Everyone has something to offer, no matter how little experience you have

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One of the most difficult parts of making the transition from college to work is waking up every morning and getting to the office on time. After you have mastered that, the next most difficult thing is the “what am I doing here?” problem. This problem has two scenarios. The first is you have the dumbest job in the whole world and you have idiots telling you how to do idiot work. In this case, you probably have fantasies of the second scenario, in which you have the perfect job and are surrounded by geniuses doing very important work. But what if you are, indeed, surrounded by geniuses and important assignments?

Often, people with little work experience feel stupid at work. And rightly so. Everyone has to teach them what to do. But the problem is that if you show that you feel stupid then no one will want to work with you. After all, the geniuses hired you thinking they could teach you quickly to add value.

So be the person they thought they hired. Stop feeling stupid and focus on ways you can add value even if you don't know anything:

Show potential. That excites people. They hired you for your ability to learn and they knew they'd have to train you. Let them know you're on the right track: Dress right. Say the right things. Show up to meetings on time. Don't be uptight. People will excuse that you don't know a lot because it's exciting to be the one to teach an up and comer.

Ask good questions. You might not have all the answers, but you can help narrow in on good answers by asking insightful questions. An ex-boyfriend, (who was actually a better catch than I had realized at the time,) once told me, “There are no right answers, just sharper questions.”

Don't try to be something you're not. It's OK if you are at a client meeting and have only one or two things to say. The client knows that she has 15 years of experience in her business and you have 15 minutes. But if you're invited, ask questions so that she knows you're engaged and interested and she can get a sense of how you think.
Compensate for your boss in small but significant ways. Think about the personality traits you have and your boss doesn't. Are you good with details? Someone who isn't will appreciate that you are. Are you good at small talk? Show that skill at an office get-together, and your social dolt of a boss will appreciate you.

Pay attention, and use slow times for synthesizing. You have time on your side. Older people have kids, mortgages and sick parents. It's likely you have none of those, which gives you lots of time to think. Creative solutions don't come when you're slogging though meetings or endless in-boxes. The new ideas come during quiet, unstructured time. Gain an edge by giving yourself these moments — you might come up with a truly brilliant idea.

For some, this pep talk won't put a dent in the nervousness you feel around bigwigs. Take solace in the fact that smart people have such a huge need to be right and add value that they sometimes never shut up. Marshall Goldsmith, an executive coach and a founder of Alliance for Strategic Leadership cites the example of an ex-director of the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., who constantly added to other peoples' ideas, as in, “That's a good idea, but it might work better if …” People like that director are better off keeping quiet, says Goldsmith. Not every idea needs to be improved 5%.

So for those of you newbies working with geniuses who always need to say one more thing, recognize that sometimes these brainacs just like to hear themselves talk. The ability to see through such chatter is something you bring to the table.

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You need a personal assistant

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Your to do list is dragging you down. Why do tasks that do not inherently enhance the quality of your life when you could pay someone $10 and hour to do them? I learned this when my boss and I had our new computers set up at our homes. I stayed at home all day waiting for the technical person to arrive and then worked the weekend to catch up. My boss had his assistant wait at home and he got more done than I did without even having to work the weekend. Day after day I watched my boss get twice as much done as I did until I hired my own personal assistant — and after that, I looked at the tasks of daily life in a different light.

We each have big goals in our life and all big goals take time: Growing a successful career, being a good spouse, and climbing Mt. McKinley. None of these grand goals requires you to pick up the dry cleaning yourself.

Each time you do a mindless task yourself you make a statement about the value of your time. If you had an extra hour with your kids, would it be worth $10? If you had an extra hour at the office could you increase the value of your output to make up for the $10 (think: raise down the line). If you're spending a significant part of your day doing tasks that are not integral to your life goals, then you're wasting your time.

Your first thought should always be, “Do I need to do this myself?” How does a CEO create value that's bigger than herself? She has other people doing the work so she can think about big picture issues. (And in fact, you are probably a person doing this CEOs work. More incentive for you to act like the CEO of your life and pass off the slough.) If you want to create something big you need to hire people to help you.

So why doesn't everyone have a personal assistant that they hired from the local university? Heck, a fourteen year old could do half the tasks on most lists. (In fact, the first university student I hired used to sub-contract my tasks to his fraternity brothers, which I accepted as evidence of how little training it took to do my tasks.)

Some people overestimate the difficulty of tasks and underestimate the frustration impact. They say, “Training the person would take longer than doing it myself.” HEL-LO!?!?! Did anyone train you to call the insurance company to complain about a bill? No. It's trial and error. So your assistant can learn himself. Even five calls would only cost you less than $10. But if you did the five calls to the insurance company yourself you'd be angry and frustrated for the next two hours.

Some people overestimate the importance of a task. They say, “The person would never do it how I want.” But so what? You're not giving the core of your life to the assistant. You're not saying, for example, “Can you climb Mt. McKinely for me?” You're asking for something like food shopping. So let's say the assistant buys the wrong bread and forgets pasta. Is having the right food in the house integral to your life goals? The answer is probably No. You can eat pancakes instead of pasta. It's a small price to pay to have enough time to meet your life goals.

A time optimist does not use an assistant because she says, “It'll take me more time to ask the assistant to do the task than to do the task myself.” This person misunderstands time. Buying movie tickets, for example takes ten minutes on the phone, but it takes only one minute to ask an assistant to do it. If you make the choice to spend the 10 minutes doing it yourself seven times a day, you've wasted an hour of your time.

If you are currently employed don't tell me you don't have enough money. Think of yourself as a small business, and follow the basic rules of running a business: You have to reinvest profits (your salary) back into the business (your career) if you want to see growth (your promotion). No matter how much you earn, as long as you can cover basic life necessities (food, clothes, housing — not sailing lessons) a portion of your profits should go back into your business.

Learning to use an assistant effectively is not easy — it takes practice. But using an assistant now, for your personal tasks, your will train yourself to effectively leverage the personal assistant you get from your employer when you get promotion after promotion from being so intently focused on your goals.

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You can learn from getting canned

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Maybe you have never been fired. I sure have — more often than I care to remember — and I can assure you that, while the moment may be humbling, the experience has always been educational. Here are things I learned after getting the boot. They may not be earth-shattering lessons, but they’re good reminders when your earth has been shattered.

Be gracious, even at the end.
My first firing took place at my grandma’s bookstore. She said, “I told you that you can’t read when you’re working.” I said, “Just let me finish this one page.” She said, “You can finish all the pages — because you’re fired.” Fine, I told her. Besides, she didn’t pay enough. She told me that I made a lot of money for a 9-year-old. Then she said, “When you’re fired, it’s important to be as gracious as possible because there’s no point in burning a bridge any more than it’s already burned. And you never know what you might need later from the person who is firing you.” Then she took me out for ice cream.

You’d rather be where you’re appreciated, anyway.
I worked at a pizza parlor, where we treated the kitchen like a chemistry lab. The boss’s wife decided that 16-year-old girls were too tempting for him and instructed him to fire anyone who fit the above description. I tried proving my worth by inventing a method to make dough twice as fast as anyone else. But my hours dwindled. I was berated for not lining up the pepperoni exactly. It became a job I could only do wrong. The boss eventually followed his wife’s directive, and I took my pizza expertise to another restaurant, where I became the go-to pizza queen.

Even if you have a job, network like a person who needs a job.
Continuing my career in food services, I worked at an ice cream parlor. It was easy when someone ordered a flavor like daiquiri ice, which would thaw in five minutes. But hard flavors like pralines-and-cream would take most of the day to soften, and scooping them made my muscles sore. So I started directing customers to other ones. (“French vanilla? Feh. Orange sherbet — now that’s a flavor.”) When the end was near, I gave ice cream away for free. When the end arrived, I got another job right away — with someone who had benefited from my scooping largesse.

Everyone is expendable. Especially you.
Upon entering the real world, I worked at one of the first high-profile e-commerce websites. I had done my master’s thesis on interactive media, and suddenly 50-year-old managers were asking me for advice. Competitors tried to recruit me. I felt wanted and needed, and I started believing my own press. So much so that I neglected internal projects for freelance ones, thinking I was untouchable. I was the only one who understood the Internet, right? Wrong. And anyone who thinks they can’t be replaced is too.

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What I learned from communication coaching

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My cousin had a karaoke party. I had to go because he’s my cousin, but I refused to sing because this would have pained the audience even more than it would have pained me. A woman at the party, however, impressed me by engaging the crowd even though she had no apparent singing talent. It turned out that this woman, Lindy, is a Sanford Meisner-trained actress who works for a consulting firm, teaching executives how to strengthen business relationships by using acting techniques. The course costs $275 an hour. I signed up.

At our first session, Lindy explained the premise: Acting and leading are both about establishing a relationship with an audience and making them believe in you. My first assignment was to memorize a short speech — “Ain’t I a Woman,” by Sojourner Truth. I loved the speech, but I hated having to memorize it, and I dreaded having to recite it in front of Lindy. Then I remembered what Lindy’s boss said at the beginning of the course: This program is best suited to high-level executives with enough self-confidence to explore leadership techniques that might feel silly at first. I wanted to fit into this self-confident high-level executive category, so I forced myself to show up for the second meeting.

I bombed. I couldn’t remember the speech. Lindy told me to think less about the speech and more about connecting with her, my audience. Finally, when I looked at her the way I look at my husband when I need him to pick up the dry cleaning, she was satisfied.

I may have gotten the look down, but my delivery was still off. Lindy instructed me to reengage her whenever I sensed I was losing her. So I started over. She stopped me immediately. “You can’t just start over,” she said. “Leaders stick with their audience and fight to get them back.” “How do I do that?” I asked. “Take a risk,” she said. In acting, one might ad-lib; in business, one can ask a rhetorical question. So I did, and then started talking right away. She pointed out that a good leader is comfortable with a long pause, which shows trust that the audience is thinking. Speaking too fast doesn’t allow the audience to absorb or interpret, killing any chance of making a connection.

My biggest problem, according to Lindy, was wanting to appear like a cool and hip leader and not paying attention to my audience. I made it about me instead of about them. “Pretend you’re an evangelist preacher,” she said, because preachers excel at engaging listeners. I continued to give my speech, adding after every few sentences, “Can I get an ‘Amen’?” I felt more and more pathetic as Lindy sat in stony silence, ignoring my bleating pleas. Then I realized that if I didn’t care about what I was saying, no one else would. You really have to want an “Amen” to get one, and finally I did.

After this breakthrough, the sessions became easier. The principles of theater and management are the same: A director and a manager both have to lead in ways that allow for and encourage a person’s best, most creative self. Managing is about performing, which takes practice, energy, and concentration. The basics are these: Believe your material. Know your audience. Engage them, so they are invested in what you have to say. And for those of you who are not yet managers, acting like a manager is the first step toward becoming one.

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Beware of the nuances of email

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Last week I met my boss face-to-face for the first time. I've been working with him for more than two years — via phone and e-mail. I had never seen him, but I had a general idea of what he looked like because over time he had tossed me clues about his appearance. At least I thought he had.

I spend a lot of time writing about appearance and its impact on career success. I've been known to say things like: People judge you in the first three seconds they see you; good-looking people make more money than unattractive people; going to the gym regularly improves your chances of success. Invariably, in response to such columns, my boss will send me a self-deprecating e-mail. He's a funny guy, and to his credit, his e-mails about his looks are usually funny. For example, in reference to the column about good-looking people getting raises, he wrote: “Now I understand why I am making peanuts.”

Or something like that. It is not a direct quote because I didn't save his emails. In fact, based on the messages he sent to me, I thought I would be getting a new boss shortly because he implied he was so incredibly obese that he might die of a heart attack any day. My mental image of him grew more extreme with the arrival of each successive e-mail.

By the time I met my boss at the airport last week, I had begun to envision him as so enormous that he needed a special chair. So you can imagine my surprise when I found myself greeting someone who is physically fit and (it turns out) plays tennis regularly. Clearly, he's not obese, he's just funny. He was sending humorous e-mails that I was misreading. This is what happens in e-mail relationships: People create pictures based on their best guesses. (Or their most desperate guesses. If I was thinking of dating my editor, perhaps I would have imagined him as really good looking.)

The lesson here? Be careful what you write about yourself to someone who never sees you. This goes beyond discussing your looks. For example, suppose you're an over-achiever, but you make jokes about slacking off. Your recipient doesn't know that you work your tail off and you're only being self-deprecating. There's a fine line between being self-deprecating and being revealing, and it isn't visible in e-mail.

As soon as I realized that I had been misreading my editor's e-mails, I started discovering other e-mail nuance problems.

My brother, an investment banker, is working on a large client's overseas business deal that's been widely publicized in the business press. He received a message with the subject line, URGENT!!, from a staff administrator. So he opened it nervously, thinking the deal had collapsed. It turned out that the administrator needed to know how much of his American Express bill would be charged to this particular client.

Now this company is so large it could pay every AMEX customer's bill for several months without severely impacting its bottom line. Obviously, the client wasn't worried about my brother's charges. And my brother wasn't in trouble. But by using the URGENT!! subject line, the administrator inadvertently tipped every one off that she was in trouble for not getting this information sooner. A more astute way for her to address her problem would have been to say in her e-mail, “Please get back to me with this information by the end of the day today.”

Inappropriate e-mail addresses comprise another harmful nuance category. The address billandmary@aol.com is ridiculous in business. Only use a joint address for business correspondence if you and your spouse/partner are applying for a job you'll do together. College career advisor Julia Overton-Healy of Mansfield, Pa., [what college, why mention her out of the blue?] has seen it all: keggerboy and even youwantapieceofme. Surely if you are reading this column you are beyond keggerboy. But analyze your e-mail address critically, paying heed to both sides of the @: bill@keggerboy.com is not an improvement over keggerboy@aol.com. .

E-mail nuances can betray you in the halls of corporate America as easily as verbal nuances. They can turn otherwise well crafted communications into undermining menaces. Even worse, your seemingly clever e-mails may become a company joke and end up serving as fodder for columns like mine.

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Checklist for career change

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My husband recently changed careers. Well, not really recently — actually two years ago. But for those of you who have never endured a career change, two years is nothing. It still feels like the beginning because salary-wise, you *are* at the beginning.

For the most part, his switch has been going well. He went from management positions in the entertainment industry to field research in a social justice think tank. Basically, he spends his days in prisons, trying to get the government to implement new programs.

He made the change exactly the way a career advisor would recommend — not surprising since he has to eat dinner with one every night. For those of you considering a change, here is the plan he followed:

Step 1. Soul search. Consider all aspect of change including, lifestyle, pay and any education you’ll need. Be realistic about what you value in life and work.

Step 2.Downsize. Get rid of huge car payments, huge mortgage payments, and huge expectations for dinners, vacations and clothes.

Step 3. Network. Headhunters and help wanted ads are geared toward people who have skills in a certain area. People who change jobs do not have skills in the new area, so networking is the best way to get someone to give you a chance.

Step 4. Try it out. You'll never know if you fit into the career environment until you try it. A baby step, like volunteering, or taking a part-time job will allow you to go back to your originally career if need be.

After step four, there is nothing but taking the leap. So my husband did. His mentor at his new job is ten years younger than he is. His boss makes 25% less than what my husband's paycheck used to be. The people below my husband in pecking order are college interns. And this is two years after he made the switch. Not that any of this is a surprise. Of course, this is what happens when you change careers.

By all measures, my husband is flourishing in his new career. He is at a top non-profit agency, he is writing significant papers, he is working with geniuses. But he is making no money. I keep telling myself that this is what we knew would happen. That we traded money for career happiness. I assure myself that my husband will make more money later, when his is not swimming in the ranks of college interns.

But there is so much pressure to be happy. Pressure from me, that is, on my husband. Every night I check in with him — look for signs that he is elated with his new career choice. And, big surprise, with a new career and a young child, most nights he is exhausted, not elated. Which makes me say, “Why are we making all these financial sacrifices if you're not happy?!!?!”

My husband doesn't answer. It's hard when he doesn't answer. But I know it's because he feels guilty because he really, really, really, doesn't want to go back to the entertainment industry. And I can't stop thinking, “If you're unhappy in both careers, why not be unhappy in the one that pays more?”

I know you're thinking, “Gosh, Penelope, can you be a little more supportive?” But don't say that until you've had a spouse throw away a lucrative career. And anyway, I'm trying; I see there is one more step on the career change checklist that we probably should have done:

Step 5: Set spousal expectations. I should have gone through the process with my husband. I should have evaluated with him what sacrifices I can make, what lifestyle expectations I had, even how happy I expected him to be. I was so determined to let him make his own decisions that I'm finding now that I'm the one who is floundering.

You think, at some point, that you know for sure a career change was good. But that's not true for everyone. Or, maybe it's true for everyone, but not in the first few years. Yes, you can be sure that the new job is more fun or more rewarding than the old job, but how much more fun do you need to be having in order to justify the financial sacrifice?

I'm not sure. So we keep going on the career change path, hoping to find the answer buried beneath the indignities.

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To the women of the graduating class of 2004

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Most of you have not witnessed extreme gender inequality during college, and most of you do not think of yourselves as activists. But I have news for you: The corporate world does not offer equal opportunity, and most of you will need to become activists to create lives which include children and work.

But you probably spent your school years hearing that you can be anything you want and that having kids is not something to worry about now. Both of these ideas are misleading.

Most likely, you cannot be anything you want if you expect to have kids; you cannot be a mom who goes to weekly tap dance lessons or weekly baseball games and a mom who runs a Fortune 500 company or leads the United Nations team to Rwanda. You have to give up one of those dreams because kids are not compatible with the amount of work required to move up through the management ranks. You need to consider this when planning your life.

“Sexism at the top remains strong,” says Barrons Business Daily in an article touting the successes of women in the workplace. Men may always outnumber women at the top because women are not willing to make the “sacrifice of friendships and family life that the jobs normally require,” it states. The New York Times magazine chimed in with a cover article highlighting how more women with business degrees from top schools are leaving the work force to stay home with children.

Here are some facts to consider:

Sixty percent of male managers have kids at home as compared with 40% of women managers. Corporate life was set up so that one person in a couple works and one stays home with the kids. For all the effort men and women have given to changing this system, it remains relatively unchanged for senior executives.

These facts come from a recent study commissioned by Congress, which shows that men and women climb the corporate ladder together, and then women with children begin to lag, earning lower salaries. Meanwhile, childless women managers remain on par with the men.

Those women with children who continue to climb are more likely to get divorced than the men with kids who continue climbing, says Barrons magazine.

The congressional study tells us that women struggle with career issues that don't affect men. Women, not men, typically must choose between a high-powered career and raising kids. And so far, we have not found an answer. Each woman who gives up something — a career, a kid, time at the office or at home — will tell you the decision was tough. And the jury is out as to what works. The next generation of women will have to try new ways to juggle family and work.

Some schools, bless them, are helping women prepare for future balancing acts. At one top medical school, a panel of surgeons fielded questions from students ready to select a specialty. The discussion turned to a surgeon's notoriously long and unpredictable hours. A student asked the panel members if they would choose surgery again. The four men on the panel each praised their wives at home for supporting them and said they would choose this specialty again. The lone woman on the panel said she would not choose the specialty because surgeons have so little flexibility and she has had to sacrifice family time to succeed.

At this particular school, women choose their specialty with care: Ophthalmology has become popular because it allows for a family life.

Consider these issues when you select your field. If you want a family, find and build a career that is compatible with having a family. If you decide on a family-unfriendly career, find a spouse who will take care of the family (a common solution for women at the top).

Graduation speakers nationwide are touting opportunity, equality, and ambition. I wish I didn't have to be a wet blanket , but someone's gotta do it: Girls, get ready for a corporate world built by men, not women. Think of the workplace as a constant test of your ability to create the life you want. Think of yourself as a trailblazer.

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Make a plan for summer reading

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As you make you plans for your summer, plan to take a break from the business book bestseller list. Instead, read with the goal of taking yourself out of your intellectual comfort zone, because fresh tracks in your thinking will lead to fresh tracks in your career. Here are some guidelines for summer reading:

Ask a big question.
All-day beach trips are great for long books. Blow up rafts promote uninterrupted thinking. Don't waste these precious chunks of time on John Grisham.

Instead, think of a big question, the kind that has no right answer but lots of angles, and dive into the relevant reading. One vacation, I asked the question: “Why do people tell stories?” Another question that has ruled my summer reading is, “What sort of human-computer interaction is fun?”

Sometimes, the answer to the question isn't nearly as revealing as just discovering what question really piques your interest.

Think like you're studying for a mid-term.
For most of us, rigorous thinking ended in college. But the organized, complex, thinking that gets you through upper-level philosophy courses also makes you sharp at the office. My brother Mike (an economist) reads linguistic theory to keep himself on his toes. I read Supreme Court decisions: They twist and turn the Constitution in ways that will give anyone an intellectual workout; they're not as dry as Kant and not as brain numbing as J Lo's love life.

Read to understand people.
Your career is dependent as much on people skills as it is on how well you do your work. So I recommend An Na's novel, “A Step from Heaven” (Front Street, 2001), which I love. It's a kids book. (For those of you who don't read kids books, you should. They'll remind you of that terrible time of life that is junior high school, and then you'll appreciate where you are in life now, no matter where you are.)

“A Step from Heaven” is about Korean immigrants, and it does a great job of showing the barriers to success that people of American-born parents do not face. Think of these barriers when you manage someone who didn't have all the advantages in life that you had. Remember that topics like patience and compassion are as important to your reading pile as leadership and finance.

Don't read to stroke your ego.
Just because you have already accumulated a reading pile tall enough to last fifteen summers doesn't mean that you have to read those books.

Our tendency is to be attracted to topics we already know a lot about. For a while, I was reading too many books about time management. I am a good time manager, so each book's recommendations would allow me to say, “Great, I'm already doing that. I'm great.” When I forced myself read about sales, because I was uncomfortable in that area, my reading became much more productive.

Force yourself to read in areas that are unfamiliar to you. Read about your weaknesses. Read about people who annoy you and topics that bore you. The best antidote to disdain is a deeper understanding.

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Lessons I learned as an arbitrage clerk

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I learned my first lessons in the importance of workplace communication when I had a job in the British Pound trading pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. What makes the exchange special is that there are no pretenses: You don’t have to be an Ivy Leaguer or a genius trader to succeed. The people who do succeed are alert, quick, and well versed in the art of communication.

It is ironic that the most treasured office skill is most prevalent at the most un-officelike place. But the trading floor is a great classroom for people who work in a traditional office, especially those who remain stalled professionally because of a lack of communication skills.

Lesson 1: Learn the secret language.
Every office has a secret language. At the Merc, it’s hand signals. The trading pit — literally a pit — is filled with people waving and motioning because it’s so large and loud that people have to use hand signals to talk to each other. I had to take a class so that I could signal phrases like “Prudential Bache has a large order in the British pound pit that needs to be filled at 68.” The guy across the room might say, “Watch me for an order coming in,” and I’d have to keep a close eye on him all day because he’d only signal the order once before giving the business to someone else. The difference between “buy at 68” and “sell at 68” is the turn of a palm. At a standard office, the secret language may be that business is mostly conducted by e-mail or meetings, or that the boss likes to be presented with ideas in a certain fashion. If you don’t communicate in the way that people expect, no one will hear you.

Lesson 2: Build relationships during downtimes, and you will benefit during the fast times.
When the trading floor is slow, the traders and clerks stand around talking; the scene resembles a bar. If you are not funny, or insightful, or clever, or at least good at laughing at other peoples’ jokes, people will not like you. And if people don’t like you on the trading floor, it will cost you — just like at the office. When trading picks up and phone orders from brokers stream in, people will trade with you or they won’t. At the office, if you are disliked, you aren’t asked out to lunch, assigned good projects, or given help and support when you need it.

Lesson 3: The small communication cues are the most important.
In the office, this rule is subtle. For example, I had a boss who was great verbally, but whenever he got nervous he would bite his nails and, no matter what he was saying, all we heard was, “This place is headed for a train wreck.” People pick up on the most casual, seemingly trivial things.

The great thing about the trading floor is that you get immediate feedback when you botch a small cue. When trading is fast, prices move fast, and if you miss a price, you could be held responsible for getting that price anyway. In the language of hand signals, a trader can say, “I have 600 shares to sell at 70,” in less than two seconds. The trader will make that sale by simply catching someone’s eye and seeing that person nod. If either one of those people makes even the slightest mistake, they could lose thousands or millions of dollars.

It is not an exaggeration to say that poor communication skills are the number one problem that holds people back in the workplace. One manager I talked to at a Fortune 500 company said that most of her management time is spent coaching people on how to talk to each other so that teams work efficiently. “And people don’t even appreciate it,” she says. For everyone out there who has been coached by a boss, be grateful. Because on the trading floor, you’d otherwise be fired immediately.

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Don’t hold a meeting without an agenda

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A meeting is a like a party. If you don't plan it carefully you’ll look incompetent and end up embarrassed. Forethought is necessary. You wouldn't invite three ex-boyfriends to a game of Twister with your mom, and you wouldn't plan a costume party without letting people know the theme in advance. While you might not have ex-boyfriends or a good costume, most offices always have individuals who love to undermine leaders in meetings.

Having no agenda is the first sign your meeting will be a time-suck. . Most people who skip writing an agenda have no idea what they want to accomplish during their meeting. They don’t know this, though.

They begin the meeting thinking they know the goal — for example, to get a project back on track. But they’re wrong. The real goal is to bring team members together to create a plan to get the project moving. Without an agenda, someone else will create the plan during the meeting, and you’ll end up seeming weak and helpless.

Most people know they should always have a meeting agenda, but for unfathomable reasons, they assume their meetings are the exception to this rule. Even if you think your meeting is an exception, write an agenda. There is no downside for you in doing this. Every meeting gives you an opportunity to demonstrate that you’re a visionary. But if you aren’t in charge of what happens during the sit-down, how can you ensure that you’ll look good?

Other people don't write agendas because their meetings are routine and predictable. Everyone who attends could write the agenda themselves. In this case, why have the meeting? Then you’re knowingly scheduling a time-suck. You’ve probably worked for a company where managers hold Monday-morning meetings to hear their staffers say what they did the previous week. A competent manager would ask for a weekly report, then distribute a weekly summary instead. Think daily listserv vs. digest. A digest would alleviate another boring meeting, or it would open up the Monday meeting for more substantive issues.

Still not convinced that your weekly meeting is useless? Perhaps you think an agenda-less meeting where everyone reports their progress will make a certain slacker in your group get the point. Forget it: Do your job and handle the slacker on your own instead of making your staff suffer through a meeting.

The downside of preparing agendas is they may get attacked. This happens when attendees get the agenda at the start of the meeting. The meeting can then degenerate into group-level agenda attacks, which then can degenerate into group-level personal attacks and a sidetracked meeting. Nip this in the bud by emailing the agenda in a note to participants a day in advance (don’t send your agenda as an attachment because no one will read it). By giving attendees a chance to review the agenda, attackees will likely approach you individually, and you’ll have time to make revisions. (Here's a tip for procrastinators: Write your agenda before you call your meeting. This way you'll know whether in fact you need the meeting before you schedule it.)

Even after writing a strong agenda, some meeting leaders feel their sit-downs will be unsuccessful. The solution isn’t ordering food for participants. If you need food to have a successful meeting, cancel the meeting. Otherwise, food will make your meeting last longer than necessary — again, a time-suck. . There's nothing like the inevitable crash from a a mass sugar high — just when you need to develop the big plan.

Still not writing that agenda? Let’s return to the party theme: The best part of a party is the after-party when you discuss everyone who attended and what they wore and said. In fact, I never feel a party has really happened until I've done a debriefing. The same is true for meetings. People will debrief and dis each other behind their backs after the meeting — nothing you can do about that. But you can ensure they're only dissing you for what you wore and not what you said by maintaining control with an agenda.

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