Welcome to What the Duck?!, a podcast with real experts talking about direct spend challenges and experiences. And now here’s your host, SourceDay’s very own Manufacturing Maven, Sarah Scudder.

Welcome to another episode of Another Ducking Digest. This is a 15-minute news show hosted by myself, and we have an expert and special guest for the month of June, Jeff Brown. Jeff is a 20-year COO and GM who’s led operations and supply chain and entire divisions for some major, major companies. He’s also been a keynote speaker and does a lot of posting content and speaking on LinkedIn. So Jeff and I have selected topics for the entire month of June. These are things that we feel are really relevant to supply chain folks who are working for a small or mid-size manufacturer. So that’s kind of the focus and audience for the show. So Jeff, last week we talked about how to accelerate your supply chain career, part one. So I’d like to have you do a super quick recap, just the high-level takeaways for those who weren’t able to join last week, and then we’ll dive into this week’s topic.

Sure. Alright, well thank you for having me back, Sarah, and I’m very excited about today’s topic too. So last week we talked about laying a foundation for a successful career, namely becoming a true free agent for your career, having a company strategy, how to get unstuck, and then a shortcut to promotion, which if you haven’t heard about it already from last week’s episode, it’s the hypo list, getting on the high-potential list at your company. The second part of last week’s episode was all about delivering massive value and that is sort of really the heart of the four steps that I followed anyway to get unstuck in my career and more than 10x my salary and get to the C-suite. So delivering massive value, why it’s so important. And then the power of benchmarking. So, benchmarking being just one of the very best tools in delivering massive value. So you wanna get some serious numbers of value driving that you’ve been able to do in your career, and that’s all part of this massive value delivery. So that’s kind of the quick overview from last week.

So today since we had so much content to talk about, I wanna do how to accelerate your supply chain career part two today. And I’d like to have you focus on two topics. The first is creating massive value for teams. You talked about creative massing value last week, but I wanna hyper-focus on value for teams. And then the second thing I’d like to have you talk about is developing your personal brand as a supply chain professional working in manufacturing.

Yeah, and that last one is usually everybody’s favorite topic, you know, how do they really brand themselves? So I’m gonna try to be quick, and hopefully, we can answer some more questions this week. So massive value for teams is really an extension of the massive value that we delivered and we talked about last week, right? So you want to deliver massive numbers, measurable value within your own role for your, with a team focus. But now when you become responsible for a team, you know, you might have a small team or a larger team, you want to train and develop each and every team member on your team to do the exact same process to deliver massive value for themselves on the team. Think about if you were to build a small army of massive value drivers. So it’s not all on you. You’re getting every single person on your team to do the tops process we talked about last time, which is, you know, making sure your training and development and your performance is already at the level that you want, not the level that you have.

Every member of your team is already executing benchmarking key for the key deliverables for their own role. And if everybody’s doing it and everyone’s delivering massive value, you now have one of the highest performing teams in your company, maybe even in the industry. And so that’s literally what you want to get go, you know, started here, is to extend what you’ve done for yourself and your team and do it for everybody on your team. So that’s delivering the massive value. Incidentally, before we move on to the next part, just one little quick thing I want to add: the golden rule of leadership. So this is something that took me some time and, and just in my own development, in my own leadership, took me some time to figure out like what’s the very best way to work with teams of people and things like that.

And I’m just gonna simplify it and basically one rule, which is the golden rule of leadership. The golden rule of leadership is literally the golden rule. And so if you put yourself in the shoes of the folks that you’re leading, how would you want them or, or how would you want your manager to handle certain tougher situations, development opportunities, things like this, and do that for your team, right? So we’ll jump, right, we’ll, we’ll go forward, but just think of the golden rule of leadership, you know, with your own team members, career ladders. Career ladders are kind of, they could be their own whole episode. So I’m just gonna hit ’em really quickly. Basically, what you’re doing is building a ladder based and, and you’re defining and publishing a tool for your team and hopefully for your whole company that defines the core competencies for every level and what your expectations are.

Measurable expectations. So if you were a manager and you had seven leadership competencies, what should a manager be expected to do for each of the seven leadership competencies? And then what should a director be expected to do? When you define all this, you publish this, you give it to the team members, and you’re actually supporting their development and you’re giving them the pathway on how to get ahead, but you’re also able to elevate the entire level of the enterprise by leveraging career ladders and increasing the definition and expectation for each of these leadership competencies at every level. So again, I just kind of glossed over a very big topic. This is a huge quadruple win in every business. I’ve been able to roll it out in, helps the company, helps the customer, helps the leadership, and helps all the staff. It’s a secret weapon that I have, and it’s called advanced career ladder.

So we could talk more about that another time. And then succession, we talked a little bit about succession before, but I cannot hit it enough. Succession is incredibly important because it greases the skids for your own promotion, right? If someone is able, if you’ve developed people on your team to take on your role, you are now free to fly and be able to move up that ladder and take on those higher-level roles. So this is all the things that you need to be thinking about with your team in order to help drive massive value across the team and help you and your team to get ahead. So that’s the first topic about massive value for teams. The second topic I want to talk about today, maybe spend a little bit more time on, is developing what I like to call a rockstar professional brand. This is gonna be fun because everybody’s gonna be able to exercise their marketing, put their marketing hat on for a little bit, and really start thinking about how to sexy up if you want, if you wanna use a fun term.

So just how to get your background in, in your experience to really be sexy on paper, right? Be sexy on LinkedIn, really attract attention. If you’ve been doing the things that we’ve already been talking about, you’re gonna be well-armed to do this, right? So when I look at professional branding, you gotta look at your internal marketing, meaning your marketing within your company, as well as your external marketing, which is your marketing of yourself outside of your company. That’s across the industry. So you need to have a strategy for both. And when people hear about internal marketing, they think I’m talking about tooting their own horn. Yes, people need to know what you’re up to and the value that you drive, but I do not recommend tooting your own horn. What I actually do recommend is a topic that I call team tooting, right?

So toot the horn of your teams. And so actually send out messages and say, “I just want to acknowledge the great work of this team.” Now you might be on the team and you might get some accolades from that, that’s fine. But give the recognition to the team, and you can, you’re in the power seat here, so you can do this as often as you want. Don’t do it too much, but you can do it as often as you want with whomever that you want. And so you’re in a controlling situation where you’re tooting the horn of all sorts of other team members. You build appreciation. So they appreciate you for the recognition, but you’re also attached to that. So team tooting is really helpful on the external marketing front. It’s all about your resume, it’s all about LinkedIn as well as networking.

So I just want to bring up here from a resume perspective, I have seen a literal pandemic in resumes. I’ve literally reviewed thousands of resumes, you know, hiring people at all levels and organizations, myself, and I have seen a pandemic, what I would call a pandemic and a lack of identified value. So when we talked about delivering massive value before, if you’ve actually been doing that and you’ve got like huge improvement numbers attached to your work, you should be highlighting those on your resume. I would say that I see 75 to 80% of all resumes that do not do a good job at highlighting the value that they deliver. I’ve spoken to over 500 recruiters on this topic, and they say that they spend 25% of their time on average coaching candidates on identifying what their value is and how to showcase that value.

So just how to get your background in, in your experience to really be sexy on paper, right? Be sexy on LinkedIn, really attract attention. If you’ve been doing the things that we’ve already been talking about, you’re gonna be well-armed to do this, right? So when I look at professional branding, you gotta look at your internal marketing, meaning your marketing within your company, as well as your external marketing, which is your marketing of yourself outside of your company. That’s across the industry. So you need to have a strategy for both. And when people hear about internal marketing, they think I’m talking about tooting their own horn. Yes, people need to know what you’re up to and the value that you drive, but I do not recommend tooting your own horn. What I actually do recommend is a topic that I call team tooting, right?

So toot the horn of your teams. And so actually send out messages and say, “I just want to acknowledge the great work of this team.” Now you might be on the team and you might get some accolades from that, that’s fine. But give the recognition to the team, and you can, you’re in the power seat here, so you can do this as often as you want. Don’t do it too much, but you can do it as often as you want with whomever that you want. And so you’re in a controlling situation where you’re tooting the horn of all sorts of other team members. You build appreciation. So they appreciate you for the recognition, but you’re also attached to that. So team tooting is really helpful on the external marketing front, it’s all about your resume, it’s all about LinkedIn as well as networking.

So I just want to bring up here from a resume perspective, I have seen a literal pandemic in resumes. I’ve literally reviewed thousands of resumes, you know, hiring people at all levels and organizations, myself, and I have seen a pandemic, what I would call a pandemic and a lack of identified value. So when we talked about delivering massive value before, if you’ve actually been doing that and you’ve got like huge improvement numbers attached to your work, you should be highlighting those on your resume. I would say that I see 75 to 80% of all resumes that do not do a good job at highlighting the value that they, that they deliver. I’ve spoken to over 500 recruiters on this topic, and they say that they spend 25% of their time on average coaching candidates on identifying what their value is and how to showcase that value.

That’s exactly what I’m talking about here, is how do you take the value, the massive value, hopefully, that you’ve delivered, and how do you showcase that? You do it with numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers. What I try to challenge people with on their resume is you should have a number on at least every other line of your resume, at least maybe every line of your resume, because that way you are identifying true value that you’re delivering and you’re getting right to the results. This is what hiring managers want to know. They don’t care that you led something, they want to know that you led something and actually beat the benchmark within the industry by 15%, right? They want to know, you know, exactly the type of value and how much, how you measure that value. So anyhow, so this is, you know, just part of the external marketing strategy that you want to undergo.

You can go through standardizing aspects of your resume, branding aspects of your resume, or getting your professional brand injected into your resume. I’ve done this with my own resume, right at the very top. I put four brand flags, if you will, right at the top of my resume. Like four key things that I’m known for that I want people to know about me when they see my resume for the first time. So think about how do you get your brand injected into your resume, right? And of course, networking is always very, very key. So keep that up on the LinkedIn front.

LinkedIn is your online resume. And LinkedIn themselves say that over 50% of their professional users do not complete their profile over 50%. So think about this, would you put your resume into the market and it was not complete, an incomplete resume, would you send that out there?

Not in your life. So why are people doing this with their LinkedIn profile? They’re incomplete 50% or more of the time. So first of all, complete your darn profile, right? The two most important sections are your headline and your about section. These have to shine. You do not only have to put your current title, you can put that you’re an award winner. I’ve done that on the top of my LinkedIn profile. I recommend all your listeners take a look at my LinkedIn profile, feel free to link up and, and things like that as well. But, but put some key things that you’re known for, write up in your headline. The headline and the about sections are very important because they are searchable by recruiters. So you want to use keywords. Here’s a quick little tip. Go to ChatGPT, take and copy a job description that really hits the type of role that you’re looking for.

Copy that into ChatGPT and say, “Use all of these keywords and write me an about section for my LinkedIn profile, right?” You can, so you can have ChatGPT load the keywords that are used in job descriptions into your about section. You want to leverage that, that will make you highly, highly searchable on LinkedIn. And again, make sure you complete your darn profile. You want to get results in there. Numbers, numbers, numbers. Use the recommendations section. I’m proud to say that I’m one of the more recommended professionals and leaders on all of LinkedIn. I’ve got nearly a hundred recommendations on there, not connections, recommendations, where people take their time and actually recommend you and write something very favorable. And I’m very happy and proud of and humbled by that. Awards, if you’ve won awards, get them on there, and you should be noting those up in your about section. So anyhow, I think you get the idea, you want to really highlight that massive value that you’ve been driving, get that into your rockstar resume, and make sure to get that into your LinkedIn profile. So I’m hoping that you might have some other questions from folks so we can get right to some of those.

Yeah, so first question is around, I’m gonna use your phrase “team tooting,” which I, I like the double T. The question is, what type of communication have you found works best for this? And who on the team should manage this communication?

Simple and informal. So email. And so what I have found simply is that, you know, a team accomplishes something. You know, they may have a cake and something and some sort of an award, you know, or celebratory event, but you wanna make sure that the company knows what’s happening, right? That’s important as part of your internal marketing strategy. The company and others in the company need to know what you are up to and what the team is up to. So I’ve just used a very informal email, “Hey, just wanna let folks know.” You might send it to and get the okay to send it to like all of North America or the leadership team or what have you. And just say, “Wanna let everybody know that this group has just done a remarkable thing.” And this is the make sure to highlight the measurable value in the email. Don’t make it very long. Make it sort of informal and you’re just patting everybody on the back. And by the way, you are probably on that team. And so,

Then, and Jeff, who should send that email? Let’s say you’ve got, you know, 10 or 15 people on your supply chain team, we can’t have every single person sending out that email.

Yeah, that becomes the not everyone is gonna team toot. So you wanna be the person to do it. Now if everybody listens to this podcast that’s part of your team and they’re all team tooting, you know that it gets to be a long email thread and that might get to be a little annoying. So be the person that maybe listens to this podcast and the others who didn’t, you become the team tooter and the one who’s acknowledging the great work of the team. Hopefully not everybody is doing it. So, you know, I just learned this earlier in my career and said, you know, I’m gonna be the person to do all these acknowledgements. And everybody started looking to me as a bit of the town criers. They’re like, “Well, what’s been happening? What’s the other good news?” Right? And you wanna be the bearer of good news. So, so hopefully not everybody is rushing to do the team tooting and you are the one to do it.

So a question about, you talked about having a rockstar resume. Do you recommend hiring a consultant or coach to help with improving a resume if you feel your resume is not very strong?

Yeah, great question. If it can help you, sure. I get a lot of questions when folks look at my resume, and I’ve done a lot of work on my resume. It’s like a classic card that I’m like underneath, and I’m tweaking all the time. I get a lot of questions about, well, who worked with you on this? Cuz obviously, you didn’t do this yourself. The que the, but the point is, I did do this myself. Your resume is like the most important tattoo on your body. You know it, take it, take it seriously and work on it. Tweak it. If it requires you getting marketing help from experts, then so be it. Then go do that. If you can do it yourself, then you should do it yourself. I do not recommend using resume templates because it’s pretty obvious that you’re using a template.

What I did, I’m an operations person at heart, and so I said, well, how do I operationalize my resume? How do I make it so it’s sort of universally appreciated? And so I looked at a whole bunch of different templates back in the day, and I said, you know what, none of these are really doing it for me. But one element of one template I really liked, and then another element of a separate template I really liked, and then another element of someone’s resume that I knew I really liked, and I mashed these together to create my own resume. And to me, for me, that worked out really, really well. So I get tons of questions about which professional group that I work with, and I just did it myself. So if you need help, get it. If not, you know, put your marketing hat on and figure out how do you best portray the value that you’ve delivered.

Question about LinkedIn. What is the best way to post content if your company has a strict policy about what you can and can say about the company online?

Okay, so if they have a policy about saying things about your company, then say things not about your company, right? So if you take a look at some of my posts on LinkedIn, you know, I talk about keeping things simple in business and that and the power of that. I talk about ChatGBT and how to use it to win at work. I talk about, you know, a number of different things. Benchmarking is my most recent one, like how to leverage the benchmarking process and really become the best in your industry. I’m not talking about my company, you know, so talk about things that are gonna help other people. And, and by the way, you can, and I have used ChatGBT for some of this, you know, either a first draft, an older post that I have, ChatGBT wrote virtually the entire post. You can leverage it to write the entire post, but you wanna put your own stamp on it, your own specifics around it. So don’t, you know, only leverage ChatGBT, but certainly put information out that helps other people. Think about this. If you put yourself in their shoes, you’re looking at your LinkedIn thread, do you want to hear about someone else doing something unbelievable? Or do you want to hear that person sharing something that makes you unbelievable? So do that for other people, right?

Another LinkedIn question, why LinkedIn versus another social platform?

So LinkedIn is the professional person’s network, right? So I’m not a big Facebooker, although I mean, I got a profile when it first came out, and I never really used it. But there are professionals, but it is not a professional network. It is an individual’s network, right? Loads of individuals and lots of different worlds and stuff. But if you want, if we’re talking about the world of work, the world of professionals, LinkedIn is the network for that. And so that’s why I recommend LinkedIn. The other major reason for LinkedIn is it is the platform that 100%, not 99, but 100% of recruiters use, 100% of internal recruiters at companies that you may want to go work at. They use LinkedIn, they have LinkedIn recruiter, which is a different interface than what you and I see, and they are living on LinkedIn recruiter to find you and me to hire and find other candidates and do a lot of different searches and find out what other companies are up to and things like that. So LinkedIn is really the professional network.

Join Jeff and me next Monday, June 19th at 10:00 AM Central Time to talk about the impact of the conflict between China and Taiwan on direct materials procurement people working in manufacturing.