"Who's Got Your Back" Book Review @ Microsoft

Recently I had the privilege to lead a "Who's Got Your Back" book review at Microsoft for a talented group of high potential employees within Microsoft IT.  The ultimate goal was to share the key points from Keith Ferrazzi's latest book which I highly recommend while also making the workshop actionable by sharing how many of these concepts can be applied to career planning and execution. Impact only happens when you apply these principles and place them into action everyday.   

The career planning framework that I have discussed on this blog does align well with a number of concepts discussed in Who's Got Your Back.  I thought I would share a few of these concepts and how they are applied.    

• Knowing Yourself - In previous blog posts I have shared how important knowing who you really are is and gave examples how to document this. There was one quote in "Who's Got Your Back" that summarized the essence of this: "I know that the more I understand myself, the more successful I become". I strongly recommend you create your own "Personal Success Wheel" as I have done below to shape how you spend your time and drive success.

• Roadmap - define your career goals and what success looks like including who you need to help achieve your goals. Read more about this in a previous post.
• Develop- Understanding your weaknesses and what skills you need to grow is fundamental to your career plan. I would recommend you review the "Building Your Dream Team" section in the "Who's Got Your Back" book for good ideas to shape your plan. Read more about the recommendations I have for the components of development plan in a previous post.
• Your Support Team - in the middle of this framework is your support team that includes your "lifelines", mentors and accountability buddies that will help shape your plans and hold you accountable. It's essential that you identify these key stakeholders and make them a part of your personal success process.  "Who's Got Your Back" provides guidance on attributes and strategies for selecting your personal dream team. 
• Personal Scorecard- driving change requires you to be specific about the critical success factors that drive the ability to achieve your life mission, goals, strategies, how you will measure success and who will hold you accountable. I use the accountability framework below to construct my personal scorecard that I manage using Excel to evaluate my progress.  Probably the biggest theme in Keith Ferrazzi's book is using your personal team to hold you accountable for driving change and sustaining success.  The process of constructing your personal scorecard will force you to be specific on outcomes and how you will go about achieving them.  The final part is selecting an "accountability buddy" that will evaluate your progress.  I recently applied this concept to my manager role at Microsoft where I asked one of my direct reports to be my coach and hold me accountable for improving my "Workgroup Health Index" which is essentially measures many aspects of a manager's overall effectiveness.  You will need to select accountability buddies for each of the goals in the scorecard. 

 

Thanks for all who joined the book review and I look forward to continuing our career strategy discussions in the near future.  I am including the Career Strategy Framework slides for all to leverage and hopefully help shape career success.