Upskilling Your Team With Guest Expert Mark Herschberg

Lauren: Welcome to The Biz Doctor Podcast, my love letter to business owners the world over. I’m your host, Lauren Goldstein, award-winning business consultant and advisor whose fondly nicknamed the business doctor by my clients. My clients call me the business doctor because I help business owners who are burning the candle at both ends, diagnose what is actually keeping them stuck in and buried under the day-to-day of their business, and then formulate a business treatment plan to help them adjust their business and team to fit them.

And most importantly, support them in having what I call true entrepreneurial freedom. If you’re ready to look at your business in a different lens and elevate yourself out of the business operator in the trenches 24 7 to visionary business owner and leader who can take a breath vacation and have more fun making an impact with your business.

Then grab your favorite beverage and your earbuds, and let’s dive into our latest episode.

We’ve all been there wanting to upskill our teams and support our employees’ career path and plan. Heck, even our own as an entrepreneur, but struggling with how exactly to do it. Well, it’s tough, but lucky for you. Today’s episode is gonna show you how. Welcome back to the Biz Dr Podcast. I’m your host, Lauren Goldstein, and joining me in the studio today is Mark Hirschberg.

If you wanna know more about how to elevate your team and upscale your whole organization, this is gonna be a valuable Beyond Measure episode for you. Now, before we get to the real juice of the episode, let me properly introduce my guest here in the studio. Mark is C T O C P O, speaker, m i t instructor, and the author of the Career Toolkit, essential Skills for Success that No One Taught You and the creator of the Brain Bump app.

Educated at M I t. Mark has spent his career launching and fixing new ventures at startups, fortune 500 s in academia. He developed new software, languages, online marketplaces, new authentication systems, and tracked criminals and terrorists on the dark web. Wow. Mark helped create the undergraduate practice opportunities program, MIT’s Career Success Accelerator, where he taught for 20 years.

Mark also serves on the board and the nonprofit Plant a million Corals. 

Mark: Welcome to the show, mark. Thanks for having me. It is my pleasure to be here. Of 

Lauren: course, I’m so beyond excited to have you on the show because I see this challenge of upskilling teams so often in the businesses I consult for. And I love that you figured out such a simple and effective way to support not only entrepreneurs, but their teams.

So to kick us off, why don’t you share a bit more about your path and how it led you here to creating this wonderful resource in book and the work that you do with business owners? 

Mark: I’ve had this very interesting dual career. When I came out of m MIT in the nineties, during the dotcom era, I started as a software engineer and I got into startup companies.

Very quickly, I realized I wanted to become a CTO, the chief technology Officer. I. What I discovered was that it wasn’t just about being the best engineer. Mm-hmm. Yes, I need to be good at that. But there were all these other skills, leadership, communication, networking, negotiating, hiring, all these skills no one ever taught me.

So I realized I had to upskill myself and as I was doing so, I recognized these skills, helped not only C-Suite people, but everyone in the company. So I began to upskill my entire team. Now I went on and I’ve had a career building classic startups from where in someone’s living room or garage and building up the company.

And I’ve gone through every phase from raising the early money through exits, successful and otherwise, I’ve also helped a couple Fortune 500 who wanted to play startup and do enemy in their organization. But now as I was upskilling my team, Something happened. M i t had discovered this similar missing piece of education.

Companies were saying, we want to see these skills in the people we hire. Not just for engineers, not just for college students or your students, but everyone. And we can’t find it either. So at M I T, they want to put together what’s now referred to as the Career Success Accelerator. When I heard about that, I reached out and said, you know, I’ve developed some material.

Why don’t you take it? Maybe this will be helpful. I thought that would be a single conversation, but instead they asked me to help develop more content and then to stay on and teach because while we have some amazing faculty at M I T, they also want to bring in practitioners like myself. So I’ve been co-teaching along with them for over 20 years now.

And that then led to the book, the Speaking, the app, and other things in parallel to my career actually building companies. 

Lauren: Wow, what a journey. And I’m just, I’m so honored to have you on the, on the podcast because I know that you have so much knowledge and expertise on this subject to really help our listeners upskill their company.

So I’m excited and I mean, let’s start there. Actually. What exactly is upskilling in case that’s a in case, that’s a term that no one has heard before. 

Mark: It’s a general term, but basically means taking your team, your employees, as well as yourself, and improving, and that’s it. We often think about improving our business.

We think about, oh, I have a manufacturing business. How can I make this 5% faster or more efficient? And that’s something you should think about, but for many of us, especially in white collar type of jobs, That process. It’s not that you can put in a robot to make it faster, it’s how do you get your people to be 5% more efficient or better.

Now, there may be some AI these days that we might be able to put in, but it’s also helping people think more effectively or communicate more effectively, or reduce friction. There’s all sorts of things, and it’s not just the mechanics of here’s a tool. Now our time reports are much faster, but even how you think and act and engage with others.

And with that, we can also improve how our individuals and teams and companies operate. 

Lauren: Got it. Got it. So it sounds like there’s a component here that is the difference between an innate talent that somebody comes to you with that’s just how they’re built versus skills that we can actually hone in and prove.

So you touched on it a little bit, but I’d love to hear your, your thoughts on how to take someone’s innate talents and improve those, but also improve other skills that will help them be better at their job. 

Mark: The skills we’re talking about what people often think of as soft skills. Mm-hmm. Leadership or communicating.

Now, a common misconception is that they are innate and you either have it or you don’t. Mm. It is certainly true. Some people are. Naturally better at leadership or communicating or networking. Some people are naturally better at math or language or sports, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us who may not have those innate abilities.

And I say this as someone who is not inherently good at sports, but became a ballroom champion. Not inherently good at public speaking, but became a professional speaker. Mm-hmm. We can learn and develop this just like we can learn sports or language or accounting or anything else. So all of these skills can be improved, and those of us who put the time in to make those improvements will typically outpace the ones who say, well, I’m just naturally good.

I don’t have to work at. So the premise here is that these skills can be improved. Let’s talk about a process for doing this. We often think of education. As what we got in school. The teacher stands up front and says, here’s the formula, here’s the knowledge. Here are the dates to write down. Memorize this, and everyone the room memorizes it and says, okay, now I understand there is no formula for leadership.

Mm-hmm. Set of just three things for a member to communicate. These are much more subtle and the way you wanna learn is more akin to how you learn sports. Imagine you wanted to be a great basketball player. What would you do? You’d say, well, I’m gonna start by doing some drills, dribbling, shooting, passing.

Then I’m going to play some scrimmage games and practice and try and get coaching and reflect. You might even watch a tape of yourself or of the other team. That’s how you’re going to learn that skill, and that’s how we can learn these skills in our office. So here’s a simple program you can do. To upscale your entire team or organization and more details about this.

It’s on my website and it’s completely free. I don’t even ask for your email. I just give stuff away for free. But here’s the essence. You want to create small peer learning groups. I recommend groups of about six to eight people from different departments. Don’t just put all your engineers in one group and salespeople another.

You want to go cross group. If, by the way, you’re a tiny company, say we only have five or six people. Other small companies in the area and just get people from different companies and different departments there help each other out or create a local meetup group or do something to bring in others. So you create these small peer groups and then you give them some content.

Now, yes, you can use my book, but no, no purchase required. You don’t need to use it. You can use other books. You can use articles, you can use free. Great podcasts like this one. Doesn’t matter the source. You get something where they spend. 30, 60 minutes reading or listening, and then come together as a group and discuss it.

And what happens if we just read or listened to something on leadership? We’re gonna talk about it and you’re gonna share your perspective, which is different from my perspective. And then someone’s gonna say, well, here’s a challenge I’m facing now, or one they had in the past, and here’s what I did and what worked and what didn’t.

And so I’ll say, oh, well I would’ve done this instead. Oh, that’s a good point. Or I wouldn’t, but it’s interesting to see why you would. I’m broadening my perspective and it’s really in this discussion.  That’s where you’re going to upskill. Now notice you didn’t need to buy anything. You don’t have to bring in an expensive, fancy coach for all your people.

You can do this yourself, and when you do so, you get four great benefits. First, you are upskilling the people on your team. Second, you are creating engagement. We know, especially in today’s labor market, people don’t just want a paycheck. They want a company that’s showing they care about them and you’re doing so by helping to train them.

Three, you are creating an internal network because when you get PO from different departments that may not interact, you’re building those relationships that’s so important for your company to operate smoothly. And finally you’re creating a common language. If the book you pick, for example, is good to great.

Mm-hmm. And your team all reads it, then someone can say, hedgehog model. Everyone says, right. Hedgehog model. I know exactly what you mean. And so you have these frameworks and language that is shared among the organization, making communication easier. All of this, and it is completely free. You can implement this on your own.

Lauren: Hmm. There’s so much, so much dissect there. Um, I, I love that one. It’s simple. Anybody can do it. It’s, um, you know, it’s got great benefits. I do, I do have to ask though, because, you know, for those listening to the podcast more, more than a few episodes, you know, that something that I really drive home is, you know, focus on what you’re good at and like outsource the rest or whatnot, but, I want, what I’m hearing is it’s not about like what your unique abilities are in like staying in that lane.

You should still absolutely stay in that lane, but it’s the soft skills that will help you be more effective in your lane that everyone will benefit from improving. Am I understanding that right? 

Mark: That’s right. Certainly when I look at the businesses I run, We’re not HR experts, we just go with a P E O and say, you deal with it.

Make me do as little work as possible so I can focus on my value add. But when it comes to these skills, we can’t outsource it. I can’t come up with a brilliant idea and then say you explain it. Hmm. Here’s the analogy I use. We’re gonna do a little bit of math, okay? And go back to middle school. It’s math you can handle.

Okay? Imagine for a moment you have a rectangle that’s four by 10. Okay. And you want to increase, want the sides by two units to maximize the area. So do you want to increase the short side or the long side? And feel free to pause the podcast if you need a moment to think about. 

Lauren: I would say the long side.

Mark: You want to increase the short side. You want go? Okay, great. Four, six for 60 units. Ok. The other way, you only got 48. Ah. 

Lauren: Don’t judge my math skills. 

Mark: People. What’s going on when we do this? Well, conceptually, when you put those two units on the short side, those two extra units are amplified by that long side.

The twos multiplied by the 10 instead of the two being multiplied by the four. Hmm. When you think about all of us, we have long sides and short sides, and more than two, but we’ll use two as the example. So a classic example is someone who may be. Brilliant in her, his discipline, finance, engineering, marketing, really longside there.

But their communication skills might be poor. Mm-hmm. They might not present well. They might have these long ramly emails. Mm-hmm. They might not be able to explain their idea without using technical jargon that people outside their discipline don’t understand. Mm-hmm. And they are definitely brilliant, but they’re really, this, this rectangle is narrow and thin.

It has a tiny area. Mm-hmm. That we do need to keep up with our alongside. I work in engineering. If I don’t, I’d still be programming in Cobalt and Fortran. Right. I do keep up with what’s happening and all of us do. But by putting a little extra work on our short sides, on the leadership, on the communication, and we’re not talking about now you’re ready to go on that TED stage.

Mm-hmm. We’re just talking about being a little more effective, a little clearer, a little more concise. All of a sudden, that long side becomes so much more effective, your overall area becomes bigger, and that’s your overall capability.

Lauren: Wow. What a great analogy. Um, That. Yeah, I’m, I’m, I’m just, I’m thinking right now to a client that I have and, uh, we, we’ve been having some communications challenges with, uh, the C F O and it’s, it’s very much a lot of that longside, um, knowledge that you were talking about that’s getting, that’s, that’s creating the friction where his short side, um, just a few tweaks and improvements would go.

A long way. So now that we’ve, you know, established what upskilling is, how does upskilling relate to their career path or plan? Like what, how does that dovetail in and how, how can business owners understand that better so that we can support our employees and maybe even ourselves on our own career path, even though we are the business owner?

Mark: Business owners certainly have a career path. It’s just that their titles may not change. Mm-hmm. But you are certainly growing and improving and it might be your career path is get better at my communication skills or leadership. It might be, by the way, that even though you’re running this company, I.

You’re going to take another job in the future, running another bigger business after you sell this one. It might be you’re looking for a board position. So even as founders and CEOs, we still have career paths. Mm-hmm. But for all of us, as we think about our career path, whether that is getting new titles or just growing as who we are, we want to have intentional plan.

Too often people just say, well, I hope in a couple years maybe I’ll make director or vice president. Imagine if someone on your team, you said, here’s a big project, I want you to deliver this in six months, and the person said, well, okay, you know, I guess I hope in six months I can get it done. No unacceptable.

Mm-hmm. Yep, yep. Put together a plan. Now we know two things about this plan. We know you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen on day 167. And that’s okay. Don’t worry about all the little details, just get the big placeholders in there. We also know your plan will change. You’re not gonna get right and that’s okay.

And this is what trips people off because they say, how do I know what I’m doing in five years? Don’t worry about the details, but lay out the plan and then adjust as you go. And that’s really the essence of career planning. Now, we as owners and managers, I do believe the onus is on us. To help our team develop their career plans.

Even recognizing, okay, this is gonna be a little scary, that sometimes those careers will take them away from our company. Mm-hmm. That’s okay. In fact, for most of us, even as owners, the reality is we might not be in this job 15, 20 years from now.  Mm-hmm. And it’s okay to admit that. We certainly don’t want employees saying, oh, I can’t wait to get out of this place, but it’s okay to say I want to grow.

You know what? Three years from now I may be at a point where there may not be another opportunity here, and that’s okay. Jobs are short, careers are long. I will help people leave the company. Because by doing so, first, they’re not just walking out on me unexpectedly. I can transition and plan. Mm-hmm.

Makes my job easier. But also if we leave on good terms, it’s almost like your ex-girlfriend or boyfriend where you broke up, but you still like and respect each other. Sometimes they’ll introduce you to a future partner or help you in other ways. That’s how you should see your former employees, help them maintain a relationship, even if it’s a different relationship from what you have today.

Mm-hmm. 

Lauren: Mm-hmm. I, I find that to be so refreshing. Um, and it’s actually one of our seven Cs, um, for a high performing team is, is connection and commitment and really understanding where they’re going and how they fit into the business and, and helping them, you know, feel valued. And, and what I, I loved about what you said is, It’s putting the onus back on business owners, cuz I think so often we think that the reason somebody failed is because they’re not a good employee or you know, they just didn’t have what it takes.

But something that I work on a lot with my clients is actually having the ownership and accountability of, you also need to be a leader and set them up for success. And, and so I’d love to have you share a little bit about. What a manager can actually do to support someone with their career path. Cuz I, I, I do not think I’m alone in saying that.

Until you and I had this discussion a few days ago, I did not know that entrepreneurs had career paths or I didn’t think of it in the way that you had shared. And so when I look at my business and setting goals, we have a lot of, of business goals, but I can’t say I’ve, I’ve ever really looked and said, Hmm, maybe I’d like to be on a board next year or something like that.

And so I don’t think we prioritize the professional and the personal. So if, if you have a manager that, that’s never done this before, you know, how can we, how can we set them up for success? How can we set the leader up for success to support themselves in this new wild world of career planning as well as the team?

Mark: There are techniques you can use, whether from my book or plenty of other sources. About setting your goals, figuring out what you want. Mm-hmm. Setting those goals and then creating that plan. And again, it’s very similar to how we do our projects at work. You know, where you want to be at this time, and then what are the things you need to do to get there.

If you want to be here in 10 years,  you know, well, we have to hit this milestone about seven, eight years out. Just like to complete the project in 10 months. I better be here by month seven or eight. Mm-hmm. And so you can backtrack from where you need to be. Now it might be for a more junior person.

Here’s a a simple example. It’s oversimplified cuz we’re gonna look at one asset or one attribute I should say. Mm-hmm. Imagine you want to be a VP of marketing and lead a team of a hundred marketing people. Mm-hmm. And right now you lead a team of three. You’re unlikely to go right from three people to a hundred.

Mm-hmm. But if you wanna lead a hundred people, possibly, if you’ve been leading a team of 80, they’d say, oh yeah, 80, a hundred, not a big deal. So I’ve seen you lead a team of 80, but you can’t go from three to 80. Well, you could lead a team of maybe 40 or 50, and then maybe you can make the jump to 80 before you do that.

A team of 20 before that, a team of 10. So you can think about those. Checkpoints. I think of it like crossing a river instead of taking one big leap, you hopscotch from rock to rock. Mm-hmm. Now I picked a very simple, measurable attribute of team size. It’s not just gonna be one thing, but whether it’s opening new territories and sales, or managing a certain scope of a project or budget, whatever it is, recognize there’s a shortfall and then you want to set out how do I over this period of time, address each of those things.

For the founders, it might not be, well, I need to lead a team of this size before next one. They won’t hire me. Nope. It’s your company. You can lead whatever team size you wanna hire. Right. But you might say, you know what? I don’t feel as strong in this particular area, in my negotiation skills. Mm-hmm. So for the next six months, two years, whatever time you set, that’s gonna be part of my personal development program.

This employee might be saying, how do I manage a bigger team? But you’re saying, How do I get better at negotiating or better at communicating? And I’ve actually laid out over multiple years, here’s where I’m gonna focus for the next few years. And then after that, I’m gonna focus on a different skill.

These can be the soft skills we’re talking about. They can be mechanical skills. At a certain point I said I need to get better at marketing, and I chose certain things to improve my marketing capabilities as well as at times where I worked on my communication or other skills. 

Lauren: So well said. So well said.

So I wanna, I wanna shift us a little tiny bit and ask what is the number one mistake you see business owners and leaders make when supporting their team in upskilling and on their career plans? 

Mark: I’d say the biggest mistake is that they just don’t do it. Company don’t have these conversations and now we have to recognize, sometimes it can be unclear.

When I bent early stage startups, I had people come to me and say, where am I gonna be in three years? And my answer was, hopefully still at this company because we’re still in business, but we don’t know. We’re not yet profitable. We’re still trying to raise money. It’s early. It’s okay if you have a period of uncertainty, whether you’re at some high growth startup or if this was.

April, 2020, and you’re supposed to talk about their career, and you’re just like, I have no idea what’s happening in the world. We’re not sure. It’s okay to say there’s uncertainty. Mm-hmm. But you want to say, let’s talk about what we can’t perhaps be more certain about is where do you want to go? Okay, great.

Here’s the path you like. I’m not yet sure the path of the company. Here’s what we’re thinking, here’s where it may work, but we have some idea, there’s some overlap here. Good. Let’s focus on that and we’ll speak again in six months in a year. But you want first, just have these conversations because if you don’t, it’s like any relationship.

If you are dating or married to someone and you have different goals and you’re not talking about it, that’s just going to lead to trouble. So start by having those conversations. Don’t be afraid of the fact that, hey, at some point, maybe this isn’t going to work. Down the road and that’s okay. Let’s not be afraid of that.

Let’s not dislike each other for that. Cuz guess what? For most managers, if you’re not the owner, you’re probably not gonna be there either. Again, even the owner, you might sell that company someday. So we want to just have these conversations, have these open conversations. You can talk about your goals, your thinking.

You can talk about uncertainty. You can say, maybe you can say, I don’t know. Those are acceptable answers. So have open, honest conversations. 

Lauren: Hmm, yes. You reminded me of, of one of my favorite sayings, which I’m sure listeners have heard me say many times, but unshared expectations are nothing more than premeditated resentments.

And I think that you pretty much nailed it on the head. And I’ve, I’ve seen in, in my work with clients where, you know, there’s a lot of hemming and hawing about. Quote unquote, wasting time with like these things that don’t move the needle because they’re so used to looking at at at tangible metrics where you know, soft skills.

Well, it might be tangible later. It’s hard sometimes to see how the improvements in these areas and the upskilling of the organization is actually moving people forward. And I know. That’s something I hear frequently is I just, I don’t have the time to do this, or, you know, I think they’re so relieved to have a team cuz they’ve been burning the candle at both ends, that they’re just like, I just, I can’t, I can’t prioritize this right now.

And so the reminder with the number one mistake being not doing this, that if you take the time now from what I’ve heard from you, it will pay dividends later that you’ll see. Not only in the fulfillment of your team, their um, efficiency, profitability, and they probably will be much happier to stay or if they leave, be much more supportive of the company afterwards.

Do I have that right? 

 Mark: Absolutely. And let’s do another example and do more math because math is fine. 

Lauren: Oh, great. Maybe I’ll get this one right. 

Mark: Let’s look at negotiating because it’s easy to demonstrate this. Now I’m gonna give the example of an employee. Mm-hmm. And might sound a little scary because you’re gonna think you’re on the opposite side of this negotiation.

Okay? But bear with me because you are not. Imagine you are an employee and you’re 25 years old, you get a job offer for $60,000. But instead of taking the job, you’ve learned to negotiate. Maybe you read the chapter in my book, or a different book or an online class, however. Mm-hmm. You’re not the world’s best negotiator.

You just got a little bit better. We made that short side a little longer. Yeah. So you negotiate for a thousand dollars more. Mm-hmm. Which sounds pretty doable. Okay. That takes you all five, 10 minutes if you do nothing else in your career. If you stay in the same job for the next 40 years, five, 10 minutes of work, one negotiation just got you a thousand dollars more.

Mm-hmm. For 40 years. You with a tiny amount of effort. Yeah. Now already you say, wait a second. All I had to do was read one book or take one course for a couple hours, $40,000. I’m gonna go out tomorrow and do this. Now, of course, you’re not going to stay in the job for 40 years. Mm-hmm. You’ll have promotions and raises, and you’ll negotiate for more.

You can literally add six figures to your lifetime earnings just by learning to negotiate a little bit better. Hmm. Now the secret, by the way, is that this applies to all the skills we can do the math and negotiations. No one says, here’s a thousand dollars more, cuz you’re a better leader, but you stand out, you improve, you get the promotions faster.

Mm-hmm. Now, when I give this example and talks at first, all the senior people start going, oh wait a second. You’re just telling all my employees, if he gets a thousand dollars and she gets a thousand dollars, what’s this doing to me? It’s like the Oprah of salaries,  right?

Lauren: But here’s the thing. That is one type of negotiation.

There is a heck of a lot that goes on First, you’re negotiating with your customers, your suppliers, your partners. Imagine if every one of those was 1% better. Mm-hmm. Your employees actually negotiate with each other all the time. Different teams negotiating what’s happening. What if those got better outcomes?

Because here’s the thing about negotiations. People who aren’t familiar with them often think of that zero sum game. Mm-hmm. Oh, a thousand dollars more for you? A thousand dollars less for me. Mm-hmm. But good negotiators know how to expand the pie. And make more for everyone because it’s not  just about the dollars.

It could be the work from home, flexibility and time off and other things. Mm-hmm. And in fact, if all of your employees know how to create slightly better outcomes, that pie your company has is going to increase so much. That you can gladly give everyone there a thousand dollars more and it is going to work out.

Mm-hmm. This skill, like all of them, will basically make a much larger pie for your whole company. Then you can gladly give everyone bare slices and everyone bigger slices and everyone is happier. Mm. The ultimate win win.

Lauren:  So, such an important reminder, and I know you talked about promotions just now, so I, I wanna, I kind of wanna dig in here and.

You know, I see this happen a lot where someone is ready and where they’re promoted, but we think they’re ready and they’re promoted, but then they crash and burn, or they find out that’s not what they wanted. So how does up-skilling your organization having this career plan and promotion all go hand in hand so that we can have more wins and people who are promoted actually really succeeding and excelling?

Mark: There’s a few things and you hit upon a couple different issues. One is that it’s not what they wanted. Mm-hmm. Because we see the job, but we’ve never actually done that job. Mm-hmm. I see my manager, I think I know what my manager does. He seems to sit in a lot of meetings. I get these emails from him. I can do that, but there’s a whole bunch of it that I don’t see.

Mm-hmm. So first we want to be transparent about what the job really is. By the way, this job, there’s gonna be a lot more meetings and paperwork. Mm-hmm. Understand that. You’re going to now spend a lot of time doing less of the fun problem solving and more of the meetings. Are you okay with that? So we want that transparency.

Then we want to help them understand that the skills that they’ve been using to be successful. May have to shift. And the biggest change, of  course, is when you go from individual contributor to first level manager. Mm-hmm. Cause as an individual contributor, you have slowly gotten bigger projects, harder problems, and you’ve solved it.

But when you become a manager, it’s no longer about you solving the problem. It’s about you getting the team to solve the problem. Mm-hmm. And so often the, well, I’m just gonna work harder. I’m gonna think more, stay up later. That doesn’t scale. Mm-hmm. So there is a shift and we have to make people clear on that.

The third thing, Is we often have no training for newly promoted people, or if we do, the training is one and done. Oh, welcome. We’re gonna promote you. We’re gonna send you off to a three day workshop on how to be a manager. Welcome back. Okay. Now you know everything you need to know. Mm-hmm. Here’s another sports analogy.

Imagine if I said welcome. We just drafted you to our team. I’m gonna send you off to a three day sports clinic. Great. Okay. You’re done for the season. You’ve  learned everything. Now just go play. Mm-hmm. Not how it works. So we want to have continual training. Now, Aiden needs to be relatively small. We don’t wanna disrupt, you can’t send ’em to three days a month all year, necessarily.

Mm-hmm. But we need those small things because as they continue to work and grow, suddenly things that they may have heard two months ago. Now this makes more sense. Or now I’m ready for what you had been saying. Or just, I had to work on one thing, but now I need to work on something else. So you really want more of that continual learning.

And that program we talked about earlier, the peer learning, that’s one of the advantages cuz you’ll do that maybe twice a month, maybe once a month, but it’s more continual. So you get that training as we do in music or sports. 

Lauren: I’m hearing a, a couple of golden nuggets in there. First, we need to manage expectations and make sure that we understand, or rather they understand what they’re getting into and, and what that looks like.

And then the other is I’m hearing consistency of. Not only leadership training, but feedback and support. And it actually makes me think back to, um, one of my clients who I’m fractional coo for, and he said, he said something to me the other day, which was, was kind of funny, but he’s like, you know what? I realized the reason I wanted to be CEO and like make this transition, he’s, he’s one of a couple partners is cuz I, I wanted more autonomy.

And he’s like, I didn’t want all the other stuff that came with it. It’s like, okay, well that’s, that’s great. Well, now here we are. How do we, how do we navigate this? But I think you, you really highlighted a really huge point about understanding the motivation for somebody who, who is getting promoted.

Like how does it align with their career, career path, and how does it align with the business to make sure you’re setting up everyone for success? The other place that I want to kind of. Tie it all back together. Before we wrap up is, is just if you have a couple quick nuggets for shifting the perspective for entrepreneurs and business owners about how to effectively do their career plan too.

I know you touched on it, but if there are a few more specific ways that we can, you know, I do quarterly planning and, and I do think about personal goals, but I wouldn’t say. The career plan specifically has ever been top of mind, so I’d love for you to share a few more things about that before we wrap up.

Mark: You can look at both for you personally as well as for you as the CEO Mm-hmm. Now you can get going for either you personal, maybe it’s things you know you want to work on, or if you’re not sure, get your personal board of advisors. Friends and mentors and others you trust. Maybe even some of the people you work with and ask them for feedback.

What are some of my weaknesses or blind spots? And there you can lay out, here are some goals I want to undertake. Mm-hmm. From the position standpoint, think about your business. Where is it going to be in two years or five years, or whatever timeframe you look at? And to run that business, are there additional skills you might need, whether it’s we’re gonna bring in a lot more technology.

I bar get up to speed on, or we’re going to roll out internationally, or it’s just gonna be a much bigger team and I can lead a team of 20, but Wow. Leading a team of 103 years, is that the same? Is that different? So you can get your goals, either just personal ones that you choose or you’ve gotten feedback on, or think about what the company, in some sense, what the board of directors, your boss.

Mm-hmm. You might not have one if you did. Mm-hmm. What they would want you to have for the role. That’s how you set your goals, and then that goes into your development plan, as we talked about earlier. 

Lauren: Mm. So good. So good. Wow. Do y’all see why Mark is the expert on this and why I had to have him on the show?

So, as much as I think you and I could jam on this for a while, I wanna start to wrap things up. But before I do, I want you to tell us a little bit more about your book, who it’s for, how it can help you or your employees, um, and also how listeners can further connect with you. 

Mark: We may give you two websites with two resources, okay?

The first is about my book, the career toolkit book.com. And the book has many of the skills we talked about leadership, networking, negotiating. It’s a book where 10 chapters, 10 skills. You can jump right to the chapter you want. You can buy the book and go right to chapter nine to work on your negotiation skills.

Skip one through eight, get to that later if you feel like it. So it is a toolkit where you can pick it up as you want.  There are ways you can follow me on social media. Again, touch with me on that website whether you have questions or wanna bring me into a conference or speaking. I have a weekly blog post and there is a page of completely free resources.

Mm-hmm. You can download these. I don’t even ask your email. They’re yours to take and enjoy. And so on the resources page, a number of things, including how you create that pure learning program. Mm-hmm. All of this is at the career toolkit book.com. Now I have a second website, brain bump app.com, and that’s for the Brain Bump app.

One thing that I hate when I read a book is you say, wow, there’s such great advice. And then you forget all, you listen to this podcast say, oh, wait, what was it that I learned two months ago? So I created the Brain Bump app to take content from books, blogs, podcasts, classes, and talks and put in. So you’ve got the notes at your fingertips.

You can use it in one of two ways, either you say, Hey, what were those networking tips? Because now I’m about to go into a conference. I need them now. Open up the app, all the tips. It’s like a flashcard app, except things are tagged by topics. Just go networking and there’s all the networking tips at your fingertips when you need them.

Or you can set up for a daily reminder, like a daily affirmation. Don’t even need to open the app. I’m working on my leadership skills, so every day at 9:00 AM I wanna get one of those leadership tips. Just pops up my phone, I go, yep, good point. Swipe done. Two seconds a day, but it will help you retain it.

And so the app is completely free for Android and iPhone. It has tips from my book and my blog, and dozens of other books, blogs, podcasts. We’re adding new stuff every day. And in mid 2023, we will also let you put your own tips. If you don’t like the ones we have, it’s a growing set, but if we don’t yet have your favorite Booker podcast, you’ll be able to add your own to that as well.

So that’s at brain bump app.com and is also completely free. 

Lauren: I love both of those so much. Um, and for those of you madly scribbling, we will put all of these in the show notes for you. Uh, so I know we’ve covered a lot, but are there any last nuggets or pieces of advice that you want to make sure you share with our listeners that we didn’t cover Right before we wrap up, 

Mark: I just wanna remind people whether you read my book or keep listening to this podcast or other books, really the best way to learn these skills.

Is through discussion with others. So create that peer group at your company. If your company doesn’t wanna do it, go find others elsewhere through some other local communities you’re part of, whether online or at your church group or synagogue or mosque or wherever you can find people and really discuss these skills because that’s how you’re going to learn them best.

Lauren: Great reminder. You can’t just keep consuming. You gotta actually make the rubber meet the road. Alright, very last question. I ask all my guests, what is the book that you think every entrepreneur or business owner should read and why? 

Mark: On that resources page, I actually list about a two dozen, maybe about 18.

I listed my own and then a couple others that I’ve read that were helpful. It’s hard to narrow to one. I’m gonna give you. I’ll give you at least two. Okay. Maybe a third will come. People wear by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Okay. He’s one of the best management books I have ever read that basically says it’s nominally about software projects, but there’s no code in it.

The reason projects fail, it’s not technological, it’s sociological dealing with people issues. That’s what will set you up for success. Okay. I would add another one for entrepreneurs. I recommend this to lots of entrepreneurs crossing the Chasm by Jeffrey Moore. Okay, which is a fantastic book on product marketing.

I’ll  leave it at just those two. There’s lots of other books, but again, that’s all at the resources page of the career toolkit book.com. 

Lauren: Fabulous. I have never heard of either one of those books, so I’m excited to add them to my Amazon queue and sink my teeth into them. So thank you so much for being on this show.

This has been an illuminating conversation and so valuable for me. I’ve, I’ve been sl taking notes and focusing, but also taking a note here and there so I can add this to my quarterly  planning that I’m about to do. So thank you so much for being on the show and sharing your expertise with us. Thanks for having me.

Of course, of course. All right everyone. That’s this week’s episode. Thanks so much for listening in. If anything we shared sparked something in you, we’d love for you to share this episode with your friends. I’d also love to hear from you, so let’s connect, tag or DM me on Instagram at it’s Lauren Goldstein or LinkedIn or wherever you hang out on the interwebs.

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thank you for listening to The Biz Doctor Podcast. Now I like to say that friends don’t let friends WebMD your business. So if you’re wondering what your next steps could be, here are some options for you  no matter what. Head to the show notes or to my website, goldenkeypartnership.com for some impactful resources to support you getting out from under your business.

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