A business friend of mine – Garret – once played a mischievous trick on his employees. He pulled out their resumes from his file and made a few changes to them. He altered the employees’ names, the names of the companies they’d worked for, and other details that would identify each employee. At the next staff meeting, Garrett passed out copies of the resumes. “These are some folks were thinking of hiring,” he said, “What do you think?”
The results were startling. The team members didn’t even recognize their own backgrounds. To make matters worse, they all agreed that they’d never hire any of these people!
“Know thyself” is a traditional bit of philosophical wisdom. It may sound simple, but as Garrett’s story illustrates, it’s not so easy to do.
Knowing yourself is especially important when you’re about to launch a new stage in your career. To help you know yourself and therefore explain the value you can add to a company, I recommend an exercise of taking inventory, of examining your past experiences in work, in school, and in life, as well as the interests, skills, knowledge, talents, dreams, goals, and preferences that these experiences reveal — every year. The objective is to see your own background as others do, and to objectively review yourself – as Garrett’s team did, without realizing it – to see if and why you’d hire yourself.
D.A. (Debra) Benton has been helping great individuals and organizations get even better for over 20 years. Just as exceptional athletes rely on excellent coaching to hone their skills, Debra's clients rely on her advice to advance their careers. She focuses on what is truly important to convert what you and your organization want to be from a vision into a reality. TopCEOCoaches.com ranks her in the World's Top 10 CEO Coaches noting she is the top female. And as conference keynote speaker she is routinely rated in the top 2%. Her client list reads like a “Who's Who” of executives in companies ranging from Microsoft, McDonald's, Kraft, American Express, Merrill Lynch, United Airlines, and PricewaterhouseCoopers to the Washington Beltway and U.S.Border Patrol. *She is the author of ten award-winning and best-selling business books including The Virtual Executive and CEO Material. She has written for the Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Fast Company. She has been featured in USA Today, Fortune, The New York Times, and Time; she has appeared on Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN, and CBS with Diane Sawyer. To learn more Debra advising leaders, coaching, facilitating a workshop, or speaking: www.debrabenton.com
