My 3 interesting things for you this month…
1. Is this the January for a new job?!
It’s a tough month!!! Every year we tell ourselves, “this January will be easier to go back to work.” But it generally never is.
For some of you, this January will be tough enough that you decide it’s the one to get a new job.
Best of luck to you if you do.
But if you would like to rely on something other than luck, here are 3 things to remember:
Firstly, my video series on successfully getting your dream job is here, including figuring out what to do next, writing a great CV and LinkedIn, interviewing like a rockstar and negotiating your worth.
Secondly, DON’T TELL RECRUITERS WHAT YOU EARN IN YOUR CURRENT JOB. I can’t say this enough to people. They don’t work for you, you are their commodity. If you tell them what you earn, they will baseline your new salary from that +10%. Do tell them you are in the process for others roles. This gives you negotiating leverage.
Thirdly, think about your career through the lens of the problems you solve. Build everything off of that, your approach, LinkedIn profile, interview technique, analysis of a new job. You will be more successful in your search.
If you want help with any of the above, or anything else new job related, let me know. I have helped many clients get great roles and, often more importantly, get paid their worth.
2. Fill your self development bucket
As I mentioned last month, I spent a lot of time at the end of last year talking with clients about personal development for 2024. I gave a framework for that as well last month – you can check it out here if you missed it.
The biggest challenge I hear is: it’s really hard to come up with good ideas of what development areas to focus on.
So let’s take a look at a framework for that.
Some of you may have already come across this if you listen to Steven Bartlett’s diary of a CEO, or if you’ve come across Ray Dalio’s principles or Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.
The first part is that you can think about your development in 5 buckets.
The buckets are pretty self-explanatory (resources are your means to achieve your goals, possession, finances, support, etc).
The authors all argue that these buckets need filling in the right order. I don’t disagree, however the useful starting point is just to think about 2024 in terms of what you need to do in each of these areas.
For example, if you want to get promoted this year, reputation and network will need focus (and to the authors point are likely to be more important than the other three).
If you need a new job, honing skills and your reputation around those skills are focus areas.
If you would like to increase your impact at work, skills and resources might be most important.
Or to get on top of the latest finance trends, knowledge and resources might be key.
Let me know how you think about this framework, hopefully it gives you a good starting point.
3. Turbo charge your transformation
The next run of our finance transformation program goes live next week (we have 3 spaces left if you want to sign up here).
We teach some great tools on the program for improving our day to day finance work. However, today I want to focus on the single most important aspect of success we see in teams making progress in transformation: alignment.
Imagine there are 8 people in the team, and each of them spends 2 hours a month trying to make progress on something. But each of those things is different. They all rely on each other, but they are different.
Often the ideas might conflict, contradict or challenge each other
Imagine instead that all 8 of those people spend those 2 hours on the same issue, collectively making focused progress.
Which makes the biggest impact?
Graphically, it would look like this.
So as we come into January, if we want 2024 to be a year of change, the very first thing we can do across the team to turbo charge our progress is decide how we can get alignment on which order we’re going to tackle opportunities and when.
Try and discuss it at least each month in your team meetings.
This should start to create patterns in our collective decision making.
Starting to sound a bit like a strategy…??
Get in touch if you want to talk more about team alignment.
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