When you look for a job or change careers, what you’re really looking for is a way to improve things in your life. But it’s hard to figure out what will really make things better and what will only make things worse.
There are some things we all know: People who are in love are happier, and people who are chronically unemployed are less happy. But most of us aren’t dealing with such clear-cut extremes.
Most of us ask ourselves on a regular basis, “What’s the best kind of work situation for me?” Yes, we’re all unique, but in truth we aren’t as unique as we think we are. So there are some rules we can all live by when looking for work we’ll love.
Liking What You Have
Forget the deep analysis. Our brains are simply not optimized to figure out what we’ll like. Instead, they’re optimized to figure out how to like what we have.
This helps us on an evolutionary basis: We eat what’s available, we take care of whatever kids we get, and so on. It doesn’t help us in a job hunt, where we have to guess what we would like if we had it.
Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, spent his whole career studying this sort of problem and published his findings in “Stumbling on Happiness.” Gilbert concludes that we’re basically unable to know if we’ll like a job until we try it, so self-analysis and market analysis aren’t going to get you very far. Start trying stuff.
You don’t have to quit your job to try things. Try new stuff on the weekend, volunteer for a project part-time, or ask for a temporary appointment to another department, for example. Be creative in how you learn about yourself. A job change doesn’t have to be now or never — it can be a process.
That said, here are some guidelines you can use for deciding what you’re going to try:
• Don’t go to grad school for humanities.
You would have had a better chance surviving on the Titanic than getting a tenure-track professorship in the humanities. The competition for these jobs is fierce, and very few corporate jobs give preference to someone who has a master’s in, say, early American history.
• Don’t be a lawyer.
Suicide is among the leading causes of premature death among lawyers. You can tell yourself you’ll be different, but statistically speaking, you probably won’t be. And while most lawyers don’t kill themselves, this doesn’t bode well for law being your dream career.
• Look for control over your work.
You might think that a manageable workload makes for a good job. But stress doesn’t actually make for a bad job. In fact, some people do very well in high-stress situations. Some even do their best work that way.
What drives people to burn out is when they work very hard but can’t meet their goals. The people most likely to burn out from their jobs, then, are those who are supposed to help children in helpless situations (at hospitals, for example) but can’t stop the pain.
Entrepreneurs, however, are known for working 18-hour days, and frequently love their work because they’re accomplishing something that excites them.
So the most important thing about enjoying your work, according to Alan Krueger, a professor of psychology at Princeton University, is having control over it — when you do it, how you do it, and what you accomplish. “People really like to be able to control the thermostat themselves,” Krueger says.
• Work where you can find a friend.
If you have one good friend at work, it’s a really good bet that you’ll like your job, according to a Gallup study published in the book “Vital Friends” by Tim Rath.
Take a look at the place you’re thinking of working. Do the people there look happy? Workplaces that promote friendship are more productive, and more fulfilling.
There are a lot of ways to judge whether or not you’ll be likely to make a friend at a new job. But one factor we often forget is architecture. Office space that promotes collaboration and taking a moment to say hi is space that is good for making friends.
• Don’t work with jerks.
Conversations that are insulting have five times the impact on your day than positive conversations. Unfortunately, we have a great memory for the unpleasant. Daniel Gilbert’s research supports this, but Bob Sutton, a professor at Stanford University, specializes in the jerk at work.
Sutton warns that if you work with jerks, you become one. His book gives advice on how to make sure you don’t end up working with these toxic people, and his web site gives you a way to test yourself to see if you’re a jerk yourself. After all, if you’re the jerk, you’re going to have a pretty hard time finding an office without one.
Work Life vs. Life Life
As you search for your new career, collecting advice as you go, remember that the stakes aren’t as high as you might think. A job is not your life.
Your personal life is your life, and your job supports that. The people who are most overwhelmed with career choices are the ones who think a career makes a life. So don’t be afraid to try a lot of options, and don’t be afraid to relax a little.
When I was a new manager, one of the steepest learning curves I had was how to adapt my communication style for the various groups I interfaced with: Technical, creative, executive. Fortunately, I had learned from my days as an arbitrage clerk that each group of workers requires a specific type of communication, so I spent a lot of time listening carefully to how other people talked.
So it makes sense that these tips on how to redesign a blog are really about how to communicate with a designer. Because good communication is essential to having a good experience doing a redesign.
1. Tell your designer you five most important things, in order.
This is what you want to convey in your blog. This will help the designer make interface choices – to help your audience focus on what you want them to see. For example, is your about me section really important? It is if you have a lot of expertise. Is your RSS information important? It is if you are aiming to build a large, loyal audience.
Also tell your designer the message you want to get across about yourself – are you friendly, authoritative, technical. This will help the designer figure out a look for your blog. The best way to get a design you love is to be really, really clear about what you want right here, at this stage.
2. Don’t ask your designer to train your dog.
Can your designer keep your dog from sleeping on your laptop? No. Of course your dog is not part of the designer’s job. Yet people dream up all sorts of non-design problems to toss over to the designer.
Problems like a boring bio, or a bad topic, or terrible category names (I have this last problem) are not design problems. If you comments section never gets used, the designer can’t fix that. Things are just going to be empty. And no designer can overcome the ugliness of a headline that is five lines long. Only you can rewrite incompetent headlines. Unless your blog is about design, design cannot compensate for lame content.
3. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
There are established conventions for blog design, and you need to have a totally incredible reason for bucking those conventions. For example, About Me is a heading and it goes on top. Just do that. Don’t bother with being inventive. It’s not worth it. Spend your energy being inventive with your content.
People want to know how to navigate your stuff as soon as they get there. I’ll learn a new navigation system to use Photoshop. There’s a lot of return on my time investment. I’m not learning a new navigation system to get through a blog I don’t even know if I’ll like. And don’t tell me that your radically new, reinvented blog interface is intuitive. It’s not. Because I intuitively look for an interface that is similar to the 55 million other blogs
4. Keep your design opinions to yourself.
There’s a reason you are not supporting yourself as a designer: You are not one. If you want to tell the designer what to design, then don’t hire one. My point is, leave the designer alone. If you don’t trust the designer to come up with something good on her own, then don’t hire her. If you think the designer doesn’t get it, then ask yourself if you have conveyed the information the designer needs.
In short, a bad design is often your own fault: You either hired someone who can’t design, or you gave bad information during point number one (above). In either case, you cannot solve this problem by becoming the designer yourself. You have to solve this problem by looking inside yourself to see where you went wrong. If you hired a bad designer, here’s an article on how to hire a better one.
5. Talk about your expertise, not the designer’s.
Instead of giving the designer instructions on how to do his job, tell him about your job. Note: This will be very difficult for people who have no idea what their goals are or how they are going to reach them. This is why good designers will not work with people who lack vision for themselves. Here are some examples:
Bad: What about blue? I really like the color blue.
Good: This design feels very edgy to me, but this blog should look like part of the establishment.
Bad: Good blog designs usually have an email me button on the top.
Good: My readers need to know how to contact me very easily, and I don’t think they’ll see the email me button where it is.
6. Know your own limitations.
With trepidation over the amount of work entailed, I agreed to add photos to my blog. I like how they look. But it turns out that my stock photos are pretty lame. And after about twenty emails from people explaining this problem to me, I have learned a bit about photos. So, like every project, you do your best at the stuff you’re best at, but there’s always room to learn. My learning area is the photos. For now, I opt for high quality, but free stock photos from sites like Burst.
One reader who complained about the stock photos is Annie. I asked her for suggestions on how to use photos differently and she sent some links. The links Annie sent showed me a different way to think about blogs. My favorite is HellomynameisHeather.
I’m annoyed that my new blog design has created a picture problem that I have to deal with, but it’s been a good opportunity to explore something new. And that, after all, is what blogging is all about.
Bruce Tulgan runs through 8 things in 2 minutes — tactics that will make you feel confident and effective as a manager.
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Barack Obama is dissing the baby boomers. But he’s doing it tactfully. So he’s got a wide range of people talking about generational issues in politics, and I’m eagerly anticipating spillover into the workplace, which also needs this frank discussion.
One of the companies I founded was an online marketplace for city governments. My business partner was a fiftysomething guy who had been dealing with city governments forever.
Our investors in the first round were all his friends, most were over 50, and some assumed I was dating my partner because why else would he start a company with someone so young.
Investors treated me like it was an impossibility that I could have learned things fast enough to get into a room with them. And one investor asked me to leave a meeting at such an inappropriate moment that even my partner was shocked.
Then, about a year later, when I was looking for a job, the guy I interviewed with said, “Kids now think they can learn on the job and they don’t need an MBA. What do you think of that?”
I couldn’t believe it: He was calling me a kid in my job interview, even though I had already launched two companies.
He did this because he thinks it’s culturally acceptable to treat someone like they don’t know anything just because they’re young.
I’ve been holding off writing about Obama because the first (and last) time I took a leap into politics with my column was when I campaigned for Howard Dean, the week before he imploded. I told myself I learned my lesson: Politics is too volatile for a workplace writer to forge a path through.
But here I am again. Writing about politics. Writing about Obama and hoping he doesn’t implode next week. I have to write about him because while this is not an official endorsement, when he talks about leading a new generation I get giddy over the idea that we could be wrestling ourselves out from under the clutch of the baby boomers.
Obama talks about teamwork and community and the end of the me-me-me in-fighting that has characterized the recent history of baby boomer politics. A report in Newsday says:
“Obama represents the transition from the Baby Boom to Generation X… He spoke of a post-boomer sensibility, of moving beyond the divisions exacerbated by undue self-focus.”
I have this conversation with my (baby boomer) agent, and she says, “Everything to you is about generations.” And okay, there’s truth to that, but there’s also some hot air, because the baby-boomer generation is so huge that everything has been about them by default.
I am from a generation that had very limited power to do anything, anywhere, except live in the wake of the boomers. Even when it came to the Internet revolution in the 90’s, most of the people who got rich were the baby boomers who invested in companies that Gen-Xers operated.
This is why I get excited about Generation Y. It’s amazing to see this group, with all their demographic power, open up the world to change.
For the most part, I focus on change in the workplace. There were a lot of things that my generation wanted at work — for example, flexible hours, personal growth and the abandonment of competitive, ego-focused hierarchy in favor of team work. But we had trouble pushing through these workplace values because there were too few of us. The baby boomers could always just say no.
But generation Y wants so many of those gen-X things, and generation Y has the demographic power to make it real. It excites me to see this happen at work.
Obama is the political corollary. Finally there are enough voters, maybe, to vote for someone who is not a baby boomer. I don’t know if it will happen. But just that we’re talking about it is exciting. Because once we talk about baby boomers giving up control of politics, the talk of baby boomers giving up control of corporate life cannot be far behind.
But there’s a workplace lesson from Obama as well. He’s very tactful as he disses the boomers. He makes it clear that he is a bridge builder. That he is respectful of the fact that everyone has a place in history. And he is, above all, someone who has empathy for diverse backgrounds. These are all the same kinds of skills we need in the workplace today.
We are all engaging in a generational discussion at work, even if it is not as overt as an interviewer calling you a kid. We all come to the table with preconceptions and biases, but we all have to work together. So, in the near future, at lest, it’s the people who are best at building generational bridges who will succeed. This is something I personally work on every day, and Obama is a great role model.
It used to be your workplace identity was tied to your company. “An IBM man” is a phrase that comes to mind. Companies kept track of best practices, hot management ideas, and recent innovations in the business world.
Today our identity is separate from our company. We manage ourselves with the care that used to be reserved for special product lines. We realize if we don’t care for our career no one else will. And we cannot depend on a corporation to keep up to speed on ideas. We have to stay on top of new ideas for ourselves.
So, here are four ideas that you should consider using to guide yourself:
Pick a pace that’s right for you.
Today waiting the typical three to five business days for a package to arrive seems like an unbearable amount of time to some people, and news travels in real time — text-messages sent from parties to bloggers at home, ready to post.
Alexander Kjerulf self-published his book, Happy Hour is 9 to 5, because he thought the typical publishing cycle was too long. “I’m an impatient sort of guy,” he says. The book sells well on his blog, and he feels certain he did the right thing, for him.
Fast all the time isn’t right for everyone all the time. Adrian Savage, author of the book, Slow Leadership, writes daily on his blog urging people to accept that often workplace success comes from downshifting into a slow gear for a while.
Sloppy networking leads to sloppy results.
The founders of the professional networking site LinkedIn tell people in no uncertain terms that building a network has to be about people you know well. Yet every day thousands of LinkedIn users invite near-strangers into their network.
Newsflash: People you don’t know cannot vouch for you. People you have not connected with in an authentic way will not be move to help you when you need it. It doesn’t matter how full your LinkedIn account is, or how heavy your Rolodex is, if you haven’t really connected with these people, it’s not a network.
The opposite is true as well. If you build a strong network, its effects will ripple. Josh Boltuch, Elliott Breece and Elias Roman spent their last semester at Brown University launching Amie Street, a new model for selling music online. They had no marketing budget to get the word out, but they did have their network.
“We sent a few hundred emails to friends and family.” The crux of the marketing pitch? “We told everyone that a requirement for being our friend is to sign up for our site.” A few weeks later, without saying anything to the founders, someone told Mike Arrington about Amie Street.
Arrington has one of the strongest networks in startup America. Getting your startup on his blog TechCrunch is like getting your book on Oprah. And there was Amie Street, right there on Mike’s blog one day.
The next day, Amie Street had thousands of registered users.
What can we learn from this? That solid networks make solid results.
The Amie Street founders had a network that cared deeply for them — their friends and family. Mike Arrington’s network is truly dedicated to helping him find the best new startups. Amie Street is a success today because it started with a truly meaningful network.
Get away from jerks or become one.
If you want to enjoy your work, surround yourself with people who are enjoyable. Most people can tell an obnoxious person right away. But even in light of one of those horrible interviews, candidates often tell themselves they can work with jerks and not be affected.
“If you think you are going to change them, it won’t happen. It’s easy to resist at the beginning, but if you work with an asshole you’re going to become one” too, says Bob Sutton, professor at Stanford University, and author of the book, The No Asshole Rule.
Rude interactions have five times the impact on your mood that
positive interactions do. Sometimes you can encourage rude co-workers and bosses to be more positive. But not if you’re dealing with the worst cases.
How can you recognize those types you need to get away from? Sutton says they are addicted to subtle putdowns, interruptions and they use sarcasm as a way to make a (supposed) joke.
Respect your unconscious decision-making skills.
When you try to make a well-formed, thought-out decision, you will probably do a bad job unless the information in front of you is very limited, according to Ap Dijksterhuis, professor of psychology at Radboud University Nimengen in the Netherlands.
He found that in situations with a lot of variables, like which soccer team will win the World Cup, people consider too much irrelevant information–which city the game is in, for example–at the expense of more important information–such as the track records of the teams.
The good news is that our unconscious minds are very good at processing lots of information. We have known for a while that trusting our gut is a good idea. But Diksterhuis’s research (subscription required) shows that sleeping on a problem gives your unconscious time to sift through information and actually makes our gut decision better.
Ta-da! It’s my new blog design. This is a big moment for me because when I started blogging, I never dreamed that it would matter so much to me that I would actually pay to have a custom blog design.
There is an important lesson here about starting something new. Many people who have successful businesses say that if they had known how much work it was going to be they never would have started. I found this was true with the companies I’ve started. And at Get Rich Slowly, a personal finance blog that has grown astronomically in the last year, JD has a nice description of this process of growing in unexpected but exciting ways.
Meeting our goals might depend on being ignorant of how much work it will really take. If I had thought I was going to post six days a week I would have procrastinated every day forever because the amount of work would have seemed unbearable. But in fact, once you fall in love with what you’re doing, like any small business, the long hours don’t feel so long.
In some cases, though, you cannot help but know that you are about to start something that will be a lot of work. That’s how I feel about adding photos to the blog. I never expected to have photos, but my designer, (Rob Brown, who I really liked working with), showed me that the photos add a lot.
The only way I could get myself to agree to make the photo leap is to live in denial — a tactic I used for starting many clearly difficult projects. This means that we are launching a new design, but I have still not learned the ins and outs of photos. So this photo of workers at a desk is what Rob picked as a demo. But it looks good, doesn’t it?
I just want to tell you about these links. Each of them made me really happy to find. Maybe one, or all four, will make you happy:
1. How to ruin your image with your signature file.
This is a great post about the stupid fonts people use in their signature file and what those fonts mean about the person. The bottom line: Don’t use a special font. Express yourself through your ideas, not your font choice.
http://lmnop.blogs.com/lauren/2006/10/americas_most_f.html
2. How to survive high school
This would not be notable except that it’s part of Wikipedia’s how to section. First, I didn’t know there was a how to section. (Okay. Update. Daniel, at Om Strategy, sets me straight on the wiki world. Wikihow is not Wikipedia.) But then I was charmed to see that this topic is listed. Although I am pretty sure that all the how-tos in the world would not have gotten me through high school unscarred…
http://www.wikihow.com/Survive-High-School
3. How to find a synonym, or just do something cool on your computer
When I taught creative writing, I told my upstart students at Boston University that they should never use a thesaurus because you should write like you talk and if you can’t come up with the word on your own, you can be pretty sure you don’t use it when you talk.
So, putting that advice aside, I went hunting for a synonym for spark. And I found this amazing site that doesn’t just find synonyms. It literally makes language come alive. Words slide and gyrate and bump into place. I found myself looking for synonyms I didn’t need just to watch what happens.
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/
4. How to force companies to be socially responsible with just one click
via TechCrunch:
“DoTheRightThing is a Digg-like site where people submit stories about companies acting in ways that can be considered ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Other users then vote on the goodness or badness of those actions and add comments. The site calculates an overall ‘goodness’ score, ranging from ‘severe’ on the negative end to ‘pioneer’ on the positive end.”
It’s interesting to read what companies are doing and see how they score. Also, it’s fun to harbor a fantasy that this site will get influential enough that companies will have to respond to accusations that get voted to the top.
At a point when I didn’t have the money to hire an assistant, I ran an ad for an unpaid intern. I ran it on a lark, thinking I’d be lucky if anyone in the world would want to work for free.
The number of responses I received was incredible, not just in quantity, but also in quality.
Losing the Management Crutches
The intern I chose was smart, talented, and fun — all the things I want in a coworker. And I was nervous she would leave. So every day, I thought to myself, “Am I doing everything I can to keep her? Am I teaching her enough? Is she getting enough out of this job?”
People aren’t managers because they have the title. They’re managers because they make the people they lead feel good about themselves and what they’re doing. I knew this before, from books, but I really learned it with my unpaid intern.
Most managers have a title and pay their employees. These are management crutches. If you want to be a really good manager, ignore those formalities and make people believe that they’re getting something even more important out of the manager/employee deal; that way, you’ll help them to grow personally.
Six Ways for Everyone to Win
Each person is at your company for a reason, and believe me, it’s not for the gold watch at the end of 40 years of service. They want to get something from your company so that they can grow personally and professionally.
Find out what they want to get, because if you’re helping them to get it, they’ll want to do the work you need them to do. People like to help each other.
Otherwise, they’ll do the work to get paid, but they won’t do it well. And managers who have people underperforming are not really managers — they’re figureheads, and people aren’t doing work for them.
A real manager gives employees what they need so that the employees deliver what the manager needs. Here are six ways to make that happen.
- Manage people first, do your own work second.Your job is to make sure the people on your team perform well. They can’t do that if you’re not managing them, so most of your day will be spent helping them to develop their skills.Your own work is something that comes after you’ve taken care of everyone else. This means you have to get very fast at doing your own work so that you can be available when direct reports need you.
- Delegate your best work.A great way to make more time to help people grow is to delegate your own work. But don’t delegate your grunt work — who wants to do that? Delegate your best stuff and the person you give it to will feel really lucky to be getting more work to do. You get more time no matter which kind of work you delegate, so you might as well be popular.
- Help people get recognized.You have more access to the world outside your team than the people reporting to you do. Use that access to make sure people know the strengths of your various team members.If you help people get recognition, they’ll be more likely to pick up a mentor. And while a boss is not always the best mentor, they can certainly help locate a mentor, and someone with mentor will stay longer and care more about work.
- Make projects relevant to people, not companies.If you’re giving a new assignment to a team member, don’t focus on what it will do for you, or the company. Focus on how it will help that person to grow in ways she’s hoping to grow. Show her the skills she’ll develop on this project and how they’ll change her.If you can’t do this, the only way to get her to care about the project is to offer other means for personal growth in exchange for her effort on the project. It’s not enough to say how something helps the company — it has to help the employee as well.
- Align yourself with your boss.People are much more likely to follow someone who seems to have support from the rest of the organization. You look like you can do more for your team if you have good relationships with people higher up.If you don’t look well-connected in the organization, people won’t work as hard for you because they don’t think you’ll be able to meet their needs.
- Work reasonable hours.If you work all the time, you look like you don’t have a grip on your workload and maybe even a little imbalanced. This doesn’t inspire confidence.It’s fine for high-profile people who have built up trust. But in general, the hardest worker looks the most scared. Otherwise, why would that person have to work so much harder than everyone else? Why wouldn’t they want to go home and be with family and friends?
Getting the Right Answer
The best way to think about management is to treat everyone like an unpaid intern.
Each day, your employees ask themselves, “Am I getting enough out of this job to keep doing it?” And each day, you need to give them a reason to say, “Yes.”
Between the ages of 20 and 30, most people have more than 8 jobs. This is a positive thing for a number of reasons. First of all, Daniel Gilbert, psychologist at Harvard, says that we really don’t know what we’ll like until we try it. So having a lot of jobs when you start your adult life is a good way to figure out what to do with your adult life.
But, job hopping is a good thing for everyone to do – not just twentysomethings – because it’s a way to maintain passion in your work. Frequent changes keep your learning curve high and your challenges fresh. Finally, frequent job hopping, coupled with high performance allows you to build a professional network much faster than someone who stays in one position over a long period of time. And a vibrant network will make finding jobs easier, so job hopping will not be a difficult path.
Human resource people complain a lot about job hopping. They say companies would rather hire someone who stays a long time at companies because that will mean the person will stay a long time at their company. Of course this is true.
It’s clear that job hopping benefits the employee, not the employer. But when the majority of young people are job hopping, and companies are having a hard time attracting young people to work recruiters don’t have the luxury of writing people off just because they job hopped. Recruiters write people off because their resume looks like they won’t contribute enough to the company.
So, the trick with job hopping is to make sure your resume always shows that you make a huge contribution wherever you go. That can be independent of job duration. You can show that you are loyal to a company by exceeding their expectations with your outstanding performance. Loyalty is about delivery. Show that on your resume, the same place you show job hopping.
A resume is not a laundry list of job and duties. It’s a document about a story. You resume needs to show the story of a person who contributes in large ways wherever you go.
Think about this. Someone wrote a great SuperBowl ad, then six months later went to Nike and launched a new shoe that’s a success, and a year later went to Google and rebranded some of their software to increase user base 50%. Most people would not care that this person was job hopping. Most people would want to hire this person, even if he only stayed a little bit.
Of course, most of you don’t have such enormous accomplishments, but you probably do have accomplishments. And you do have a story about how you chose to leave when you did. When I explained my own job hopping, I talked about how I went to companies, launched great, successful software products, and then moved on. I never felt the job hopping held me back, though I always had to explain it in interviews.
That’s the thing about job hopping. People want to hear an explanation that makes sense. They don’t want to hear you failed, or didn’t get along with people, or have no attention span. Not every job will be the pinnacle of success, but a good resume writer can make every job look like it was some sort of success, and that your level of success increased with each hop, because with each hop you got more responsibility.
I know that a lot of you hop because you don’t know what to do with yourself. But you’ll probably be able to find some consistent string running throughout all your jobs. Maybe it was customer service, maybe all your jobs were sports-related, you’ll have to figure out the story. But a good story weaves everything together into something linear, and, if you’re lucky, it’ll point you toward what you should do next.
Bruce Tulgan is back. Here he talks about what to ask for and what to give when recognition is deserved and the coffers are empty.
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