Blogger’s refrain: What am I doing here, anyway?

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Yesterday traffic to my blog doubled. On top of the usual load of about 350 visitors, I had 350 investment bankers: At 1pm Dealbreaker posted a link to my guest rant, and in the next hour alone, 100 people came. No joke.

Of course, my traffic statistics were endlessly interesting to me throughout all this. But by the end of the day, all I could think about was how I have no system for capturing these extra visitors. I can tell from my traffic analysis that most people from Dealbreaker did not read other posts. I’m still thinking today about what would hook them.

As a former software marketing executive I think “squandered sales leads.” But then I think, hold it, I’m not even selling anything.

This reminds me of the time I worked at a Fortune 100 company during the very beginning of the Internet. A team of four of us (yes, that’s all it took back then) launched the web site and rumor had it that our site was the second online store — right behind Dell. A big deal, right? But no one in the company cared, probably because there was no strategy for making the web site huge, only a strategy for getting it up.

Now, like then, I am doing something large (read: consumes a large amount of my time) and I’m not sure why.

This is a career issue we should all think about. Here are the questions to ask:
1. What is your next career step?
2. What is your plan for using what you do today to get to your next step?
3. How can you let people know where you’re headed so they can help?

If you can’t answer these three questions then you don’t even know if you should be doing the stuff you’re doing today.

I don’t have great answers to those questions right now, but I realized from all this extra, one-time traffic how connected I feel to the people who do read the blog regularly. I realize that the community aspect is one of my favorite parts about the blog. So I know that when I have answers to those three questions, it will include the idea of community.

Meanwhile, I continue to post. And you know what? I know I have some affinity to those investment bankers, because below the Dealbreaker post about my blog is a post that I think is so funny.

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Office politics is not optional: Five tips for doing it better

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John Annabel, of Northampton, walked into the office one day to find himself working side by side with a new employee whose only qualification seemed to be that she was having an affair with Annabel's department head. Annabel says people didn't particularly care that she was in the office doing no work until she started taking credit for everyone else's work, most frequently Annabel's.

“I wanted to strangle my boss,” Annabel says. “I wanted to bring that dirtbag girlfriend down before she took credit for one more thing.” But Annabel's supervisor told him to stay calm and to say nothing damaging. He pointed out that the manager would never fire the woman, and the two of them would deny all of Annabel's accusations; complaining would only make Annabel look bad.

So everyone in the department laid low — said nothing about the woman who did nothing except among themselves. When the company went through a reorganization, and the department head changed, the new head said, “Does anyone know what this woman does?” And everyone said, “No,” and she was laid off.

In fact, though, office politics might be the most important skill to master as you climb up the corporate ladder. Julie Jansen, author of I Don't Know What I Want, but I Know It's Not This, says that in corporate life, one has no choice but to be savvy about politics. “Politics is everywhere. It is about the way things are done. It is the personality of the company.” So you have to figure out how to fit in. She tells people, “Be an actor, play the game, follow culture and this is jus as big a part of your job as anything else.”

In the end, Annabel left his job in an effort to escape the political climate of his last job, which left him cold. And he hopes to never have to deal with office politics again.

Larry Stybel, president of Stybel Peabody Lincolnshire, says that is it a common reaction to refuse to participate in office politics, but he advises those people “to just get over it.” Politics is not something you can escape. “Politics is really setting objectives and developing a coalition of people that will help achieve that objective.” Stybel explains that office politics does not have to be a bad thing. After all, politics is primarily about diplomacy and coalition building.

Stybel recommends taking the same approach Annabel did in his last job: Find a mentor in the office, someone who is great at office politics, get some direct advice from them about tough spots, but also study them from afar to figure out what they do right.

Jansen adds, “There is a tremendous amount of resistance to office politics.” Many people complain that this sort of behavior goes against who they are at their core. Jansen points out that done right, politics is not inherently immoral. It merely involves, “speaking to the right people, going to the right parties and communicating the way everyone else at the company communicates.”

While Jansen advises that you should not compromise your core values to be political, if you find that you can't ever engage in office politics without violating your core values, then you don't belong in corporate America.

Jansen suggests five steps you can take to be more politically astute immediately:

1. Don't try to change or resist company culture including dress, communication styles and office hours. Being different does not work.

2. Practice self-awareness. This is a life-long task and every day you can become a little bit more aware of how people perceive you. Just doing your job is not enough. You need to do it in a way that makes a positive impression on everyone else.

3. Manage your stress levels so you can avoid emotional displays of inconsistent behavior and inconsistent messages. Most emotional outbursts come from unmanaged stress.

4. Be approachable all the time — in your cube, in the hallway, even in the bathroom.

5. Network before you need to network. Being good at politics means that you are good at relationship building, and you can count on a wide range of people when you need them.

But some people will never feel comfortable playing the political game. For those people, Stybel recommends a job where one can say, “Leave me alone” and still excel at the work: Sales would be a definite no, but a career in, say, programming might work. But take a look at yourself. If you don't have the skills for a leave-me-alone job, you need the skills to make office politics work for you. Otherwise you'll get stuck.

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Guest rant: My investment-banking brother says…

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Here is one of hundreds of reasons senior investment bankers make life for analysts worse than it already is: Voicemail.

First of all, no one under thirty uses voicemail unless they are making a joke. If you make a call and the person does not pick up their phone, send an email. That’s why they gave you the BlackBerry, right? Picking up a voicemail is slow and there is no way to file it.

Also, people must stop using inept management tactics like the “red bomb.” This is when a senior guy wants to tell you something, but instead of calling you and risking that you’ll answer the phone and therefore be able to ask a question, (like What’s the deadline?), he goes directly into the voice mail system to leave you a message.

It’s a red bomb because you get the red light on your phone that means you have a voice mail, and a bomb because you know only someone internally can do it, and it must be a senior guy because no one else would do it. If you’re sitting at your desk and all of a sudden you have a voice mail, and you know your phone hasn’t rung, you’ve just been nailed by a red bomb.

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How to tell your boss you quit: Artfully shift the balance of power

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Of all the Google searches that end up at my blog, the most common is some version of, “How do I tell my boss that I’m quitting.” This seems to be a frequent topic at a lot of career sites; quitting well is a big issue.

A lot of the problems around quitting come from the abrupt shift in power. Before you quit, you are beholden to your boss. When you are quitting, you feel a surge in power as you let your boss know you’re moving on to something better.

So really, quitting is about managing assertiveness. You want to be assertive enough to go find another opportunity for yourself, but not so assertive that you offend the person who has been a decent boss. So have humility and thankfulness, but add some choice words about what a great offer you took for your next job.

Assertiveness is a skill that people notice a lot in other people but we don’t pay attention enough to in ourselves, according to Daniel Ames, professor of Columbia Business School. When it comes to quitting, it is easy to get overly assertive, as you become intoxicated with the idea that you don’t need to please your boss any more. And it is easy to downplay the greatness of the next thing you do so as to not seem ungrateful for the job you are leaving. So it’s natural to feel a little unsure in this situation.

The good news is that Ames says we can teach ourselves tactics for effective assertiveness. And since people in their twenties quit a job almost every year, quitting is a great way to learn these skills.

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A messy desk undermines your career

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You can judge someone’s personality by what his or her work space looks like. Take Tara Hirshfeld, for example. She’s set up her office on a picnic table. She has the laptop, the headset, even the office-type snacks. But there are leaves falling and cars honking. Intuitively, you know she’s not an accountant-type. And you surely won’t be surprised to hear that she’s a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

People leave deliberate and inadvertent clues about themselves in their personal space and Samuel Gosling, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, studies these clues. And Gosling concludes that your co-workers are good at judging what the clues mean even if they don’t know why.

Deliberate clues people leave are things like plants, which reveal that you are nice and that you intend to stay a while, and candy, which reveals that you’re an extrovert, because you want people to drop by your office and talk. These are deliberate because a person puts them in their office for other people to see. Some clues are deliberate but not other-focused. For example, a pebble you keep from the beach of your first kiss will not be meaningful to someone who doesn’t know the story, but it reminds you of something nice. Still something like this gives the co-worker information, and he or she will pick up on the fact that you’re sentimental.

Hirshfeld’s clues fall into the inadvertent category. For example, when asked about her picnic-bench desk, Hirshfeld says, “I needed some fresh air.” She inadvertently conveys that she is non-conventional, which, for an art student seems fine. But for an accountant, watch out. You can give inadvertent clues with a plant, too. “Anyone can buy a plant,” says Gosling, “but you need to be task oriented to actually keep the plant alive.”

Be careful about all the clues you leave about yourself in your office because your image is at stake. And the image you project might be more powerful than the work you actually do.

So manage your workspace like you manage the colors in your wardrobe, the layout of your memos and all other aspects of your image. In many instances you’ll be able to control what you project. For example, if you are trying to be more detail-oriented in your work, but you’ve killed every plant you’ve ever owned, don’t buy another because your dead plant will just emphasize your lack of attention to detail.

When it comes to projecting a positive image through your personal space, some areas are more easily managed than others. A messy desk is tough. If you keep a messy desk, it’s probably inadvertent, and you will have to change behavior in order to clean up your act. It’s worth the effort, though. “There is a cultural bias toward orderliness,” says Eric Abrahamson, professor at Columbia University Business School, “Messiness is considered bad.” Kelly Crescenti, an Illinois-based career coach, concurs: “When people have a clean desk it looks like they get things done and they are productive.”

You cannot really know how productive someone is by looking at their desk, says Julie Morgenstern organizing guru and author of Never Check Email in the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work. But she concedes that “the image issue is giant.” So even if you can find everything you need on your pile-laden desk, clean it if you want to look good. Start with a filing system, and Crescenti advises that at minimum, you take the last fifteen minutes of every day to actually use the system and clean things up a little before you go home.

But as with all image management advice, don’t go overboard: Everything in moderation. Abrahamson provides a postmodern defense of the messy desk: “Messiness is related to creativity because it tends to juxtapose things that don’t normally go together.”

“It’s the last frontier of messiness,” says Abrahamson, and he reports that he’s seen computer desktops that rival the worst of the classic desktop messes. Hirshfeld can attest to that. “The last computer I had got very, very messy.”

But that might be okay; it’s true that your co-workers can accurately judge you by looking at your work space, but it’s also true that your computer desktop is a nice place to hide your worst attributes.

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