How can you take charge of your career?

We’re joined by Mark Herschberg, author of the Career Toolkit. Mark is incredibly experienced in helping professionals keep their career goals moving forward while empowering managers to use proven tools to facilitate their employee’s advancement.

In his interview, we discussed how to learn many of the soft skills that are required to move forward in the current job market. Leaders can learn how to best position their team members to continue to develop and advance within their company.

This interview gave me a ton of different ideas on how to best lead moving forward. Bring along something to take notes as the interview is full of plenty of gold nuggets.

The Career Toolkit Website: https://www.thecareertoolkitbook.com

Brain Bump app (Brain Bump app)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brainbump&hl=en_US&gl=US (Android)
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/brain-bump/id1616654954 (Apple)

Learn more at https://www.adamliette.com

Discover how to work with me: https://www.adamliette.com/work-with-me

Transcript

Adam Liette
All right, thank you so much for joining today's episode of smooth operations. I'm joined today with our very special guest, Mark Hirschberg. Mark is the author of the career toolkit, essential skills for success that no one taught you. And he's also the creator of the brain bump app, which I've been playing around with for the last couple of days. So Mark helped start the undergraduate practice opportunities program and also teaches at MIT, at Harvard Business School, he helped create a platform that's used to teach finance at prominent business schools. And he also works with many nonprofits currently serving on the board of plant a million corals. Thanks for joining me, Mark, how are you doing today?

Mark Hirschberg
Thanks for having me on the show. It's my pleasure to be here.

Adam Liette
Fantastic. So if we could begin if you could share a little bit about yourself, and what brought you to write this book?

Mark Hirschberg
Sure. I've had this very interesting dual career. I came out of MIT back in the mid 90s. Back during the.com era, and I started as a software engineer, I knew early on that I wanted to be a CTO Chief Technology Officer, the person charged the engineers, what I quickly realized was that to be the CTO, it wasn't just about being the best engineer. Sure, I needed to be very strong and that skill set. But there were a number of other skills, I would need leadership, negotiating, communicating team building all these other skills, no one ever taught me, we don't have classes on this in high school or in college, we just assume you kind of pick it up somehow. But most of us don't. So I recognized I needed to develop these skills in myself. And as I began to do so I realized these skills are not just for the executives, they are for every one on your team, your whole company is better off when everyone has the skills. So I began to upskill my team. Now I went on. And I've been part of a number of different startups, I do, typically tech startups, I've been companies of three to 300,000 people, because I've helped some fortune five hundreds who want to play startup, I've created classes at MIT and HBS. And the way I did that in parallel, because that seems a little different, is as I was upskilling, my team, MIT had recognized the need for these skills across all our students. Because companies were saying, we want to see these skills. And by the way, the company saying this, they don't just mean in MIT students or in college grads, they're saying everyone, but we could only address our students. So MIT was pointing out this program I heard about, I reached out and said, I've got some material. I'm happy to give it to you. And instead, they said, Well, yes, thank you. But why don't you help create more and help teach. So in parallel to my career building and scaling startups, I've been teaching at MIT's career success accelerator for close to two decades for a little over two decades, in fact, and a few years ago, I said, you know, we want to reach more people. Let me turn this into a book, because not everyone can take a class at MIT. And that's what put out the book and the subsequent apps.

Adam Liette
So fascinating. I love that. It wasn't just learn this at the college learn this at university, it was companies saying we want to scale from within we want to grow these skill sets from within. And as a team leader, myself, it's always been, I'm always looking for those opportunities with my own team, like how can I continue to bring professional development, even if it's just me teaching them something and kind of a kind of an offhanded way, just like throwing together a training that's really fascinating. And so glad to see it at the institutional level to where, where we're constantly elevating our, our employees?

Mark Hirschberg
Well, let's talk about how you can do it at your organization. Because there's a lot of books out there, I think my books pretty good, but I'm not gonna say this is the only book there's plenty of great books on leadership on networking on negotiating. But how do you actually go from the book to upskilling people. And so one of the things that you get on my website, I give away everything for free, other than the book where people who print it seem to like getting paid for it. But everything else I give away for free. And on the resources page of the career Toolkit book.com There's a whole bunch of free things you can get. The very first is the career toolkit development program. And let's talk about how you can upskill not just yourself, but your whole team. I give away this program completely free there's no cost. When you think about these skills. These skills are different than how we learn other knowledge. When you learn to Formula math laughs The teacher said, here's the formula, memorize it, we'll do some example problems. If you're learning how to use a social media tool, here's how to use Twitter. Here's how to post here's how to add Okay, great. It's knowledge, you memorize it. That's it, you know exactly where to apply your knowledge of how to create a Twitter post. But when it comes to his other skills, like leadership, there's no memorize these three things, and you're a leader. There's no simple formula. There's also not an obvious time, you know, exactly when to use your knowledge of Twitter posts. You don't know when do I need to use my leadership skills? Do I need to use it in 10 minutes or not. And so these skills the way we want to learn them, it's more akin to how we learn sports, you wouldn't say, Hey, I'm putting together basketball team, I'm gonna send you all to a two day basketball clinic. And you're done. That's it, no more training the rest of the season, we just go and play. And yet, that's what we do with our training. If you're lucky, you get a two day leadership clinic. And that's it. But really, just as in sports, what do we have to do what we have to keep scrimmaging we have to run drills, we might even watch the tape and review and reflect. That's how we want to learn these skills. And so in this program, talk about how you can develop it across your organization, what you want to do is create small learning pods, typically, they should be about five, six people in size, you can do a little smaller or larger. And if you really want to scale it up by talking about how you can do that, they create these learning pods of people, ideally, from different groups, not just all your marketers in one group and all your engineers in another, you want that diversity of opinions, then what you do is you take some content. Now, yes, you can use my book and you can say, Oh, we're going to, for this session, use these 10 pages. And next session, we'll do different 10 pages. If you don't want to use my book, use a different book, use an article, use content online, use a great podcast like this one, you will listen to the episode, and then discuss it. The point is you get some initial content. And then we come together and talk about and if we're talking about leadership, you're going to share what you got out of that section. So you know, I hadn't thought of it that way I saw this. But you know, it's helpful to see your perspective where you get these different ideas, because there's no one answer, there's no magic formula or number. And by getting these different perspectives, we really deepen our understanding, we broaden it. Now we also help do that reinforcement, because instead of having well I did that leadership training two years ago, you're getting it, let's say once a month, or every other week, you're coming together for just 30 to 60 minutes. So you're helped keep me a top of mind, you're reinforcing it, just like you do regular practices for your sports teams. But you get some other advantages too. So obviously, you're upskilling your entire team, which is fantastic. You're also fostering your internal networks. You're helping people meet other people in other departments. That might be if you're a team of 10, you all know each other. But as you get to be a larger company, this is so important to meet people in different groups to get those different perspectives. You're also creating employee engagement. Today, especially we know in a tight labor market, employees aren't just driven by money. Yes, make sure you pay competitively, but they want to know you care about them. You're saying, look, it's not just you get a paycheck for this, we care about upskilling. You we care about training you helping you grow, employees really like that. So you engage your employees. And then finally, you're creating a common language. So if for example, you use the book, Good to Great, very popular classic business book. And if we all did that book, then at the end, I can say to you, oh, well, let's apply the hedgehog model. yourself. I know exactly what you mean, Mark, because I've read the same book. And I get that. So we create this framework, this language that makes it easier to communicate. So by doing this program that again, completely free, you can use my book if you want, but no obligation to do so. You are upskilling your employees, you are fostering internal networks, you are creating employee engagement. And you are creating a common framework to help communications all this completely free.

Adam Liette
And I'd love that, especially from this new job paradigm where we're in where I'll be honest, I don't know a single CEO that has an office, we're all remote. Like every one of my friends in my network. None of us are internal. So you want to talk about building those inter team relationships and that common framework, those common languages, those aren't happening at the watercooler because it doesn't exist when you're a virtual remote company, but you're providing the opportunities to be away from the leadership. And that's actually a question I had when you're setting up these learning pods. Is that like, I would set it up as the operations manager and then Let them do what they let them run it? Or will I be like in the group with them? Do you recommend leadership? Is there kind of let them be on their own?

Mark Hirschberg
Great question. And there's different ways you can go a talk about in the guide that you can download for free. Here's the oxygens, here's how to think about do what's right for you. Certainly, we said, you want people from a diverse set of teams. And by the way, if you're a small company, if you're saying, Look, we're only six people, we'll find another small company, and say, let's kind of cross train our people, we'll get your perspectives of our guys and some of ours with yours. And that's great, you can do it with people outside your company to obviously don't share proprietary information. But now when it comes to people from different levels, here's where you have to be a little more sensitive. Because imagine, if you have some vice president, with 25 years of experience, and some junior person with two years of experience to dynamics can be a little awkward, that younger person might defer to the more experienced person. And that's not what you want, you want engagement. So I recommend generally try to keep at the same roughly experience level, that might not be possible in a small company, you're going to have to mix a bit, but you definitely don't want very senior and very junior, you certainly don't want a manager and a subordinate in the same group, because that dynamic is too awkward. If you're at a big enough company, you might even say, hey, all first level managers, you're in one of these first level manager pods, and all second level managers, you're at this level pod. So you can really scale it that way. There is one potential other way to do it, you can cut this orthogonally and stead of saying this is our group. And we're going to go through a series of books or podcast episodes on different topics, you might say we're going to create a standing group. And we see this in larger companies, I can do this. This is our negotiations group, and just meets every other week for the year, you come in for a few months, when you say I want to improve my negotiation skills. Six months later, three months later, it's okay, I'm feeling better. Now I'm gonna go focus on the join the communication group. And so you'll have people shifting in and out of the groups. Now for that, in particular, because you'll get a larger diversity of levels, you probably want more formally run by someone from HR, who can say, let's make sure we're hearing from everyone in terms of in the traditional group where you're you're mixing doing different things. If you feel the group's experience enough, they can be self directed. In other companies, they may have someone from HR or experienced moderator, kind of running the group just to make sure it's moving forward. But it's totally up to you with what works for your organization.

Adam Liette
Very cool. I like those suggestions, those are all really good. I'm taking down notes as fast as I can here. And the other part I really like about that is if it's that recurring meeting, it's that other bugaboo I have about virtual teams where we feel a lot of feel like oh, we don't have to meet, we have slack. No, you have to meet, there's a different dynamic happens in this face to face. And most of us have been doing the zoom thing so long, it feels like we're right in the same room. At this point, I'll be completely honest. If you don't like that, I'm sorry. That's just my opinion at this point. But by having it be routine, like you establish that cadence, you establish that rhythm, that routine for your team members, which in virtual teams is just hard to get. So I really love all of that all of us have those various ways of employing this and really building your team up. And what you're really doing in many ways is like you're building your next level of leadership, you're building your future leaders. So you're truly ascending people up as the company grows, you don't have to go look for a senior manager, you're you've been training one for two years.

Mark Hirschberg
Exactly right. You can say if these are the skills we're going to need, we need someone with this skill set in six months in a year. Well, let's look at each of the skills, let's map out six skills, 10 skills, whatever they are. Now we're going to train people up over the next six or 12 months, you can say oh, Mark's book will help or this other person's book, her book will help find the resources that addresses those skills and start to train people up. Now I've mentioned using sources like books and podcasts. You can also do things like case studies that you can get from business schools, role playing exercises, you can bring in outside facilitators. There's other ways you can do this. But the idea is you've identified these skills and now you're creating a free training program to get your people to where you need them for the company to grow.

Adam Liette
love that so much. And if the listeners out there happen to have subordinates under them. You know, one of the biggest questions I always have from subordinates is like Adam, I want to move up I want to I like this job and I really want to move to the next level? Like how can an employee make themselves? Like noticeable? Or like give that? Like, what can we tell our employees of how to improve themselves and what they should do to be progressing with the company?

Mark Hirschberg
Great question. It begins by being clear on career plans. Now, chapter one of my book is how to create a career plan. We all need one, even if you're the founder, CEO, you need a career plan, your job title might not be changing from one year to the next. But you need to figure out how to grow and develop yourself. And people should be open about this. One of the taboos is that if you're my subordinate, and we talk about where do you want to be in a few years? If five years from now you're thinking you want to be at a different company? Oh, you can't say that? Because, oh, how dare you? I'm gonna fire you today. No, let's be honest, you're going to be somewhere else, I'll probably be somewhere else in five years. This is okay. It's okay to have these conversations. In fact, one of the things I tell my employees is, if you're ever thinking of leaving, let me know, because I'll see if I can address whatever is causing you to leave. But in other cases, I had one guy who gave me the heads up, he said, Hey, my wife's going to grad school, we're leaving in six months, nothing can do to keep me this is long before virtual was an option. And I said, Okay, thank you for letting me know, no penalties no more well, you don't get the good projects. But it made my job easier. And so I built up that trust. So I can plan and not find out, Oh, I'm leaving in two weeks, sorry. So we have to have that trust relationship, we have to be open. And if we can teach our employees how to create their career plans, then we can have conversations with them. Whether it's at the annual review, or other times, say, Okay, let's talk about where you want to go. Both, here's where you want to be in three years and five years and 10 years, I recognize that might not be here, and we can talk about it as we get closer. But you want to be at this level? Well, here's the skill gap. Because here's the skills you have today. And here are the skills you're gonna need. And we're missing some. So let's see how we can train and develop you. Now some of those might be great, I want you to have these because you'll do better in your current job. Some, maybe it's not helping your current job. But just as I compensate you with money, I'm going to compensate you with training as well, because that makes you happy and makes you want to stay. But if we're not open about talking about our careers, and the skills and development, we can't do that. If you're not happy with your money, if I'm paying you 50,000, you want 60 And we don't talk about you're just unhappy, I don't know it, and then you leave for another job. The same thing is true here. If there are skills you want to develop. And I don't know about I can't help you develop it, you get frustrated you go on. So let's build that trust and have open conversations about where we might go in our careers.

Adam Liette
I love everything about that. Because it's you know, we talked about retaining high quality talent and like, make sure you pay them right make sure given them their vacation. This is like much higher level on Maslow's hierarchy, like make sure you're meeting their needs, their fulfillment, their their dreams, their goals, not just did they get a vacation this year, that's important too. But it's it's that much higher level and the commitment you're going to get back from your from your team, you're going to get back three fold from from my experience, and is that your experience as well.

Mark Hirschberg
Really, right? There are some people who are just working for a paycheck, you do the job and will give you money, they're generally not going to be your most motivated people. The ones who are your super motivated people, the ones who are the high growth people. They're not just in it for the money. And their own development is really important. So that's how we have to compensate them to what they need.

Adam Liette
So good. All right. I have one. I have a question about this. Because it's it's become such a bad thing in these last couple of years of the work life balance, especially with remote companies, like what balance is there? And I have to ask you this question for me because I've been the most guilty person of it. So we do have some employees, they enjoy that flexibility, being able to work whenever they want. Work in different time zones, you know, have time off during the day. Whereas others do want that more like stable nine to five. But with this fractured job market we're in and these kind of ambiguous working environments we're in, like, how can we set those like expectations of work hours play hours off hours? As a manager, it's it. I feel like there's no right answer no matter which way I go.

Mark Hirschberg
The only you're right, there's no right answer. The Wrong answer is not to have an answer. Let's consider a more traditional example. Let's suppose you're all in the office, we're gonna take a non virtual example to start. Now, there's something that would happen that we never talked about. You might as your management style, prefer that before someone comes to you with a big idea that they email you the idea that they write it all down, they send you a proposal, you can read through it and say, Okay, after I've read this, I want you to come into my office, and then we'll discuss it, but it's helpful for me to really think about and read through it beforehand. So you want to get the proposals ahead of time, other people, so I hate long emails, if you have an idea, like, let's just talk it through, that's much better. Both are perfectly valid styles. But now imagine you have two people, you have a manager and subordinate. And the manager likes to get something written, but the subordinate, that's not her personality. So she comes in, and she says, Hey, I got this great idea and just starts pitching it and managers, okay, I can't, I can't think of us right now go write it up. So she feels rejected, you didn't like my idea, Oh, he wants me to do all this busy paperwork that I don't like, I'm not motivated. idea doesn't happen. Or we can reverse it. She's a manager. And he's sending her all these long emails, because Oh, my God, I don't have time to read this, like, hey, just come and talk to me. Now, again, both are valid. But together, these two styles don't mesh well with each other. And so it's important, we talked about culture, like culture, something, oh, we have these seven values customer first, blah, blah, blah. Culture is really, hey, how do you prefer to communicate with each other? What are the rules day to day, when we have a disagreement? How do we handle that? Do we vote on it as a team? Do you and I go off and discuss it one on one? That's what corporate culture really is. And we never talked about this. Now, what would be helpful is if during the interview process, we could say, Hey, by the way, I'm a guy who loves really long emails, and you say, I hate long emails. Hmm. Okay, might be an issue, right? Just like, you know, if we were dating, and you said, oh, you know, I love the opera, and I love arts, like, Oh, I hate all that. We say, well, there might be an issue, maybe that's not the right relationship. So the same thing should happen. workwise. Now, let's bring this back to your virtual example, that some people like the very structure nine to five others to know and be able to come and go, well, let's define what the structure is. Because if you have someone saying, Hey, it's 330, you should be at your desk, because that's what I expect. And you're thinking, Yeah, you know, I'm, I'm gonna play with the kids for a couple hours, and I'll get back to work later. That's a problem. So as long as you set the expectations, now, it might be a well structured from 10 to three, that's when we know everyone's around. Outside of that, if you're structured, you say nine to five other people say whenever I feel like it, or you say the expectation is that you are responding to emails within an hour or two hours, during nine to five. But outside of that, we don't expect it if you want to, you're welcome to. So as long as you set those boundaries, and we know how to engage with each other, then we can work together. And these conversations need to be had at the hiring stage. It is important for both the company and the candidate to have these discussions. And to help you do that. I have another free resources at the Career Toolkit book.com on the resources page, and it's the questions candidate should ask. And I even have a guide how you can ask this. And I'll give you go right to the end. Blame me. Because it can be awkward in the interview. It's like, Hey, listen, I got a bunch of questions like, tell me about how you like to email and have conversations. Alright, that can feel weird. So what you can do is say, Hey, there's this guy, Mark. And I read his book or heard him on this podcast, and he recommends we go through this stuff. So this way, they think this is weird, but marks the weirdo, not you. And so you're not you're not taking that risk. So you're welcome to blame me.

Adam Liette
That's so good. Reminds me of the first time when slack came out with his new audio feature those you've been on Slack long enough. used to just be text and they came out this little you just hit a button and type in say your message. I made that mistake once I like sent my CEO a message. He's like, Dude, can you do not ever do that to me again? I cannot work that way. I'm like, okay, lesson learned. The rest of my team loved it. I can do it to them. And they were like, yes, it's so much easier than reading everything. CEO was like No dice. But it's just being open about it. And like establishing those those communication cadences. And like, here's what we do here. And I do like the idea of like asking that in the hiring process when bringing someone on board. It sounds like if we're talking about, like those kinds of things, plus career plans plus kind of their goals. I think all of that's in that initial phase of their employment if I'm not, unless I'm thinking of it wrong, like we can bring them in under those right pretenses, set them up on their glide path and really give them momentum during those initial days and weeks in the company.

Mark Hirschberg
That's exactly right. The earlier the better. Now, for something like a career plan, it's not one and done, you want to keep revisiting. And even you might notice, I came in thinking, we're going to communicate this way by discover just the dynamics of the team, the nature of all the communications we need to have, maybe it does make more sense to do longer emails, I'm not a fan of it, but I get why it's necessary here. So let's, let's change it up a bit. And that's fine. But we want to be intentional. And we want to be on the same page of that. So start early, but don't feel it set in stone.

Adam Liette
So wonderful. Awesome. I want to switch tracks a little bit here. And when we talk about, like, soft skills that we don't, we're not actually taught, but we do need to really know. So last week, I was at this really major marketing convention in Orlando, like 5000 people in a room is tremendous to get for some of the offices in two and a half years, it was wonderful to be part of this huge convention. How do we put our best foot forward when we're networking? Or if we're asking our employees to network? What kind of skills can we help them develop to really represent the company and themselves? Well,

Mark Hirschberg
there's a number of concrete specific techniques I give in the book. But here's the key idea. Most people network wrong. There is a great book by Harvey Mackay called dig your well before you're thirsty. And if you just think about the title, well, that makes sense. I lay the groundwork to benefit later. And fortunately, when it comes to networking, most people think, oh, I need a job time to go network, or I need to hire someone or I need this time to go network. Like, Hey, stranger, I need a job. Can you help me? Imagine if I met you in a bar tonight? And we're hanging out and we have a couple of drinks and go hey, yeah, it's been great hanging out with you. So listen, this Saturday, I got a pack up and move my apartment. So why don't you come on over? We have such a great time tonight. Come on over help me pack my apartment, not gonna take more than about six hours. How's that sound to you? That's insane. We'd never do that. Who do I call to help me pack up. I call my friend for 20 years, I call my friends from high school I call people I've known for a while and said, Hey, I need your help. Say, Well, this does not sound fun. But you are my friend, we have a relationship, I will help you. But when it comes to networking, people just think, Oh, let me go and grab. And so we want to start by building that network, not because I need something today. But because I'm going to build these relationships. So they are there in the future. And that's how we need to think about networking. So don't say, Oh, I'm going to a conference. And my goal is to do this. That salesperson who comes back with 15 business cards in an hour. Oh, he's a great networker. That's not networking. That's step one of a long process, saying collecting business cards is networking. That's like I'm on a dating app. And we both swipe right. Oh, we're practically married. We wouldn't think of that as real dating. And yet, that's how we think about networking. So change your mindset to relationship building and recognizing that it will take a while.

Adam Liette
I'm happy to say I've never swiped right. I was already married before Tinder was the thing. So I know the reference but but great example. And it kind of brought to mind. Me Do you remember the show Seinfeld? When Jerry became friends with Keith Hernandez. He's like, he asked me to help them move. That's like going all the way for guys. And for my fellow marketers a bit like Ryan Deiss, he often talks about the way bad marketers do it is Hi. Glad to meet you. Let's get married. Like that's how a lot of bad marketers approach sales where it is a process. So we have to treat networking in that same way of its relationship building and more of getting to know you. Let's go have a drink at an event like that.

Mark Hirschberg
That's exactly why I get so much outreach from marketers from salespeople with an email, Hey, I'd like to network with you to know that's not networking. That's you asking me to do something for you buy your product, take a pitch call. And you're just throwing in the term networking because you think I'll be more amenable to that. When you reach out one of the best things to do when networking is give before you get don't go up and be like Hey, you, here's what I need. No one likes to be approached that way. But we either just start talking, we're at an event we just start talking no ulterior motives, and we build that relationship over time. Or I reach out and offer you something. So here's an example I have all these recruiters all these recruiters keep telling me this Oh, CTO, he hires lots of people. Let me just pitch him. I literally get pitched three or four times a day. And of course, I know if I ever do need an agency, I can literally find a dozen of them in about 12 minutes. It's not that hard. So I don't need to invest my time with you today. Because I know even if I haven't talked to you for three years, if I say I want to give you money, you'll say Yes, sir. So you're not offering me anything, but you're asking for my time. On the other hand, if they showed up and said, Hey, I know you're busy CTO, I'd like to offer you here is our analysis of compensation in the last year or six months, just wanted to give this to you. No obligation, nothing. Let me help you. Let me give you something like, oh, okay, that was nice. I might have ignored him, I'd say I don't need this. But oh, they just gave me something, they didn't ask for anything. And when that happens over time, I start to develop a positive feeling about this particular company. And when I need to say, Oh, now I go and have to find a bunch of recruiters whom I'm more likely to use the one who's been giving me things. So think about giving in your relationship building, whether it's formal marketing to your customers, or potential customers, or in the relationship building you're doing with people you meet.

Adam Liette
So fantastic. And even in a leadership role, like you're always looking to, it kind of comes full circle, we're looking to bring our people up, put them into leadership positions, and that no necessarily enable or require them to reach outside the company, we're always looking to our left and right working with other companies like it can be networking with someone that is going to provide us our T shirts for our swag box. I mean, like all these things come into play. And if we're training our employees and our team members on this at a low, low risk level, low threshold level, and they're learning to do it the right way, then when it comes to those higher those high ticket sales calls, Well, geez, we've already set the conditions for them to do things at a very high level. Exactly. Right. Fantastic. Awesome. So you had mentioned, like you came in, during the.com era was when you were like, really, you were coming into your professional environment. And I feel like we're kind of in this weird area of massive disruption again, and unless it's kind of like coming right up on us. Are there any opportunities that you're seeing from your desk that are coming around? Or what can we kind of expect over these next couple of years?

Mark Hirschberg
That's a big question. One of the lessons I learned post.com That I wish I knew, then, there's a famous saying, in a gold rush, the best way to make money is to sell shovels. I wish I knew that during a.com. But I've seen it subsequently. And so it's not that you're going for the gold, you're saying oh, I've I'm the one doing whatever the sexy new thing is. But I can provide tools, because we don't know which of the companies in this new space will be the winner. But if you're selling tools, you're selling to all of them. And eventually, whoever wins, they'll keep needing your product. So I'd first say no matter what is happening, think about selling shovels, but recognizes, well, when you think about what will those disruptions be? Yeah, there's a lot of disruption. But I think disruption is here to stay, we've accelerated the rate of change. What happened in the.com era was we went from people really not being there was no web, to people doing things on the web and a certain new level of accessibility. But we see time and again, when a new social media platform came out. First, okay, here's these weird things. But the people who got on early, succeeded and built brands. Now, that's not a guarantee, take for example, clubhouse, there's a new type of social media channel and people got in early and it's not going anywhere. Maybe we'll have a second life somewhere. There are reasons you could see why that wasn't going to go anywhere, unless they made some significant changes to the product. But we can see other things happening with for example, automated driving, this is going to displace literally millions of workers. And so we can see some of these changes coming within your own industry, your own role. Automated disruption is something you can pretty much guarantee. So what do I mean by that? I'm old enough. I think you are as well to remember, tollbooth workers. As we were driving, we needed to stop and give money to someone so that we could continue to use the road road and there were literally 1000s 10s of 1000s People throughout the US collecting money, very inefficient. Now we got rid of them. And now we all have these electronic passes. We love that because that eliminated the backups of these things. Universally, they're loved. With one exception. The people who are working in the toll booths were not happy because it put them out of their jobs. travel agents used to be a lot of those, we got rid of them, because we can all book online. And we like being able to book a line and not having a travel agent. What about this well about that. But travel agents lost their jobs, all of us have technology slowly eating away at our jobs. And so if you look at what you do, and you say, I'm spending time doing rote things that will eventually be automated. Think about the higher value work you can do. And that's where great automate all this stuff away from me. Because I don't want me doing it, I can provide so much more value and therefore ask for much more money by doing this higher order function. So recognize this disruptions coming. You might even say, Hey, here's a bunch of stuff I wish was automated. Well, there's a sign of what you should disrupt a company you should create. But recognize this will happen across all industries and all job functions.

Adam Liette
It's a second time I've heard that analogy in a week of, you know, in the Gold Rush, you know, be the guy selling the shovels. Russell Brunson said that last week at this convention I was at it was like, Yep, I've heard that before. But it's true. You know, there's so much to be said for that. And I don't think any of us missed the toll booths at all. Plus, we don't carry change anymore. So we don't have the change in our car. Right? True. And with that are like, I see it as my responsibility as someone who has subordinate someone who is a leader, like I have to be enabling my team to be ready for this disruption, for disruptions for things that are changing. And do you think moving forward, our credential is going to play as much of a role? Are we going to possibly look towards experiences portfolios? Like, what's the dynamic going to be? Is it going to be more of the informal education or like needing the letters on our wall? From institutions? Really good

Mark Hirschberg
question. Now, first, you said something very important. I want to commend you for it, that you recognize as a manager, you have an obligation to develop your team. And fortunately, not all managers feel that way. But I feel we do have an obligation. That is our responsibility. Now, if someone says, I don't want it, let me just do my job. Okay, fine. But we as managers have an obligation to help the people we manage, help them today, help them prepare for tomorrow, even if tomorrow somewhere else. So I commend you for it. And I hope other folks listening recognize this important obligation, we have to the main question you asked about learning and certification. So first, our education system is out of date, not simply because we're not teaching important skills, like the ones we've been talking about, but also the belief that you're done with your education at 18, or 22. That doesn't work, we need to continue to learn. Now, that might mean, every 10 years or so you go back for some six month training program. And as a society, we have to recognize you might take six months off between jobs or have some type of sabbatical and this is normal. And no one's gonna say, Oh, you haven't worked for six months. It means loans for people who might go to some mini grad school program, and need financial support. So we need to really change what we're doing. But of course, you'll have continual learning, and continual meaning maybe every two years, you're taking classes or seminars or doing things. So I do think our education system will change to more of a continual learning small steps with some big steps along the way. In terms of the certification system, I think that is a phenomenal load of BS. Now, I've seen this happen before. So in my industry, in technology, we started creating all these certifications. I remember way back when I was doing Java software, Java language, and sun which control Java had all these certifications. You are a certified Java engineer, you're a certified Java architect, and all these different levels. They certify you for these things. Now, if you're doing I'm gonna say almost grunt level work, okay, that's that's fine. Dental Hygienist for example. It's a very mechanical thing. You either I don't know how to be a dental hygienist. I don't know what to look for. For the people who do. Do you understand? This is plaque. This is not this is what you scrape great. Easy. But when it comes to being a Java architect, a software architect, what they were testing, because remember, they're scaling this to 10s of 1000s of people. They're saying, Do you know what this tool does? Which of these three, would you choose? And pick? It was like a multiple choice test. Okay, you should know what the tools are and what these things do. But how to think strategically? How do you architect a system to really think through your business needs today, and for the next 10 years, that's hard to capture in a test, it's hard to at scale, check if all these people can do it. And so the certifications are very mechanical. If you look at online courses, from Coursera, for example, and you take the test, I've taken some Coursera things from all these world class universities. And you're doing effectively multiple choice tests. It tells me you have the knowledge, but not that you have the wisdom. You might know the difference between this is what social media is versus a billboard ad by the side of the road, you can tell me mechanically what each is. But when do you think about here's a new type of product you're rolling out? Why might you use one over the other in our really subtle, interesting case. And it's not clear to me just because you have this class and got the certification that you know how to do that, I need to evaluate differently. So I am not very excited on certifications, I think they'll continue to get abused and overused, they're fine for lower level more wrote mechanical jobs. But for the higher level jobs that most people listening probably want. I think they're going to be a red herring.

Adam Liette
impresses hiring managers, it's if we're in the hiring process, I think I see it as an opportunity where we can check for that application of knowledge into we in the hiring process. I always use trial TAs, when I'm hiring, it's a it's a multi step process to get hired by me. And trial tests are always part of it. And there's those quick little critical thinking things, I sneak into my trial test to see how they respond. Because you're looking for that application of knowledge.

Mark Hirschberg
When I hire, for example, a director of marketing a VP of Marketing, one of the things I'll do, I don't like to give people big work assignments, I want to respect their time. But as we get to the end stages, I'll say, okay, suppose I gave you a million dollars as your budget. How would you allocate over the next year? And I don't want them to come up with this big formal 20 Page plan. But I just want to see why are you putting 60% in this and 20%? In that, let's talk through what are you thinking? Why are you thinking? What are the questions you asked me before you came up with this? That tells me a lot more that discussion, that conversation we have, that's how I understand how you think. And that's not something you can really get at a certification.

Adam Liette
I love that story you told from your book where you were hiring as a 19 year old HR intern, just came back with Well, here's the 20 leads I found and they're all ready for you. And it's like, oh my gosh, that'd be like a hiring dream.

Mark Hirschberg
Yeah, she is still the best candidate I have ever seen to this day. Fantastic.

Adam Liette
All right. So one last question I always like to end with, because we've mentioned at least five books in the course of this call besides your own. And I have half of them, so I need to buy the other half. That being said, I'm a huge believer in reading. I believe Leaders are readers. my bookshelf is I'm getting I get in trouble every time I ask this question, because I go buy stuff on Amazon. But what books have you recently read that you can recommend that anyone in our positions, take a look at and really dive into I

Mark Hirschberg
have a whole list because if you go back to that Resources page, there's two other sections on the page first references, books I referenced in my own book, if you want to go deeper on a topic, but then there are some other books that might not directly relate to mine, or I didn't happen to mention it and fit in that I recommend. And I've got about 30 different books that I list there and links to their website, so you can go find them. There's a number of books organized by topic there. So rather than give you a warranty now, if you go to the career Toolkit book.com and go to Resources on the menu on the top right resources. On that page, the references, and the recommendations will have a whole bunch. And then of course, to remember what you're reading. That's why I created the brain bump app, so that you can better retain everything that you've read.

Adam Liette
Oh, you got me in Super trouble Mark 30 books I'm gonna have to explain this, but that's okay. Because I it's just me we spend a lot of time on these digital screens. I I like the book, I don't do the digital books anymore. And if you're still digital, but I mean, that's everyone's personal preference. But if you're out there listening and you're still on Kindles, they have their place for sure. There's a different relationship you have with a physical copy of a book. It's just unparalleled in my opinion. But everyone's a little different. I get that. That's just, if you're anything like me, that's, that's I found a different relationship. Fantastic. Mark, this has been so fun. I really enjoyed got a lot of great tips on continuing to level up because I think I think we said this a number of times, if we're not continuing to progress ourselves, not continue to stretch our own skills, our own knowledge, our own application of that knowledge. And what's the point? I mean, that's kind of how I feel. It's like, I never want to be done learning. And I look forward to taking this into my own teams and letting them know we're having, we're gonna have internal training, oh, man, they're gonna, I'll let them know it's March fault. So I'll be sure to let them know it's March fault. But

Mark Hirschberg
you can if you or anyone out there listening uses this, again, completely free. I don't even get it with an email. So I don't know if you're taking it. I don't know if you're using it. If you're using it. Feel free again, touch with me. I'd love to hear how it's going, what's working, what's not working? Please let me know. Because it's nice to know if I'm able to help people. And if I'm not well tell me what we need to do, bear, but all of it completely free to help you and your team.

Adam Liette
Great. Thank you so much, Mark. Again, the book is the career toolkit. We'll have a bunch of links on the show notes for this episode. So make sure to come over there, give good marks and love find him. Give him a review. And yeah, thank you so much, Mark. This has been a ton of fun. And anything we can do in the in the future, please do shout, and I can't wait for our paths cross again.

Mark Hirschberg
Thanks for having me on the show.