Manage your Manager
Your boss is busy. Too busy to have to worry about following up with you about every deliverable you are working on. Remember, your boss has 6 or 7 other people and many critical projects that all demand his attention. Your job is to make his or her job more manageable. If you do this, you will be successful, and so will your boss.
What’s the best way to do this?
Focus on doing things that specifically make your boss’s life better. Find ways to do more with less, improve your team’s effectiveness, or fix problems. Whatever you do, make sure it’s making things better for your boss. Don’t wait for your supervisor to set up one-on-one meetings with you. Find the time, and schedule the discussions yourself. Then, when you meet, come prepared with a plan and corresponding information. Don’t waste your supervisor’s valuable time. Keep it as brief as possible and provide them the information you need them to know. Make it short, useful, and positive. When you are done, follow up with an email recapping what you covered.
Manage your manager to build your career.
Do What You Say
Trust is not freely given. Trust is earned. The quickest and best way to earn supervisor’s or managers' trust is to simply do what you say you will do. Make no mistake; if you consistently fail to follow through on your work commitments, your career progress will suffer. Further, this doesn’t have to be failing to finish significant work projects on time or being consistently late for work. Doing what you say goes far deeper than this.
Think about this, if you let your manager know you are going to lunch and you’ll be back in 30 minutes but don’t get back for 60 minutes, what is the message you are sending? Two things: first, you do not do what you say you are going to do, and second, you don’t think your job is important enough to be on time. Neither are good messages. This is an elementary example, but it still holds true. The bottom line is if you don’t follow through on the small things (being punctual, submitting your timesheet on-time, or showing up on time), no one will have any faith in you. You will not get the priority work, the high-visibility projects that help you set yourself apart, or the critical tasks that allow you to shine. They will be given to others who do what they say they will do, those who have built trust, and their career will move forward while your career stalls.
If you are not doing what you say at work or in life, you cannot expect good things to happen. You will languish with the untrusted, be passed over for promotions, and not be given positive lateral move opportunities. You will stagnate, and it will be your fault.
Build trust to build your career.
Communicate Everything
You cannot over-communicate when it comes to your job. Your boss cannot be excited and thankful for things that you don’t share. Without proper communication, even if you are doing all the right things, no one will ever know. Even worse, your great work might be attributed to someone else. Don’t think for a second that your coworker will correct a misunderstanding about who completed what. Have no doubt, they will take credit for your hard work faster than you can say, “It was ME!”
If you are not communicating your successes, you miss an excellent opportunity to set yourself apart from your coworkers. I share most everything I do with my team, including my manager, and they do the same. This not only allows everyone to know what I have been working on, but it also provides an excellent trail of information for annual reviews. Writing my self-evaluation becomes more effortless, and I have proof to back up my claims. When I complete a task that saves time or effort or makes processes more straightforward, I call out those time savings to the team. When you do this, keep in mind to do it in a manner that is informational, not braggadocious.
Because of the current COVID-19 situation, many are working remotely. In fact, many jobs that weren’t considered remote work just 6 months ago are now working off-site. This means many people who are not accustomed to working from home have been forced into a different work paradigm. This makes communication even more critical.
Speak up, or you’ll never be heard.
Communicate everything you do to build your career.
Change Starts With You
If you wake up without any fire in your belly and head out the door dreading the day ahead of you, you have a problem. While your job or career doesn’t define you, your job satisfaction can certainly impact how you feel about yourself. Considering the amount of time you spend working, finding a way to enjoy your career and achieve success is critical to your overall well-being. There is simply too much to lose by being passive and letting your career happen to you rather than taking action and making your career successful.
I consider myself very lucky. I’m on the backside of my career. I have been fortunate to build a stable career with a company that I am very proud to be a part of. I’ve spent the last 18 years of my nearly 30-year career helping build a company I love. At the same time, I have worked on expanding my own skills, making friendships, and educating myself. I’m happy with the career I’ve built and proud of the work I have done.
Even with this great career, I recognize that I’ve made many miss-steps and mistakes along the way. Like many things in life, if I knew then what I know now, I may have done things differently. One of the key realizations I have had over the past 3 decades is that I am the only one who cares about my career. If you can take away any one thing from this and apply it to your career planning process, this is by far the most crucial action you can take: Own your career.
No one else cares if you succeed or fail.
No one else cares if you are promoted or get a pay increase.
Your career and your success or failure are on you, no one else.
It’s not your supervisors' job to make sure you are moving in the right direction. The company you work for does not owe you a promotion. Your career path and progress are your responsibility. If you take this to heart and start applying this idea to your decisions and the things you do in your career, you will find that things will start changing. You’ll no longer feel stuck in a job. You will go to work happy and excited for the day to come. You’ll no longer dread Monday. You will start building a career you can be proud of.
Do You Need Personal Coaching?
Here are 4 reasons hiring a personal coach might be a good idea:
- They are objective. You are not.
- Different perspective brings new insights.
- Coaches force you to think about things you don't want to.
- Typically, they've done the research to fix your problem. This knowledge saves you time, effort, and money.
I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Don't Be Miserable at Work.
Too many people are doing work they hate.
They are either unhappy with the work they do, the people they work with, or the amount of money they make.
Their unhappiness follows them around like a black cloud, and it ends up impacting everything they do.
These are the people that call their job the “daily grind.”
They dread Monday morning.
They live only for the weekend.
These poor people pour a drink as soon as they walk in the door in the evening.
Some people resist even rolling out of bed in the morning.
Don’t be that person.
End the Misery
If you are miserable at work, you are doing it wrong.
Work should be where you find your passion.
Work should allow you to do something you love.
Work should make you a better husband, wife, mother, or father.
The bottom line is, if your employment is causing you pain rather than elevating you to a higher level, you need to make a change.
Consider for a moment how much time you spend at the office, with your co-workers, doing your work.
Then consider if you are willing to spend that much time unhappy.
Are you willing to trade your happiness for money?
If the price is too high, and you are no longer willing to be miserable, you can fix it.
You need to do one of two things:
Change your mindset
or
Change your job
Both are possible, but neither is easy.
Change Your Mindset
To change your mindset, you need to start by finding something about the job you enjoy.
Focus on that one thing.
Make it yours.
Improve it.
Build on it.
Be the absolute best that you can be at that one thing.
Then find another thing and focus on that.
Do it again.
Pretty soon, you’ll be the best at what you do.
You’ll love the work you do, and people will respect you for it.
You will wake up Monday morning with a fire in your belly ready to attack the week.
You will kill that miserable soul and replace it with a driven, triumphant, and happy spirit.
Change Your Job
To change your job, you need to understand what you want.
Understand what is making you miserable.
Determine what would make you happy.
Find someone to pay you to do the thing that makes you happy.
You’ll need to sell yourself.
You will need to convince someone else that you are worth their money.
Never forget, when looking for a new job, that YOU are the product for sale.
You want to get the best price possible for your skills and passion.
You can only do this if you are putting the best product on the shelf.
Putting out the best product (you) starts with your resume.
And it continues with your interview skills.
Proving your value never ends.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: The Autonomous Database
When you look up the word autonomous in the dictionary the key definition that relates to the use of the word in this context reads something like this, “not subject to control from outside; independent.” The OCI Autonomous Database handles many of the tasks that you currently rely on a database administrator for, without any outside intervention. Right from the creation of the database, the autonomous database begins taking care of itself. Along with the actual creation of the database it also backs itself up, administers patches, applies upgrades, and performs database tuning – all hands off.
Along with all of these automated features, the OCI Autonomous Database comes in two different configurations. First is the Autonomous Transaction Processing configuration which can be used for normal transactional database processing type operations. This configuration is well suited to high volumes of transactions with random data access. The second OCI Autonomous Database configuration is the Autonomous Data Warehouse which is, you guessed it, tuned for decision support or data warehouse type workloads.
Within the Always Free tier of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, users have access to two free instances of Autonomous Database. In the free tier these databases have a fixed 8 GB of memory, 20 GB of storage, 1 OCPU, and are available in either the Autonomous Transaction Processing or Autonomous Data Warehouse workload configurations. If you are interested in more information on Oracle’s Always Free Tier – give my recent blog post a read HERE.
Obviously, there is a lot more to know about the OCI Autonomous Database than what I’ve covered in this brief primer. I will be digging in a bit deeper on some of the more detailed functionality and processes including how to Provision Autonomous Transaction Processing, how to connect SQL developer to an OCI Autonomous Database, along with a few other bits and pieces.
Keep your head up and keep learning new stuff!
I’m not a fan of the mask mandates. That said, if it makes others feel better and safer I’ll play the game. Could be worse. They could close everything down again.
All about me.
Exciting adventures ahead. Moving my personal blog back to micro.blog was step 1 in a multi-step process to better align my personal, professional, and side project platforms. I will be using this site for personal stuff - basically whatever I feel like posting about persoanlly will go here. Step 2 was to launch my processional platform - which I did this week. Professionally you can now find me on www.ociconsulting.us. Excellent.
More to come in the next month on my side project.
Back on Micro.blog! Ok - I went out and stretched my legs with Wordpress, that’s done and I’m back. More to follow…
Introducing PeopleSoft & OCI Tidbits on AaronEngelsrud.com
I’ve been looking for an opportunity to blog a bit more and to, hopefully, provide a service to the Peoplesoft community I have been a part of for the past 20 years. In thinking about how best to accomplish this, I’ve come up with the idea of Peoplesoft and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Tidbits. These will be short and simple blog posts covering a variety of PeopleSoft and OCI topics. Topics will be wide reaching and include information about new PeopleTools enhancements, PeopleSoft Cloud Manager, new features in the OCI, and useful topics for Oracle System Administrators and Developers. My goal in doing this is that these posts take less than 2 minutes to read and you (the reader) leave with some useful information and a link or resource to start doing some digging on your own. These are not meant to be all inclusive or detailed explanations of functionality, but rather short and concise overviews of what may be possible coupled with the resources to find more information.
Tomorrow (Thursday February 20th) will be my first official PeopleSoft Tidbit. I’m going to do a tidbit a day for as long as I can find relevant, useful PeopleSoft and OCI information to write about. Upgrades, new functionality, bugs, best practices, it’s all fair game. If you are part of the Oracle or PeopleSoft community and know others that might be interested in the content I’m posting - send them my way. I’ll be cross-posting this on my blog - aaronengelsrud.com - as well as to LinkedIn. Hopefully someone will find a useful tidbit!
Snowy day in Minneapolis.
Doing easy things is, well, easy. Doing hard things, the things you don’t want want to do but know you need to, the things that make you uncomfortable, the stuff that keeps you up at night, is hard. Do hard things. Take care of business. Make things better.
Merry Christmas everyone!
Throughout the year in my role as an EMT, I get the privilege of helping dozens of people when they need help the most. Sometimes it’s just a kind word in the dark of night, other times I provide the life saving care they need. Each case, each person, has left an indelible mark and I am thankful that I was there when needed.
I deactivated my Twitter account today. It’s something I’ve been thinking of doing for quite some time and today I finally pulled the trigger. As I put more effort in to real-world personal realtionships I’m finding less and less value in traditional social media.
Truth in a fortune cookie. So much of making the right decisions stems not from what you know, but from accepting that you don’t know everything. Humility and self-awareness lead to not only being a better person, but more personal success.
The holiday can season can be a very difficult time for many. Those who may be dealing with the loss of a loved one, financial issues, or realtionship pressures may find the festivities difficult to take in. Reach out. Show you care. Be the friend they need. Make a difference.
Every 40 seconds someone in the world commits suicide. In the time it took me to write this post 5 more people have taken their own life. If someone seems detached, distant, sad, or withdrawn ask them how you can help. Show you care. Make a difference.