Put me down, Coach, I’m ready!

In which our Hero considers consulting an expert in a capacity that he generally fails to respect

First, let me tell you a small peeve of mine. I generally find myself burdened with a significant distaste for the bloggers who start with a great and helpful blog and then cross a threshold where they “monetize it,” because 9 times out of 10, the content goes away and is replaced with a series of coaching seminars on how to succeed at blogging. Or just general life coaching because acquiring a lot of readers naturally makes a person an expert on life.

So, imagine my own surprise when I noticed a link on a blog that I’ve been reading regularly for years, offering coaching. So I clicked on the link and discovered that yes, this blogger also does coaching, for a remarkably expensive rate (I say without any other reference points for life coaches). And yet a couple of the suggestions for what services she might provide spoke to questions I do have.

Then again, I have long since developed the belief that the proper tool is frequently worth the additional price over an inappropriate or insufficient one. It doesn’t mean that I need the top of the line computer controlled milling machine, but while you *can* use a drill to cut wood, a saw is substantially better. Certainly my accountants charge me a rate that is absurdly high for the amount of work that they do, but they get the job done, and my stress has gone down since hiring them, so sometimes the expensive talent is worthwhile. So I think she’s pretty pricey but I don’t especially object.

What really makes me uncomfortable, however, is the lack of a clear outcome. Yes, I’d love to get her opinion, but what’s a reasonable amount of time to spend on the problem. How long do I want to hire her. What are the outputs? What should I expect.

The two coaching options that interested me were “resume design” and “developing your blog identity.”

I have a blog, under my own name. I have the capacity to write in a semi-articulate way. But my blog is half neglected and unclear to me in terms of the mission. Sentinel World has a mission to be my diary, to be my mind’s compliant little punching bag. The other place has the conflicted burden of being my identity plate.

Which brings me to the second problem. Is my identity personal or professional? And what is my professional identity. I still haven’t found a good way to describe my job in a way that captures my value. The reference points I have for explaining it lack the zeitgeist stability to be generally (or cross-culturally) applicable.

I decided I needed an external reaction to help me decide, so I told Nocturne about it. I’m glad I did because she asked some good questions that really helped focus my thinking, particularly, “Why this particular person?” and “What do you get from her that you couldn’t get from books/reading/conferences.” And then she suggested an approach for how to define my professional identity, something I’ve done before but not in a long time. It’s not profound, but it’s still a good process and worth revisiting: Throw everything I’ve ever done against a wall and see what patterns I find.

We talked about this for awhile, but I have a better answer now for why this particular blogger, that touches upon what I get from her that’s unique. First, this person is a successful entrepreneur who specializes in career development and trends. That’s the point I was making to Nocturne when we spoke. So in general, she’s got relevant knowledge in the space I’m trying to figure out. Next, one of the business that she founded is actually a career and networking organizations, which suggest that she’d be seeing larger populations of resumes and seeing outcomes.

And this morning, it occurred to me that there’s one more benefit to hiring her for coaching purposes, which is networking. Basically, the cost of coaching would enable me to get her attention ahead of the random commenters on her blog, and that provides me the opportunity to then get her attention on my merits. And while I wouldn’t call her an A-list blogger, she’s connected to more than a few of them, and being more proximate to them would be potentially useful, leveragable.

Not to say that a billion people couldn’t also try that approach. Or that my merits would actually impress her. We’re far more likely to disagree. I just think the dissenting opinion on defining my identity could be very interesting.

Anyway, the result is that at least I have an answer that makes sense to me for why I saw potential here. She’s still the wrong contact for right now. Maybe later when I have something *to* network. Right now,

So the end decision is that it’s not worth engaging the blogger at this time. There’s way more value in doing the self-definition exercise, especially since it’s been long enough that the picture must surely have evolved. But one big thing that came out in that conversation is an ongoing issue that I haven’t been able to solve since a manager first pointed it out many years ago. With an extra wrinkle that Nocturne added.

The problem has always been the same. A wise manager of mine some years ago put it simply: People hire deep skills, not broad ones. When you hire a Java programmer you want someone who lives and breathes Java. When you feel sick you want to go to a doctor with years of experience with your flavour of issue, rather than a veterinarian who dabbles in squirrel taxonomy.

Nocturne said the same thing, and they’re are both right. And what my manager, then, and Nocturne, now, both recommended was to figure out the top three, or the top five things that I’m particularly good at and declare that as my specialty. Nocturne added that frequently my stories consist of heroic applications of common sense rather than overwhelming skill, and that I shouldn’t reference common sense as evidence of skill. But that’s both my two big problems with professional identity: First, the judicious application of common sense *is* one of my outstanding characteristics. And second, I’ve been an expert in a number of areas and after a while, the specifics stop mattering. Common sense and broad knowledge are a really powerful set of tools on their own.

So if I’m talking about specialties, I’m a project managing software architect who has decades of programming experience. That’s what gets me through doors. But the reason I stick at clients is the synergistic effect that comes from lots of experience and common sense. And if I call myself a specialist, I’m ignoring the thing that’s my biggest actual value.

Nocturne made the specialist case by referencing my accountants. If they were hiring for help for the rush during the corporate year end that just closed last month, they’d be asking for people with tax knowledge. And I’d go in and say “I make things go” and they’d laugh and show me the door. On the one hand, she’s right. On the other hand, that’s not what I’d tell them when I showed up.

What I’d tell them is that I was working on a project as a database designer but the client’s tax people had a bunch of different situations that were causing them problems. So I listened to them, built a unified model in Excel that covered all of the scenarios that they’d talked about and allowed them to play with it till they got comfortable that the math really worked for everything, and then automated that taxation engine for them and added control reports and auditing. So that at the end, even though I had no accounting experience, I codified their national taxation process and along the way eliminated the cause of about 80% of their auditing issues.

This is the problem. Most people deal with a job of a function. They’re a squirrel taxidermist, or a doctor, or an accountant, or a payroll specialist. Me, i work magic by being cross-functional. I’m the guy who can bridge the specialties and make them work together to get a result. I’m the guy who can fill in the gaps between the specialists what they know to get to a complete solution. And there is a value to that, there is a profound value to that and I’d like to get suggestions for what this skill is called because it’s what I’m a specialist in.

Right now, day to day, my job is split between two activities. One is taking a 15 year old server that I don’t know that talks to the mainframe and another software package I don’t know using a protocol I don’t know and there’s nobody who can help, so basically I’m reverse engineering the entire thing from nearly scratch. The other is redesigning the accounting process to use a software system that none of us know. And common sense and broad knowledge is letting me school the expert that came with the software on how *his* software works.

So do I sell the specialist or figure out how to sell the genius? Right now, I think I need to work on selling the specialist, because it’s the easier problem to solve. But after that, I’m going to figure out how to sell the technology-savant aspect too. (Even if it’s the same problem as trying to explain the third dimension in Flatland)

And then maybe I’ll know what the hell to do with my blog.