St.Louis Business Journal
WORKING AROUND LIMITATIONS AND DISLIKES IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF SUCCESS

By Anna Navarro

October 2006  

Author's note: Client stories in this column are based on actual situations fictionalized to protect privacy and told with permission.

The best way to deal with things you don’t enjoy doing or aren’t good at is to avoid them altogether or get others to do them for you. Learning to do them yourself is a last resort.

If this sounds like slacking, I invite you to read Bob’s story.

Bob was a career success. He owned a profitable business, enjoyed what he did and was respected. One of his secrets was having the courage to sidestep his weaknesses and dislikes.

He started out in marketing research doing a temporary job to earn money after college graduation. The work was boring, but he was diligent and soon was hired full time. Eventually he became a junior analyst, and the firm offered to send him to school to learn statistics.

That offer sent him into crisis and propelled him into my office. He didn't like marketing research but he felt guilty walking away from the opportunity.

The problem was that writing, working with numbers and computers were a struggle for him. Since they are all central to marketing research, I asked how he managed to get promoted. He said he worked very hard. Admitting he wasn't good at those tasks made him feel like a loser.

I urged him to believe the best approach would be to focus his career on what he enjoyed doing and did well. We did a skills analysis and learned he was good at making presentations and coaching clients on how to use marketing research. He also enjoyed teaching and fundraising (read sales), which he did as a volunteer.

After brainstorming and investigating several careers he settled on outplacement services, a field which relies heavily on presentations, client coaching and teaching. He soon found a job. Eventually he left his job and, using his sales skills, started a solo operation offering outplacement services to small businesses.

The niche fit him perfectly. He relied primarily on his verbal communications skills, developed a template for his client materials and proposals so he didn't have to write much and used a secretarial service to type and do his billing. He had managed to find a career that mostly avoided working with computers, numbers and writing.

But then personal computers arrived. Emails started replacing personal and phone communication, and power point presentations took the place of hand lettered flip charts. He needed to adapt to keep up with his clients.

He came to see me to help him figure out what to do. When we met he told me he had recently learned why he had difficulty working with computers and writing. He had serious dyslexia, which he had only discovered when his son was diagnosed with the same problem.

We concluded that he’d be best off hiring a technically savvy support person to do the things he wasn’t good at. It would be more efficient than trying to do all these things for himself. It was a financial stretch, but he was able to grow his business to afford it.

Years later he was invited to write a column about recruiting for a trade publication. It was a terrific chance to market his business and he accepted, thinking he would contract it out to a ghostwriter. But that approach quickly proved itself unworkable. The publication’s editor told him the columns he turned in were flat.

He came to see me to see if I could come up with any other solution.

I said I thought he had finally reached the point where there was an irreducible minimum of work he wasn’t good at and disliked that he should attempt to do. Delegating it was proving difficult. Avoiding it didn’t make sense because it would be so beneficial to his business. And since it would at worst take 5% of his time, it was probably worth doing.

I suggested he draft an outline and hire a writing coach to help him turn it into a column. That worked better than a ghostwriter because as he struggled to express his ideas in writing he was able to add real life tidbits, language and examples, which made the columns lively. It was a laborious process but it worked. The column was accepted and helped him market his business.

Bob was no slacker. But much of his success could be attributed to what he avoided and delegated. Only as a last resort did he tackle what he didn't like and wasn't good at.

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that trains independent career strategists and consults with individual clients.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.