Chris Hooley’s -ThinkBait-

YOU want to plant the flag? Want to be a rockstar at your job? Want to climb the ladder? There’s a ton of ways to make it happen, but there may be only one way that best fits you. You will not get an exact blueprint to any of them.

Here’s some verbal diarrhea, which is expanded on for your reading pleasure.  (I called this verbal diarrreah because they are pieces of advice, sayings, or new phrases I have pumped out at random this week.  I thought they could be summed up to make a nice list.) Below are some general principals that can be applied to YOUR path that may help get you where you long to be.

• It Starts with Smarts and Ends with Heart - Surrounding yourself with smart people is the obvious; surrounding yourself with people who want it so bad it hurts results in amazing accomplishments and personal successes around you more frequently than you may think.
• You Can’t Polish a Turd - Hire well, never short sell. If you only look for “worker bees“, you’ll always be a manager and never an executive. Never hire somebody to be a permanent pawn. If you hired them, their successes are yours. Let them succeed, even if it means giving up a piece of your pie for now. It will pay off.
• New People are a Blank Canvas, BE AN ARTIST - Hiring wiley old veterans sometimes has upsides, but molding eager new people can yield more powerful results. You get to build exactly what you need in a person, give them exactly what they need to succeed under you, and you might even look like a champ to the higher ups.
• Just Because Somebody did X, Y, and Z DOESN’T Mean YOU Can’t Use the Other 23 Letters - Saw somebody succeed and want the same thing? You don’t necessarily need to do the same things to get there. Use your best skills, the the next guy’s.
• You Get What you Pay For, but You’ll Pay for What You Pay - Finding talent can be easy if you cough up the big bucks. Developing talent is easy if you hire “heartists“. Frequent raises and bonuses are cheaper in the long run than repeatedly hiring and losing talent, or having to buy fully developed professionals. It also gives people a reason to stick around and try harder. As your new talent develops, pay them for it. People are the best investment you can make.

Being a leader means you need to develop leaders [loop] who develop leaders [/loop]. Eventually things will be getting done and you’ll have more time on your hands…

This should only worry those who are afraid of stepping up. If you can man up and allow your leaders to succeed and to own their jobs, you are well on your way to being a top executive. Don’t let your fear stop you if that’s what you really want, because your fear is the only thing that can stop you once you learn to guide the fires.

I sent my team an email today about how to leverage your research for SEO / marketing value. After reading it, I thought it would actually make a helpful blog post for those who ask lots of questions.

I am in no way implying anybody is dumb, I just thought that title would be nice and catchy for the blog post. Here’s the email I sent out today:

Hi Team,

Often our jobs require that we need to research a topic… software, new info for content development, changes in the advertising landscape, etc. We “Google” things probably a dozen times per person per day in this department. We also ask each other tons of questions, which is great communication.

There is a way however, that we can get the answers we need AND some SEO value (maybe some links, maybe some buzz) from our own curiosity as well. By visiting forums, blogs, question & answer sites (like answers.yahoo.com), and other social media sites, we can create relevant profiles and even have little signatures that have a link back to our site. We can link to our website in our questions too if it makes sense and is not spammy.

Researching this way has a triple benefit. You can get your questions answered by people who are experts or junkies in a certain area (try visiting a software forum for a question about software, they will probably be very passionate about the discussions), you can help brand our company by being a friendly contributor to these communities, AND you even can help our SEO efforts by getting free links back to our site where it makes sense.

I strongly encourage you to try this method of research, since it will help us expand our presence into the social web and may help us for SEO as well. We might even learn some neat new things that we can bring back to our colleagues here :-)

Keep up the good work guys, you rock!

Now that my team is growing, I can imagine these types of emails will be more frequent than things like “Is this project done yet” or “Can you try this font?” or “Please go get my dry cleaning” (kidding!)

Do you think that emails like this, ones that give broad guidance instead of specifics, are an effective way to manage a large team of web marketing managers and professionals? Seems like the higher up you get in an organization, the more it is about vision than specifics.