The Wall Street Journal ran an article last week entitled, Firms Search for Technical Talent. The article detailed that many firms are struggling to find competent people for technical openings, such as mechanical, electrical and chemical engineers, and computer science and information technology majors.

So, you’re a manager in one of those companies. I’d like to hear from some of you: what does an article like that make you think of?

Today’s show is the third and final part of our series on resigning. If you have to resign, distinguish yourself my resigning professionally. With the completion of this series, you now know how!

Seriously - do you think it matters how clean and neat your desk is at work?

It does.

The idea that it doesn’t is preposterous. We judge people - I use that word carefully but accurately - for attire, vocabulary, speech patterns… all things that we believe in some way reflect or shed light on their ability to perform. They’re only proxies, perhaps. They’re not de facto predictors. They’re just our own heuristics at work. If enough of us share the same heuristics, it’s culture, and it makes a difference.

The reason I’m writing this is that I read an Ask Annie column recently where she asked readers whether a messy desk could hurt someone’s career. You can find the column here (last item). Here’s how she characterized the responses:

The vast majority of you pooh-pooh the notion that an office that looks like a bomb site reflects badly on its occupant - as long as said occupant is producing great work.

“What your expert is really saying is that there is only one correct way to do a job, and that is in a neat and orderly fashion,” writes a reader named Chris T. “While we’re at it, why don’t we make everyone wear white shirts, burgundy ties, and charcoal suits? Trying to make everyone conform is a sure-fire way to lose some very talented people.”

[To be fair, in a previous column, Annie answered , “yes it does.” And she listed the reasons, which you can get from anyone in your office with a neat desk. But at the end, she asked for input, and what she got back is represented above.]

Let’s look at those two paragraphs. Note what the first ends with: “…as long as [you are] producing great work.”

Let me get this straight. I ask someone if a clean desk is important to one’s career, and they say, “NAAH. As long as someone’s producing great work, it doesn’t matter”?

Hey! Pay attention, survey respondent! You’re not being asked whether top performers can GET AWAY WITH a messy desk. That is a completely different - I would argue enormously different - question. Maybe the “vast majority” were answering as they did to support their own beliefs that a messy desk “ought not to” hurt one’s career, maybe they just didn’t get, I don’t know… and it doesn’t matter.

If one of your team asked you that question, and you answered that way, the “Naah… AS LONG AS…”, here’s what happens. They tell themselves, hey, the boss says it really doesn’t matter. And they wonder why, in close races for promotions, they don’t get it. What’s more… no one can tell them why, because something like a desk is something we NOTICE, but not something we EVALUATE. We just judge, silently, heuristically.

All good career advice starts with the fundamental premise that for the purpose of the advice, everything else IS equal. It may not always be able to be purely applied (YES, brilliant geniuses can have AWFUL desks), but it is the best way to advise your charges (because they are likely NOT brilliant geniuses for whom standards of culture don’t apply.)

The second paragraph is even worse than the first one. Telling your team and those who come to you for advice that a clean desk is better than a messy desk is NOT the same thing as saying there is “only one way.” A subtle, unspoken cultural standard of a clean desk is NOT fascism - it’s effectiveness. Just ask yourself how you feel when you come back to your desk and it looks like “a bomb went off.” That feeling does NOT make you more effective.

A clean desk is more effective. If you don’t tell your team, you’re not being “understanding.” You’re asking them to run with weighted shoes.

It does matter.

Sometimes I harp on interview behaviors. I do so only partly because I used to be a recruiter. Also, it’s because interviewing is routinely done so poorly that sometimes it boggles my mind.

I understand WHY people stink at interviews. There are all kinds of reasons, but basically, gross lack of preparation is the big one. I just wish it weren’t so, because it’s not hard to understand the system.

Unfortunately, there are so many people doing so many WACKY things, I’m convinced that a narrow, step by step (you are surprised?) system is the only way to go through the process.

Here is is a WSJ article about HOW wacky people get. DUMB, DUMB, DUMB.

I don’t want to give it away - there are so MANY dumb moments. But here’s one: checking your Blackberry DURING the interview? Reminds me of something I said recently on the boards: “NEVER hire this person.”

My point is simple: these people thought they were doing the right thing.

They were NOT.

What is it you are doing that YOU think is right?

Anybody care to share stories of what they did, or watched someone else do?

Best story gets a book from our list. (Best is defined as Mike’s and my best judgment.)

One of our British members posted something today that was so good I wanted to highlight it.

In order to do her post justice, some background. Quite often when I am coaching someone, I get a comment that sounds something like, “hey, I know everybody else knows this, so I couldn’t ask you except in private. What do I do about ‘X’”?

The thing that USED to catch me, but now just makes me smile, is the “everybody else knows this.” It’s as if every manager I’ve ever coached is the ONE who doesn’t “get it”, and they’re deathly afraid of being caught.

Well, here’s the truth. Very few - less than a hundred, maybe even less than 50 - of the tens of thousands of managers I have known actually “get it” in a way that puts them at ease and at peace with their skills in ALL situations. What might surprise you is that they’re not all clustered at the top of their organizations. They’re not all CEOs. [I know plenty of CEOs who are terrible managers, and yet still are quite deservedly CEO.]

YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

Further, it doesn’t do as much good as people think to “hide” our weaknesses. Trust me, everybody knows them. And in the spirit of rewarding self-deprecating candor - which is just professional honesty - here’s an excerpt from the post I mentioned above:

I listened to the time management podcast at the end of last week. It was a tough week, back to back meetings and nothing usual getting done. Well, so I thought! Friday, I did a quick tally of just how many meetings I had - 20 hours! So where did the other 17 (plus!) hours go? I don’t know. But it did incentivise me to block out some time for my number 1 priority this week - hidden in my diary subtly marked MH!

This morning when I got in, I tried to ignore my email and start immediately on my priority. I dithered a bit but started about 10 minutes late. 45 minutes later, the document I’ve been trying to start/finish for weeks was done. Cool! I thought. That was so important, what shall I do now.. and for the next 3 hours, when i had uninterrupted time that I never get, I faffed and dithered and didn’t achieve anything.

I’m still trying to work out what I learnt from this.. but going to try again tomorrow - the FRPlan is about to be ticked off!

You can find the post and responses here.

Thanks to Wendii for her candor. More is better.

And I was afraid you might as well, so this post is to remind you to do so.

Funny how it happened. I had had a busy day, and a listener wrote a nice note and said he had voted in place of buying a subscription “because you guys wont’ let me do that yet !” And it hit me, at eleven o’clock at night: I hadn’t voted!

You can vote here.

Thanks.

We’re pleased to say that our “monthly members only cast” went up yesterday, just before the end of the month. It is, “How To Prepare For Your Own Review”.

What’s more, you don’t even have to be registered this month - it’s available to EVERYONE. We did this once before, with our December ‘05 cast, and got lots of new registered members. Mike and I are not natural marketers, so sometimes we’re not as clear as we could be about the value proposition of everything we offer. So, we thought we’d let the content speak for us.

This cast is special because we’re showcasing the kinds of collateral that will come with ALL casts to premium subscribers. In addition to the free cast, we’ve created free collateral content to support it:

- a PDF of the show’s transcript - it’s 16 pages!
- a PDF of a PowerPoint show covering all the key points of the show
- a second PDF of the same PowerPoint, optimized for printing (no color background)
- a custom note taking form to help you with the 6 hour (over 12 weeks) process of gathering your data.

These are the kinds of collateral we plan for every show, every week (and month) for all premium subscribers. Just think of creating a series of binders with all the content in it, every show, all the details, all the background.

We’d love to hear any comments, positive or negative.

Thanks for waiting!

The People Principle, by Ron Willingham. Subtitle: a revolutionary redefinition of leadership. Willingham owns a very successful sales and customer service training company, and I’ve seen his training packages in a couple client sites. As you might imagine, I read LOTS of books like this, and unfortunately for Mr. Willingham, I am probably way too discerning. This book was terrible. It certainly wasn’t revolutionary. Don’t buy it, even if it gets 4 and a half stars on Amazon.

[Full disclosure: I was predisposed to not like this book, but read it anyway in a spirit of being fair and open to my own narrow-mindedness. The reason I was predisposed was that Mr Willingham’s coaching model was not impressive. At one point in his COACHING model, he says that you should then “COACH”, without saying what that means. It was weird. Many who were using it at a client came to me and said, “I’m supposed to use this tool, but I can’t figure it out. Can you help?” There are lots of bad coaching models out there, and so I don’t mean to pick on him. And, I really like some of his customer service stuff.]