Book excerpt: How to turn a bad boss into a good one

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It’s another excerpt from my book, Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success. This is tip #33 : There Are No Bad Bosses, Only Whiny Employees.

Want to deal with a bad boss? First, stop complaining. Unless your boss breaks the law, you don’t have a bad boss, you have a boss you are managing poorly. Pick on your boss all you want, but if you were taking responsibility for your career, you wouldn’t let your boss’s problems bring you down.

Everyone has something to offer. Find that in your boss and focus on learning everything you can. Or leave. The good news is that in most cases, you don’t have to leave. You just need to manage your relationship with your boss with more empathy, more distance, and more strategy.

My favorite example of a managing a bad boss is one I had at a software company who refused to learn how to use a computer. I conducted most communication with him via phone, and I often played the role of secretary even though I was a vice president. He once said to me, “You’re such a fast typist!” And I thought, “You’re such a complete idiot!”

But in truth, he was not. He was a top negotiator of government contracts. I stepped back and recognized that he was overwhelmed with the prospect of changing the way he had been working for twenty years, and I was in a position to help him. I found that the more dependent he was on me for email, the more I was able to insert myself into high-level deals that he would not otherwise have let me in on. I helped him avoid having to change, and he taught me how to be a dealmaker.

It’s always important to weigh the benefits. A good boss would have learned to type and never would have thought of delegating his typing to a vice president. But I didn’t have a good boss. I had a typical boss – one with poor execution of good intentions. He had knowledge and skills to offer me as long as I could manage our relationship productively. I never expected him to manage the relationship for us, because I wanted to make sure I was getting what I needed out of it.

I could have spent my time complaining. There was a lot to complain about. Instead I always approached him with empathy and knew when to put my two cents in and when to shut up.

Aside from cutting a deal, he didn’t have a lot of management skills, and this gap left more room for me to shine. My solid interpersonal skills helped fill in what he was missing and helped me to get what I wanted: A (reluctant and difficult but ultimately) very useful mentor.

So take another look at the boss you call bad. Think about what motivates him: What is he scared about that you can make easier? What is he lacking that you can compensate for? What does he wish you would do that you don’t? Once you start managing this relationship more skillfully, you will be able to get more from your boss in terms of coaching and support: You’ll be able to tip the scales from the bad boss side to the learning opportunity side.

In fact, you should always hope for a little incompetence on your boss’s part. The hole in his list of talents provides a place for you to shine. The point, after all, and no one shines when they’re complaining.

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Blending my kids and my career (ugh)

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Here’s what it looks like to have a flexible schedule for kids and work all day: A computer with a broken K key.

Usually I can tell people I can’t talk after 1pm. It’s when I take care of my kids, and I know better than to think I can have a serious conversation with them around.

But now, when I’m doing radio and TV for my book, I am not really in the driver’s seat when it comes to scheduling. The first time I took an interview after 1pm, I was living in a fantasy world that the kids would sort of care for themselves. That’s the time that somehow, my son who has never displayed a penchant for small-motor skills, dismantled my K key and lost it.

I told myself that I’d replace it. Can you buy a K on the internet? And then I told myself that I would move the Q key to the K spot. But the truth about having a great flexible schedule where kids and work mix is that there is never any time for things like replacing a K. So I just learned to come up with words that don’t require it.

And I continued. But then I get a day like the one when Fox News calls me at 3pm. I can’t tell them call me back, right? It’s not like I’m endorsing Fox News here, but I am endorsing the idea that being on Fox will sell some copies of my book. So I take the call.

But it is not good news. It is good news that they want to talk with me about my opinions about cancelling email at work to increase productivity. You can imagine, I have a lot of opinions on this completely inane idea from some luddite CEO who can’t get a handle on his inbox.

But my two-year-old is trailing me, not really being noisy, but doing things that need some attention, like investigating the lamp switch. At first I pay a little attention to him and a little attention to Fox. But you know how right before you are going to die you have ten thousand thoughts in one second? I had that – I had ten thousand thoughts about how this is my big break in television and I am messing it up by letting myself get distracted by my kid. I am not being as scintillating to the producer as I could be.

All this in one second. And in the next second, I am taking out a box of Cheerios and letting my son dump them on the floor. This is very interesting to him. For a minute. Then, when I fear he might be getting up to do something I’d have to pay attention to, I take out Coco Puffs. He dumps. Then walks. Then stomps. By the end of the call, I have endeared myself to Fox, I think. But you can imagine the house: Crunchy and disgusting.

So it is no surprise that when I have a radio interview at 4pm, I plan an intricate babysitting scheme where I give up hours on three days to get extra hours on the day of my interview. And then the babysitter is sick. Of course. So I try to weasel out of the interview, but I worry that this is something that women with kids are known for. (Are they?)

So I take the kids to swimming and I plan a scheme where they are nonchalantly eating junk food next to the TV when it’s time for my radio interview, and then I sort of disappear. But other kids come and then I have to reveal to the other parents that I’m dumping my kids in front of the swimming TV. And then the radio show is late, so I have to reveal to the manager that my kids might be unruly and there is actually no one supervising them.

The manager is so nice that she lets me stand in the broom closet so there is no background pool noise.

So this weekend I decided that I need to get a grip. I don’t want to be the book author who does interviews from broom closets. The thing is, I don’t really know how to solve that problem right now. So I solved the problem I could, and I bought a new computer: Check out my new K. It’s everywhere.

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Letter to new graduates. And how about a braided career?

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Are you switching jobs every two years? Are you draining your savings to start companies with no business plan? Are you hiring a headhunter to find you a spouse? These are things you should be doing to find the success you’re looking for in the new workplace. Sure, they create instability, but what else are you going to do? Work for IBM until you get a gold watch?

The most important thing in your life is the people you love, so you need to figure out how to create a work life that will accommodate that. Do you love your dad? Tell your new boss that before you even start working, you need a week off for your dad’s birthday cruise. If your boss says no then thank goodness you learned ahead of time that you don’t want to work there. Do you love your girlfriend? Pack your sleeping bag and follow her to Costa Rica to save a village. You can get a job saving the rain forest, or, better yet, spend the six months making a plan for how you two are going to do shared-care parenting.

The best way to make sure you will have time and money to create the life you want is to have what I am going to start calling a braided career. Intertwine the needs of the people you love, with the work you are doing, and the work you are planning to do, when it’s time for a switch. This way, when you run out of money you can get a corporate job for a year. If life as a stay-at-home mom is unfulfilling, you can start a side business from the cafe on the corner. If your COBRA runs out, you can get a hard-core job that involves a lot of travel, pick up the free miles and the international experience and once you’ve earned the ability to do COBRA again, take a trip around the world with a backpack and sleeping bag. And don’t forget to use those upgrade miles. Who says you can’t store a sleeping bag in the first-class cabin?

Does this sound unstable to you? It’s not. The voice inside your head that’s screaming about instability is your mom’s. She’s saying, “I lived through the feminist movement so you can quit your job to follow your boyfriend? I didn’t raise you to do that.” The voice inside your head is your dad’s saying, “You want to have fun? You have one minute’s worth of experience. Who’s going to pay you to have fun?” And, unfortunately, the voices might also be at your dinner table, because you might also be living with your mom and dad.

But tune them out. Because you’re on the right track. And really, it’s a track. It feels like you’re all over the place, it feels like you have no plan, it feels like you’re always about to spend your last cent. But you are learning to create stability through transition. You can become a master of transition and you are achieve the thing you want most: A work life that supports the values you hold dear – time, family, friends, community, passion, and fun.

So look, this is what you need to do. You need to stop thinking that the transitions are going to end as soon as you grow up. This is not reality talking, this is your uncle talking — to your dad to console him that you just quit grad school. What is going to end is the bad feeling about transitions. You’re going to get great at them because you are not the first person to have a quarterlife crisis. You’re not the first person to quit a traveling sales job so you’ll be home to have sex when you’re ovulating. You’re not the first person to run out of money and have to take a 70-hour a week corporate job – for awhile, just to catch up on bills. Lots of people are making these sorts of decisions, and they’re great decisions, in the context of good transition skills, and a good understanding of the new, braided career.

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Book event reminder: New York City on Thursday, June 7

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I’ll be at Tequila Jack’s on the upper east side from 6:30 – 8. You can buy books there if you want, I’ll sign them, and it’ll probably be small and casual, so we can chat. I’m looking forward to meeting people there.

Regular exercise is no longer optional

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Exercise is an essential part of a successful career. It’s an essential part of a good life. I think one problem a lot of us face is that we approach exercise like it’s a choice.

When email first became widely used, I worked for a guy who thought it was optional. At some point, it truly was optional. High-level executives used to be able to say, “Call my secretary. I don’t have email.” I remember thinking that my boss did not understand reality. That times had changed and his career was going to end if he couldn’t manage to take a look at his in box once a day.

Today I am thinking the same thing about exercise. We used to think that it was optional. But today, it is so overwhelmingly clear that regular exercise changes your life and makes you perform better at work, that it is absolutely absurd to think that you can function optimally in your life without regular exercise.

This is not just about good-looking people doing better in life (which is true). It runs deeper than that. Mary Carmichael wrote in Newsweek about the research that shows exercise boosts our IQ. And exercise increases our resilience to difficult times, which is often the difference between success and failure in getting what we want.

I told myself all of this stuff last month when I started going to the gym again. Last year, a few months after I started blogging, I was so totally overwhelmed by the amount of work it took, that I told myself there was nothing to do but stop going to the gym until I caught up with my work.

It took me four months to realize that the extra hour a day that I was able to work because I wasn’t at the gym was not changing my life. Being overwhelmed by the demands of blogging was not about one hour. It was about that I had made a career change and didn’t even realize it.

But going to the gym for an hour does change my life. Regular exercise requires a careful mental shift. First you clearly prioritize what’s important to you, and why. Then you pick a specific time and specific place, and then you convince yourself that going is not negotiable. There is clear evidence to show that people who make one conscious change – such as going to the gym every day – unconsciously change many other positive changes in their life. Making one decision to live consciously has a ripple affect throughout your life.

In an interview with Harvard Magazine, psychology professor Ellen Langer says, “More than 30 years of research has shown that mindfulness is figuratively and literally enlivening.” And while we all say we want to live in the present, Langer points out, “If you’re not in the present, you’re not there to know you’re not there.”

I remind myself of this when I start thinking of exercise as negotiable. And for all the ten million pieces of advice on how to make exercise regular in one’s life, the best advice, I have found, is to realize that I will not get the life I want if I don’t go to the gym when I plan to go to the gym. When I interviewed positive psychologist Senia Maymin, she convinced me that the key to regular exercise is to tell myself that it is not a choice, and to also tell myself stories that encourage me to go to the gym. One of my stories is the one I told you — about how working that extra hour did not help me catch up at work.

So tell me, what stories do you tell yourself to exercise regularly? Do stories work for you?

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Twentysomething: Raunchy old photos will be part of the revolution

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By Ryan Healy – During my senior year at Penn State, the Nittany Lions knocked off the highly (over) rated Ohio State Buckeyes. It was one of the best football games of my college years. A mob of students rushed down the bleachers, the field became a flood of blue and white.

But unfortunately, rushing the field is not a Big Ten-acceptable activity. So the other guys in blue, the police, started an investigation using Facebook to identify suspects.

I guess if you’re going to perform illegal acts, Facebook, MySpace and other online networks that incorporate photographs are probably not for you. But as we leave our crazy college years behind and enter the workforce, should we really have to worry what recruiters think of our social lives?

I have a MySpace page and a Facebook profile. I have hundreds of pictures on each site that show me in both professional and not-so-professional settings. I could remove their embarrassing or “incriminating” pictures to save some face in the real world. Or I could replace them with photos from an old photo restoration service. I have never considered either option.

Social networking sites are blurring the lines between personal and professional life. There is no reason these lines should not be blurred. Most young people lead very healthy social lives, and because of these websites much of our social lives are online. When you live your personal/social life online there is no escaping who you are and what you do. It may be scary to people not accustomed to the openness of the Internet, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a refreshing. Why should I pretend to be one person for eight hours a day and someone else entirely for the rest?

It’s absurd to pretend that everyone at work is a saint. It’s just not true. What’s the big deal if our bosses know what we did on Saturday night or what we did in college for that matter?

The whole idea of our lives being available for public display is actually pretty cool. Think about it. If the world already knows what we do in our spare time and we are all able to be completely open about our interests, thoughts and ideas without fear of retribution or not being hired then we can bring our whole being to work everyday.

Of course, if you’re idea of a good time is extremely sick and twisted then you may want to consider keeping things a secret. Better yet, you may want to figure out some better things to do in your spare time to avoid a prison sentence. But for most of us who like to have a little innocent fun, there is no reason to play the Jekyll-and-Hyde role.

Jason Warner, head of staffing at Google writes, “Today there is a fuzzy, but growing distinction that companies will continue to draw between candidate professional experiences, competencies, and capabilities and their private lives and outside behaviors. It’s a line we don’t likely want to cross, because if we cross it for candidates, we may cross it for employees, and that compounds the problem.”

The more young people enter the workforce the less risk there is that someone will Google them to look for bad behavior. Human resources leaders don’t have the time to sleuth. But also, there just aren’t enough perfect little angels in the world to go around.

I urge everyone: Let’s leave all of our pictures up on whatever social networking sites we use. What we do on the weekends is just as much apart of our lives as our day jobs. Don’t be afraid of your boss seeing a risque photo of you and don’t be afraid to talk a little business at the bar. The sooner we get past this personal and professional juggling act, the sooner we can see real change in the workplace.

Ryan Healy’s blog is Employee Evolution.

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Atlanta book tour update

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I'm sorry to say that I'm not going to make it to Atlanta today. I have a family issue that I have to deal with and there is really no other choice. I'm so disappointed to cancel. And I'm really sorry to inconvenience people in Atlanta. I was really looking forward to meeting people. I hope I will have another chance for an Atlanta event down the line!

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