The Career ToolKit w/ Mark Herschberg
Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, presentation skills and soft skills, especially professionally and also personally, this is the podcast for you. Today we are joined by Mark Herschberg. He is the CTO and instructor at MIT and he authored a book titled The Career Toolkit. And before I go any further, please help me welcome Mark. Hi Mark, good to have you here.
Hi, thanks for having me on the show. It's my pleasure to be here. Glad to have you. And I know that a lot of the things you're going to talk about today, our listeners are going to benefit immensely. So first of all, just give us a bit of your background. I have this really interesting dual career. I came out of MIT back in the 90s, and I started as a software engineer. Most of my career, I have been building traditional tech startups, but I've also helped some Fortune 500s play startup, and I've been a consultant.
But I realized early on that I wanted to become a CTO, a Chief Technology Officer. And as I was recognizing, was it mean to do that? How do I go down this path? I realized it wasn't just about engineering skills. It wasn't about being the best engineer in the room. There were all these other skills I needed, communication, leadership, negotiating, team building. No one ever taught this to me. So I had to develop those skills in myself. Now, as I was doing that, I realized the skills are not just for executives.
This helps everyone from the most senior person to the most junior person at the company, as well as solopreneurs and entrepreneurs, we all benefit from these skills. So I began to upscale my team, not just myself, but those who worked for me. And as I was doing this, MIT had been surveying companies and asking, what are the skills you're looking for? They got the same results. They got the same answers, communication, leadership, team building, not just for MIT grads, by the way, not just for college students.
But everyone, companies want these skills and everyone from new grads to experienced in all different fields, they couldn't find it either. So MIT wanted to put together a program now referred to as the career success accelerator program at MIT in which they can still this in our students. When I heard about that, I reached out, I said, I've developed content for my team. I'm happy to share with you. But instead of just taking the content, they said, please help us create more. So I helped create the program and then they asked me to teach. So in parallel to a few decades of
building tech startups. I've also been teaching at MIT for over 20 years. And now the speaking the book and the app that goes along with professional skill development. It's funny you say that it also applies to Fresh Grads because when I started coaching people online on communication skills, especially focusing on the tech industry, they will say, oh, you know what? It's mostly the ones in leadership positions. Fresh Grads just wanna sit in the cubicles and say nothing and just program.
Obviously that's not necessarily the case. Well, that's what the fresh grads might want, but the companies, they want more. Companies always talk about, we want leaders and they don't mean we want people with senior titles. What they want is for you, even as a new grad to stand up and say, I've got an idea. Hey, let's do this. I think we should go in this direction. Let me convince you, this is why. Let me explain this technical innovation I have to you a non-technical person, but I have to put it in a language you can understand.
They want that initiative. They want that communication. Many people don't want to do that and that's why they have trouble moving up. But those who do, those who invest in that, it's not about being amazing at, it's just being a little bit better than everyone else who puts in no effort. You're going to stand out and your career will grow faster. Exactly, because if everybody thinks we will wait to be in a leadership position to develop our communication skills, how will they choose the right person in the first place to put in that position?
Exactly. Most companies are risk adverse individuals as well. So if I have to choose between two people for a leadership role, would I pick someone who, well, probably he can do it. I think he has the skills or do I want this woman who has done it? I don't mean that she's had the title before. That's certainly one way, but I've seen her act as a leader. I've seen her take initiative on the team. I've seen her do it less chance. She doesn't know how because I've seen it happen.
So by showing these skills, you want to demonstrate the skills for that next level before you get it. And that's signaling you are capable and ready to do it. Right. Act for the job that you want, not the one you currently have. Yes. You talk about 21st century skills on your website. Would you like to share with us what those are? There are 10 skills that we have seen in survey after survey done by multiple universities,
time and again. And these are the 10 skills that I put into the book. They're divided into three sections, 10 chapters. So let's just run through what they are. First section, chapter one, career planning, how to create and execute your career plan. Chapter two, working effectively, things like managing your manager, understanding workplace culture. Chapter three, interviewing. Now there's lots of content, oh, how do I answer this interview question? Yes.
And we've got to know training whatsoever. So knowing how to hire other people is usually missing from our education. The second section, leadership and management, the essence of what it means to be a leader, and then the people side and process sides of management. And here again, it's not just for people with certain big senior titles, these skills will help you even as an individual contributor. These leadership and management skills will help even as a junior person. The third section, interpersonal dynamics.
communication, networking, negotiations, and ethics. And these are the 10 skills that time and time again, companies want and will help you no matter what role, what industry or what level you're at. How do you think the pandemic and lockdowns and everything switching to Zoom and us working from home?
How do you think that has affected people acquiring those skills? Because I think when we were in person, interacting in person, we were more cognizant of the fact that I meet people personally, I have to develop these skills in order to have a much better working environment. But now that we're home, do you think that we've become complacent and think as long as the Zoom meeting is over, I'm good? These skills have definitely atrophied. And let's just pick a couple ways we've seen it. One is with networking. Now, most people think, well, networking, that's how I go and find a new job.
But networking matters for many more things in our internal networks. The networks we have, the relationships with people in the company is really important. Those relationships often come from the water cooler conversations. From, oh, you're going out for coffee? I'll go with you. We're not doing that anymore. We don't have that small talk and, oh, show me pictures of your kids. I just want to get off Zoom now. I don't want to see that. So we've lost some of that relationship building. We've seen it with communication.
and that we know how to communicate, know how to send an email, I can say something on Zoom. But part of the communication, and this goes to leadership as well, especially senior people, if I have to talk to my team, say, okay, team, look, I've got some bad news and let's talk about the bad news, I know you're going to be upset, but then I'm gonna hopefully inspire the team and guests to push forward. When I do that in a room of people, I can sense the mood. Do I see nodding heads? I look at their body language, are they frustrated? I read the room, I react to it.
When you're looking at that zoom screen of all those little tiny heads, it's a lot harder for me to feel, are people getting this? Are they reacting? Are they happy? I can't tell. And so the communication gets harder no matter what type and that affects our leadership, but that even affects if it's not necessary leadership, just communicating to other people. Even when you think about communications, again, how often have you found out something really important or even made some innovative breakthrough?
As you were talking to someone on the way going to the bathroom, we're getting coffee or one of those hallway conversations where I just run into you and go, wait, you're doing what on the project? Oh, no one told me, wait, we got to talk. Those serendipitous conversations have disappeared and that's affecting our workplace communication. So we're seeing not the main thing. We still have meetings and emails, but these little things around the edges. And the people who know how to compensate for that are the ones who are going to really stand out in this new hybrid workplace.
Hmm, you're an MIT instructor. And I remember when we used to watch movies, and there will be college scene and somebody will say, Oh, I'm majoring in math, but I have to take this poetry class in order to graduate, you know, something very out there compared to what they're studying. So outside of somebody who's studying for a communications degree, why don't they make
communication, that extra class instead of poetry or something Shakespeare that's not relevant to this person in their career plan. Why don't they make this the mandatory extra, so to speak? Funny you say that. Now, MIT, interestingly, we have more humanities requirements than any other university in the United States. One quarter of our classes have to be humanities. Most of us are majoring in science and engineering, but they know we are more effective.
when we have that humanity background. Because I can speak numbers and math all day long to other engineers, but when I'm talking to people in marketing, in finance, in sales, in operations, they don't think like engineers. And so I need to understand how they think. I need to draw an analogy to a Shakespeare play or something from history or some art. And that helps me better communicate with them. So I'd first argue these general classes that seem to make you well-rounded.
there is some benefit to them. Now, MIT as well, we actually have communication requirements. When I was there, it was a writing requirement. Now it's brought into communication. These skills though, to answer your general question, the university system is antiquated. It goes back hundreds of years and it is narrow because the professors who run it are narrow in their field. They are experts in their one field. And they say, oh, well, if you want to be a marketer,
Okay, come to our university. And if you take all these classes that we the experts think are important, we'll give you a piece of paper. Now that doesn't say you are a good marketer. It does not say you're a good employee. It simply says you've acquired marketing knowledge or accounting or whatever your field is. That was fine in the US in the 1950s and elsewhere maybe a little later.
When, okay, I'm a marketer, what do you do? You show up to work and your boss says, okay, sit in the corner, I'm gonna give you this assignment, do it, come to me when you're done and I'll give you another. So, okay, yes, sir. He just sat there as a cog in the machine and just turned out little pieces of marketing. When we think about today's companies, you're not the cog in the machine. You're no longer waiting for your boss to assign you work. Your boss expects you to take initiative. You're working with flatter teams, less mill management. The teams are cross-functional.
your boss no longer knows more than you. And we think about, we'll take marketing, the boss who might be in her 40s says, okay, TikTok, you 24 year old, go figure out TikTok. I don't know this. So our bosses rely on us to do things and know things that she or he may not do. So now it's not just about, well, I can be that cog and do it, I have to think broader, I have to work with this other team. And these are the skills not taught at universities.
it's going to be another few decades before it finally gets into the university system that, yes, we need to focus as much on these skills as the technical skills, technical being engineering or marketing or hit point. Subject matter expertise. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Because that's what I'm saying. I find it funny that you say every company requires this, but if you don't graduate from an actual communications degree,
most likely you graduated without having attended a single class that is teaching one of these curriculums. And then when it comes to hiring people, you touched on it earlier, how would you know that other than the subject matter expertise that this person, what are some of the probing questions you can ask to find out if this person in addition to that, they have their soft skills, obviously, everybody's a work in progress, but they have their soft skills on point.
subject matter expertise. I likened it to learning to drive. Imagine if you said to your teenager, okay you're 16 now or whatever age they happen to be eligible to drive. He said okay well you're 16, I know you've seen me drive, you've been in the car, you get you know steering wheel turns it, so 16 here you go, here are the keys to the car, best of luck, go out and drive. We would never hand the keys to someone untrained. That's insanity.
And yet what do we do in our workplace? When we talk about people are our most important asset. Oh, well, how do we find the most important asset? Say, hey, you, you've been interviewed before, right? Yeah, I think I saw you in one. Here are the keys to the door. Go talk to this candidate. See if you can find the best person for the job. That's what we do. And it is crazy. So we need to be more intentional. We need to train people how to interview, how to assess this. Now, to what you're asking, it's important to understand it's not just about.
those domain skills. Yes, you need to see those. But then you also need to figure out what are the other skills you want? We never put this in job descriptions. We never talk about it. Or if we do, I see people say, oh, strong leadership skills. Or works well with people. Usually the last bullet point is works well with people. After they list it, you must know how to program, you must do this, computers, works well with people.
Now, works well with people could just be, hey, you're fun to be around. You know, we're going to have some late nights and we'd like someone who's fun. It could be, we're all a bunch of jokers in this company. And if you're just very straight-laced, you're not going to fit into that culture. It could be, by the way, we've got a couple of folks on our team, they're really difficult. We need someone who can handle difficult people. Those are all useful skills, but at any particular job, one of those might be more important than others.
but we're not being intentional about it. And so we need to be intentional and say, what are these professional skills, these soft skills that we need for this role? What type of leadership, communications, what type of teammate? And then intentionally say, this type. Okay, now how do we assess it? What type of questions, what type of tools are we going to use to assess that candidate's ability? But it starts with intention. I don't know how much social media exposure you have, but
Believe it or not, hatred people argue. Everybody sits on their keyboards and they just start spewing hate and disagreements. Do you think that we have become a generation that doesn't know how to resolve conflict anymore? Unfortunately, yes. And we see this over and over, especially I look at political debates in the US. The idea is to get that soundbite and get the mic drop and get the, I hit you with a good one-liner mic drop. The reality is solving complex problems, whether in politics,
or other areas, it's not a one-liner. And yeah, that can sound clever. I do stand up comedy. One-liners are great there. You get that punchline. Fantastic, that's what you want in comedy. That's not what we do in the office. I think back to my days, I was in my high school debate club and we looked at how do you debate? How do you put forth arguments? How do you refute other arguments? And looking at formally how to do that, unfortunately we don't teach people logical reasoning. We don't teach them how to debate, how to disagree.
how to criticize perhaps your argument or position and not you personally. Unfortunately, we resort to a lot of ad hominem attacks on the other person. So I really think this is another skill we need to bring back into the education system. We used to learn it from our parents and society, and fortunately we've lost that.
It's very important because when you're in a project team, you have people with different skillsets that they all need to bring together to have the final result. There's going to be clashes. We're human. There's going to be disagreements. They're going to be, oh, Mark, I was waiting for your part of the report and you sent it to me late and now the boss, I'm in trouble. We don't even know how to distinguish between disagreeing over the issue versus me taking you personally. That's why if I send you an email so that you don't think I'm harsh.
I must have a smiley face and this emoji and to soften the blow. That second piece, well, I think it has just because of the generation I'm in and how I grew up. If you look at language overall, it evolves. If you think back a couple centuries, if I just went up and say, hey, how's it going? That's acceptable today. But if you did that years ago, if you didn't have that formal address, it is, you know, good morning to you, dear madam, that would be offensive. So the standards do evolve.
But you hit upon something that I think is important, which is it's this cultural. It's the norm, for example, when you think online culture that it's okay to do this. By the way, I had an experience running an online website with a couple hundred thousand people 20 years ago. What we found is when we attached real names to it, that went down because it was no longer this anonymous attack. Now we're seeing more of that happen online, but we still have this culture. There was a very interesting article I read the other day.
about gun culture in the US, where we have a terrible problem with gun violence. Said the problem, it's not just guns, it's that if I were to hit one of my peers with my car, accident, we'd get out and we'd say, oh, okay, it was an accident. Even if one of us is clearly wrong, okay, that's bad, well, we have insurance and we'll exchange things and they'll deal with it. But there are other people in certain socioeconomic aspects of the USA. I'm not just tying it to any race, just certain people from certain type of cultures, where...
when you have some type of conflict, you have to get defensive. You really, you expect, okay, there's a fight, sometimes quite literally a fight, and you have to immediately respond with strength. And so when they're in that same situation that two other people could say, okay, hey, we have a problem, we'll let our insurance deal with it, or we'll just walk away, and you can think I'm a jerk, and I'm okay with that. They're in situations where they can't just have someone think they're a jerk, or they can't rely on some other type of resolution.
they have to move to hostility. And then hostility with a gun leads to problems. So if you think about online culture, I remember I was having a discussion with a friend online and he asked about something that was a subtle political issue. I gave a long explanation. He said, oh, your stuff is just too long because it's unacceptable to have a long multi-paragraph communication on the subtleties of this issue. That's just not the appropriate culture for online. It's gotta be quick. It's gotta be one or two lines that completely solves the problem.
And it's okay to jump to the verbal violence online. That's acceptable in that community. So we're reinforcing these behaviors and we have to move away from that and lead to, no, we have other tools when we have a conflict, but it's gonna be a difficult change. Certainly gonna be difficult. Do you think that part of the onboarding process, especially because not every university offers these tools like MIT does, do you think part of the onboarding should emphasize the-
soft skills and the conflict resolution and the communication? 100%. This should be part of all university curriculums, whether it's research-based or expecting you to go out and get a job afterwards. I'd even encourage starting to explore this at the high school level. You might be able to get a few of these maybe in the middle school level, but certainly at the high school and definitely at the college level. And there are additional skills. Now these are more life skills, things like conflict resolution.
Personal finance is one that we hear often, teaching people basic personal finance. It's another skill we used to get from our parents that is no longer generally being taught. And so we have people coming out without the fundamental skills. Once our parents dropped the ball, I mean, generally holistically societal parents, school did not pick it up. And that's created a shortcoming in our training and education. Disclaimer, because I'm not a parent. I know they do the hardest job in the world.
Speaking of parents also, all the teaching starting at home, what about the actual communication skills and conflict resolution as well? Because I'm wondering if we have so many keyboard wearers and everybody just being conflict driven, do you think there's something at home that is no longer being done compared to previous generations? I do think that as well. I know when I was a young kid, my parents would always say, use your words. When I was four or five and I'd...
slam the door or storm, they taught me, use your words. And I was very fortunate. I have wonderful parents who really taught me some skills. Now, as wonderful as they are, there were other skills they didn't teach me. They didn't teach me how to network, for example. Most parents don't. So I had to learn some of these skills on my own, but we can't rely on parents doing it. Yes, they should. They should teach all of this and more, but they should also perhaps teach calculus and history. We say, you know what?
You can't rely on the parents to teach this. We should outsource some of this to professionals, and we call them teachers in the school system, that can do it more efficiently and effectively than their parents. And perhaps some of these skills as well, especially because our parents don't always have them, should also be included in this outsourced education that we call schooling. And speaking of networking, just to touch on it again, when you don't have these skills and you don't acquire them, that's one of the things that's gonna be very challenging for you.
You know, when people network, they communicate. You don't just hand out your business cards and keep moving. You actually must let people like you, trust you, wanna work with you. But if you don't talk, why would they feel that way about you and wanna work with you? Well, you're right, most people get it wrong. They think it's just handing out cards and it's really relationship building. But I don't want people to be intimidated by this. Often people say, well, I'm just not a good networker or leader or communicator. All of these skills are learnable.
the same way you can learn software engineering or learn to play soccer. You can learn any of these skills. And here's the key thing. I'm going to use negotiations as an example. Suppose you're 25 years old and you have a job offer for $60,000. Instead of simply taking the job, imagine if you go and negotiate. Now you're not doing a big push. You just get $1,000 more, 60 to 61,000.
That takes about five minutes of a conversation or a few emails. So in five minutes, you get a thousand dollars more. If you do nothing else in your life, if you stay in this job for the next 40 years, that five minutes of negotiating just got you a thousand dollars more for 40 years. One little negotiation and you got $40,000. But of course you're thinking, well, I'm not staying at a job for 40 years. And you're right, you're going to have other jobs and promotions and raises. And there'll be more than a thousand dollars.
If you learn to negotiate, we're not talking about being the world's greatest negotiator. We're just talking about getting a little bit better. You can add tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars to your lifetime earning. Now we're just talking about negotiating your compensation. You of course negotiate with suppliers and customers and coworkers all the time. But the key thing is it's not about a big, oh, I doubled my salary. It's about getting a little bit better and getting that return.
Now here's the big secret. I use negotiations because we can do the math. We can do a thousand dollars times 40 years. If you get a little bit better at communicating or networking or leadership or any of these skills, no one's going to say, oh, you're a better communicator, here's a thousand dollars more, but they will say, hey, we want you on this project. They will say you stood out during the interview process. It will lead to more opportunities, which will lead to more success and money. So getting just a little bit better at
any of these skills is going to produce this massive ROI, this incredible return on investment for your career. So don't think, oh, I'm never going to be as good as that person on the stage. You don't have to be, you just have to be a little bit better than the other people around you. And one thing when it comes to being interviewed, when you're busy negotiating, a lot of people, especially if this is the first interview, the freshly graduated from college is they don't think that the company is also lucky to have them.
That's not the mindset. You're just thinking, oh, if I could just get this job, let me realize, so they don't come with the mindset of, hey, not to be arrogant, but wait a minute, what I'm bringing, I'm also adding a bit of value, and that's why their minds will never even reach the point of thinking, hey, let me look at this. We often negotiate out of desperation, and so let's just use a simple analogy. Let's use dating, and imagine I wanna date you, and I'm thinking, oh, please, please, please, please go out with me, please, I really want to go out with me.
I'm not really coming from a position of strength there. No. I'm looking pretty weak. But if I were to approach you and say, hey, you know, I've got all these great things to offer. I'd love to go out with you. Now, yes, I'm still saying, please go out with me in some way. But I'm also saying, I'm bringing something here. I'm not just begging to get a date with you. There's a trade off here, right? We're both getting something. Now I might think, oh my God, you're out of my league, but I'm not going to say that. Don't say that on the first time that you've given me an impression of you.
Exactly. You need to have that mentality even when you do feel desperate of I have no other job prospects. You need to think you know what there's going to be other jobs they're going to love me and you have to have that mentality that hey I hope this works you've got a lot of great things at this company I've got a lot of great things I can bring you let's hope this works out if it doesn't plenty of fish in the sea. Yeah that is so true and that's why they don't negotiate anything and whatever's offered in the HR person says here's your package.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. That's the mindset, especially if it's your first interview, your first job, but people need to start realizing that, hey, I'm also bringing something to the table here. And that's when they can negotiate for that little extra thousand dollars. Exactly. Mark, it's been a pleasure having you here. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you very much. If people want to learn more, you can go to my website, thecareertoolkitbook.com. There you can see where to get the book. You can get in touch with me if you have questions or you want to bring me into your company.
You can follow me on social media. I put out new content each week. There is a free app on the Android and iPhone store linked from the website. And there's a number of free resources on the resources page to help you plan your career and get better at developing some of these skills. All of this at thecareertoolkitbook.com. Thecareertoolkitbook.com. That's right. With Mark Herschberg. Thank you so much, Mark, for all the career advice and tools that you gave us today. Very valuable.
Appreciate you. Thank you for your time.
