You do not deserve a raise just because you have been doing your job well for x amount of months. It is your job to do your job well. That’s why you were hired.
Also, do not complain about your salary not being at market rate six months after you take your job. Because if you are underpaid it’s your own fault for accepting the job six months ago. Do the salary research before you take the job.
Here is a situation where you do deserve a raise: You are doing more work now than when your salary was set. Caution: This does not mean that you are doing more work within the job description you were hired for. Because then you are just doing what you were hired to do. You need to show you are doing more than you were hired to do.
So if you want a raise in six months, get really good at your job immediately so that you can take on more responsibility in another job, in another capacity. Look around for something more to do, and figure out how to do it. Then tell your boss you are doing more than one job and you want to be paid extra for doing the other job you have already been doing. That’s how to ask for a raise.
What if things are moving too slowly for you? David Christiansen at Information Technology Dark Side gives sound advice for those who are both feisty and mobile — put pressure on your boss relentlessly, and if that fails, job hop.
But hold on. Surely there are more important things you can get from your boss than a little bit more money or a better title. Your career will go further faster if you negotiate for things that really matter.
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…
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.
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.”
Here’s one of the hottest topics in management training: How to manage the current crop of twentysomethings. Really. Baby boomers are sitting in seminars for hours and hours trying to demystify the alien ways of the new work force.
But what about the opposite situation? One of the most classic pieces of career advice is to manage up: Manage what your boss thinks of you; steer your boss’s plans for you; get your boss to supervise in a way that works well for you. Younger workers need to know how to manage their baby-boomer bosses.
Managing up will not be easy. You’re dealing with someone so different from you that he or she sits through PowerPoint presentations about your emoticons. But there’s hope for you because managing up has always been a generational challenge. Lynn Lancaster, one of the aforementioned consultants on generation Y told me, “All generations are angered that the next generation is not like them.”
Once you’ve established you can reliably meet your boss’s weekly and monthly goals, you can let your boss know about your own goals. When I spoke with Gen-X demographer Laura Shelton, she reminded me that to a boomer, meaningful goals might be a reserved parking space and a new title. So you need to make sure your boss understands that you want shorter-term goals and that you care most about issues like being challenged, learning new skills, and preserving your personal life.
Make your priorities clear to your boss so you don’t get sidetracked in areas that are irrelevant to you. For Francois DeCosterd , a management consultant turned art teacher, problems arose in his consulting job when he found himself working among people so obsessed with rank that he could not focus on the work that interested him. “It is very difficult to find your own voice when you away have to deal with hierarchy and power politics, which are very draining.”
Understand what you can get from your boss, so you can make reasonable, actionable requests for mentoring. When a baby boomer says, “Do you realize how many years of experience I have?” The baby boomer means, “Do you realize how long I’ve paid my dues? Why do you think you can do challenging, interesting, work immediately?”
Don’t be put off by this exchange. Instead, recognize what those years of experience mean for you right now: A lot of experience doesn’t mean someone is clever, likeable or talented. But when you are dealing with people who have worked many, many years, “you can assume they have learned to deal with many different situations” says Fran Pomerantz, executive recruiter at Korn/Ferry International.
So use this person to help you with project management and prioritization because they’ve seen it all before. Your seasoned boss can identify deals that are going to blow up, policies that will derail you, and perks waiting to be claimed.
Investigate which other skills your boss has picked up over the course of his or her long career. Make a list of skills and knowledge you want to accumulate in the next two years. Bring the list to your boss and ask which your boss can help you with. For the others, ask what sort of projects or teams you can get to aquire the skills out of your boss’s reach.
You’re going to get the best results from your boss if you use your boss’s language: The language of diplomacy, says Dianne Durkin, president of Loyalty Factor. You might want to say, “Stop talking to me about my career at this company. I’m leaving in two years to start my own.” But you will get a better response if you say, “It would be a big help to me if we could focus on what I’m doing this quarter.”
The other language barrier you have with your boss is IM. It’s like a poorly spoken second language to boomers, if they know how to use it at all. So effective management of your boss means using email. And take the time to type full words and use a spellchecker; two small concessions to get what you want from your manager.
If you do all this and you don’t get what you want, you should leave. “Don’t sit in a job with a baby boomer boss who doesn’t get it. Vote with your feet,” advises Shelton. “It costs companies so much to replace a worker that they will eventually change. And this will be a better workplace for all generations.”
DeCosterd also advises to leave your job if you don’t feel valued. When he talks about his transition from consulting to teaching art he says, “It’s been remarkable to meet so many people who are excited and supportive about my ideas.”
Understanding your boss is the key to managing up. But what’s the best way to understand your boss? The Myers Briggs survey is a psychological system designed for understanding other people, and it’s a test used by nearly 100% of the Fortune 500 to help senior executives succeed at work. If you understand the test now, earlier in your career, you’ll be able to manage up in a way that will put you on the fast-track to success. Learn how to use this tool in the course from Quistic: Fast Track Your Career with Meyers-Briggs
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.
There’s disconcerting news in CareerJournal today. They list the top ten professions, using generally the same criteria that Salary.com used to come up with its list of the ten best professions. And the only professions that are (only sort of) on both lists are: “analyst” and “social worker/psychologist”.
Analyst is such a broad term that it is almost useless, but it is conveniently something that requires almost the complete opposite skills as social worker/psychologist. So at least most personality types have an opportunity here.
Maybe the only really actionable advice on this topic comes from what has become one of my favorite sources for career advice, New York Magazine. Here’s a quote from a funny and informed lecture on happiness by Ben Mathis-Lilley:
“Don’t go to law school. Lawyers are 3.6 times more likely to be depressed than members of other professions, and it’s not just because their jobs are more stressful. For most people, job stress has little effect on happiness unless it is accompanied by a lack of control (lawyers, of course, have clients to listen to) or involves taking something away from somebody else (a common feature of the legal system).”
That advice is not just for lawyers, it’s for everyone. Even if you can’t be an analyst or psychologist, at least get a job where you have control over your work.
What is control? For some people, it’ll mean working for yourself. But you can have control working for other people, too.
I asked David Blanchflower, professor at Dartmouth College who is known for slicing data to create happiness equations, “What does having control over one’s work really mean?”
He said that control goes beyond just workload and pace. “People don’t like to feel there’s a risk of being fired. They like control over what they wear, they want access to the heat control.”
Surprisingly, in study after study, women report more job satisfaction than men do. So maybe the biggest factor in whether or not you feel like you have control over your work is not whether you’re in a “best profession” but whether or not you’re a woman.
Most people who want career coaching from me set up an appointment. My brothers send random emails that they tag as urgent. Here’s one my brother sent at midnight last night:
“Why don’t you ever write about how to interview someone? What do I do when someone goes on and on about himself and I don’t care. Should I cut him off? I only have thirty minutes to do the interview.”
Answer: The most important thing to find out when you interview someone is if you like the person. You can teach someone to be competent in the skills you need, but you can’t teach someone to have an appealing personality. No matter what the person talks about for thirty minutes — really, much fewer than thirty— you can figure out if you like them.
Which leads me to the first thing you can do to be better at interviewing:
1. Learn how to conduct an interview.
You need to understand what is driving the interviewer and how he or she is thinking. So know enough about the interview process to put yourself in your counterpart’s shoes. If the person is bad at interviewing, you can run the show. If the person is good, you have to figure out how to meet their agenda, make your points, and still be likeable.
2. Learn from other peoples’ mistakes.
The best way to see people making errors in interviews is to interview them yourself. But you can also read about other peoples’ interviewing incompetence. Jobaloo shows how candidates misread a seemingly innocuous question. And CareerBuilder lists some examples of extremely bad judgment.
3. Know your agenda.
What is the image you are trying to convey in the interview? Match that to the kind of job are you trying to land. You should have three points about yourself that you aim to get across in the interview. Before I became a full-time writer, mine were: great at executing a plan, a manager who everyone loves to work for, very reliable. I wanted those points to come across because I wanted to be hired to a position where I would have a lot of responsibility to execute a visionary plan and manage a large team.
4. Practice.
You can find tons of lists about how to interview well. Take a look at them and you’ll notice that they are all about practicing: Avoid too much information, cut the puffy stuff, know your strengths and weaknesses. These are all things you can practice. If you think you can wing it in an interview, you’re wrong. There are no questions that cannot benefit from preparation, so any question you look unprepared for makes you look clueless about the interview process at best and lazy at worst.
5. Be comfortable with silence.
People who can remain calm during silence look powerful and comfortable with themselves. People who have to fill silence end up saying stupid things. Part of your interview practicing should be to sit, saying nothing, so you are comfortable when that happens in an interview.
The interesting thing about preparing to ace an interview is that most aspects of preparation carry over into the rest of your life. When you know who you are, and how to convey that to other people, when you are comfortable with a pause, and you are good at reading another person’s agenda, you will function better in all aspects of your life.
Amanda Congdon, co-founder of Rocketboom, got fired last week. Congdon performed a fake daily newscast, which was downloaded by 300,000 people each day. Her audience was bigger than Connie Chung’s.
Congdon announced the end of her participation in Rocketboom in her last video blog. Her partner, she says, proposed many stories to offer up in place of getting fired. But Congdon declined and said, “The Internet is all about being transparent.”
I don’t think it’s just the Internet, though. It’s the post-boomer generation. Authenticity is important in the new workplace — not just online. And it comes naturally to most young workers except when it comes to getting fired.
But really, getting fired is not that big a deal, and I think we can all take a cue from Congdon and stop being embarrassed about it.
In 1950, when you stayed at a company like you were married to it, getting fired was a big deal; it was like getting kicked out of the house by your spouse and having your clothes strewn across the front lawn.
But things are different now. People are averaging a new job every three or four years (one or two years if you’re under thirty-two) so getting fired is not such a big deal. You were probably going to leave anyway. And now you can take a long vacation.
Most people do not lose their jobs because they are incompetent. They lose their jobs because of some sort of personality clash. I have said a million times that you should try to get a long with everyone. But few people can do it all of the time.
So it seems to me that the new way to get fired is to let everyone know it. Congdon is not alone. Star Jones, for example, was careful to tell people she did not leave her spot at The View but was fired. Like Congdon, Jones says her boss wanted her to lie. And she thought it would be best for her career if she didn’t.
The most reliable way to get the kind of job you want next is to let people know what you want. And how can you be honest with people about what you’re looking for next if you are pretending to have quit a job you like? How can people help you if they don’t know what you want? This is why I like the idea of saying you got fired.
And, while I’m at it, what’s up with saying “taking time to be with my family”? That is absurd. First of all, only men say it. If women said it, which they don’t, people would think, “She’ll be out of the workforce for fifteen years.” When men say it, people think, “He got fired. He’s looking for a job.”
The most recent example of this is Jeff Jordan, who worked for eBay as president of PayPal, until he suddenly felt the urge to spend time with family this month. I am not buying that. And I'm not alone. Others are commenting on the credulity of the claim. And Jack Shafer disparages the phrase in his article: More time with the family – Right, and the check is in the mail.
So consider the bravery and forthrightness of Congdon and Jones. When you get fired, consider the idea that it is not a time to be embarrassed but a time to learn. One of the best indicators of how successful someone will be is how well they bounce back from crisis. So let people know the true you, and they will be more able to help you bounce back with more success the next time around.
Here’s some career advice. Stop obsessing about how smart you are. Instead, get some exercise and you’ll perform better at work — athletes do better in the workplace than non-athletes. Even off the field. This advice is true in a wide range of scenarios — across age groups, job descriptions, and types of exercise.
Athletes make more money because their self-confidence and competitive nature makes them choose jobs that pay more money, says James Shulman, author of The Game of Life: College Sport and Educational Values. “This happens from every group of athletes from the liberal arts colleges to big-time sports. It is not affected or skewed by a few people winning million-dollar NFL contracts or anything like that.”
Another reason athletes make more money is that they fit in better in today’s workplace, which values emotional intelligence over academic intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the “soft skills” that enable smooth running interpersonal relationships at work — such as the ability to read peoples’ nonverbal cues and the ability to manage oneself within a team.
These skills are not taught in a classroom; however, someone with athletic experience is likely to have picked them up. “Sports teach workplace values like teamwork, shared commitment, decision-making under pressure, and leadership,” says Jennifer Crispen , a professor at Sweet Briar College who teaches a course in the history of culture of women’s sport.
Also, playing sports helps people succeed because it teaches skills such as, “time management, mental toughness, and focus,” says David Czesniuk, manager at the Center for the Study of Sport in Society.
This is especially true for women. Crispen told me, “Eighty-one percent of women executives played organized team sports growing up.” These women attribute their success, in a part, to the fact that they learned the values that playing these sports teaches.
Mariah Titlow, a biologist, has been involved in sports all her life. “Sports have given me better focus and discipline,” she says. “I’ve done gymnastics, swimming, dance, field hockey, track. Sports increased my confidence, made me a happier person, and taught me how to get through something tough.”
Elite colleges are aware of this connection, which explains why it is easier to get into the Ivy League if you are an athlete. And employers know that athletes have an advantage in the workplace, so hiring managers like to see candidates with athletic experience.
For athletes, this is great news. Non-athletes should stop complaining about the unfair advantage, and instead, take steps to confer some of the advantages of being an athlete on themselves. Here are some ideas for getting started:
If you’re in school, join a team and approach it with dedication, because that’s an integral part of your education. “Your body and your brain are connected,” says Titlow, “so the benefits of sports spill over into other parts of life.” The career benefits of being an athlete are not necessarily related to talent, they have to do with focus and commitment. So get some.
If you are out of school, there are still opportunities to join teams that cater to adult beginners. But if you can’t image doing that, at least go to the gym. It’s no coincidence two thirds of female business executives and 75 percent of all chief executives, exercise regularly, Crispen said. While you do not gain team-oriented benefits from individual exercise, you do cultivate business essentials such as self-discipline, goal setting, and self-confidence.
In fact exercise in the morning notably improves your workplace performance that very day, according to research from Leeds Metropolitan University.
Still feeling like a couch potato? That couch time is costing you money: The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that good-looking people make 14 percent more than ugly people. Part of this discrepancy is because, `’The perfect leader is someone who is able to control other peoples’ perceptions of him. Everyone has a secret — a weakness or a raw nerve they don’t want to be touched. For a person who is overweight, the secret is out.” says executive recruiter Mark Jaffe.
Before you hem and haw about beauty being in the eye of the beholder, just go to the gym. You know good-looking when you see it, and you know ugly when you see it, and a body that’s been exposed to regular exercise at the gym is probably not ugly. You might not get that whole 14 percent of extra pay, but your career is going to benefit one way or another if you exercise regularly.