Most jobs turn out to be very different than what you were told about in the interview. So your first task in your new job is to figure out what the job really is. Most people don’t do this which is why there is a whole cottage industry of people who coach for the first ninety days of a job (here’s a book and a web site for starters).
You must realize that each new hire has political motivations. It’s your job to uncover the politics behind your position so you can figure out what you should really be doing instead of relying on your official job description.
A good example of this situation came up in Fortune magazine this week. Garry Betty, CEO of EarthLink said, “Google only has three engineers working on Wi-Fi. [CEO] Eric Schmidt laughingly told me in a meeting that the best hires they ever did was when they hired those three Wi-Fi engineers and put out a press release. The market cap went up $10 billion.”
In fact it was never Google’s intention to be a huge Wi-Fi provider. But Wall St. Analysts loved the idea that Google hired some top Wi-Fi engineers. By hiring three people, the stock price went up significantly. Certainly enough to justify the three salaries. So in fact, these three engineers didn’t need to do anything. For these engineers to thrive at Google, they needed to understand this situation, and decide where to go from there.
So before you get giddy about your new job, don’t get too attached to the job you think you got. Spent the first ninety days figuring out what people really want from you but couldn’t tell you in the interview.
And then, instead of complaining about bait-and-switch, recognize that it’s part of corporate life – it is, in fact, very hard to predict exactly what someone might do once they get to an office. So just do the job that needs doing. If you do it well, you should be able to finesse your position into something you like in no time at all.
Movie mogul Mark Gill, the guy who produced blockbusters on a shoestring like “March of the Penguins” ($77 million at the box office) and “Good Night, and Good Luck” (six Oscar nominations) has been fired. Well, officially resigned, but really he was pushed out because he can’t get along with his boss.
The New York Times reports that, “Mr. Gill’s personal style continually clashed with that of Jeff Robinov, Warner’s president of production and Mr. Gill’s boss.”
About a year ago, Gill knew there was a problem and said, “I definitely had to make some adjustments to fit into this culture.” But he obviously did not make the necessary changes. No surprise. The more you feel like a star, the more you feel like you don’t need to change.
But don’t kid yourself that doing great work for your company means you don’t have to adjust your attitude and behavior to fit in. Even a guy who produces the most popular documentaries of the year has to get along with his boss in order to keep his job.
This is not revolutionary management. In fact there’s a Harvard Business Review case study (that you have to pay for) called “What a Star – What a Jerk” that discusses the need to fire people who perform well but don’t mesh with the organization.
But, like most case studies about interpersonal skills, you don’t need to read twenty pages to know the truth: If you don’t like someone, nothing else about them matters.
My husband and I both want to be home with our kids while they are young, and we downsized our standard of living enormously to do that.
I made a career change from software company executive to writer. This has been great for me. It’s a career that can grow big, but there is lots of flexibility for working around my personal life.
My husband ended his entertainment industry career and downshifted, slowly, first to the nonprofit world, which we found surprisingly inflexible for parenting, then to stay-at-home dad.
You know how you hear about the dads in the 50s who folded under the pressure of having to support a family with no financial help from a partner? I am sorry to say that I felt like that — especially living in New York City.
But, like most people who want jobs with flexible hours, my husband was not able to find one. And a standard job would mean leaving at 8 a.m. and getting home at 7 p.m. which are pretty much the hours our kids are awake. So, he had to choose between working nights or not seeing the kids. He chose working nights.
There are not a lot of options for working nights. Especially if you don’t have the talents to work at a nightclub. So my husband is answering phones at a car service. He takes down the time the person wants the car and some other information and a computerized system dispatches the car. My husband does the same thing, over and over again, for eight hours a day.
To give you a sense of his co-workers, the woman next to him slammed down the phone the other day and said, “The customers are so outrageous! This guy wants a car in a quarter hour. How am I supposed to know what a quarter hour is?”
In between calls, his coworkers play brand-name Internet-based games that my husband produced in his former career. He doesn’t tell anyone. He tries to fly under the radar.
But the customers, investment bankers at the most chic-chic firms in the city, notice something is different about my husband. Two or three times a week, someone will say to him over the phone, “What are you doing at this place?” One guy said, “Is this your real job?” My husband said yes and the guy pushed until my husband explained our situation. The guy said, “That would have never happened when I was your age. Men couldn’t do that.”
The hardest part about this life is that very few people understand what we’re doing. You can imagine what a conversation killer it is when someone asks my husband the great American question: “So, what do you do?”
Although I overheard one woman say to him, “Your kids are so lucky,” the best support system I’ve found is learning from other people who are thinking seriously about this topic.
I particularly liked The Bullshit Observer’s rant this week about how difficult it is to manage career aspirations and be a hands-on parent. He has some interesting statistics as well as insights like this one:
“American parents have two very fundamental responsibilities at war with each other every single day. Those who’ve chosen the path that goes up the ladder appear to have chosen not to be parents. Those who’ve chosen the path that leads to the diaper bin have chosen not to move up.”
One organization that publishes a lot of information on changing the situation is the Third Path. This organization helps couples move beyond the idea that one parent is the primary caretaker and toward a mindset of “shared care”.
Third Path offers mentoring to couples who are trying to implement a shared care arrangement in their home. Though this path is not easy for anyone, the stories of what people have gone through to make shared care work are inspiring.
The reason you need to take breaks from your work is that if you don’t pick your head out of the trees you’ll never see the forest. Great ideas do not come to those continually mired in details. Your brain needs a moment to relax. Most of us know this intuitively. The problem is that most of the ways we relax at during work are destructive: candy break, smoking break, online shopping.
I thought of this because today Chad’s Reviews, which is totally over-the-top workplace commentary, pokes fun of the idea of taking a break to do something destructive: “If You Get A Smoke Break, Then I Can Punch The Wall For 15 Minutes.” (If you like Chad, you must read his blog raison d’etre: “Why I’m Frickin’ Doing This“)
I find that I usually degenerate from doing something hard to surfing to eating to biting my nails. It’s a frustrating path and I always wish that I took a true break at the surfing and saved my nails.
I have actually taught myself how to meditate, and it works every time. But sitting on the floor next to my computer, which takes no energy and less than two seconds to do, somehow has become as difficult for me to do as going to the gym.
Being with yourself is hard. Turning off the input is hard. Believe me, it is so much easier for me to read Chad’s Reviews than it is to clear my head and think of nothing. But when I meditate, even for a minute, which is acceptable but on the too-short side, I see huge improvement in my ability to do good work. And I am not crazy. Researchers have found that meditation improves work performance.
I have to be honest, though. Training myself to meditate took a lot of practice, and I learned it in order to perfect my jump serve in volleyball, not to be better in an office. (Visualization is a proven technique among Olympic athletes.) But you know what? I really don’t think I’d have reached the professional ranks of volleyball without having added meditation to my training. (The book I used: Peak Performance: Mental Training Techniques of the World’s Greatest Athletes.)
Just typing the name of the book reminds me of what a big impact it made on my life in terms of my ability to focus and think big. I really believe meditation will improve my office work, too, if I’d just sit on the floor and do it. I thought maybe if I blogged about how important it is, then I’d be more likely to do it next time I find myself going to the fridge when the only thing I’m hungry for is a break.
The best companies to work for are those that understand that priorities among workers are changing. In fact, Laura Shelton and Charlotte Shelton conducted a nation-wide survey about worker priorities, published in Generation NeXt. The survey showed that for Generation X, “Recognition scored very low, and power and prestige ranked dead last. Salary, a major preoccupation for boomers, came in third from the bottom.”
The companies that do the best job of keeping Gen Xers happy are companies accommodate life outside of work and that downplay hierarchy, since “rank and seniority mean nothing to Generation Xers.”
The book is full of fascinating statistics which you would never know by looking at the dowdy cover. But anyway, when I interviewed Laura Shelton, who is an Xer herself, we talked about the difference between what women did twenty years ago (her mom and co-author, Charlotte Shelton) and what they do now. When Katrina hit, Laura, who is a newscaster in Louisiana, left with a few of her friends to take a break and regroup. Her mother said that when she was Laura’s age the women would have been too nervous about getting ahead in their careers to think about leaving for a break during such an important time.
Laura’s final message: Forget about being nervous. “Don’t sit in a job with a baby boomer boss who doesn’t get it. Vote with your feet.”
The new workplace currency is training. Title is not important if you’re not staying long term. Salary increases of 3 or 4 percent are ceremonial. So use the clout you earn to get training; it will make a difference in a way salary and title cannot because training can fundamentally change how you operate and what you have to offer.
This column shows you how.
The book I’m reading right now is by twenty-five-year-old Ryan Heath: “Please Just F* Off, It’s Our Turn Now: Holding Baby Boomers to Account.” The book is great and offers incredible insight into what young people have to offer and why baby boomers need to get out of their way.
It’s published in Australia so you can’t buy it in the U.S. in stores. So it’ll cost you $40 to buy the book from the Australian publisher and have it shipped, but it’s worth it. In any case, I will tell you some of my favorite parts here.
The premise of the book is that baby boomers refuse to retire, refuse to admit that their ideas are outdated, and they are making their institutions irrelevant to young people, who are basically refusing to take part in baby boomer institutions. Heath focuses a lot in Australia, because young people are leaving in droves. But a lot of his points resonate in the U.S. also, where young people have little interest the all-consuming corporate life that baby boomers have institutionalized.
Heath describes his generation with great one-liners like, “We’ve been to IKEA more than we’ve been to church.” And he does a great job of describing how totally different his generation is from the baby boomers. Of young people’s energy he says, “It’s not a counter-culture or a mass protest. It’s not even a movement — it’s a view on hundreds of little movements, technologies, communications, social networks and practical philosophies.”
His ability to describe his generation is reason enough to buy the book. Young people will cheer at his ability to frame them in an extremely positive light and his ability to inspire excitement. The U.S. supports a large industry of baby boomers selling themselves as experts on generation Y to other baby boomers who want to retain gen-Y employees (who usually leave after less than two years). This book also makes you wonder about the ability of baby boomers to train other baby boomers on how to handle gen-Y employees.
Heath also does a great service when he tells boomers to change how they are dealing with young people. He warns boomers that, “We lead a much grander lifestyle than our incomes suggest, we solve problems in a flash and we’ve read about the latest dumb thing George Bush said before most of you have even turned up to the office.” He describes the power of blogging and being part of a networked community and says, “We want conversations not lectures.”
Heath shows that the impact of a networked community and a generation that refuses to receive lectures is that hierarchy is dead. “You are playing the wrong game if you thin power and influence and even fun is about being in control anymore,” warns Heath. “Hierarchies can’t cope with the new complex world we live in unless they are rigidly enforced as in the case with armed forces. But they aren’t needed for most things in our lives. Networks are designed to negate hierarchy — their members collaborate rather than compete.”
He has great insight, and he’s brave to dis the boomers when they still control almost all media outlets. Generation X might bristle at the unbridled self-confidence and optimism of Generation Y. But the Xers will be relieved to see that finally young people have the demographic force to take the boomers to task. Ryan Heath is the beginning of a tidal wave.
You have to specialize. Not right away, but figure out how to own some sort of niche. It is the key to your freedom. A specialist in a large company can demand flexibility, but a specialist also has an ability to leave corporate life and succeed on her own, which is something generalists can’t easily do.
There is good research to show that you will have an easier time staying employed if you specialize. This research comes, in part, from Hollywood, where people say they don’t want to be typecast, but the reality is that being typecast is a great way to get steady work.
In the corporate world, headhunters always have a job description they are trying to fill exactly. If you are a square peg, you can go in a square hole. If you do not define exactly what kind of peg you are, a recruiter can’t put you in a hole: No calls from headhunters.
But most people who are strategizing their career right now are not thinking long-term employment, they are thinking entrepreneurship. (Industry pundit Paul Saffo said in the EETimes, “I think the unintended consequence of the dot-com bust is that we have created the largest generation of entrepreneurs this country has ever seen.”)
For this generation, specialization is key to getting OUT of corporate life and into a more flexible work situation. You can’t market yourself to clients if you don’t offer any specific, unique service. And you can’t start your own company by selling to everyone all at once. Specialization is what will make you stand out enough to make it on your own.
When you are wondering why anyone would go work for a big company, the answer is to learn a specialty. Think of corporate life as an apprenticeship so that you can start your own company. Big companies are crawling with mentors and training programs that will help you narrow your focus effectively.
If you’re looking for a road map, there’s a nice story this week about how Christopher Burge became a specialist in running snooty auctions.
And when you get a little further down the specializing road, check out the book Slightly Famous, which, of course, has a web site in an effort to dominate the how-to-be-slightly-famous niche.
According to Newsweek, more than 3.4 million people have a daily commute that is longer than 90 minutes. Insane. I know it’s insane because I used to do it – Los Angeles to Orange County — and I went nuts. My whole life was organized around getting up at 4am to beat traffic and getting to sleep in time to get up the next morning.
I took the job because it was much better than any offer I had in LA, but I didn’t want to lose the life I had in LA. The thing is, I didn’t have a life anyway with my commute. I left that job after a little less than a year. To be honest, the job was great and enabled me to land future jobs in Los Angeles, near my home.
But what blows my mind is the people who think an extreme commute is a long-term solution. It’s not. Your life starts rotting away. Your friends and family don’t see you, you have no personal time that is not in the car, and perhaps most importantly, there’s no time for sex.
Take this last point seriously. David Blanchflower, professor of economics, found that the most important factor in one’s happiness is not money, it’s sex. And the two are not related, according to him. On top of that he found that the thing people do that makes them the most unhappy is…drumroll…the commute.
So stop rationalizing that a long commute will get you something you need. And stop living in denial about the true cost of those hours spent in the car: It’s your happiness, and good money or a big house in the suburbs will not improve things.
The best jobs are the ones where you are learning; the work is not too easy and not too hard. (The Yerkes-Dodson law says that optimum difficulty leads to optimum performance.) So forget looking for a pay increase (what is three percent of your salary going to buy you, really?) and forget a new title (titles only matter if you are going to stick around for twenty years and climb the ladder). Keep your eye on training perks. That’s what really matters. Training can change you, challenge you, set you up for the next great project, and generally make your work more fulfilling.
In an article about office politics, in Fast Company, it becomes clear that office politics is really about jockeying for the good training and good projects. Career coach Marilyn Moats Kennedy says, “Workers today compete for schedules and projects, for money and training. But they rarely compete for power – especially when that means power over others. Instead of power, people want assignments that build skills valued by the market. Learning experiences are what’s really important.”
That said, don’t settle for cheap, poorly run training. Ninth House published a white paper on what types of training top-performing companies use. Here’s a list to give you some ideas of what to ask for from your own company:
1. Executive coaching. No surprise here. But a good reminder that this sort of training is expensive and you should try to get your company to foot the bill.
2. Rotational assignments. Companies that grow their own executive management usually have intensive training programs that include many departments and businesses within the company. Push hard to get yourself into one of these programs. They are treasure troves in terms of both learning and prestige.
3. Quantitative measurement. There are ways to objectively quantify your leadership effectiveness (for example, 360-degree performance reviews). And then you can quantify your improvement, too. Ask for this. It’s a great way to find out what other people think of you without sounding lame for asking.
4. Learning by doing. Role playing is the best teacher there is, even though we all hated to do it. It’s the new rage. I see it in ads for business school, everyone claiming that they teach this way the most. I see it in image management consulting firms. I even noticed on Passover that my Haggadah has role-playing sections for kids. So even if you think you are too cool for role-play-based training, go to it if you have the chance.