For those of you who have read my PolyWogg guide for competitions, you know that I have the general “slogan” of “Be the Duck!”. The idea being of course that if a manager wants to hire a duck, then your best chance to get hired is to tell them you’re a duck. Not someone who speaks Duck, or who knows Ducks, or who has worked with Ducks, but rather that you are indeed a duck. Preferably the best dang duck they’ve ever seen. But definitely you want to say “I’m a duck”.

I developed the cover long before I had the guide written…seeing the cover is “visually motivating”. So what if I do ones beyond the Duck?

For example, are there times when you might want to do something other than say you’re a duck? Sure. Like when you’re managing your career, not just going through a selection process. Then, you want to…dun dun dun…

As you can see, I maintained the same look and feel. Same frog, top swath in green, bottom swath for name and website address. I added an edition, but ignore the year, not sure when I’ll get it written. Volume 2 — Be the Swan — is more about how you strut your stuff to be a great employee and to develop in your career. A part of that is about formal selection processes, sure, but most of it is just shaking your tailfeathers.

But what if you want to go beyond the staff / analyst / employee stage? What if you want to move into middle management (aka sub-executive level)? Well, in that case, maybe you want to … dun dun dun …

Okay, I know the theme is a bit cheesy. But a lot of what you do as a middle manager is round people up and herd them in the right direction. I’ve got a framework that may help people decide what kind of manager they want to be. And, as the final chapter, I’ll talk about moving up to the executive level (or not).

That should be it, right? Well, not quite. When I was at the Ministry of Education in BC, I did a lot of analysis of cases where “things went wrong”. And there are a lot of degrees where things go wrong…simple difficult conversations due to conflict with coworkers. More serious problems with your supervisor. Or even more serious things with grievances, and legal stuff, and the Public Service Labour Relations and Employment Board. I thought about including it with the swan when managing your career, but that is more about positive management, this is more about issues where there are problems. So what do you do … dun dun dun …

It may be the toughest of the books to write, particularly if I get into the weeds of the PSLREB. I definitely have views about the Board’s decisions though, maybe my passion will guide me.

But that is a batch of books I have on my mind for future writing related to “government” and HR. Hopefully, the images will help motivate me. The order above is the likely order I’ll do them, after I revise the current Be the Duck guide later this year.

So, what do you think?