I founded a company with a guy who was single and good looking and everyone who met with us thought we were dating. We weren’t. He was almost twenty years older than I was, for one thing. But we did spend ten hours a day together, and at some point it’s hard to say it’s only business.
It’s not uncommon to feel like you’re almost married to someone you work with. In fact, 32 percent of workers feel that way. The Des Moines Register reports that this is generally a common and positive workplace trend. I have to say that my experience of the phenomena was positive, also. We were very in tune with what each other was thinking because we were so emotionally connected. We handled meetings better as a team, and we grew the company more effectively because we were so invested in the other person as well as the company.
This sort of relationship can go bad, though, according to this month’s Oprah magazine, (which, by the way, is really underrated by the intelligentsia. I love the magazine and recommend that you subscribe. After all, what other publisher has the power of Oprah to get anyone she wants in the whole world to be in her magazine?) So anyway, according to the magazine, when these relationships go bad it’s because the people are getting their emotional needs met by a co-worker instead of their boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse. Oprah’s in-house therapist says that’s cheating, even if there’s no spit-swapping. And, she points out that if your marriage sucks, it’s a lot easier to fix it when it sucks than to fix it when it sucks and you’ve cheated.
So really, this sort of workplace spouse relationship only works well if you’re not in a relationship outside of work. It’ll work well as a stop-gap measure to keep things interesting until you can either get something going outside of work or start having sex with that co-worker. (If you’re going to do the latter, it’s tricky to not destroy yourself and/or your career. Here are four tips, along with the comforting fact that 40% of the working world has taken the same, insane risk.)
In case you have had your head in the sand for forever, emotional intelligence is what you need if you want to work with other people successfully. At this point, about four thousand studies have shown that emotional intelligence (“EQ” as in “emotional IQ”) makes people more successful at work. For you doubters, here is a quick summary list of ten studies from the Emotional Intelligence Consortium.
EQ is basically about being likeable. And the truth is that if you are not likeable people won’t work with you. Not that your skills don’t matter. If you need to learn media buying to do your job, then learn it. You will get hired because of your skills, but you will get fired for your personality. In fact, a study by Tiziana Casciaro at Harvard University showed that people would rather work with someone nice and incompetent than someone skilled but unpleasant.
The trouble is that everyone overestimates their own emotional intelligence. To make this point, I found an EQ test that you can take. And, to my chagrin, I found that I also overestimate my own EQ, Not that I am not at the top of the class. I am. But I didn’t realize that being good with one’s own finances is an indicator of EQ. (I confess that I buy the expensive, pre-sliced fruit almost every day.) At least I admit where I fall short. (Which, by the way, is a sign of high EQ.)
Salary.com and Money magazine just released a list of the top fifty jobs.
Here’s how they did the rankings:
Things that are bad are less than $50,000 average salary, dangerous, and small field with little room for advancement.
Things that are good are a growing field, low stress, flexibility in hours and working environment, creativity, and easy advancement.
Here are the top ten:
1. Software engineer
2. College professor
3. Financial advisor
4. Human resource advisor
5. Physician assistant
6. Market research analyst
7. Computer/IT analyst
8. Real estate appraiser
9. Pharmacist
10. Psychologist
I dove for this list as soon as I saw it, but the rankings are not as useful as you might imagine. However it made me happy to see that psychologist is up there at the top — it’s hard enough to go to a therapist, so I at least want to know that while I’m talking she is enjoying herself.
If you work the most hours you look the most desperate. You shouldn’t look lazy, but don’t be the hardest worker. After all, why do you need to work so much harder than the next person? Are you not as smart? Not as organized? Not as confident in your ability to navigate a non-work world? In many cases all three are true for those who work the hardest.
The fact that the hardest worker is not necessarily the most successful rears its head before work even starts: A study conducted by Alan Krueger, professor of economics at Princeton University, shows that when it comes to workplace success, it doesn’t matter if you get in to an Ivy League school, it matters if you apply. In this case what matters is ambition and self-image, not getting the best grades or having the best test scores.
Nonstop work offers diminishing returns after graduation as well. Marita Barth is a student at MIT in biological engineering. She is at the top of her field yet she makes time to play ice hockey and volunteer at local charities. When she talks about taking breaks from her lab, Barth says, I could not maintain focus and energy if I worked nonstop. I would completely lose perspective.”
Don’t tell yourself that you work nonstop because you love your work: If you really loved your work, you’d take a break so you don’t mess it up. People who work longer than the typical eight hours a day start to lose their effectiveness quickly. “If you work all the time, you lose your edge,” warns Diane Fassel, CEO of workplace survey firm Newmeasures and author of Working Ourselves to Death. “Often these people are perfectionists, controlling and not good team players. The hardest workers are “not the best producers in terms of efficiency and creativity.”
Ironically, moments that elevate your level of success at work often require time away from work. For example, a grand idea that impacts your company's bottom line probably won’t come to you when your brain is entrenched in workplace minutia. Anyone can work the hardest, but only special people can sit on a rock and come up with a brilliant idea. In fact, even daily troubleshooting requires some mental space. Barth has found that, “It takes a lot of thought to see what’s going wrong and make another plan. And at some point, if I spend too much time in the lab without a break, I’m not efficient.”
If you can’t stop working, you might be in for some bad news: Workaholism. Kevin Kulic, professor of psychology at Mercy College, says, “With any of those -holics, you are one if it causes you or other people a problem.”
But some people purposely create imbalance. “For many people, workaholism is about perfectionism or avoidance,” says Kulic. The hardest workers have actually lost the self-confidence to stop working. They are either terrified of making a mistake or a misstep, or they are terrified of the world that lies beyond their work — for example crumbling personal relationships.
Kulic cites the Yerkes-Dodson law that says too much or too little stimulation is bad. We need a happy medium in order to perform best. And Fassel cites worker surveys that support this law — the happiest workers have a workload that falls in between very heavy and very light.
This rule for working less applies to a job hunt, too. Many of you will be happy to hear that, “The amount of time you work beyond five hours a day has no impact on your ability to land a job” — good news brought to you by David Perry, managing partner of the recruiting firm Perry Martel International and co-author of Guerilla Marketing for Job Hunters.
Perry told me that a job hunt is like training for the 50-yard dash. “Everything is aimed at getting the interview. And you need to be mentally prepared.” Just as an athlete does not over train for the race, a job hunter will also experience defeating fatigue if there’s too much energy spent on the hunt.
Perry is adamant that the best jobs do not go to the smartest person or hardest worker but to the person who best reads his or her situation. So forget being the hardest worker because you need to be “bright eyed and bushy tailed.” Get out from behind that computer each day, he says and “enjoy the rest of your life.”
If you don’t organize your life with a list then you won’t know what is most important. Here are the problems with not knowing what is most important:
1. You spend your life doing things that don’t matter.
2. You drive yourself crazy by doing things of little importance all day long and then having to stay up late doing the things that really matter.
3. You don’t spend enough time asking yourself hard questions. Because what is a harder question than, “What is most important to me?”
I am a fiend about lists. So I was excited to try out Ta-Da List. It’s software that allows you to make linked lists. I love this because I find myself, as a list obsessive, using comment fields in Excel for extra lists. So, for example, I have a list of people to call, and then comment-field lists of what to say to each person. With Ta-Da List, I can have lists embedded in lists without my Excel jerry-rig.
Sometimes, though, when I am writing my lists, I think, gosh, this is so much detail, and I am not a detail person. I wish I had an assistant to dump this stuff on. Then I read that Bill Gates does not have a to-do list. I was surprised, but it makes sense. This is the nicest benefit I have ever heard to being rich and powerful: He can actually think something and it will get done because he is surrounded by such a wide range of competent people (who are, of course, at his beck-and-call).
Until you are Bill Gates, though, you should manage your days with a to-do list. And you should set aside time each morning to organize the list. Otherwise, you will just be reacting to what happens during the day; other peoples’ priorities will dictate your own. And then whose life are you living?
When is comes to aspirational reading, the Title 9 catalogue is my favorite. I don’t know anyone at the company, but I curl up on the sofa and read the catalogue like it’s a letter from a good friend.
Great things about this catalogue:
- The women who model the clothes. No pro athletes here and no models. These are career girls. This month there is Kathy, who is a business owner and pole vaulter and mom. There is Brigid who is a sales rep who competes in the Ironman. These are women I want to be like.
- The lifestyle. All good catalogues sell one. The Title 9 lifestyle mixes work and play. For example, the stash and dash satchel (which I will be buying) is pictured next to this description: “Flat zippered outer pocket fits files and documents perfectly. Plus two outer stash straps for a yoga mat.”
- The name. For those of you who don’t know, Title IX is the law that required girls to receive equal access to sports that boys do. So (theoretically) no more spending thousands of dollars on high school football and basketball for boys and nothing for girls. This law is constantly under threat even though people like law professor Joanna Grossman write that, “Title IX is arguably the most successful civil rights statute in history.” Women who play sports do better at work, according to a study published in the magazine Sports File. Title 9 is a great company for making the law a household name.
Read this catalogue to get excited about your life and your work. Really. You can find it online, but call (800) 342-4448 to get one delivered for optimal sofa reading.
Here is my first post to my blog. About two years too late.
I know this because two years ago, my readers started telling me that I should blog. I ignored them, mostly, because it seemed like too much work to write every day. After all, I write two columns a week and I invariably do an interview from the gym or from my son’s preschool. I couldn’t imagine doing more work. But now I can’t imagine not having a blog.
One of the readers who made me think the hardest about blogging was Dennis Yang. In fact, he set up a trial blog for me. Which I never used but also never stopped thinking about.
And this reminds me of dozens of readers who told me I should write a book, two or three years before I did. (And my mom. She told me a lot, too.)
So now I have learned my lesson. If I had taken the advice of my readers, I’d have been ahead of myself in many ways. Hopefully, the blog will make it so I hear from more readers on more topics.
As for listening to my mom more, I’m not sure about that.
Can we all just stop talking about promotions like they matter? A promotion has meaning when someone is moving up the corporate ladder at such a slow pace that every small step is grounds for celebration.
But there are no more ladders because no one stays long enough at a company to get up the whole ladder. And even if someone did try to climb, they’d probably be laid-off outsourced or off-shored before they got to the top.
So what is the point of a promotion? Titles do not matter because they are accoutrements of hierarchy in a nonhierarchical workforce. And no one cares about getting MORE responsibly that implicitly comes with a promotion, they want the RIGHT kind of responsibility — which means interesting work and a chance to expand one’s skills set.
So all that’s left to justify continuing to talk about promotions is getting a raise, which is hardly a notable event. Here is a headline from Salary.com: “Raise Outlook Better than Employees Expected”. The article goes on to say that the average raise was something just above three percent. Let’s say four percent. This means if you were making $100,000 a year, you’ll get $4,000 a year more. SO WHAT? After cost of living and tax adjustments you are looking at a little over a thousand dollars. That will not change your life in any significant way, that’s for sure.
When someone tries to give you a promotion or insult you with a $1000 a year raise, tell them you want someone that really matters. Here are some suggestions:
1. Growth opportunities
Learning new skills is worth a lot more to you than some ridiculous 4% raise. Ask to get on a team that will teach you how to do something you think is important. Ask to work with the clients who are doing the most innovative projects. Request a training budget and send yourself to a bunch of seminars. The best way to learn is to role-play, which everyone hates to do, so go to a seminar where someone is forces you to do it.
2. Mentor opportunities
Ask to be matched with a mentor in the company. This is not a revolutionary request. Human resource executives have been studying this process for more than a decade and they know how to pick someone good for you. They just need to spend a little time doing it.
3. Flex-time opportunities
If you are so great at your job that you have earned a promotion, suggest that you keep your current job but do it from home or do it four days a week. After all, you’ve already shown you perform well. Heck, ask to work from Tahiti; you should be able to do the job however you want as long as you maintain that stellar level of performance.
4. Entrepreneurial opportunities
Just say no. To the promotion, that is. Now that you have a sense of how much time and energy your current job requires, now that you’ve mastered the scope, you can try something on the side. The safest way to experiment with running your own business is to do it while you still have a regular paycheck. Who cares if it doesn’t include that 4% raise? Think of that paycheck as a research grant for your ideas for a side business.
Instead of letting last century’s carrots dictate your workplace rewards, think about what is right for you, right now. What do you really need? You don’t need a promotion. It’s something else. Think about what would really make a difference in your life and then make it happen. While the rest of your organization is focusing on titles and money you can slip under the radar and get something truly meaningful.
People would be a lot happier with the job they had if they were happier with themselves outside of their job. We have seen steady decline in job satisfaction, no matter if the employment rate is very high or very low, and even when most people have control over their time and their workload, they still report that they are unhappy in their jobs, according to the Harvard Business Review.
People do not like work because they don’t like their personal life. And the key to being happy at work is not so much finding the perfect career as it is finding yourself. The more self-knowledge you have the happier you will be. So stop looking at your job to solve your problems and instead look inside yourself. Make friends with yourself and with other people, and your job, whatever it is, might start looking better because you’re not asking so much from it.
If you are looking to your job for the meaning of life, forget it. Even people who feed starving children with the Peace Corps have crisis of meaning. (For example, What is the point of feeding one child when six will die?) The meaning of life is elusive and you must put in a lot of time and energy to find meaning in your life.
The job hunt is separate. The job is something you have to do to support yourself. Since you’re going to be doing it for a good portion of your life, you should look for some basics: People who respect you and your personal life. A company that is honest. A job that uses your skills and experience. A job that challenges your abilities without overwhelming you.
Work does not need to give your life a grand purpose in order to be a good experience. The most pleasurable work provides a perfect balance between too much and too little — in terms of both amount and difficulty, according to Diane Fassel, the chief executive of workplace survey firm Newmeasures and author of the book Working Ourselves to Death.
A career is like a mate. The relationship is limited by what you bring to the table. If you are not happy with yourself, you won’t be happy with the match-up. Here’s an analogy a friend once told me: You have to have the cake, and then the relationship is the icing. It doesn’t matter how good the icing is if there’s no cake to put it on. Who eats icing by itself? Gross.
The part about you is the most important. What do you do when you’re alone? How do you feel about yourself? What are your core values and do you lead your life according to them each day? Do you numb yourself with food or TV or alcohol? It’s very hard to be honest about this stuff. Yet amazingly, people spend lots of time on locating a job and a mate and very little time locating themselves.
“Employees should not demand that companies imbue their lives with meaning,” writes E.L. Kersten in the Harvard Business Review. “Employers and employees have something the other needs. One of the keys to a mutually beneficial relationship is a realistic understanding of what that something is.” A job is not a life.
In fact, online dating is not a bad model for evaluating a job. For one thing, you should never write that you want a mate to make you feel fulfilled — that’s asking much too much from a single person. Yet we complain all the time that our jobs are not fulfilling.
Dating services ask that you be as specific as possible in your desires. So try that for a job. Here’s what I would ask for in a job, and it’s the same thing I looked for in a spouse:
Fair
Fun
Mind-expanding
Interesting
Consistent with my values
Leaves space for the other parts of my life
And here’s another thing about those lists: You are probably going to have to be your list to get your list. That’s why interesting people are at interesting companies. So be who you want to be instead of looking for a mate or a company to make you who you wish you were.
I’ve been doing a little research on sleep. I have found that the more I understand about nutrition, the better I eat. And I thought the same would hold true for sleep. In fact, though on my way to convincing myself to sleep more, I found mostly research to help me sleep less.
But first, here is the research that will make you want to sleep: If you don’t sleep, you’re more likely to be obese and dumb, both of which are bad for your career.
People who get fewer than six hours of sleep function like drunk people at work. For example people who missed just one night of sleep scored 20% lower on math tests than they did when they had eight hours of sleep. And, people who get significantly fewer than eight hours a night of sleep are more likely to be obese, according to a study at the University of British Columbia.
Here’s some research I didn’t expect to see:
Humans need only six or seven hours of sleep. In fact, if you get more than that, you are likely to die earlier, according to researchers from the University of California at San Diego.
And here's more good news for the chronic night-owl who suffers with a day job: If you miss out on sleep, you don’t need to make it all up. Only about a third of this lost sleep needs to be regained. The people who spend all weekend in bed catching up don’t need that much sleep. They just like lying around in bed.
You don’t even have to wait for the weekend to make up the sleeping time: Power naps are in fashion — at least among elite athletes and soldiers in Iraq, both of whom are required to take power naps before a major effort. The power nap should be exactly twenty minutes, according to sleep researcher Sara Mednick, at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Your sleep cycles run in 90 or 120 minute cycles, but after twenty minutes you’ve done the most important part of your sleeping.
I am an easy convert to the idea of a power nap, but I never seem to wake up at that magical twenty minute mark when researchers say that I won’t be groggy. I am, in fact, routinely groggy after my supposed power nap. And that groggy feeling when you wake up is the equivalent of you after four beers, according to Kenneth Wright at the University of Colorado. So the power nap is not for me.
But here’s my favorite study, the one that really pulls everything together: The caffeine nap. This is a nap that allows me to compensate for not quite getting my seven hours of sleep a night, but I don’t feel groggy after the nap.
Researchers at Loughborough University in England found that coffee can clear your body of the sleep-inducing chemical adenosine. The best way to handle the caffeine is to chug a cup of coffee and then immediately take a nap, before the caffeine kicks in and makes for jittery napping. The nap should last exactly fifteen minutes, which is the point at which the caffeine starts to gain traction in your brain.
I did it today, head on the table, next to the computer, when I was sure that I could not keep my eyes open another second: Fifteen minutes and boom! I was writing again with perk and verve.
Of course the caffeine nap will not save the world from having to sleep. For one thing, there’s no research to show that caffeine nap can help you beat the correlation between lack of sleep and obesity. But I’ll tell you, I’ll never aim for eight hours of sleep again.