Maximizing Your Value with Mark Herschberg - MIT Instructor & Author of "The Career Toolkit"

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Mark, an MIT instructor, fractional CTO, and the author of the book "The Career Toolkit." And they discuss how to ask the right questions to generate the most value in your role, the value of peer learning groups for leadership development, and how to train recruiters on what to look for when hiring technical roles. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Mark at 00:00:46) It's interesting because I have this dual career. I came out of MIT in the nineties during the dot-com era. I started as a software developer. Early on, I realized I love doing the engineering, but the people problems are really challenging, and that's the part I wanted to address.

(Mark at 00:01:02) So to do that, I had to become a more senior person. I want to become a CTO. I recognize that to be a CTO, it wasn't just about being a good software engineer. There are all these other skills—leadership, communicating, team building, negotiating—but no one ever taught them to me because if you look at a CS college program, those aren't covered.

(Mark at 00:01:23) So I had to develop those skills in myself. And I worked on my own training and development, and that got me to get to where I was as a CTO. I've been a fractional CTO. I've done startup companies. I've helped Fortune 500s build new business units and spin them out.

(Mark at 00:01:37) But I realized as I was developing these skills, they're not just for executives. They are for everyone. Even the most junior person can benefit from having these skills. So I began to train up others on my team. Around the same time, MIT had gotten feedback from our corporate partners, the people who come and hire our students, and they said, "Look, we love your students, but there are skills we're trying to find—leadership, negotiation, networking, communication—and we can't find it. Not just in your students. In fact, not just in college students. In general, we can't find these skills. No one's being taught."

(Mark at 00:02:04) So at MIT, we put together a program referred to as a Career Success Accelerator to teach these skills. When I heard about it, I reached out. I said, "Hey, I've been developing this on my team. Can I be of any help?" And MIT said, "Yeah, we've got these great professors, these master experts on negotiation and teamwork, but it'd be great to get the experience of a practitioner."

(Mark at 00:02:30) So I helped develop some of the modules, and then MIT asked me to come teach. So I've been doing that for twenty years, and it's given me this parallel career. I've had my CTO path, but in parallel, I've been teaching at MIT and then elsewhere. And now I have the book and the speaking that I do around professional development, which is not just for CTOs but very broadly for everyone, the skills that will help us be more successful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:53) And so what was the moment like when you decided that it's time for the book?

(Mark at 00:02:59) It's funny, there wasn't an "I think I want to write the book" moment. For years, I've been trying to convince MIT that we need to take this class we created and make it more accessible. Now this is not a lecture-based class. It's very hands-on and interactive. But MIT, of course, pioneered online learning.

(Mark at 00:03:18) We were one of the first universities to take our content, put it online for free. And I kept saying, "We need to take our content. Let's put what we can online or let's share this course with other universities. Let's get it out to more people." For various reasons, we just didn't have time to focus on that.

(Mark at 00:03:34) So I thought, spending lots of time on planes and hotels for my job, "Let me just write up some class notes," both because our students don't take a lot of notes because it's so interactive, and I can also just share this online or give it to other people. So I really thought I was writing twenty pages of notes, and that's all I was trying to do. But twenty pages became forty and then eighty, and once it passed a hundred, I thought, "You know, maybe this isn't just some notes. This might actually be a book."

(Mark at 00:04:04) So it came spontaneously. And then, of course, I had, through a conversation with my neighbor, the idea for the app as well. And so both of them weren't intended. They just kind of came ahead of the process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:16) Oh, I didn't know there was an app. What's the app called?

(Mark at 00:04:17) The Career Toolkit app.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:21) Okay.

(Mark at 00:04:21) Very well with The Career Toolkit book. And the app comes from recognizing a problem that we have with our books. When you read a book—mine or any business book or self-help book—you say, "Okay, well, that's great, real useful information." And then you forget it, right? Thirty days later, "Yeah, I think there was something in there about networking. I can't remember what."

(Mark at 00:04:38) My job isn't to sell you pieces of paper. My job is to help you improve and be more successful. So we know there are certain techniques that can help you with this, one of which is known as spaced repetition. That's a fancy term for flashcards or looking back at your notes. Now I know you're not gonna take notes on my book, and you're not gonna create flashcards for it. And in fact, even if I gave you flashcards, you're not gonna want to open an app every day and go, "I have to go through this."

(Mark at 00:05:06) So I created an app. This combined my experience in technology and as an author of a book and having worked in media. I created an app. You don't even need to open the app, just once every thirty days so I know you're active. And what it's gonna do is pop up a little notification on your phone each day at a time you select, and that's going to have one of the tips from the book. So if you had gone through the book with a highlighter, said, "Oh, here's a good point. Here's a good quote"—that's what gets saved and just pops up and you go, "Oh, right, that's a good tip." Swipe it away.

(Mark at 00:05:41) So you don't even have to be active. You don't have to remember to do it. It will happen automatically. Or you can say, "Oh, I'm about to walk into a networking event. What were all those great tips?" Well, you don't have my book with you, but you've got the advice in your pocket. So you open the app, and you can just flip through those tips and quickly come back to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:01) Give me some tips for networking.

(Mark at 00:06:04) Networking is fundamentally relationship building. And especially for engineers, we tend to have an aversion to networking because we see the slimy side of it. We see the person who's just there trying to be transactional or the person who walks into a room and comes out with ten business cards fifteen minutes later, and that just feels slimy. But really, true networking is about relationship building.

(Mark at 00:06:29) So if you've ever had a friend, which all of us do, you know how to build a relationship. And so don't think about "I have to get ten business cards" or "I have to meet so many people tonight." Sure, it's helpful to meet other people, but think about building that relationship. Consider you would never say, "Hey, I just swiped right on someone on Tinder, so that's my girlfriend," right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:53) That's by yourself. No, I'm just kidding.

(Mark at 00:06:57) If you both swipe right, okay, good start, but you're not married yet. You have to go and build that relationship. In that case, go on dates. Just because you got a business card, just because you add someone on LinkedIn, that person isn't in your network. You don't have a relationship yet. But now you can go build the relationship, get to know someone, meet for coffee, and over time you're going to build that relationship too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:20) Oh yeah, and I've learned personally that it's way better to have those relationships before you need them.

(Mark at 00:07:27) There is a great quote, which is the title of a book by Harvey Mackay: "Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty." Because if you think about it, if you need to go pack up your house this weekend, you gotta pack everything up, you're not getting a moving company. Maybe you can't afford it, so you want to get people to come over and help you. Who's gonna be there to help you carry your couch into the truck? Is it gonna be the guy you met two nights ago at a bar, or is it going to be your friend from college who you've known for twenty years?

(Mark at 00:07:51) You need to invest time in relationships so it's there in the future. And too many people come to their need. They say, "Oh, it's time for me to find a new job. I better network." Well, the time to network was two years ago. But don't worry if you're looking for a job now, start networking today because it will be there two years from now when you need to do it again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:23) For sure. Absolutely. What's, what's the—you teach class on this, right? Are you actively—okay, so what is the subject? I know you've got a bunch of them. There's like twelve or so categories in this book. What's the one that you get the biggest moment from the students?

(Mark at 00:08:41) I think networking. I can think of a few moments where they say, "Wow, wait. Networking is just talking to people and it doesn't have to be slimy and I can learn new things." With all of them, there is that mental shift, the "Oh, wait, it's not what I thought it was." And I think when they get that shift in any of them, you get that—I can see the light bulb go on in their heads.

(Mark at 00:08:57) And this is really an important takeaway. The class that we teach, I can't teach everything you need to know about leadership or negotiations in the class time we have. Even in a few semesters, I couldn't get to all of it. But if you can get that shift in your head and say, "Oh, networking, it's not just about collecting business cards. It's building relationships, and I can meet anyone anywhere and potentially build a relationship." All of a sudden, your opportunities to build your network expand greatly, and you go from being avoidant or only seeing a handful of opportunities to many. And you're going to continue and grow and develop much faster on your own.

(Mark at 00:09:52) So with each of these topics, the key is getting that mental shift to saying, "I now see it in a new way." And when you do, you're going to really start to accelerate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:55) I agree. Because that happened with me a few years ago with sales. So I told you that I had built software, sold it, and had a handful of close relationships. So business just came to me for that decade. And it was good money too, right? And then when I decided to go out and start a business, I didn't have a sales counterpart, whereas before my business partner always handled the sales side of things and I just built the technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:09) So I was like, "Oh, sales is slimy. It's like car salesmen and network." So I was super against it. And then, you know, you lose enough money to realize you have to figure it out and you just get comfortable with it. After you go through the process, or at least what I took from it was, it's just about helping people. It's not cliche to say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:26) It's like, all right, this is the area where I have expertise. I've built this product that solves this need. If you have that need, let's talk about it. What are you experiencing? Is this good for you? I like to go into it often into sales with, "It might not be good for you. Let's figure it out. Do you actually have the need for what we do? Because we see it every day. And can we actually help you or should we refer you to somebody else because you might have a different—"

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:49) I'd get people all the time that would ask me for leadership training. And after talking with them and understanding why they're seeking leadership training, I would redirect them to an organizational consultant that could actually transform the culture there. "Cause you don't need leadership training, you need culture transformation. So you need to go over here." And so after I learned that and it was clear and became real to me, I became okay with networking, with sales, with all of that.

(Mark at 00:11:35) Brilliant insight. I think you hit that transformation for sales because we often, especially as technology leaders, we're so used to those spammy salespeople. Literally, every day, I get someone saying, "I have a hammer to sell you." They don't even know whether or not I have nails, but they just want to sell me the hammer. And they go in thinking the problem is, "How do I sell this hammer?"

(Mark at 00:11:57) But when we just shift it to that approach that you're taking, which is, "Hi, tell me about your problem. Do you have nails? Because I have this lovely hammer that I think can help. Oh, you have screws? You know what? I don't want to waste your time. But hey, I have a friend who sells screwdrivers. Happy to introduce you." Or even just, "I'm going to tell you, stop talking to hammer salesmen. I don't know a screwdriver salesman, but let me tell you, you got to go find one of those."

(Mark at 00:12:18) When we're looking at solving your problem, the customer's problem, which we as engineers are naturally good at, and not just being that self-centered, "Well, my problem is how do I sell more of these," we become great salesmen. And that's the difference. And so that's the type of mental shift with all these skills that once you just look at differently, since this is an engineering group, I think of it as rotating the coordinate space. All of a sudden, the problem becomes so much more tractable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:52) Yes, absolutely. I love your analogy too because I was thinking some of the mistakes I made early on in the careers—or early on in figuring this out—I would see that they have screws, right? And then I would try to figure out how to get a Phillips head onto the tip of my hammer. I realized, "No, no, no, no, no. Just stick out what we're good at." And then, yeah, then things got better.

(Mark at 00:13:14) Yeah. And you can build a relationship with them because now they know once you refer them to a screwdriver salesman, they say, "Okay, you're not just trying to sell me something for the sake of paying your quota." And so when in the future you go back and say, "Hey, I noticed you have a bunch of nails now. Can we talk?" They think, "Okay, you're not wasting my time and I trust you." And if you're really solving the problem, they're gonna want to go with your solution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:39) Absolutely. I like you. This is good. I want to just go through a couple of the topics in your book and extract the best information out of you. Is that okay? I think that'll help the audience and position you well in their eyes. Is that cool?

(Mark at 00:13:52) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:54) All right, what's "working effectively" about?

(Mark at 00:13:57) This is a broad chapter. It's chapter two of The Career Toolkit, and it encompasses a lot of skills that we don't even talk about. Now, networking, I'm sure you've heard of. Leadership, you've heard of. But these skills, this is understanding how you're adding value at work, understanding corporate culture, knowing how to manage your manager, and in fact, it's how to manage everyone around you.

(Mark at 00:14:23) And so learning how to do that can make you more effective. Now we, particularly as engineers, are all about solving the problem. We've been trained that, "Here is the problem. Go come up with a solution." And whether you're writing that answer on your test or saying, "Well, here's how I would build the system," we're very solution-oriented.

(Mark at 00:14:43) But in this chapter, it's about asking the right questions. Because if you're not asking the right questions and thinking about the right way, you're solving the wrong problem. So when you think about how am I adding value, so many engineers I know, and by the way, this is also true for accountants, for customer success, for lots of people in companies, they say, "Well, I know how to solve my problem, the engineering problems, the accounting problems, whatever, but I don't really understand the larger ecosystem in which I work."

(Mark at 00:15:23) And those are things like, who are your customers? Who would not be a customer even though at first glance they might look like a customer? Who are your competitors? How are you different than your competitors? Are you cheaper? Are you faster? Are you more durable?

(Mark at 00:15:30) More flexible? And how does that tie into your job? Because when you need to build something, particularly as engineers, when you're told "build this," you know, "I need a button here," so, okay, I can build that button. Is it important that that button be really fast or really flexible or integrated with a lot of different things? Because that goes to what your larger value proposition is to your customers.

(Mark at 00:15:54) But we don't often think, "Oh, you say, okay, well, I said button. I just said make the button fast." But really, we're not the fast company. We're the well-integrated company.

(Mark at 00:16:02) So it should be something else. But because everyone looks at that one narrow piece, they don't think of the larger picture. So what you want to learn to do is look beyond just your narrow work role. Look beyond just the problems you solve and say, let me think more broadly. What is the company doing?

(Mark at 00:16:20) Where does it fit in to our customers, even the larger ecosystem of our industry? And then you're going to start to understand how you generate value.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:29) I love it. You're exactly right. When I started figuring out that the other people on the teams that I'm working with, when I figured out to ask them what they're incentivized by, like what their goals are, there's what they want to accomplish, and then there's what they're bonused on. If you figure out that, even in engineering, like if you figure out with your, let's say, your mid-level engineer, and you go to your VP of engineering, like what is driving them?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:00) And then like, how can you add value to that? And often, one of the things that I was just absolutely blown away by, Mark, when I started—you know, I didn't do much public speaking. I was fairly introverted before doing the podcast. It was one of the things that got me out of my comfort zone. But after that, I got to go all the way around the world, giving talks to all different types of companies and sizes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:19) And I found this question that I asked once, and I loved it because I kept asking it all the time. I would ask executive members of the team or the leaders of the company, like what's their purpose or how they add value to the company. And the amount of crickets you'd hear—there would be maybe one person every other time I asked the question who'd know exactly what they're doing and they're intentional about it. A lot of people would just be like, "I don't know how what I do brings value to the company. I just know that here's the thing I need to get done."

(Mark at 00:17:50) That's exactly right. And once you understand how you add value and how other people add value, it's much easier to then say, "How can I add more value?" And when you start adding more value, that's how you get promoted.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:05) Yes. And I think we should take a moment to realize that you could totally get by at a hundred percent. You can just focus on that one thing, not add value, not be conscious of your value. But if you want to move forward in your career, if you're trying to grow and you're trying to become more valuable and you're trying to climb the ladder or increase your quality of life, then these are the questions you can be asking.

(Mark at 00:18:31) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:34) I don't like average, man. I train myself like that too, which has made me quite a crazy human being, but it keeps me in a cycle of growth though.

(Mark at 00:18:45) Well, certainly, everyone who's listening to this show is doing so because they want to grow. They want to improve. And let me offer up a way how. The way we teach these skills at MIT, the way they're taught at top business schools is through a peer learning model. Now you can listen to podcasts like this and read books like mine, and they are great.

(Mark at 00:19:07) But these skills are a lot more subtle. If you want to learn Python, you say, "I'm going to read a book on Python. I'm going to go do some online Codecademy," and, okay, I have to memorize. Here's where I put the semicolon, right?

(Mark at 00:19:20) Here's how it works. Here. Okay. Now I've got it. And it's really just memorization of how things work, design patterns, how to deploy systems.

(Mark at 00:19:29) When it comes to leadership or communication or any of these other skills, there's no simple memorization. I can't say, "Here's a formula for leading," or "Here's the three things you have to do and then communication is done." It's subtle, and it's complex. And I would draw an analogy closer to learning a sport. So let's consider basketball.

(Mark at 00:19:51) If I just told you the rules of basketball, you're not ready to play. What happens? Now you do need to learn the rules, but then what do you do? Well, you start doing drills: dribbling and passing, shooting, rebounding, and you might play some scrimmage games and practice. And if you're a real serious professional, you might even watch the tape, right? Watch the opponents you're going to play. Watch yourself. Learn and improve. That's what we have to do with these skills.

(Mark at 00:20:10) You can't just say, "I read the book," or "They sent me to a two-day leadership training seminar. Now I am a leader." It's not that simple. So the way you can best learn this: create these peer learning groups in your organization. And on the resources page on the Career Toolkit book website, I have a free download on how to do this.

(Mark at 00:20:36) But you can create these groups. I recommend about six to eight people, but there's ways to do it with larger groups. And, by the way, if your company doesn't want you to do this, go find friends, go create a local meetup group. Create these local groups and then say, "Okay. We're going to take some content."

(Mark at 00:20:51) So, for example, you can take my book and I break down for a particular goal, here's how to chop it up. Read these ten pages in the next two weeks, and then you come together and discuss it. Because it's in that discussion that I say, "Hey, you know, as reading this, it makes me think of this leadership challenge I have in my company right now or on my team." And you say, "Well, you know, Mark, I had a similar type of challenge a few years ago. Here's what I did." "Oh, great. That's really insightful." There's no leadership practice. You can't say, "Hey, team."

(Mark at 00:21:22) You know, "We're going to come together and going to try leading, and then we're going to call do over if I get it wrong." But by having that discussion, by helping you with your leadership and you with mine, or communication or negotiation, that's our scrimmage game. That's how we get to practice and develop our skills and really widen the perspective. Now I mentioned you can use my book for this. I don't want you to think, "Oh, he's just trying to sell more books."

(Mark at 00:21:44) Yes, you can use my book. You can use other books. I list a whole number of other great books I have no financial incentive in that get to different topics. Use books you like.

(Mark at 00:21:54) Use articles or videos online. You can take a great podcast like this one, and every two weeks, you listen to a podcast episode and discuss this podcast in your group. The key thing is you start with some seed content, and then you have that discussion. And that's what's really going to help you develop these skills that are not just memorizing some formula or algorithm or knowledge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:16) I love it. So we have a group called elevate150.com. So we break the groups, and the max limit is 150 because we notice in communities when they get too big, they start to decay. So it's a bunch of technical leaders, a lot of people that listen to the show, and we come together like one day a week on Wednesdays for an hour and we have a guest speaker every week. And then we have action weeks, weeks where we actually do things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:43) So I'm going to connect you with Britney. And if that's something you're interested in, I think we should have you to that group as a speaker.

(Mark at 00:22:50) Let's definitely talk about that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:55) Yeah, for sure. It's a great thing. I was actually really surprised when it all came together. But it turns out to be incredibly valuable to get together with people and discuss either what's going on in your current life, get different perspectives, things of that nature.

(Mark at 00:23:06) Yeah. One of the best groups I'm part of is the New York CTO Club. And it's a bunch of CTOs where we do bring in speakers to address some issue and advance our knowledge, but we have a very active mailing list where we talk about I'm having a problem with my board or I'm trying to figure out how to reorg my groups. Someone else in the group has experienced that and can share their experiences and wisdom. It's been a wonderful resource for all of us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:32) CTOs that are in New York that are listening, can they—how do they learn more about that?

(Mark at 00:23:37) We don't have a website, but you can find us on LinkedIn. It's a private invite-only group, but you can certainly reach out. And I don't know what the rules are for how this works, but you can reach out to the organizers and certainly learn more about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:54) Yeah. If you're cool enough, they'll let you in, right? Now, let's just be real. There are different levels of groups. Like we have a standard at Elevate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:02) We don't let certain people in. We actually ask them questions when they're registering and we can tell their mindset. And we want people to have a growth mindset that meet our qualifications and then we invite them in. So I get it. I think that's a feature. It's a benefit.

(Mark at 00:24:21) It is. And I will say now I grew up a nerd as probably many of us did. So I was often excluded from social activities. And I always felt, "Well, I don't like these groups that exclude people. It should be open to everyone."

(Mark at 00:24:34) And those are the best, very egalitarian. But what I have learned is the most valuable groups in my life are actually private communities because, first, we gate and we say, "Well, only people of this qualification," and it could be experience or knowledge or anything else—it's not about being better, it's just having certain qualifications—"can join this group," because that creates a much better signal-to-noise ratio. And second, by being a private invite-only group of a limited size, it creates trust because you know everyone else in that group has been vetted. So there's a higher degree of trust, a higher degree of sharing, and those two together make it really valuable. So as much as I like to be egalitarian, I have found value in these private groups.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:24) I love it. So I want to get to interviews. Do you talk in the book about posting interviews or being interviewed?

(Mark at 00:25:34) I look at it from both sides, but I really wanted to focus more on being the interviewer because there's so much content about how to be a candidate. How do you answer this hard question? How do you talk about yourself? Plenty of that that you can find on your own. But so few people teach you how to interview someone else.

(Mark at 00:25:54) In fact, most of us, and this is true of many executives I've spoken to, you ask them what interview training have you had, and they say, "None. I just start interviewing people. I ask questions people have asked me." Can you ever imagine doing a project or driving a car or anything else where I say, "Hey, you know, you've sat in a car."

(Mark at 00:26:15) "So you've seen how it works. Okay. Why don't you go ahead and drive?" Right? That's insanity, but that's what we do with interviewing.

(Mark at 00:26:22) And especially, companies always say, "Oh, our people are our strongest asset." Now, whether they believe it or not, for an engineering company, that's typically your highest cost. Getting the right engineers makes all the difference. We all know that. And yet you're not investing in how well you assess your engineers.

(Mark at 00:26:41) This is lunacy. So I focus probably over half the chapter on how to be a more effective interviewer. And that begins by thinking about what is it you are hiring for and coming up with a clear job description. And I'm going to get very specific for engineering because how many times do you look at a job description? Let's say, Director of Engineering.

(Mark at 00:27:04) It says, "Well, your job is to manage the engineers and watch the scrum teams and help plan the backlog and the road map and be technical." Like, okay. Great. I knew all this once you said Director of Engineering, right?

(Mark at 00:27:19) There's nothing in there that's unique to your company, but I want to understand how much time might I be working with the engineers on debugging versus sitting in meetings versus being engaged with customer conversations because that ratio is going to differ from one company to another. As a CTO, I've met companies where they've said, "Why would you ever leave the office? You're just supposed to sit here with the engineers and just make sure we get the work done." By the way, I don't work for those companies anymore. I avoid that.

(Mark at 00:27:49) I've met other companies where some quarters, I am traveling a third of my time to go to conferences and client meetings because I'm a key part of sales and partnerships. Those are very different roles. And so understanding what you need out of the role helps you then say, "Well, now we have to look for someone who is good in sales and partnerships." Or no. "We don't need that skill."

(Mark at 00:28:11) "Our sales team can do it without technical people. We need technical people who are just really deep experts." So understanding what you want out of the role, what it's really like, and then creating a set of questions to evaluate the candidate against that—that is the key to being successful in the interview process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:30) I like it. We found out over here that it was really effective for us to take our training. This is specifically for a sales position. So I'll give us some context. For our sales position, we took the training that they would go through, like their onboarding and like what they need to be learning and their daily routines.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:48) And we sort of, you know, cut it all out and made that like their bullet list of like, "This is what you'll be doing." That way, when we get those people and they see that list—so often in life, I feel like it's just copy and paste from somebody that has no clue about the position. There's like, "This sounds good, 800 languages in there." And it's like, "Nope." And I mean, so I found that it created a lot of trust when the job description said A, B, and C.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:12) And then day one, when they start, they learn that they're going to be doing A, B, and C. And that ended up really improving our process of bringing on salespeople.

(Mark at 00:29:22) That's fantastic. That's a great way to do it because now you said, "What is the actual job?" And I will share—you talk about cutting and pasting job descriptions. A big pet peeve of mine, especially in technology, are recruiters, whether in-house or external, who do not understand their technical terms. And I've seen this time and again.

(Mark at 00:29:44) You say, "Okay, we work with Mongo here. So I need someone who's experienced with a document database." I say, "Oh, okay. So Mongo database is great." And I'll see a resume: "Oh, four years with Couch."

(Mark at 00:29:57) Well, nope. That's not Mongo. But, of course, Couch is pretty close, and I'd be glad to take someone who knows Couch because, generally, you don't know this specific command. Fine. You'll learn that in three weeks.

(Mark at 00:30:08) But you get how document databases work, how they scale, what the issues are. And so if your recruiters don't understand, "Hey. This technology is like that one. This is close enough, and these are equivalent. And when we say this, what we're really meaning is this is an example, but here's what we want."

(Mark at 00:30:25) You need to train them up. I will spend time with any recruiter at my company and say, "We're going to go through, and let's look at resumes together. And let's look at why I like this one, don't like this one, why this one's a maybe." You can almost think of it as your AI training of your algorithm. I have to go train up my recruiter.

(Mark at 00:30:45) And recruiters who don't know how to do that or don't have an interest in learning, I will not work with them. Even if they're in my company, it's like, "Nope. Not working with you. You are a waste of my time. I'm going to go figure out a different way to source candidates."

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:58) I love it. And that'll help them learn. If they hear that enough, they'll be like, maybe I should change my life, right?

(Mark at 00:31:04) I hope so. I've said this quite often in my auto response to many recruiters, trying to explain to them why what they're doing is wasting their time and mine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:14) I saw this hilarious slide. Like, I'm on this group and it's got IT memes and stuff, like funny things. And it was a picture of somebody at a conference, and they had a slide up with a word cloud of like different languages and names. And they sprinkled in names of Pokemon, and then they asked recruiters, which one of these are Pokemon? It was hilarious.

(Mark at 00:31:37) Oh, I love that. I'm going to have to go find that one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:40) Yes, I will. If I find it again, because I just saw it yesterday, and if I scroll across it, I'll tag you or send it over to you. Yes. So I like this question. This is a fun one. You have a chapter on leadership, you have a chapter on management. What's the difference?

(Mark at 00:32:00) The best description, the best way to distinguish the two, is a wonderful quote. And I'm blanking on the source of this quote at the moment, but the quote is, no one has ever managed men into battle. I think that really sums up what leadership is and how it's different from management. Now, we can spend hours talking about the distinctions, but I will also note I conclude the middle section of my book—there's three sections, the middle section is leadership and management—and management, I looked at the people side of it and the process side. But I conclude that section by saying, good leaders manage, good managers lead. You might be doing more of one than the other for a particular role or at a particular moment. And I teach them separately because it's very wax on, wax off. Let's look at the essence. By the end of the day, they're not going to say, oh, I have to lead now, or I have to manage now. You're going to do both. So remember that good leaders manage and good managers lead.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:59) How can people buy this book?

(Mark at 00:33:01) You can go to my website, thecareertoolkitbook.com. And there you can hit the buy button, and it's going to take you to your favorite source of books. That could be Amazon or Barnes & Noble or local bookstores. You can get a physical book or online. You can reach out to me on the website. You can follow me on social media channels. You can download the free app—it links to both the Android and iPhone stores. You can download the app. And then, of course, there's the resources page where I have that guide I mentioned, The Career Toolkit Development Guide, completely free. There's links to other online resources, a lot of other great books. So all of this is on the website, thecareertoolkitbook.com.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:41) I love it. So I could just open up Amazon and just type in The Career Toolkit and click buy?

(Mark at 00:33:46) You can. In fact, at the time of this recording, Amazon's had some algorithm issues, so the algorithms to juice it have dropped my book down to about $3 at the time of this recording. This book, at the moment, for a print book—I know it costs us more than that to print it—so thank you, Jeff Bezos, for subsidizing everyone's career development. So for less than the cost of your morning coffee, you can get the book right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:13) I love it. And you've got, dude, it's like a five-star book. Have you done the Audible yet?

(Mark at 00:34:18) You know, I've gone back and forth on Audible. I may eventually do an audiobook, though.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:24) I vote yes, because you have a very clear, concise speaking voice. People will learn your voice and develop a stronger relationship with you by listening to you for a couple hours. And I didn't even know you could return Audible books. And I have like maybe 150, right, because I like it. And I've been a member for probably five, six years now. But then I did this road trip recently, like five weeks around the United States with my family. And I had bought like two or three books that were just not good, right. And so I had got three or five minutes into it, and I was like, I wonder if I could return them. So I searched and there was a return button, and they let me return all three books. And I didn't realize that you could listen to the whole book. That's crazy. You would think as being in technology our whole lives, you would stop it at—if they got an hour into the book, if it's like a seven-hour book, they get an hour in, or they get thirty minutes. You know if you like something in fifteen minutes.

(Mark at 00:35:22) Right, right. I know Oculus says you can play this game for up to X hours, at which point you've committed to the sale. I think that's very reasonable for a book. You can return it after a little bit, but yeah, not by time. That doesn't make sense for the product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:38) I mean, with any product ever, when have you used it and like, you continue using it for an extended period of time, knowing that—like when you use something and you don't like it, it's very clear and it happens really fast. All right, so the back third of this book, you got communicate. We talked a little bit about networking, communication—like, what's the key takeaway there? Don't mumble?

(Mark at 00:36:05) Communication is such a broad topic. And by the way, I'm going to mention one of my pet peeves. I see in so many job posts, strong communication skills. What does that mean? Does that mean you can stand on the TED stage and do a really eloquent talk? Does that mean you send very concise, to-the-point emails? Does that mean you always bring up the right information just as your boss needs it? Does that mean you can explain very complex technical ideas to nontechnical people? Those are all different ways to be a very good communicator. You probably don't need all those. Some might be more important than others. So I hate when people broadly say, oh, strong communication skills. Now, in my book, I get down to the essence of communication, which is how we can effectively convey the ideas in our heads into the heads of other people. And that comes from understanding the different mental models that we all carry with us and how you can understand those mental models and then put your ideas to fit the mental models of your audience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:12) I love it. I love it. As I'm looking at all these, I'm like, this is so good. I'm so glad that we're talking here, because like I said, when I read that index of yours or the back of that book, I was just like, this is going to be on point. And it's so far, like, dude, 100%. I'm a huge fan of Mark now.

(Mark at 00:37:30) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:32) Back third of the book, you got communication, networking, negotiations. There's a popular book out with negotiations called like Never Split the Difference. What are your thoughts on negotiations?

(Mark at 00:37:45) I am eight chapters into Never Split the Difference, and it's not a negotiation book I would necessarily recommend, maybe as like your fifth or sixth negotiation book. And one of the reasons I mentioned this—and he's a good negotiator, but in certain circumstances—the very basis of his negotiations, right, never split the difference. Well, he's a hostage negotiator. And let me be clear, if your family's ever taken hostage, call him, not me. He's better at those. But his premise is, well, you know, you can't say like, all right, look, why don't you only kill half the hostages, let half go, we'll call it a day, right? That's not acceptable in his world. He also is often dealing with very emotional situations. Hostage takers are always emotional more than rational. Even if they began rational—say, oh, this is how we'll fund our terrorist campaign or whatever—emotions run high. There's guns, there's danger, there's risk. A lot of the negotiations we deal with, there's not this time pressure. There are some types of time pressures, but it's not eight hours being surrounded by police. There is not that level of emotion. That's not to say there's no emotion. And in particular, when we negotiate for anything that directly impacts us—my salary, oh, that's emotional. How much money will I have? If I'm selling my company or doing a business deal, what will this do to my earnings, my bonus? There's an emotional piece. But I think he focuses a lot more on the emotional aspect and on, you have to almost win at all costs, which he very well should as a hostage negotiator. Whereas I focus more on broad negotiations that are more common in the business world, and so do many of the books I reference and the training that I've gotten and talk about in the book. So that book, I know it's very popular, but if that's the only book you've read on negotiations, it might orient you towards a different type of negotiation than what you are going to be experiencing quite often in your job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:58) What did you think of—I hate that it's political now because I read it before it was political—but I had read the book that Donald Trump had produced about negotiation. Can't remember the exact name of it, but I took so many very specific examples out of that book and applied them to my personal life. And I thought it was like really great information.

(Mark at 00:40:24) I think I had glanced through it when I was in high school or college. I don't think that's a great negotiation book. Beyond any personal views I might have on him, it is more—it's just not effectively done. Good negotiation books: there's Getting to Yes, which I think is a good philosophical approach to negotiations. Now one of the drawbacks to that book, you can read it in a couple hours, but you're going to go, okay, this makes sense, but what do I actually do? So another great book, Bargaining for Advantage by Richard Shell at Wharton, is a very good book on specifically, what do you do? How do you make an offer? How do you make a counteroffer? How do you think about things? Really good book. It's a little long, it can be a bit of a dense read, but it is so helpful. Start with No by Jim Camp, also a great practical book. There is Good for You, Great for Me by Lawrence Susskind of MIT. And then for a really advanced book, once you've gotten through some of those, 3-D Negotiation—and I forget the author, he's at Harvard Business School. That has some really advanced techniques. And so these are the books I would recommend. They're all listed on the resources page on my website for books to go. And of course, in my book, I have a chapter on this, and that's a good starting chapter. I referenced some of the techniques used in these other books.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:50) Nice. I've heard of like two or three of those books, but I'm going to check out the other ones. I always like a good negotiation book. As time goes on, you read these books, and then you realize out of nowhere, ten years has passed, and like, yeah, I think I need to get a refresher on that area.

(Mark at 00:42:10) Here's the thing about negotiations. Imagine you are 25 years old and you have a job offer for $80,000. Instead of accepting that job as is, you go and negotiate it. It takes you a few minutes, you go back and forth. If you get just $81,000, right, just $1,000 more, so you get $81,000, you take the job, and then you spend the rest of your career in that job—forty years working at that job—you've just earned $1,000 more for forty years. That one five-minute negotiation just got you $40,000. Now, of course, you're not going to be in that job for forty years. You're going to get promotions and raises and other jobs. You're going to negotiate for more than just $1,000. If you learn to negotiate—I'm not talking about being the world's best negotiator, being able to write one of these books—you just get a little bit better at negotiating, you can add tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars to your lifetime earning. And when you think about it this way, you say, oh my God, why have I not learned negotiation? I have to go out right now and learn to get better at it. And now, negotiations aren't just used for salary. They're helpful in sales and partnerships. We negotiate all the time with our boss, with our coworkers. Some people are affected in those areas. And now here's the other big takeaway. I always use this example because it's easy to do the math and say, oh, wait, yeah, $40,000, I get it. But that ROI, that return you get from being a little bit better, applies to each and every one of these skills. If you just got a little bit better at being a leader, a little bit better at communicating, a slightly broader network, no one's going to say, you're a slightly better leader, here's $1,000 more. But by being that slightly better leader, you're going to have more opportunities that will get you jobs and promotions, which will of course have a financial benefit and other benefits. So this example in negotiations, it applies to all of these areas. It's not about being the best leader in the world or the best communicator. If you just work to get a little bit better at each of these skills, it's going to be adding hundreds of thousands of dollars to your lifetime earnings and your overall success and happiness.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:33) I love it. I fully agree, 100%. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.