Overrated: Cleaning up your online identity / Underrated: Cleaning up your offline identity

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The idea of having a perfect online identity is not realistic. Instead, maybe you should focus on making your offline identity one that you’re proud of.

First of all, no one is getting away with anything online. Today recruiters are expert and tireless Internet researchers when it comes to scoping out candidates. I just read a story about someone interviewing for a job who was asked about his wish list on Amazon. I would never have thought of that. (In fact, I can’t even figure out how to find other peoples’ wish lists on Amazon.) The list of ways to snoop feels infinite. And the list of ways to fix snoopable problems seems very limited.

If there’s someone in your life who is glued to their computer each night, posting career-killing commentary, maybe you should forward a link to this Wall St. Journal article by Vauhini Vara chronicling one man’s struggle to get his page removed on MySpace:

“He emailed MySpace, begging the site to take down his old page. Nothing happened. He sent at least eight more urgent messages to the site, including a note to MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson. Finally, he received a cryptic email telling him to write his user name — “craigisanidiot” — and password with a marker on a piece of paper, to take a photo of himself holding it up, and to email it to MySpace along with a note saying, ‘I wish to be removed from MySpace.” (Note to the concerned: It worked.)

A pseudonym will not save you. A majority of bloggers use pseudonyms, but people will find out who you are. The first weekly column I wrote was about my job while I was in my job. I used a pseudonym and presumed I was safe. I wrote about my CEO’s pharmaceutical cocktail and diagnosed him (correctly, I still think) as manic depressive. I described the scene of my boss sexually harassing me. I documented my expensive and useless business trip. It turned out, pretty much the whole company had been reading my column.

If you are going to be anonymous, take a tip from Waiter Rant, who never reveals his restaurant but never disses it either, or Your HR Guy, who writes funny human resources scenes, but publishes his policy of not getting fired for his blog.

But don’t go to the other extreme. If you get too careful, you’ll be like college student Matthew Zimmerman, and find yourself unable to write anything. (Don’t worry, he got over it.)

The BBC News tells us How to Blog and Not Get Fired, but it seems much harder to give advice on how to blog and still get hired. When it comes to recruiters, a blog is like a lighthouse: You don’t know how many people have been repelled because they never show up.

At some point, you just have to be yourself. Figure out your best self and be that — online and offline — and then no one will be surprised.

The people entering the workforce today did not grow up posting every little thing that happened to them. But in five years, those kids coming to work will have no way to cleanse the Internet of their posting transgressions from when they were fifteen years old.

There will have to be new standards for what is okay to have online. It will have to be okay to say, “Oh, yeah. I remember when I posted that. Stupid, huh?” Interviewers will have to judge people by what they are doing right now, or else they won’t be able to hire anyone.

So for now, take a look at that wish list you made. Does it make you look like a moron? Instead of getting rid of anti-social items and replacing them with crowd pleasers, ask yourself why you want to read books that reflect poorly on you. Ask yourself who you are.

Karen Salmansohn writes about the idea of congruence: “Be yourself wherever you are, whether at work, with your partner or with friends. When you compartmentalize yourself to be wildly different in different circumstances you can start to feel out of whack. Create a life that is congruent with the person you truly are.”

The impact of incongruence is big: You’ll have an online persona that conflicts with your work persona. You’ll have huge stress. When I was making fun of my co-workers in my column it was because I was a fish out of water in that office. When your impulse is to write mean things about the people you work with then you probably shouldn’t be there.

Research published in the Harvard Business Review (paid) shows that in order to be a great leader, you need to make your work consistent with your core self. When you can be authentic in your job and authentic when you blog that’s a step toward living congruently and you will be priming yourself for success.

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You will like your job more if you make a friend at work

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Here’s some advice for those of you who don’t like your job: Maybe your job is not your problem. Maybe it’s that you are not trying hard enough to make friends at work. People with one friend at work are much more likely to find their work interesting. And people with three friends at work are virtually guaranteed to be very satisfied with their life.

These are some of the findings Tom Rath reports in his new book, Vital Friends: The People You Can’t Afford to Live Without. As a longtime Gallup employee, Rath draws on a massive number of interviews conducted by this polling organization.

Rath says a friend who can change your work environment is “someone you spend a lot of time in a relationship with. And you are probably making a difference in that person’s life, too. If the person were gone, work would be less fun.”

Nikhil Rajpal, at Project: Think Different identified a best friend at work immediately: “My friend Will and I go to lunch together every day. When work gets tough the friendship makes it easier to get through the day. When one of us is stressed or had too much work one of us buys the other coffee and we walk around and talk about it.”

Rath has identified eight different friendship roles. No single person can be all these roles at once, and the fatal flaw people make in relationships is asking that of one person — often a boss or a spouse.

A navigator, for example, is someone who is like a mentor. You don’t need to have regular conversations with the person, but when you do, they are very meaningful in your life. A connector is the type of friend made famous by Malcolm Gladwell, in The Tipping Point, for being able to give you a network. And a champion is the type of friend who thrives on your accomplishments and happiness.

The threshold for gaining the benefits of health and life satisfaction from friendship is three or four friends. Here are some steps to make those friends:

1. Identify someone appropriate.

“When I was in human resources I had a lot of confidential information, so it was no surprise that I became friends with the executive assistant for the CEO, who also had a lot of confidential information,” says Heather Mundell, career coach and author of the blog Dream Big.

2. Be open.

On the Internet, where ranting is de rigueur, it would seem that half of all workers are surrounded by idiots. This way of thinking will not find you friends. “We like to think we can size someone up in ten seconds. But often our opinions of people change over time,” says Mundell.

3. Make time for face-to-face contact.

“If someone stops by your cube and says do you have few minutes? It’s nice if you do. Be a good listener,” says Mundell. “Over time, problem solving together and venting will lead to building trust. You should stop by peoples’ cubes and shoot the breeze, too.”

4. Choose your surroundings carefully.

Find an office that encourages friendships — the structure of workspaces, the quality of common areas, the size of the well-stocked fridge — all these factors can contribute to making an office full of friendships. Rath found that you are three times more likely to have a close-knit workgroup if the physical environment makes it easy to socialize.

5. Find coworkers with shared vision and values.

This situation is probably most common at a nonprofit like Project: Think Different: “Everyone is linked together based on a passion for what we’re doing,” says, Raipal. “We all have a strong desire to change messages in pop culture.”

6. Shift your focus away from yourself.

“People spend so much time trying to manage themselves,” says Rath. Formal education focuses on mastery of topic areas, and graduate school allows you to focus on your own interests. But “when it comes to improving our lives,” writes Rath, “it’s the energy between two people that makes a difference.”

This is going to be a big change for most people. Most workers do not make friends at work. But without a best friend at work, the chances of being engaged in your job are slim. So maybe you should put aside advice about finding the perfect job by searching want ads for your calling. Instead, look for a job and an office that facilitate relationships; friendship is your calling.

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How to be a star performer: 4 things to get good at

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One of the best ways to get what you want is to be an extraordinary performer at work. Stars get more training, more mentoring, better projects and greater flexibility. Fortunately, you don’t need the perfect job situation in order to be a star, because most star qualities come from you — from taking your basically good skills and bringing them up a notch.

Most people have the ability to be a star, according to Robert Kelly, professor at Carnegie Mellon, and author of How to Be a Star at Work, because “most people genuinely want to be more productive, do their best, and live up to their potential, but they don’t know how to do it.”

The traits that make stars different from everyone else are the strategies they use to do their own work and to work well with other people. Star strategies allow people to be highly effective, yet highly productive at the same time, so that stars can fulfill their potential at work and in their personal lives. (Yes, stars have time for both.)

It isn’t so much what you’re born with as how you use it. And the traits of star performers are traits you can teach yourself. Here are the four areas that Kelly identifies:

1. Initiative
Stars exceed expectations. Just doing your job is not enough. Stars do their own job well and then perform well in areas that exceed the job description. Generally star initiative includes helping people, taking risks and seeing a project through to the end — all in arenas that go beyond their job duties.

2. Networking
Stars don’t think of networking as something to do once a day at 3pm. For stars, it’s a constant. Nothing is a complete waste of time because you can always meet someone, talk to someone, or help someone. That last piece is important — stars know that networking is as much giving as taking. And there is an inherent humility in this way of life; stars know they can’t get what they want by acting alone.

3. Self knowledge
Knowing how to do your job is expected. You need to know how to manage your relationships, your long-term goals, and your personal development. This is not a one-time goal, this is a life commitment to very regular self-assessment. And this is a commitment to soliciting and accepting outside input, because it’s impossible to know for sure how you appear to others.

4. Kindness
Average workers see the world from their point of view. Stars have exceptional empathy and act on it: They are good followers because they know it’s important to help leaders be the best they can be, too; stars can give the right message to the right audience; and they can get an accurate big picture by looking and listening to the people around them.

The interesting thing about star performance at work is that it actually demands that you be the person you want to be anyway. Being a good person, seeking self-knowledge, and taking responsibility for where you’re going are probably key pieces of your core belief system. So you truly do not need to stray from your idea of a good life in order to be wildly successful in your career.

But Kelly is quick to point out that star performers are not people hanging out in lazy-boy chairs relying on their stellar IQ or remarkable social skills. Star performers work hard to live up to the values they believe in.

People who can be their true selves at work will be the outstanding leaders, says Rob Goffee, professor of organizational behavior at London Business School and author of Why Should Anyone Be Lead by You: What It Takes to Be an Authentic Leader. Many of you will find yourselves in a position to lead others. The most successful of you will find the right balance between authenticity and adaptability: No small feat.

To become your best self — a star, a great leader, a fulfilled worker — you need to know yourself and your goals very well. Start now. It’s a lifelong process, and done honestly, it’s the process that makes almost any job intrinsically challenging and interesting.

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How to find happiness: Listen to scientists who study it

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We spend so much energy trying to decide what career will make us happy, what job to take, what kind of boss we need. But today happiness is actually a science, and we can teach ourselves to make better decisions faster based on what we know about happiness.

This science of happiness is such a popular field that 150 colleges offer courses in it. If you can’t take a class, read this article in New York magazine for a fun introduction to the topic.

The article is slanted for New Yorkers because New Yorkers are more unhappy than everyone else, (which is unfortunate since I live there). But most of the information in the article is useful to everyone.

For example: “No matter where they live, human beings are terrible predictors of what will make them happy.” This is because our mind plays tricks on us: “We are more comfortable with decisions we can’t reverse than ones we can.”

Here is something that really affected me: “Those who seek out the best options in life are called maximizers. And maximizers, in practically every study, are far more miserable than people who are willing to make do.” One way to stop being a maximizer is to move to where you have fewer choices, (which takes us back to the New York City problem.) Another way is to make choices faster, before you obsessively weigh every possibility.

Other zingers: Kids don’t make you happy, losing limbs doesn’t make you sad, and if you have as much money as the people you hang out with you’ll feel like you have enough.

How can you not be curious about this article? I read it three times.

Now, if I could only make better choices…

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Social skills matter more than ever, so here’s how to get them

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It’s hard to underestimate the impact of good social skills on your career. In fact, across the board, in a wide variety of businesses, people would rather work with someone who is likeable and incompetent than with someone who is skilled and obnoxious, said Tiziana Casciaro, professor at Harvard Business School, whom I spoke to on the phone. “How we value competence changes depending on whether we like someone or not.” And people who lack social competence end up looking like they lack other competencies, too.

When it comes to holding down a job, social skills matter today more than ever. For people who want to break into a popular field like entertainment, for example, the only way to differentiate yourself at the bottom is to be likeable.

Many fields that used to be havens for loners, like programming, increasingly require exceptional people skills. “The jobs that are staying in the United States are those that require regular touch, face-to-face contact with clients or a manager,” says Erran Carmel, chair of the Information Technology department at American University. The people landing those jobs have great social skills because of the difficulty of “managing teams that are distributed across cultures.”

And as the need for social skills at work grows, the bar for good social skills gets higher. Until the 1970s, a smart child uninterested in playground politics was considered eccentric but okay. Since the 1980s, educators see the playground as essential training for the future, and kids who can’t navigate are often sent to experts for extra help with social skills.

“Today a variety of therapeutic approaches can teach a child social skills while their brain is still forming,” says Amy Berkman, a therapist working with New York schools. “Therapies we’re using now, like cranial sacral and sensory integration did not enter the mainstream until twenty years ago.” The result is that each year, those entering the workforce come in with a better likeability factor than the year before.

Most of us have to work at being likeable. Fortunately, Casciaro’s research shows that the biggest impediment to likeability is not caring. So if you “just decide you want to do better,” you probably will.

Take responsibility for yourself,” says executive coach Susan Hodgkinson. “Everyone needs to know that they are responsible for creating healthy, productive relationships at work.” No one is going to make you likeable. “The people who are likeable actually care about other people and care about the connections they make.”

Being good at talking to people requires that you figure out what interests them. Casciaro recommends a tactical approach: “Find the hook that makes your similarities more visible. For example I might meet a man in his 60s and I’m a woman in my 30s but we both like basketball.”

Also, figure out how to help someone else get what they need. “Recognize what you’re trying to get done and who you are trying to get it done with. Then think beyond your own stuff to what the other people want,” advises Hodgkinson. Think of this as project management synergy, or resume empathy; you need to help others reach their goals. This will make you more likeable and then more likely to reach your own.

And, don’t discount flattery. “Usually the reason we like someone is because we think they like us,” says Casciaro. It’s the rule of prom-dates: He was ugly until he asked you to prom, and now he doesn’t look so bad. Since there is no prom at the office, to make someone feel liked, Casciaro suggests, “smiling and listening to make someone feel liked.” “But it’s not a personality popularity contest,” Hodgkinson says, “you need to stay true to yourself while still expending empathy in order to connect.”

It’s hard to do, but Casciaro says that people are much more likely to notice an increase in your likeability factor than an increase in your skills. So next time you consider areas for self-improvement, choose interpersonal coaching over office skills and you’ll likely get more bang for your buck.

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Workplace etiquette Emily Post would never think of

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Here are three pieces of etiquette advice that made me go, hmm:

Don’t wear flip flops to work.
“U.S. style gurus are warning that the casual shoe once mainly seen on the beach could be damaging to careers. Shoes convey the mood of a woman. Wearing flip-flops conveys the mood that you are relaxed and on vacation. That’s not a good message in the office.”

Don’t IM someone you don’t know well.
“What's the deal with people you have never met before IMing you? IMing basically says, ‘I know you well enough to do this’ (among friends) or ‘this is urgent’ (among business associates). I cannot tell you how many times I receive IMs that fall into neither category.”

Don’t pull rank at the potty.
“Everyone is equal in the eyes of the bathroom. Even if you’re the boss’ boss. Doesn’t matter a whit in the bathroom, you’ve still got to follow the rules.”

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Devil Wears Prada is a hit, but that doesn’t mean it’s career news

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I swore that I would not write about the Devil Wears Prada because the bad boss topic has gotten so much play lately.

But now respectable news outlets like CBS News and the Chicago Sun-Times have crossed the line for me: As an excuse to run a trailer for the Devil Wears Prada, they are going on about how women want male bosses.

News agencies are citing a poll released by Lifetime media in which 800 women were asked if they prefer a man or a woman boss. Among generation Y respondents, 31% preferred women 47% preferred men and 22% didn’t have a preference.

But the margin of error is 6%, which is so high for a poll like this that you may as well not do it. In this case, with the absurd margin of error, the results could actually be 37% of women prefer women 41% of women prefer men and 22% don’t care. Is this news? No.

But now random people on the street and on the Internet are spouting off about how to explain why women are more difficult to work for.

EVERYONE PLEASE SHUT UP!!! These are not statistics that show that women are any more difficult than men, so we don’t need to dig up reasons why that might be true.

That said, you might want to take a look at the poll results yourself. There are some interesting findings that do not relate to a movie and therefore have gone unreported. For example, women who are single like working for women and women with kids like working for men.

What I really want you to do, though, is take a look at the career pundit who talked about this poll on CBS. Her suit is totally out of control. The last time I had a top that fit like that I had to safety-pin the middle so that my breasts didn’t flop out. What is she thinking?

Everyone — even the 50% of you without breasts — when you have an important thing to do, like appear on a huge television show, have someone who is qualified give you some outfit advice.

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Writing short is good

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I decided I needed a short blog entry in between my long ones. Being a good writer is important if you want to be able to communicate ideas at work. And writing short helps.

The faster and more concisely you get to your point, the more likely your audience will understand your message.

We sound most authentic when we talk, and verbally, short, simple sentence construction comes naturally to us. When we write, authenticity gets buried under poor word choice. For example, people who use complicated words are seen as not as smart as people who write with a more basic vocabulary.

Writing short is not easy. Take the 270-word Gettysburg Address, for example. “Lincoln didn't just suddenly master elegant language. He wrote wonderful, down to earth language that was very concrete. But he rigorously trained himself to do that,” says Bryan Garner, editor of the Dictionary of Modern American Usage.

People pay attention to brevity, writes Janice Obuchowski in the Harvard Management Update. “If today the president got up and addressed the nation in 270 words, it’d be a top news story,”

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Networking for a new generation: Be authentic

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You’ve heard the axiom, “You’re only as good as your network,” but how do you get one? It used to be that a network was a Rolodex: A flip-book full of beer-stained business cards collected at an industry brew-ha. Today, your network is the people you truly connect with, and their friends.

Isabella Tsao understands networking. She is an information technology project manager, who enjoys salsa dancing. With the ten or so dance partners she has each night, there is an immediate connection, and there is no pressure to engage in small talk. Tsao says that “you make friends in a wide variety of fields and you get a different perspective.”

Keith Ferrazzi, coauthor of the book, Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time, says you cannot get anywhere alone. “Everything you’ve achieved has been done with the help of other people “? parents, teachers, friends, family,” he says. For those people who think networking is for the obsequious and desperate, he advises, “they need to give up their ridiculous sense of John Wayne rugged individualism.”

When Ferrazzi talks about networking, he talks about being liked. If people like you, they will help you, so instead of concentrating on getting favors, focus on being likeable. Otherwise, he said to me, “you’ll wake up when you’re 40 years old in a cube and upset that a 30-year-old is your boss. And you’ll say to yourself that the person got the job because the boss likes him better. And the answer will be, right.”

How does one become likable? Ferrazzi recommends you project yourself as confident, interested, experienced, and excited. But ultimately, you need to create a connection. To this end, share your passions so the other person will feel comfortable sharing his.

After you’ve established positive rapport, share your struggles and the person will share his; the more you understand about someone the better you can connect.

It is not your immediate friends, though, who will be the most helpful to you in a crunch. It’s your friends’ friends. Ethan Watters, author of Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family and Commitment, told me that when you have a difficult problem to solve, like finding a job in a new city, the group of people you know has the same information. “But the people just outside this network are the most helpful: It is the strength of weak ties,” he says.

The current generation intuitively understands this lesson, hence the rip-roaring success of Rolodex-replacing online services like LinkedIn, MySpace and Instant Messenger’s Buddy List.

These community-building tools seem more like ways to keep track of friends rather than to get a job. But in fact, for tech-savvy generations streaming into the workforce, networks of friends are not distinct from networks of career helpers.

Says Watters, “This generation doesn’t make distinctions like ‘we’re friends outside of work.’ Friendship ties are mixed up in all aspects of life.

Asking a friend to recommend you to an organization for a job is like asking a friend to move a couch.” So many of you have a wider network and more effective skills than you even realized.

And now, the inevitable question: “What if I’m shy?” The good news is that shy people aren’t bad at networking, they are just obsessed with what they sound like.

Bernardo Carducci, professor of psychology and director of the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast, told me, “Shy people need to be more other-focused and less self-focused. Think about what you can do for the other person. Shy people worry that their opening comment will not be smart enough or witty enough, so they never get started. Instead, remember that when initiating contact you don’t need to be brilliant, you just need to be nice.”

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Training is essential, so make sure it’s a perk you receive

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The new workplace currency is training. Title is not important if you’re not staying long term. And salary increases of three or four percent are ceremonial. So use the clout you earn to get training; it will make a difference in your life in a way that salary and title cannot because training can fundamentally change how you operate and what you have to offer.

The two most important types of training teach you how to understand yourself and how you function in an office. To a large extent, you have to take responsibility for training yourself in these areas. You can’t learn this stuff passively, like learning key dates in U.S. history.

“This must be a self-motivated kind of learning,” Julie Jansen told me. As a career coach she recognizes that, “The problem is that most people don’t know how self-aware they are.” Her book You Want me to Work with Who? offers self-diagnostic tests to show you where you fall on the spectrum and how to re-train yourself.

Most people think they make a good impression, but they are misguided. So a great help is an objective third-party who can tell you where you are weak”?after all, everyone has weaknesses. The trick is to identify and fix them early in your working life so they don’t hold you back.

Workplace stars receive great training perks. “Most companies quickly segment out high potential employees and they get more advanced and aggressive training,” Jeff Snipes, CEO of Ninth House, told me. “Companies don’t usually market these programs because they create an atmosphere of haves and have-nots. However you can ask around at your company if there’s a high-potential program and what you’d need to do to get in.”

Here are some of the types of training to ask for:

1. Self-awareness coaching. Few people can accurately judge the impression they make on others. This is so widely accepted that companies are willing to pay big bucks for the a performance review that gives 360 feedback and includes in-depth interviews between a third-party and a wide range of people you work with. Once you determine your weaknesses, hiring a coach is a great way to understand the results of the review and figure out how to either get rid of your weaknesses or at least get around them.

2. Communications coaching. One of the most difficult pieces of managing yourself is projecting what you really feel to other people. So many things get in the way of authenticity in the office — most notably, your ego but also your nerves.

Lindy Amos, a coach at TAI Resources, teaches executives to communicate better by using acting techniques. She has said things to me like, “The difference between fear and excitement is breathing.” Before you decide that you are already good at projecting your true self, consider that Amos’s clients are top executives from companies you respect. If they need it, you do too. So get the training early in your career so you can make authentic connections from the beginning.

3. Training on how to navigate within a company. Many young people complain that they have great ideas but no one is listening. And this is often true. That’s because it’s not enough to have innovative ideas. You need to know how to promote them within the company.

Ninth House, for example, offers training programs that teach how to package an idea so that you can get it funded within the company. Topics in this program include how to align the idea with corporate strategy and how to find an internal sponsor, two critical pieces to being an innovator in the workplace.

When it comes to selling an idea at the office, don’t forget that you’ll have to sell the idea that training will be good for your boss and the company as well as for you.

If you’re unemployed, you can also think about training is in terms of the job hunt: Hayden-Wilder, for example, is one of a bunch of companies that teach people how to use public relations and marketing techniques to present themselves to employers.

Whatever sort of training you use — self-generated, corporate funded, or a mix of the two — if you create a life that encourages constant learning, your career and your life will be more interesting and more fulfilling.

 

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