Interviewing idiots

, , , ,

In case you've never noticed, I rarely interview anyone for this column. Most of my sources are family and unsuspecting friends who complain that I make everyone look bad. But it is not true. It is true that they THINK I make them look bad, but in fact, I could rip them apart in my column, and I do not, in the spirit of being invited back for Thanksgiving and Birthdays.

Recently, I have taken up columnist tasks that require me to interview strangers. And, like the courtesy I give to my family, I do not trash the people I interview. But I am at my breaking point. Some people are so incredibly stupid about their career that I actually struggle to make them seem intelligent during the interview.

So here are two interviews from smart people who are career idiots. (But first, a caveat: I am making the people anonymous. Many readers generously send stories from the field. And really, I love to hear from readers. I learn a lot. So you should know that if I think you're an idiot and decide to write about it, I will at least disguise your identity.)

Career idiot number one: The Apprentice. Not all of them. Just the unlucky one I interviewed. He really did not have a career, which was, undoubtedly, the cause of his ridiculous antics on the TV show that eventually got him fired. But he decided to make a career out of getting fired by becoming a public speaker.

Here are things you need to become a public speaker:
1. Something to say. This guy had nothing. Except to tell me that he was available for speaking.
2. You need an ability to answer questions from the press so that your name gets in the paper and people recognize you and hire you as a speaker. He did not answer my questions, which were all softballs. And he even asked to see the notes I was writing so he could edit them. I laughed.

The lesson from this career idiot is that if you must be a poser, pose carefully. When you first start being something new, (for him, a public speaker) you need to pretend you are that person so people hire you as that person. But do some research before you start pretending. At least learn the basics of how to conduct yourself, and what people will ask of you.

Career idiot number two: The painter whose identity I probably don't even need to hide because you don't know him because he's never sold a painting.

He makes a lot of money as VP of Something Big at his tech company and he gave notice six months before his wife quit work to have a baby. He is starting a career as a painter. He has no idea how to get his art to the market, or how many pieces he'll have to sell to support his family. But he says he has to be true to himself, and painting is his dream.

He says he feels trapped at his current job. This is the picture he paints of trapped: He wanted to move across country, so his large and generous company let him set up remote office in his new home. He hates the long hours of his lucrative job, and his company would let him go part time, but he doesn't ask for that because he doesn't want to like his job. He fears that if he liked his job he wouldn't quit to do his art.

Here is the lesson from career idiot number two: Take a big-picture look at what you have. It might be a lot better than you realize. Remember the first time you woke up next to the love of your life, and up close, in the morning, their face looked splotched and scruffy and gross? Well jobs are like people; they never look great up close so you need to pay attention to the big picture. This guy's big picture is that he has a great job for supporting his new family and painting on the side, and if he's really an artistic genius then he can make a bundle painting and quit his job.

I hate to be a buzz kill here. I'm not saying that I don't like dreamers. I do. I like people who reach for careers that are fulfilling but difficult. But just because the odds of success are low doesn't mean you have to make them lower with poor planning.

/17 Comments

Make a plan to manage your success

, , , , ,

I got a book deal. So this is, undoubtedly, the first of at least a hundred columns that will plug the book, which is not coming out until spring 2006. Far away, yes, but not too far for you to make a note in your planner: “Buy Penelope’s book.”

I got a big advance for the book. Not big like Bill Clinton, who received four million dollars. But big enough to buy a nice house (if I didn't live in New York City, which I do) and big enough to stop fights with my husband about money (no small feat, believe me).

Yet for all my recent success, someone asked me last night, “So, what do you do?” and I didn't say anything about a book. Lame. That's when red lights went off in my head. Experience tells me that one needs to manage career success as carefully as one manages failure. So I am making a plan to manage the book success.

1. Take time to be happy.
In the past, I have been at points of great success and been too driven toward the top to see how far I had come. For example, when I was a professional beach volleyball player signing autographs and smacking a volleyball in Bud Light commercials, I was always unhappy that I was not in the top twenty players. Now, as someone who makes a living sitting at a desk, I am amazed at my former athletic achievements (and muscle mass). But I never enjoyed them when I had them. I focused too much on what I didn't have.

So I am taking a month to bask in my book success. I am telling myself that my hard work and tenacity with my book proposal paid off. I am patting myself on the back, which I always tell other people to do, but rarely do myself.

2. Tell people about the success.
One of the people I mentor amazes me with his diligence when it comes to telling me about his success. I don't have a very close relationship with him, and sometimes I think to myself, “Why is he telling me this? Why is he sending me links to his stuff?” but I always end up thinking better of him when he tells me his achievements. He has taught me that there is very little harm in letting people know what you're doing that is great.

When it comes time for me to send emails to announce my book deal, my first instinct is to be hesitant — thinking with each email, “Does this person really want to know? Does she care?” But my mentee has taught me that I shouldn't think twice. I should just send the email. If someone is offended by my announcement then they were probably never going to be helpful to me anyway. Being shy about my success will get me nowhere.

3. Draft a strategy to leverage the success.
Too many times in my life I have followed up success with worries — that I would not get to the next level, that the achievement would slip out from under me. My worries about leveraging success undermined my ability to do it.

Take, for example, the time when I was running my own company and hiring all my friends and family and we had tons of money and great press. I spent my days so worried about where to take the company next that my hair started falling out. Really. I never even knew that women could lose their hair from stress until my shower drain clogged.

This book deal has great potential for worries because really, a book deal is all about sales. I have to make sure people buy the book. Also, I can't help thinking about the next book deal. Writing is a business; there's no point in launching one product and calling it a day because a thriving business is a bunch of products.

So this time, I'm going to use my success as a starting point for strategic thinking instead of fearful thinking. And the first thing, in this vein, will be to craft a new answer to the question, “What do you do?” I need to get my book into the answer.

/2 Comments

Blame yourself first: Answers to letters from readers, sort of

, , ,

Even though I rarely tell you about the letters I receive from readers, I do receive a lot of mail. Almost all of it is thoughtful and intelligent, and the mail does influence what I choose to write about. Many times I answer questions directly, but today I'm going to answer a reader email in the column. My hope is that if you see how I answer a question, then you can answer your own questions using a very basic but tried-and-true Penelope formula.

The woman, I'll call her Darcy, wrote that she is a PhD who was hired to do research and present numbers to the Board of her company. The letter is much longer than that one sentence, but the basic point is that the board was getting inaccurate numbers from a lesser-qualified person so the board hired a PhD to make sure the information was completely accurate. Fair enough, especially in the wake of Enron and Aon and all the other number-hiding companies that crashed in recent history.

The problem is that, according to Darcy, the board is frustrated by Darcy's inability to come up with a way to present the numbers that the board likes. And Darcy is frustrated by the board's need to have numbers that are not exactly what she comes up with. After all, wasn't she hired to come up with the truth?

Here is some insight into how Penelope thinks: I look at the letter and say to myself, why is this Darcy's fault? You might think, Penelope you are so unreasonable to always blame the letter-writer. But face reality: You are not going to make a board change. You're not going to make a boss change. The people who write letters to me are generally having trouble with people who are not going to change. So there's no point in saying, “Wow, you sure do work with difficult people. Sorry. Love, Penelope.” Or, worse yet, saying, “Yes. This is a very bad situation. You should quit. That'll really teach your company a lesson. Good luck with unemployment. Love, Penelope.”

The best advice I can give is how the person with the problem can solve the problem herself. In the case of Darcy, she needs to recognize that she has an impossible job. There's a reason why very few Ph.Ds are CEOs. The former is all about detail and accuracy. The latter is all about big-picture and spin. Not that both titles don't require big picture AND accuracy, but very few people can focus on big picture and accuracy at the same time.

Probably, Darcy is never going to be able to re-jigger numbers for public relations spin. My first advice would be for her to extract herself from the spin part of the job — give the numbers to a public relations person before the numbers go to the board, for example. But maybe Darcy really wants to step up and deliver the numbers in a way that the board wants. In truth, people who can juggle details and big-picture go very far in corporate life. So maybe Darcy can do this, but then she needs to stop complaining about what the board wants, and learn to deliver it. Let the board decide if it's proper or not. (Note to ethics mavens: Darcy is definitely at the beginning of her career and in no position to be questioning her board's ethics. She would be ignored and then fired.)

But let's take a step back. Because almost all of my “What should I do?” emails from readers are like this one. When you have a problem with how other people in the office are treating you, figure out how you can change. When you have a problem with how people want you to do your job, change your approach, or change your job description, but don't blame someone else for what they want. This is not going to get you anywhere.

People in corporate life get promoted for their ability to take control of a problem and solve it. If you cannot take control of problems within your own job, you are not going to persuade people you can take care of corporate problems. So on some level, you have to look at your problems like I would look at your problems: Blame yourself first.

/2 Comments

7 ways to decrease your hours without harming your career

, , ,

It is possible to work fewer hours without hurting your career, but you need to get serious about systematically changing how you approach your work. First, don't blame your long hours on your boss, your CEO, or your underlings. Someone who does not make a conscious, organized effort to take responsibility for the number of hours they work can be thrown off course by anyone. But the person who systematically follows the steps below will not be thrown off course, even by a workaholic boss in a workaholic industry.

1. Concentrate on quality of work over quantity.
The person who builds a career on doing the most work commits to living on a treadmill. The work will never be done, and you will become known among your co-workers as someone who never turns down an assignment. Read: dumping ground.

Quality is what matters: people don't lose a job for not working unpaid overtime, they lose a job for not performing well at the most important times; and a resume is not a list of hours worked, it is a list of big accomplishments.

2. Know the goals of your job.
You need to know the equivalent of a home run in your job. Get a list of goals from your boss, and understand how they fit into the big picture. Judge if your work is high quality by what people need from you and how they measure success. Be sure to get goals that are quality oriented and not hours oriented. Suggest replacing, “Devote eight hours a week to cold-calling” to “Find six qualified leads in three months.”

3. Refuse bad assignments.
Figure out what matters, and spend your time on that. Once you have clear short-term and long-term goals, it's easy to spot the person you don't need to impress, the project that will never hit your resume, or the hours worked that no one will notice.

And then say no. Constantly. The best way to say no is to tell people what is most important on your plate so they see that, for you, they are a low priority. Prioritizing is a way to help your company, your boss and yourself. No one can fault your for that.

4. Know your boss's goals.
Your best tool for saying no to a project is reminding your boss what her goals are. If she cannot keep track of her own goals, help her. Because if you worm your way out of work that doesn't matter to her, so that you can do work that does matter to her, she is more likely to back you up. Also your boss will protect you from assignments from other people if you show her how the other peoples' work affects your boss's goals.

5. Take control of what you can.
Even small efforts at control add up to a lot, and best of all, they usually go unnoticed by others. For example, refuse to make meetings on Monday and you are less likely to have to prepare for meetings on the weekend. Refuse meetings after 4:30 p.m. and you are less likely to miss dinner at home. Ignore your phone while you write your weekly report and you're less likely to stay late to finish it. You don't need to tell people: “My policy is no meetings at x time.” Just say you're already booked and suggest another time. You can't do this every meeting, but you can do it enough to make a difference in your life.

6. Know your own boundaries.
“Wanting to work fewer hours” is too vague a goal because you won't know which hours to protect. Try getting home at 7pm, not working weekends, or leaving for two hours in the middle of the day for a yoga class. These are concrete goals for cutting back hours.

7. Be brave.
Brave people can say no when someone is pushing hard, and brave people can go home when other people are working late. The bravery comes from trusting yourself to find the most important work and to do it better than anyone else.

/1 Comment

Handwriting analysis can help careers

, , ,

Handwriting analysis is no longer for freaks and psychics. Multinational companies hire handwriting analysts to understand personality traits of prospective job candidates. Character traits that matter during the hiring process — creativity, self-esteem, leadership, and optimism, for example — are revealed in one's handwriting.

You should learn how to analyze your co-workers' handwriting and your own to give yourself an edge at work. I have found that the basics of analysis are quick and easy to learn. Getting along with other people and knowing yourself are essential pieces to career success, and analyzing peoples' handwriting can help you speed up the process. Here are some examples:

Get along with people better
Knowing someone's personality traits is invaluable for collaborating with and motivating that person. Depending on that person to tell you his or her own traits is risky. Most people don't know themselves well enough; even focus group leaders don't bother to ask people directly what they like anymore.

Fortunately, with very little expertise, you can use handwriting to evaluate someone's dominant traits. For example, someone with a signature that leaves a lot of space between first and last names is not going to be an intimate, emotional person, so you can stop trying to forge that kind of relationship. If the first and last names overlap, that person is relationship-oriented and probably wants more than long-distance management from you.

Make better career choices
You can also use handwriting analysis to gauge your own dominant traits. Then you can figure out which career is best for the type of person you are.

For example, you can learn what sort of handwriting is appropriate for the job you aim for, and compare your own handwriting to that standard. Angular is appropriate for a programmer and inappropriate for a sales person. Perfect, schoolteacher writing reveals the need to establish order and would be a bad sign if you aspired to the freethinking required of an inventor.

Handwriting really does reflect your true self. So if you discover your penmanship does not reflect traits necessary for the career you have in mind, ask yourself if you are even in the right field.

Improve your image
Handwriting is like clothing. Your audience cannot help but evaluate your message by what it looks like. You wouldn't wear sweatpants to an important meeting, and you wouldn't wear a ball gown, either. Take the same care with your handwriting.

For example, in a note to your boss, if your letters are rigid and perfect you will project the image of someone who is anal, inflexible, and non-visionary. Fine if you are an accountant, not fine if you want to be CFO. If you scrawl a quick, barely legible note to your boss you seem to be more involved in your own ideas than in the people around you, you might project the image of an eccentric artistic genius, but if you aspire to management, write more legibly.

You also project self-esteem in your signature. I am shocked at how many people have a very tiny signature. You need no training in handwriting analysis to know that this is an expression of low self-esteem. Even if you feel like you want to disappear, force yourself to sign your name like you want people to see it.

To all you doubters, test the theory. Get a handwriting analysis book from the library. You only need to skim a few pages to get an idea of what to look for. Then take handwriting samples from people you know well and evaluate them. I bet you'll find the rules of analysis depict an accurate view of that person.

When you add handwriting analysis to your career arsenal, start out small — look at different loops and slopes and figure out what they mean. After a while, you'll find that handwriting analysis actually feels intuitive; like all good insights, once you have it it'll seem obvious, and acting on results of handwriting analysis will make as much sense to you as it does to those multinational companies.

/9 Comments

How to choose between passion and pay

, , , ,

Everyone wants to feel passion about their job, but passion and pay do not always go hand in hand, and often they are inversely related. The trick for many of us is to figure out how to balance the love of our life with the food on our table.

Bill Hewett is the bass player for the band, the Modeles, but he does not consider himself a big risk taker when it comes to putting food on the table. So he knew he was in trouble when fire was banned from street performances on his favorite street for performing. Before that, he had been making $500 in a weekend juggling flaming rings.

“It wasn’t easy work,” he says. “I’d have to stake out my spot at 8 a.m. even though I didn’t start juggling until 6 p.m. I used to let other performers have my spot until my show began. The best juggling spot was a place a few jugglers have held for forever, and if you don’t get a big enough crowd, they hassle you for wasting their space. So my spot was at a newsstand.”

After the fire ban, his income fell and he had to supplement it by working at a grocery store. But when the juggling season ended in the fall, the salary of a bagger didn’t cut it. So he took a computer job at the New England Foundation for the Arts. Bill didn’t really have all the skills the company needed, but the company didn’t have the money to pay for the skills they needed, so it worked out well for everyone.

Barbara Reinhold, a psychologist and the head of the Career and Executive Development Program at Smith College, encounters people with the passion-pay dilemma at all levels of the workforce.

“There’s no escaping the need to do what you love as part of your paid or unpaid work,” she says. “But like so much of life, the secret is in the timing.”

And Reinhold recommends that people make money first and then follow their dreams, “as long as you’ve been careful not to grow your tastes with your income. Many people spend and spend to try to forget that the lucrative work they’re doing doesn’t really fit them. This unfortunate condition usually results in a bad case of the golden handcuffs.

“Young people who make a deal with themselves about eventually going where their hearts would lead them and live frugally can have a much easier time of it than those who forget the frugality, or those who don’t develop the skills and discipline required to make money until later in life.”

I ask Bill about the possibility of postponing his dreams of being a musician, and he says he can’t imagine not making music. “I’d do it anyway,” he says, “for myself. So I want to see where I can take it.” But it’s clear that his dream has limits.

He makes $34,000 a year as a computer guy, and I ask him if he’d leave the job if he could make $40,000 a year touring with his band. He says no. He is certain he could make a lot more money as a computer technician in the future. And he sees it as a job he could keep his whole life, and grow with it.

He sees the creativity required to solve computer problems as similar to the creativity involved in music. And he is more skeptical of life on the road: “I couldn’t live off that $40,000 a year for more than a few years. Right now, I don’t worry about food, but sometimes I worry about strings for my bass.”

It is no small feat to get band members to talk to a career columnist. A bass player explained that it would be death to her image to talk about her job to the press. And Bill himself cited a friend who has actually worked for years as a consultant to save a truckload of money and is now spending six months focusing on his band. “Don’t mention his band, though. He’d be embarrassed if people knew he owned a condo.”
Meanwhile, the Modeles continue to make headway in the hyper-competitive world of almost-breaking bands. Bill is a modest guy. When I ask him how he knows his band isn’t a dud, he says, “When we play in upstate New York, people get excited to see us.”

Of course, the music industry is not known for signing a band to a label after hearing them in Utica, but one guitar player (who said his band is gaining traction in the underground and therefore cannot be mentioned in an above-ground career column) reports that the Modeles are well-liked by people who have jobs.

/5 Comments

Learn goal-setting from the Olympics

, ,

Watching the Olympics is inspirational if you need a kick in the pants to set high goals for yourself, but the trick is not to make goals so lofty that you make yourself sick.

Having finished 17th at beach volleyball nationals, I can tell you that the difference between the very top and those near the top is not skills — everyone has the skills. The difference is mental. Players in the top five or ten are so tough that almost nothing makes them waver, and their belief in their ability to succeed is extreme. I know because I didn't have those qualities, and as I inched closer to the top ranks the pressure gave me stomachaches during games.

I remember the first time I played the team ranked #1 in the United States: I got killed. Their focus on the game was unflappable, whereas I found myself thinking about my bathing suit, the crowd, my mother. Anything. Everything. It was like my mind was possessed by the volleyball devil. And every time I lost focus I made an error on the court.

Lack of focus became a defense against the goals that overwhelmed me. By distracting myself from my goal – to get to the number one spot — I protected myself from huge disappointment. Unfortunately, I also ensured that I never inched up beyond 17th place. I found myself spending too much time off the court, excelling at ancillary parts of professional sports where the stakes weren't very high. I was great at landing sponsorships and sniffing out the best coaches, but my fear of failing at my real goal always held me back.

Today I play volleyball only recreationally, but my experience with competitive volleyball informs my approach to setting goals in all aspects of my life: Goals should be tough enough that they challenge you to stay focused; goals should scare you a little because that's how you learn about yourself, but if the goals are too hard, you get stuck and stop learning.

Today most advice is about how to dream big. But goals need to be flexible. Too small a goal would not be rewarding, but too big a goal can be stifling. You need to create goals for yourself that enable you to stay focused. One way to know how well you're setting goals is to look at your intensity of focus: Too small a goal does not require focus, and if you want for focus but you can't make it happen, then your goal is probably too large. The better you know yourself the better you will be at setting goals.

I noticed that Natalie Coughlin, who has been called a more natural swimmer than anyone in history, decided to race in only two individual events in Athens. Most aficionados would say she's capable of winning more — maybe even a Michael Phelps sort of feat. But she knows her own limits and said, “It's good I'm not getting a lot of the attention he's getting. He does really well with that attention and I don't think I would do as well.”

I cannot imagine what it would be like to be as great an athlete as Natalie Coughlin, but I got shivers when I saw her holding a gold medal in Athens. Because I can imagine what it's like to have to adjust your goals in order to cope with the pressure. That is a path to success that requires knowing yourself very well, and it is a path as brave as any other.

That was the first time I realized that my focus was not strong enough to get into the top ten.

But I had worked so hard to get to #17. I felt surely I could figure out how to overcome the focus barrier. I tried the punishment approach (pushups for every mistake) and I tried the Zen approach (lessons in meditation). Nothing worked. Then I tried the introspection approach: I found that in a low-pressure game I had almost perfect focus. But in a high-pressure situation — like the end of a close game – I'd start thinking about my laundry, my mother, my senator. Anything. Everything. It was like my mind was possessed by the volleyball devil.

I came to the conclusion that I was too scared to focus. The harder you focus on a goal, the more energy you put into a goal, there more there is at stake. When you focus very little, then not achieving that goal is okay. But when you dedicated every ounce of energy to that goal, the pressure to achieve is huge. In order to put that kind of pressure on yourself you have to have total faith in yourself. I had total faith until I reached #17. Then I folded.

/8 Comments

You only need $40,000 to be happy

, , , , ,

Looking for happiness through financial success? Wondering what the magic number is? It's $40,000 according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert. Really. So technically, most of you should be happy. And if you're working for the next big raise, forget it. You're better off working on teaching yourself how to look at your money with a different eye.

I remember when I passed the $100K mark. My boss loved my work and gave me a raise that put me at $125,000. But a competitor offered me $140,000 and my boss told me he wouldn't match it. At that point, I had no kids, no mortgage and no car payments, so I didn't need the money. But I recognized salary as a gauge of prominence in my field, and although I was making $125,000 I felt under appreciated.

Eventually, I left that job for one that paid more than $200,000 a year, and I lived the aphorism that you have to spend money to make money. I couldn't take high-end clients out to dinner in my refurbished wreck of a car, so I leased a BMW. Dressing as well as my clients cost an arm and a leg. And I hired an assistant to manage my personal life since my new position left no time for that.

You might scoff at my choices, but I was not unique among those whose salaries hit six figures: My expenses rose with my salary, and my desires expanded with my bank account. You might think, “That won't happen to me,” but how foolish you would be to assume you would be the exception to the rule.

In fact, the rule is well established in research: The first 40 thousand makes a big difference in one's level of happiness. Happiness is dependent on being able to meet basic needs for food, shelter, and clothing. After meeting those needs you need to turn to something other than consumerism. Because additional money has negligible impact on how happy you are. Your level of happiness is largely dependent on your outlook.

Maybe you're thinking there's another magic threshold beyond forty thousand. Like maybe 40 million. But you're wrong. When I ran in circles of venture capitalists, there was a common phrase, “It's not jet money.” Which was a way of saying, it was a good deal, but it won't earn enough money to pay for a private jet. No matter what size the pile of money is, there's always a way to see it as small.

So for those of you looking for more happiness, realize that a new job or a new home won't be nearly as rewarding as a new outlook. Optimism makes people happy. Raising your standing on the optimism scale will impact your happiness more than raising your worth on the pay scale.

Here's a ten-second test to figure out how optimistic you are:

Think of something really bad that has happened to you. Do you think:
1. It has made me a better person.
2. I made some mistakes, but bad things happen to everyone sometimes.
3. Nothing ever goes right for me.

Think of something really good that happened to you. Do you think:
1. I am good at creating my own success.
2. I got lucky.
3. In the end it didn't turn out to be that great a thing.

If you chose the first answer both times, then you probably already feel pretty happy regardless of your income. If you didn't answer one both times, then a shift in the way you think could dramatically improve your happiness.

The good news is that you can train yourself to think positively. Watch how happy people behave. The cliche about gaining strength through adversity might annoy you, but happy people live by those words.

If you took the test above and picked the third answer both times, you probably blame your life on external things so that you don’t have to take responsibility for your plight. Happy people take responsibility for their success and consider failure a temporary fluke. To change your thinking, start assuming responsibility for your emotions.

If you chose the number two answers, you probably tell yourself, “I’m not happy but I don’t know why.” Start believing that if you take action, good things will happen. Tell yourself good things happen because you expect good things and bad things happen to make you stronger.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Forget it. I don’t believe any of this works. And I can’t do it anyway.” But that’s part of your problem, isn’t it?

/37 Comments

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

, , ,

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.

/3 Comments

You can learn from getting canned

, , ,

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.

/12 Comments