need to ask and understand, well, is this 10% of the job or 40% of the job. Ideally accompany should either express in the job description, there’s pros and cons to doing that, but at least internally have a sense of what are the relative sizings of these activities. As a candidate, you should be asking, what are the sizings and make sure it aligns to what you want to do, because if social media is what you really enjoy, it’s only 10% of the job might not be a great fit.

JANICE: That’s a great piece of advice to really assess what the companies, how, what the breakdown is of the activities of how that maps to your interests and passions. I think that also leads well into the question about cultural fit and diversity. How important is that to you as a person? And as you assess a company, I’ve heard from team members too, like the leadership team all looks the same and I don’t feel like I fit in here… So let’s talk more about diversity and why it’s important and how to really assess whether you’re a good cultural fit for a company before, and once you’re in there… go ahead.

MARK: Here again, it should be on the company. Whether you’re a small business or a large one to think through these, and whether you explicitly put in the job description or not internally should know the answers to this, but as a candidate, you should also explicitly ask if it doesn’t, if it’s not brought up and, culture and diversity, these are, I think of them as slightly different. Let me talk about each of them and diversity itself.
 
There’s classic diversity, where we think about gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, race, why we want to have that is because heterogeneous teams pretty much always outperform homogeneous teams in the long run. You get a diversity of thoughts of perspectives, of ways to approach, problem solving. Of course, even if you say, well, we’re doing fine on our own. Doesn’t mean you can’t do better. My guess is your customers, whether they are individuals or companies staffed by individuals, they have diversity. If you don’t reflect that diversity, you’re going to be missing out on opportunities to deliver value to your customers.
 
It can be hard of course, when you’re a company of five people and, you’re constrained about who you can hire and how much you can afford. I’m not saying you have to have every group represented when you’re these tiny companies, but you should recognize that. If you don’t have it within your group, look to get, say advisors or other people, you can rely on to give you those perspectives. In the book, I then talked about mental diversity and that’s what we spoke about earlier, different mindsets, because they again will have different approaches to problem solving. As we shift to cultural, to really having a cultural fit, I think cultural fits is kind of fuzzy thing.

I haven’t found very good definitions of it, but really I think most of the time we’re actually talking about communication style. We’re talking about, for example, is it a collaborative work environment or is it a hero work environment? Is it very political and relationship based or is it very deliver results-based right. This is where we get conflicts because we have different styles, all of which are valid, but we don’t think about what these are. What can work well in one company won’t work in other, so a lot of it comes down to, I think even I talk about this in the book, even how we directly communicate with each other, but even broader and just how we problem solve and engage with other people.

JANICE: Yeah. I think how we problem solve and how we engage all of these are somewhat soft skills. Like I don’t know if we learn them in college. I mean, there’s some problem solving as your engagement with other students, as you’re trying to, come up with answer for a class project or, there’s some of those skills that you just do when you’re working with others. As people are growing through their careers, how much of a factor is understanding cultural fit and incorporating diverse thinking into your teams, part of leadership and developing influence and being a good manager. I mean, I know your book talks about how leadership and management is not the same thing. I’d love for you to jump into like the factors of leadership building influence and being a good manager and/or a good leader.

MARK: Yeah. These two, the first part of your question, this is important. Whether you are a new employee at a company to understand the culture and unwritten rules, or if you’re a founder of a company or a leader at a company being explicit in these rules, and this can be anything from, don’t give me like big projects before I’ve had my coffee at 9:00 AM, because I just can’t focus on them. And I’ve met many leaders like that. I’m not a morning person. You want to catch me and pitch me a big idea. Afternoons are definitely better. That’s a small, simple thing, but really if you’re trying to convince your boss or, another executive, this is why we need to do this important thing, catching them. First thing, 9:00 AM Monday morning versus three o’clock in the afternoon has an impact on your success. Now that’s a small one.

There are other factors. So for example, some companies …
 
[SOUND BREAK]

MARK: At some companies, we have a process where decisions get made in the meeting, right? Everyone shows up and we’re going to have this open debate and it’s okay to challenge each other at other companies, decisions get made through a collaborative process that happens back. Room’s not quite the right, concept because it’s not just for the select few, but in the water cooler meetings and stopping by someone’s office, it’s coalition building and that open conflict isn’t really, desired. If you’re used to one cultural style, when you walk into the other, you’re going to be less effective. If we just take a little time to understand this, how effective we are at work, or if we’re a leader, how effective our teams are, can change significantly, right. By easily a factor two. This is important for us to focus on as leaders or as employees.

JANICE: I think it’s so good to understand, like, what is the best time of day to talk to your manager? Or what is the style and communication type? Do they prefer an email or a text or an in-person meeting are decisions made in one-on-ones before meeting or do they happen in the meeting together? And that’s also something I think, as you think about differences in gender, in particular, I’ve read that women often don’t realize that the men are meeting one-on-one before meeting they’ve already come to a decision when they get to the meeting. I don’t know if that’s just a gender thing or it might be different across different corporate cultures but understanding how people make decisions can really help. I think with that level of influence and how to insert your voice into a conversation or to be heard at a company. The other thing is, I think there’s also these physical differences too, where, another thing I’ve read is that, women tend to nod their heads when they’re talking to show that they’re listening, not because they’re agreeing and that can send the wrong signals to people who think you’re nodding your head because you agree.

Understanding the cultural differences on how people are physically giving cues that might be interpreted differently, I think is also another aspect of building influence and understanding diversity and growing as a leader.

MARK: Absolutely. There’s a great book written by Deborah Tannen who’s a linguistics professor at Georgetown. The book is called Talking from 9 to 5: [Women and Men at Work], and it talks about gender in the workplace, specifically how we tend to communicate differently based on our gender. Now of course it’s not universal. It’s not all men speak like this, all women speak like that, but there are some correlative factors that come with gender. To your point, recognizing, okay, if someone tends to be doing this because they’re listening and I’m not used to it, I’m going to misread that signal. She gets into what are some of the other signals and styles that we do that and what the alternatives are. We can be more aware of this.

JANICE: Yeah. This was a point at your book launch event where someone said that often there’s some cultures who are all about not promoting herself or not being egotistic or so, like, how did, how do you address different cultural aspects of career growth and, what is appropriate in America may not be appropriate in China.

MARK: Yeah. Now this gets even broader. I always think about Asian cultures, which is very, it’s not direct conflict. It’s very respectful and it’s very “listen to authority.” You know, don’t raise your voice. You think about parts of America. I mean, America in general, we tend to be a lot more animated and emotional in our speech, even at work. Even in certain regions of America, it’s okay to bang on the table and to raise your voice and to shout, not necessarily that you’re angry, but that you’re trying to make a point or even within certain disciplines. If you think about the classic wall street trading floor, you cannot be a wilting flower and make it on that floor. You have to be able to scream and shout swear, even back in the eighties, if you weren’t swearing, you weren’t quite fitting into that culture. That isn’t going to translate to certain other industries or certain countries, and we have to be aware of this.

There are books and resources out there. There’s one I mentioned at the launch and I haven’t read this one. The other books I’ve mentioned, I’ve read, it’s called Kiss, Bow, Or Shake Hands: [The Bestselling Guide to Doing Business in More Than 60 Countries] on cultural practices. I’m not sure if it goes into these differences, but I think it does.

JANICE: Yeah. I’ve heard of that book too. It’s on my reading list to really understand, what other cultures are, how they do business. Cause I don’t think I fully understand it. Having been part of global companies. I’ve gotten some sense of, you hand your business cards with both hands to show respect in Asian countries and certain things that we don’t necessarily know here in the U.S. and vice versa as they come to the U.S. we can educate others on how to best interact with us in our business dealings. And personal dealings.

MARK: It’s gotten better, right? In that we are more global and people now television, the infinite has made things global. People see American culture, American see culture of other countries. It’s not that your example of the business card, right. In Asia, that you hand with two hands, right. You show it with respect because this is an extension of the person. I’m pretty sure most Asians today who’ve worked with Americans. If American just pulls it out and hands it consciously, they know, okay, right. This is what Americans do. They’re not going to take it as a conscious insult. However on a subconscious level, it’s still a little. That wasn’t what was expected. Right. It was just like, you just lost a little credit, not consciously. If we do things like that, it can add friction to our dealings. The more we can reduce that friction, the more effective we can be with our coworkers, partners, suppliers, and customers.

JANICE: Yeah. I love that. As we think about resources and books that you’ve read, or haven’t read, I think you have a whole list on your website, right. Do you want to kind of share what that is?

MARK: Yeah. In my book, because I cover a number of topics, I don’t always get a chance to go deep. I wanted to first reference some of the sources I got from because I’m an academic by heart and believe you always have to credit other ideas. Also I want to give the reader a chance to look at the book, to look at the, and learn it for themselves. I list out, certainly within the book, I have extensive footnoting, so you can follow these references. I always prefer footnoting to end noting it made the layout really difficult, but I like to see it on the spot enough to flip to the end or remember 20 pages later. You can find a list of everyone of these books on the website, under the resources page, you can find a whole bunch of other books that I didn’t necessarily reference, but these were some of the best books that I found in my own personal development.

Some are direct career skills. Some were just interesting reads that expanded me to other ways of thinking. There’s some additional resources links to some of the assessment tools that we talked about links to some ethics case studies and continually adding more links there. There’s also some free downloads to help you, deploy these skills, not just for yourself, but across your organization. Everyone in your organization can actually develop these skills. Now you have this common language and a framework for engaging your coworkers to be more effective.

JANICE: What is the website URL where they can find the resources,

MARK: TheCareerToolkitBook.com

JANICE: The Career Toolkit Book dot com, right? And I’ll make sure to put that in the YouTube channel, as well as on the blog post to people can find it as well as a link to your book, the CR the career toolkit. As we think about careers, now, I’d love to end this call by talking about where are you now? Where am I now? And what’s next for us as you’ve finished your book. I haven’t written a book yet, but let’s talk. What’s next?

MARK: Right now, I’m doing fractional CTO work, and this was another conscious decision. I’ve typically been CTO of different startup companies. I’ve also made consultant at times and knowing that the book was coming out for anyone who ever writes a book, there’s the writing the book, which takes a lot of effort, the writing of course, the editing and the production, but then marketing the book. It really is like doing a startup. You really have to think about all these different aspects. Everything is on you. I’m doing some fractional CTO work right now, because that gives me the flexibility to jump on a call in the middle of the day. Because I’m doing lots of podcasts, lots of news interviews. So I needed to have that flexibility. I’m going to figure out this is one of those points where I’m saying, I know long term where I’m trying to go in the short term.

There’s some uncertainty, how well will the book do? Do I want to put a second book? Do I want to spend this much time promoting the book or this much time? So I’m giving myself that flexibility for a few months, and then I’ll reevaluate. Once I have more information.

JANICE: What is that big vision for yourself as the, as a long-term, can you share that?

MARK: The long-term and the details of it are still being worked out. I love being a startup executive. I love being a CTO COO and building startup companies that is enjoyable. The scaling part is always so challenging and so much fun for me. I never want to give that up at the same time, the skills I talked about in the book, I’ve been teaching at MIT for 20 years at other universities in nonprofits and mentoring, I’ve done. I wrote the book because I know this can help people. I really want the world to benefit from this. It pains me to see people have career goals they can achieve. I want to invest time getting that out. The logical thing, someone who writes a book like this does is they become a career coach and executive coach. They consult to HR. I know I don’t want to do that full time, but I do want to spend some time doing that and finding that balance and figuring out at the level of time I can commit what’s the right. This is what I can offer to companies or individuals I have to find that balance. So it’s a combination of the two.

JANICE: Yeah. I actually got this great piece of advice recently from a career coach, Michelle Carroll, she said, it’s okay to have a fuzzy vision because it’s farther away. As you get closer, it becomes clearer. I think we’re both very aligned in that we both want to see a better future, a better world. I think that there’s a, a group of us on this earth that really care about this earth and want it to be good for future generations. And that’s a fuzzy goal. Cause we don’t necessarily see that right now with all the division in our country and all the challenges. I know that one of my long-term goals is to help support the UN Sustainable Development Goals. I want to see us work together on partner and relate, develop, these and be able to track and understand every action we take can help either put us years behind or move us years forward.

So, while in the short term, I have a new role with Nextech AR where I’m presenting our Augmented Reality solutions. I think the vision of the company really aligns well with my own too, in that we are creating infinite experiences to help inspire the world and pioneering new technologies to help create a better future. That I think is the long-term vision. The short-term vision is successfully sharing these new technologies in ways that can inspire the world and can help us build a better future. That’s what’s next for me, hopefully, and for us, and really happy you joined me here, Mark.

MARK: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

JANICE: Thank you.