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.
Getting a call from a recruiter is like getting asked to the prom. It doesn’t matter if the offer is sub-par; it’s always flattering to be asked. But there’s a lot of advice about how to get a prom date and not very much on how to attract recruiters.
The best way to encourage recruiters to call you is to understand how they do their job. So I talked to a few recruiters and came up with five things you can do to look attractive to recruiters.
1. Post to sites with good search tools.
Recruiters like to visit sites that aggregate resumes and offer specific search criteria, says recruiter Matt Millunchick. Blogs are difficult to search but social networking sites like MySpace and LinkedIn facilitate keyword searches. Be sure to fill in profiles thoroughly on these sites so that your resume matches more searches.
2. Choose your friends carefully, and then monitor them.
Recruiters will put up with a little quirkiness in an online profile but don’t worry only about what you post yourself: “Be careful about what photos of you are available and what and your friends post about you,” warns Millunchick. Recruiters will find everything. Recruiter Mark Jaffe told me he has a full-time employee with a master’s degree who researches candidates. “The two of us work like the FBI looking at persons on interest.
3. Be a thought leader.
Recruiters use Google to find the articles you’ve published, says Millunchick. So write some. Many sites are eager to get well-written content for free. If you feel totally lost in the article-writing world, Article Marketing Niche Blog can show you how to do it.
4. Use the scientific method.
The importance of keywords on your resume cannot be overestimated. John Sullivan, recruiting advisor and professor of management at San Francisco State University, told me that he advises his students to post three different resumes in an online database and see which receives the most responses. This is a way to continually hone the keyword effectiveness of your resume.
5. Do great work at the job you have.
The higher up you get, the less likely it is that a recruiter will troll the Internet. Jaffe told me he relies on word of mouth to find senior executives. “We follow candidates like my sixteen-year-old son follows all the details of baseball players. We look at minor leaguers, we look at who’s coming up, and we track people who we see as nascent superstars.”
He adds, “If you’re doing a really, really good job at work, we’ll find you. Once you try to get our attention you are turning that dangerous corner where you start looking like a used car salesman in gold chains.”
Time magazine’s cover story is How Your Siblings Make You Who You Are. There are a few good tidbits about how your sibling experience affects how you are at work.
Adult life is made up of relationships – at work, in marriage, among friends — and we learn the skills for these relationships through siblings because we spend so much time with siblings during our most formative years, according to Susan McHale, psychologist at Penn State University.
One example is if there is a favorite child (which researchers see in the majority of families) all the kids will use it to their advantage. As in, “Why don’t you ask Mom if we can go to the mall because she never says no to you.” And we end up using the same tactics at work: “You go tell the vice president that we missed our sales goals. He has a soft spot for you.”
Negotiation styles between siblings affect skills beyond the home. If kids have good conflict-resolution skills among themselves, then they will have more success in school. Regardless of race, income and family structure, it’s the style of play that will make the difference in future success.
Favorite statistic from the article: “Kids in the 2-4 age group have more than one clash every ten minutes,” which I read as my older son hit my younger son with Buzz Lightyear.
The Wall Street Journal gives terrible advice this week on “going from maternity leave to permanent resignation.”
Columnist Sue Shellenbarger writes, “Once a mother is absolutely sure she isn’t going to return to work after maternity leave, I believe she’s obligated to reveal her intentions to her employer.”
WHY? There is no description in the column about the genesis of this obligation. Is it a moral obligation to protect corporate America from having to support families?
Listen to me: Take that leave, and don’t feel guilty. The United States is the only country in the developed world that does not provide national, paid maternity leave. So the few women in the US who can actually take maternity leave have EARNED it. The law gives these women the RIGHT to take that maternity leave regardless of what happens afterwards.
Shellenbarger also warns that you will “burn your bridges” by taking maternity leave and then quitting. She writes this as if it’s a national trend to rehire women after they take extended leave for children. In fact, it’s just the opposite: Most companies do not take you back after leave. And companies that do are notable exceptions. (Anyway, I would not even want to go back to a boss if he were the bitter-about-maternity-leave type, so why bother appeasing him?)
Here’s the advice the Wall Street Journal should have given: Don’t tell anyone at work that you’re not coming back after the baby. Collect all your maternity leave money and do not feel guilty. Call at the end of leave and say you’re not coming back. Tell your boss you’re sorry to put him in a difficult position, but everything feels different once the baby is there. That is true. It is not lying.
Please, do not feel guilty. That women take maternity leave and then quit is a result of the system being totally flawed. It is absurd to presume that women know if they want to continue working before they know what it’s like to be home all day with a baby. And it is unreasonable that the workplace cannot provide a decent number of baby-friendly jobs so that women who want to continue working can without compromising their own health (exhaustion) or their baby’s (too much separation).
In fact, quitting right after maternity leave is not so uncommon, says Laura Shelton, who has done extensive research about Gen X women at the office. She suggests that advice like the Wall Street Journal’s is a result of a generation gap — boomers like Shellenbarger just don’t get it: Boomers fought to get women into he workplace but boomers ignored maternity benefits.
Maybe your boss will take some advice from Shellenbarger’s source, Don Sutaria, who gives companies some good advice: Hire a temporary worker who could stay on as permanent if the maternity leave turns into full leave.
And while you’re pregnant, train the temp well. This will make you feel better if you decide not to return to work, and it’ll even make you feel better if you do return because someone will have kept your work in order.