WEEKEND EDITION: Get Ahead in Your Career by Reading 'Blitz the Ladder'
Blitz Author J. Todd Rhoad discusses traditional career development and working your way up the ladder of a corporation. He also points out that most workers rely on others to help move them up the ladder – and sometimes they aren't the right people to rely on. Managers are the wrong people to ask for career guidance because they're too wrapped up in other things to have to deal with their subordinates – and their own career paths. HR departments are no better.
Additionally, Rhoad says that most companies don't even judge talent and often use subjective data to determine who moves ahead. This basically means that performance – which is objective – oftentimes does not matter.
The usual approaches, Rhoad says, is to develop your strengths, model others' behaviors and to eliminate negatives. But one obstacle is competitive workplaces, which by their nature encourage win/lose environments. This can lead to tangled webs, with coercion and alliances that make the competitors on Survivor look tame.
That's why Rhoad puts forth the need to manage perceptions. Changing the perceptions of others, he says, changes their behavior.
At the core of Rhoad's book, however, is his Ten Blitz Principles. Career self reliance is key. So is managing perceptions, as one can change others' behaviors by managing their perceptions. A surprising addition to this list is trust. Sometimes the things you don't think need to be mentioned really do.
Blitz the Ladder isn't necessarily a light read – and presumably it wasn't meant to be. It offers a lot of meat to digest. Blitz runs longer (at 250 pages) than the publisher's (Happy About) normal offerings of 80-120 pages, but without puffing the length with a lot of fluff. In fact, it's The Daily Machete's humble opinion that Blitz needed to be this long to be complete.
Some of the concepts are also difficult to absorb. In these cases, Rhoad wisely includes simple, effective diagrams to aid the information digestion. Thankfully the diagrams and charts he uses are adult to adult. He doesn't talk down to his readers, nor does he attempt to inject childish humor into them the way many pop-info manuals do.
Blitz the Ladder is a solid read and well worth the purchase price for anyone looking to move up the corporate ladder.
Copyright 2007. All rights reserved.
Todd is certainly right. Moving up today is worse than running for political office. It seems they always find some reason to keep us down. The method Todd discusses appears to be pretty simple and easy to understand. AND, he's right about the people that one would think should help our career mobility. I think people look out for themselves too much. So everyone competes with each other. The team based approach makes more sense in this light. One person vs a team. I'll go with the team.
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