Improve your performance by lying to yourself

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Maybe it's time to set aside all those “know yourself” advice books, and try lying to yourself about who you are. You are a finance wiz. You are a sales guru. You are a genius writer.

Any successful careerist needs to be these things. But most of us are not really all of these things. The skills are too diverse even for the mind of an overachiever like you. But why not try telling yourself you are all these things and see what happens? After all, the first step to being great at something is to believe that you're great at it. Then you will attack the task at hand expecting yourself to succeed.

Sales
You can say you don't like selling. You can say you're above it. But you may never get the chance to know, because people who can't sell themselves can't get jobs. So, okay, you don't have to sell cars (though you should study the people who do — the best are incredible sales people and could sell anything to anyone.) But you do have to sell yourself to get a job, and you have to sell your ideas in order to keep your job interesting. (Singles, take note: Dating is, in fact, the most important sales game of your life.)

The hardest thing about sales is taking the time to understand what the person you're selling to cares about, and under which scenario that person is a good listener. People who say, “I'm bad at sales,” are people who, for the most part, refuse to take the time to understand people. How embarrassing. So even if you are bad at understanding people, don't announce it to the world by saying you can't sell. Call yourself a salesperson and practice all the time.

Finance
I first learned the importance of faking it when I had to present financials to my angel investors. I had to pretend that I did not score in the bottom 20% of the math section of the GRE. I had to say confidently, “Oh, I have everything explained in an Excel spreadsheet.” And then I had to hire someone to teach me to use Excel.

Today, I don't run numbers as fast as a real finance wiz, but I have confidence because I told my investors I knew what I was doing thereby forcing myself to learn. Thank goodness, because each of us needs to be a finance wiz.

You need to understand broad corporate financial goals in order to place your own projects in context. You need to understand how to manage a dynamic budget without tripping on the question, “How did you get to the number on line six?” Most CEOs did not move up the ladder via financial positions, but you never hear a CEO say he's bad at finance. In an ambitious career there is no room for financial weaknesses. So don't ever say you don't do numbers.

Writing
Here's a scenario: you write an e-mail that consists one, 25-line paragraph with no breaks. No one reads it. At best it looks unintelligible because it's too long a paragraph for email. At worst, it *is* unintelligible. But still, in this case you are a writer, you are just a terrible writer.

The list of scary scenarios is endless: If you send a disorganized report to your boss, she won't understand it; If you have typos in your resume you'll lose interviews. Everyone's career is dependent on their talent for communication. And in the age of email everyone's a writer.

So take responsibility for your own communications and function like you are a top-tier writer. This means outlining first so that you are organized, writing to the point, and proofreading. A few of you will need to take a grammar class. Some of you, who have made some of my past projects miserable, will need to take ten grammar classes.

So lie to yourself. Tell yourself you are great at sales, writing and finance, and you might not be great, but you will get a lot better. And even a small improvement in each of these skills will add up to a large improvement in your career trajectory.

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How to do workplace sports talk

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For those of you who cannot shut up about this weekend's Super Bowl, think about your impact on the workplace atmosphere: A study of Harvard Business School graduates found that in 85 percent of the cases — drum roll, please — men initiated sports talk. This is because female population does not care about spectator sports with nearly the fervor of the male population.

Of course, small talk should be easy, inclusive, and non-offensive. The weather comes to mind as a safe topic — unless someone's mother just died in a hurricane. The price of gas is safe — just don't start placing blame. Commenting on the new furniture in the office is a good tactic because it affects everyone.

Sports talk is not like the weather. Those who initiate sports talk at work alienate people who do not follow sports. And when sports-talk gets to the metaphor stage, the whole company is in trouble. When the sales manager says, “We’re using a long-pass strategy,” the sports-ignorant may continue to go after small accounts, and then there is no strategy at all. So those of you who initiate team-building meetings with talk about sports should consider the fact that you might be undermining teamwork by talking about other people’s teams.

I do not differentiate watching soap operas during the week from watching sports on the weekend: both strike me as a vapid escape from ones own reality. But people who want to be in charge are the people most likely to enjoy competing, so it’s natural that the leaders of the workplace talk sports. And it makes sense that if you want to be friendly with the leaders of the workplace, you need to be able to talk sports.

Luckily, you don’t actually need to be capable of playing the sport to understand it. Exhibit A: the beer-bellied couch potatoes who pontificate on football. Exhibit B: me. I play basketball very well and have never played football, and when it comes to analogies, I feel equally competent in both arenas.

Another step I’ve taken to fit in at work is to follow the soap-opera aspect of sports. This is not difficult to do because:

1. It satisfies my need for intrigue, which would otherwise require hours with the National Enquirer.

2. Personal problems (Mike Tyson has a temper) are much easier to remember than personal statistics (Mike Tyson had X knockouts in X number of years).

3. The New York Times Magazine (registration required) does an amazing job of covering sports as if it were drama. (My favorite — a recent article about a grade school aged skateboarder who won sponsorship from Nike. Now I can talk for hours on the perils of corporate sponsorship for athletes.)

The great thing about the drama of sports is that once you read a story, it’s good for more than a few years of workplace chatter (e.g., Venus's stint at fashion school or Michael Jordan’s family life).

If you can’t stand the idea of reading about sports, try this: Go to a gym. Learn a lot about weight training; people love to talk about their workouts at work. You can impress someone with your knowledge of squat techniques to the point where you will get out of having to talk about other sports-related trivia. Because, after all, people who talk about sports at work are just looking for an easy, non-threatening way to connect with people that is not as obvious as talking about the weather.

So okay, sports talk is workplace behavior that is non-inclusive of women, but so are a lot of other things, like, impromptu meetings in the men's room and posters of naked women in cubicles. So battle the latter when you can and capitulate to the sports talk. If you can't figure out how to fake it in a sports talking office, check out the book Talk Sports Like a Pro, by Jean McCormick. If you are one of the sports talk promoters in your office try reading a section of the newspaper that is not sports. It'll give you something else to talk about even when the Super Bowl looms large.

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Learn to give a compliment

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The problem with being nice is that it is not very interesting. It's the people with dirt to dish who are magnets at the water cooler.

But if you want your boss to like you, give him compliments. I know, that sounds like I'm telling you to brownnose. Instead, I'm telling you to find genuine ways to compliment your boss.

I never knew how important it is to compliment a boss until I complimented mine, mostly by accident. My boss gave a speech packed with bad news to employees, and I knew it had been hard on him. So after the meeting, I stopped by his office to tell him privately, “You delivered the bad news really well. People were shocked, but they listened to you, and you made them hopeful.”

His face brightened, and he said, in a surprised voice, “Really?”

I realized immediately how much my input had meant to him. How surprised he was to know I thought he did well and how much he respected my assessment. It seemed pathetic, really. I had thought he was a more confident guy than that. But that's the thing about complimenting your boss: It's disarming and makes your boss think of you as an equal

Studies show, in fact, that powerful people think that people who praise them are smarter and more likeable than those who don't. This may be because powerful people receive fewer compliments than the rest of us.

Not surprisingly, it is the job of powerful people act as though they don't care what anyone else thinks of them. But everyone likes — and needs — compliments, and one reason for the dearth of them at the top is that men give fewer compliments than women, and we all know who dominates the top ranks.

So start crafting your compliments now.

But don't brownnose. The difference between a genuine compliment and a desperate brownnosing attempt is empathy and insight. If you understand what worries your boss, and what she is trying hardest to achieve personally, then you will easily spot opportunities for praise. Don't just say “good job” for the sake of it. And don't just say “good job” either. Carefully craft a compliment in an area that is particularly important to your boss.

Why? The most effective compliments are very specific. And creative words are more memorable than standard words, according to research by Mark Knapp of the University of Texas. Praise of character is the most rare and most memorable praise of all. For example, “Nice job of being compassionate while you were laying everyone off.”

That said, your boss needs to view you as a trusted resource. This means you need to be able to give him bad news as well as good news. I will never forget the employee who told me, “You know how everyone laughs at your jokes at the staff meeting? Well, the jokes are not that funny, but since all those people report to you, they laugh. You should stop with the jokes.”

I was crushed to hear that I was not funny. But it would have been worse if I had been allowed to go on and on. (Though sometimes I tell myself that I really was funny and that particular employee just didn't get my humor.) Still, this person's subsequent compliments meant more to me because I knew she was honest.
I also remember when a boss pulled me into her office and said, “Joe (not his real name) is accusing me of leading him on romantically. This is a serious accusation since I am his boss. Do you think other people perceive me as leading him on?”

I was floored that my boss would ask me this question. Especially since she may have already been in a legal mess. But I was flattered that she trusted me to give her an honest answer. (The guy was a nut case.)

So give genuine compliments, but offer insightful criticism, as well. And remember, if you compliment your boss, she'll view you as a smarter person than she did previously and begin to take all your comments more seriously.

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Trying to network like a guy

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Everyone says, “Penelope why don't you write a book?” and I always reply, “Good idea.” And then I say, “I mean, I *am* writing one.” Because that's what you're supposed to say when someone asks if you’re close to accomplishing your next big goal — that you’re “working on it.” But I wasn't working on it. For a while, the only thing I knew about writing books is that to get a publisher’s attention, you first need to write a proposal, and 99% of book proposals are terrible.

I figured if I was going to write a book, I needed to know how to create a proposal. The bookstore seemed like a good place to start. But all the how-to books I read about writing a book weren’t helpful.

I read things like, “Writing a proposal in five easy steps,” and “How I sold ten thousand books.” After reading this advice, I wondered why, if proposal writing is so easy, all the agents complain that 99% of the proposals they receive are intolerable?

Since the how-to books were so unhelpful, I enrolled in a class on how to write books, conducted by a professional writers' organization. All the participants in the class were women. Immediately, my sirens went off. I know my next remark is sexist, but women earn 75 cents for every dollar a man makes, so I figured this class was not my ticket to making tons of money.

Yes, exceptions do exist. But salaries in typically female professions are lower than salaries paid for typically male occupations. Think elementary school teachers vs. university teachers, nurses vs. doctors, education sales vs. technology sales, and so on.

So on balance, my feeling is that a class attended solely by women will not lead me to grand career success.

I also was deterred that the instructor wasn't even male. Catalyst, the women’s research organization, notes that women who succeed in reaching their career goals typically have better mentoring experiences than women who don’t reach their goals. Since I planned to write a business book, and men are still further up the ladder in business than women, I wanted a male book-authoring mentor, because I felt I would reach my writing goals faster.

Despite all my belly-aching, I took the class, learned a lot, and even made a friend. But still, I mentally ran through my list of networking contacts hoping to think of a man who could help me write a book proposal. Eventually I thought of Bob Rosner, author of several books, including “Gray Matters: The Workplace Survival Guide.”

Since Bob also is a career advisor, I felt he wouldn't be afraid to give me some straight talk. For the most part, the only people who tell me how to run my career are my brothers (“Here's a good column topic: [Insert brother's name] and his perceived greatness.”) and my husband (“I'm sure your readers are sick of hearing about me in your column all the time, so could I have a little privacy?”) But Bob had some good advice. His first: “You should call me more often.”

He's right. Because he’s the one who usually calls me. And I need to be reminded to pick up the phone and network. Women are not as effective as men at networking, and I may be a good example of this.

There are many reasons for the gulf, a few mentioned recently in a CareerJournal.com article: For the most part, women aren’t included in the old boy’s network, the so-called real sphere of influence in business today; women are more often the primary caretakers and caregivers, so they have less time for networking; and finally, women are more reticent than men to mix business and pleasure — to women it seems inappropriate to use a friendship for business purposes.

But Bob and I talked a long time about book publishing and writing good proposals. He was willing to share information about royalties, agents and ways to cut corners. He even shared his ideas for a next book.

I felt great when I hung up. I thought perhaps I might be able to do a proposal after all. But after speaking with Bob, I understood why men are better networkers than women. Bob and his wife had a baby, with a difficult delivery, the same week his latest book was published. Yet after only a week, Bob was back on his feet and milking his network for publicity and book reviews. His wife was not back on her networking feet so fast.

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10 counter-intuitive career tips

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1. Don't be the hardest worker.
No one can work 70-hour weeks forever without losing their mind — or at least their perspective. You need to pace yourself. Besides, at this kind of pace, you may not always the best worker, but you’ll surely look like the most desperate.

2. Hire people you wouldn't want as friends.
Diverse business teams are more successful than homogenous teams. Creating diversity doesn't mean hiring one guy from each fraternity. It means hiring people who scare you, disagree with you and think in totally different ways than you.

3. Don’t fear failure.
Most people who have wild success have wild failure first. Have your failure early and significantly so that you're primed for success.

4. Learn to write direct mail.
A resume is a piece of direct mail. At best, it will get a 10-second scan from a hiring manager trying to decide whether to interview you. Know how to control what happens in those 10 seconds. Hint: You don't want the person to spend that time reading “References available upon request.”

5. Bake cookies for your team.
Surprise people with your caring and kindness. They will view you — and your mistakes — much more generously. Also, showing your soft side at the office is risky. Cookies are softness without the risk that you're revealing too much.

6. Give the brand of you a rest.
You cannot get to the top alone, so stop looking at yourself like you're a one-man show. Education is the No. 1 factor in determining who will be successful. The caliber of your stable of mentors is the No. 2 factor. So start looking outside yourself. You need help.

7. Blend in.
Do not stand out for how your dress. Stand out for your intelligence and creativity. If you dress in a way that makes people look at your clothes, then you say “look at me for my clothes”. If you dress in a way where no one notices what you are wearing then you force people to look at you for your brains. Remember, though, that boring, frumpy fashion stands out as much as flashy, funky fashion.

8. Toss the business books: Read fiction.
Your career is as dependent on your people skills as it is on your professional skills, so read books and magazines that help you to understand people. Read novels your co-workers recommend, and you'll have reliable repartee for weeks. Besides, most non-fiction tells you about peoples' mistakes, but fiction describes what’s achievable.

9. Say no frequently.
Be choosy about how you spend your time so that each project you work on becomes a great bulleted item on your resume. Don't work on projects that don't matter, will get killed or are clearly mismanaged. When your boss asks you to do something you don't have time for, remind her of her priorities and say you want to work on what’s most important to her. This is a professional way of saying no to unimportant assignments.

10. Ignore the urgent stuff.
Most urgent items on your to-do list are not big-picture items. But it’s the big-picture tasks that will make a significant difference in your career. So block off time each day to work solely on big-picture aspects of your to-do list. You don't have to be a visionary at work. But if you aren’t a visionary for your life, who will be?

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