Workplace etiquette and the art of selling it

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Have you read Bob Sutton’s book The No Asshole Rule? It’s a great book because it is the harbinger of two trends that I care a lot about.

First, this book is the first business book we can definitively say that the bloggers made a bestseller. Offline bookstores wouldn’t carry it because of the A word. And print publications wouldn’t write about the book either. My column in the Boston Globe is a good example. I wrote about the book, and my editor refused to run the title. But Bob got great press online, and eventually, brick-and-mortar stores had to carry the book because it was a bestseller.

This book also definitively marks the moment when it stopped being okay to be a jerk at work. People used to think it was okay to be the eccentric, difficult genius. When the Harvard professor Tiziana Casciaro conducted research about how people would rather work with someone incompetent than unlikable, I jumped all over it, but to be honest, the data went mostly unnoticed outside of the corner offices and the academics who visit them.

Bob Sutton ushered in the broad understanding that the total cost of working with an asshole is so high that it’s not worth it. He started naming names (Steve Jobs, anyone?). And he gave a self-exam that more than 100,000 people have taken. The book is so full of research that it has become impossible to justify being a jerk. Even to yourself.

There are some other books about workplace etiquette that have the good fortune of coming out right as Sutton’s book has paved the way for us to start talking about the nuts and bolts of being nice at work.

30 Reasons Employees Hate their Managers, by Bruce Katcher
Yes, I know it says thirty, but most of the reasons can be boiled down to one reason: Gratitude. If you manage someone, they are trying to please you. They are trying to do what you want. How can you not thank them? This is something we teach to five-year-olds.

The idea that you don’t have to verbally acknowledge people comes from the old-fashioned idea that managers can motivate people with money. That used to work well, but it doesn’t anymore. Today it is insulting to suggest that your employees are just there for the money. They want way more than that. They want to stretch themselves to do their best work and then get acknowledgement for it. And before you get all snippy about this being unreasonable, take a look at this article in the Harvard Business Review that says reaching goals and receiving praise for it makes for the most productive and happy workplace. Managers: People do not want your money as much as your acknowledgement.

Work 101: Learning the Ropes of the Workplace Without Hanging Yourself, by Elizabeth Freedman
This book is an offbeat etiquette book for people who will never need to know how to use a fingerbowl. (Side note: Yes, I did have finger bowls at my sixteenth birthday, and yes, it was insane because none of my friends knew what they were.) If you are just entering the workforce, this book will be a good introduction the unspoken rules at work, like “Your boss holds the keys to the kingdom.”

If you have been in the workforce a while, this book is a great introduction to how to use a book to propel one’s consulting business. Freedman goes to companies and teaches young people how to be more professional. And this book is a great calling card for consulting gigs, which pay way better than book publishing. Another side note: When I was younger, my boss hired a consultant to help me with these issues. She told me not to show so much cleavage. I never knew I had any. In this way she boosted my confidence and changed how I saw myself.

45 Things You Do That Drive Your Boss Crazy, And How to Avoid Them, by Anita Bruzzese
This book, too, is basically 45 things that come down to one: If you are a jerk, your boss won’t like you. The thing is that there are so many ways to be a jerk, and it’s a pleasure to see them organized into essential categories like “Stupid, sloppy and sleepy” and “Snippy, snotty and socially stunted.”

Maybe I’m partial because we’re both newspaper columnists, but I have to say that Bruzzese writes very well. But side note: What’s up with her name? Who has any idea how to pronounce it? If you want people to talk about the stuff you do, you need a name people can say. Of course, this is easy for me to say since I’m already on my fourth name now. But remember how blogs did wonders for the book with the unprintable title? Maybe blogs can also do wonders for an author with the unpronounceable last name.

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Twentysomething: The Paradox of Choice, gen-Y style

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By Ryan Healy — Go to college, graduate with a technical degree and become a professional, preferably a doctor, lawyer or accountant. Join the workforce for a few years, then get married and have a kid or two.”

According to my father this was the typical advice given to young baby boomer boys growing up. Their parents expected them to follow the same straight and narrow path as them. They had a few choices; follow the advice or rebel and make it on their own.

“Be whatever you want to be. Find something you love and pursue that passion. With enough desire and enough hard work you can do anything you set your mind to.”

This was the advice I received growing up. Flash forward to today and I’m still trying to figure out what it is that I love. There are too many choices! Should I join the Peace Corps and rebuild houses in Mongolia? Should I work for a presidential campaign for a year? Should I go to Wall Street and become a money making machine with no time for a social life?

Not only can I choose any career, but I can choose any city, state or country. My family lives all over the United States and my friends live all over the world. I can communicate and keep relationships with them through the internet no matter where I move. I feel no pressure to get married or start a family any time soon. I can do all of these things when I am ready.

The choices go way beyond career and family. I can choose from hundreds of TV channels, and if I don’t like the graphics I can choose to watch them in HD. The Internet, where I spend too much time, is a big black hole of decisions about information. Even the cereal aisle at the grocery store can turn into a painful decision process. Life in the 21st century is a constant choice.

If you don’t have you’re head on straight it is much easier today to become paralyzed into inaction because you don’t know what the perfect choice is. Many of my peers will probably never specialize in anything because we will never be satisfied. How can we be? There is so much more to do and so much more to explore. And it’s just a click or two away!

Having an unlimited amount of possibilities is one reason so many of my friends move back home after college. They just don’t know what the right choice is. I can see why some people think this is a problem. Living at home until age twenty-five was not the norm in the old days, but neither was working eight different jobs by the time you are thirty. As long as you are working towards an end goal or figuring out what line of work will be best for you, living at home for a few years is a great option.

One of the most difficult realizations I have made is that there is no such thing as the perfect decision. Whether you are picking out what type of cereal to buy, what TV show to watch, or what career path to venture down, you can only make a decision based on what you know at that particular time. This is why it is so cool to be joining the workforce today. If you make a bad decision and enter a new career that doesn’t align with your strengths, wants, or desires, then you can simply pick up and make another career change with very little consequence.

Making the wrong career choice is not nearly as life altering as it was thirty years ago. It’s a different world today. It’s a beautiful world filled with endless possibilities, and maybe too many. But you know what? I would never trade a life filled with unlimited possibility for a pre-written script. Luckily, that’s one choice I don’t have to make.

Ryan Healy’s blogs is Employee Evolution.

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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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New financial data highlights generational rifts

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A group of think tanks, lead by the Pew Charitable Trusts, found that for the first time, men in their 30s are earning less than their parents. For the first time ever, this generation will not be more well-off financially than their parents. What should we make of this new finding? Does this mean the American Dream is no longer attainable?

Probably not. Because this statistic is just a magnified section of a much larger picture — of the great generational shift taking place in America since Generation X became adults.

The shift is in the definition of the American Dream. Our dream is about time, not money. No generation wants to live with financial instability. And we are no exception. But finances alone do not define someone’s American Dream. Especially when our dream is about how we spend our time.

Those who are magnifying a different part of the picture of this generational shift will tell you that what defines it is the inability of corporate American to keep generation Y from quitting their jobs.

The best of Generation X and Y are slow to move into the work force and quick to leave it. According to the department of labor, people in their 20s change jobs, on average, every two years. And Generation X is shifting in and out of the workplace in order to spend more time with kids. It’s costing companies a lot of money, and they’re paying millions of dollars a year in consulting fees to figure out how to decrease turnover.

There are many reasons for high turnover, but the most fundamental one is that baby boomers have set up a work place that uses financial bribes to get people to give up their time: Work sixty hours a week and we’ll pay you six figures. Generation Y will not have this. To hold out money as a carrot is insulting to a generation raised to think personal development is the holy grail of time spent well.

Baby boomers are also baffled by women who grow large careers in their 20s and then dump them in order to spend time with kids. Newsflash: Generation X values their family more than their money. Our American Dream is not about buying a big house, our dream is about keeping a family together. You can tell a lot about values by the terms that are coined. When baby boomers were raising kids they invented the term latchkey kid and yuppie we invented the terms shared care and stay-at-home-dad. The divorce rate for baby boomers was higher than any other generation. We can afford to have less money because most of us don’t need to fund two separate households.

The positive psychology movement has taken a large hold among those in generation X and Y. We are convinced that money does not buy happiness, and this conviction is rooted in hard science. More than 150 universities offer courses in positive psychology. It’s the most popular class among Harvard undergrads.

Our dreams are tied to time. So it’s no surprise that many of the most popular blogs offer tips for time management. And topics like productivity are favorites among hipsters who know that “getting things done” (GTD in blog-speak) is the key to having a fulfilling life. And believe me, GTD doesn’t take money, it takes massive respect for one’s time.

The new American dream is that we will have fulfilling work that leaves plenty of time for the other things in life we love. In this respect, Generation X is doing better than our parents: We are spending more time with our kids, and we are keeping our marriages together more than twice as effectively as our parents did. And Generation Y is doing better than their parents, too: They refuse to waste their time on meaningless entry level work because they value their time and their ability to grow more than that.

The new American dream is about time. It’s not a race to earn the most to buy the biggest. It’s a dream of personal growth and quality relationships. And, despite the declarations coming from Pew about unreachable dreams, our dream is not about accumulating money to do what we love at the end. We are hell-bent on doing what we love the whole way. That’s our dream, and we’re doing it better than the baby boomers ever did.

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