Because of what you know about yourself as a result of working through this book, you can choose to manage these changing circumstances rather than letting them manage you. A high proportion of men and women drift along as changes occur, and pay the price of drifting with frustration and more serious problems, including occasional unemployment. In 1979 more than 23 million men and women were unemployed at some time or other, not counting about two million more who had given up looking for jobs. The problems that arise are not only those of meeting expenses, but can be psychological too. Thoughts occur such as, "My life has lost its meaning," and "Nobody wants me," and, "I've become a nobody," and "There's nothing to my life any more," and "The system has put me on the outside; I don't belong."
Those feelings are real enough, but you don't have to have them if you choose to manage your circumstances. This requires that you keep track of how your potential is growing, set goals, plan for what you want and be prepared to increase or reduce your objectives. Also, you will need to develop a support system of other people and establish and maintain personal relationships. In addition, you will need to be aware of circumstances that are changing and the signs of new changes. The rest of this is about how to do all these things, and how you can prepare to benefit from the flow of progress that might otherwise pass you by.
The basic work of this has already been completed in your Career Journal. A little effort is required to maintain it, but before going into that let's look at some of the realities of the 1970's. About ten years ago there was a military contract cutback and tens of thousands of space scientists and engineers suddenly found their jobs were obsolete. The most successful government-sponsored program to help them change jobs and careers was an experimental one directed by in the U.S. Department of Labor headquarters. A majority of the 22 people in this project got jobs with equivalent pay within two months, and more than 80 percent had jobs a few months later. Nearly all said that by using the systems described in this book they regained their self-confidence and many changed their careers successfully.
Bridging
It is extremely important to have a handle on your best skills, so you can change the way they are combined and bridge your way to fit new and different requirements in the job market. One young person who learned to do this was Alex Jones, a twenty-year-old Vietnam veteran, home after two years of service. He'd been promoted in the field three times and then had led his squadron; he'd been busted three times when he returned behind the lines, and had seen the inside of jail twice. He received honorable dis¬charge as a private. He was a high school dropout who com¬pleted his equivalency tests while in the Army, and was awarded two medals.
When Alex came to a project the Army was sponsoring, he resisted participation at first. As a black man, he'd had his share of being pushed around. After persistent counselor encouragement he told how he had, at the age of nine, organized kids to keep paths and sidewalks clear of snow, on a contract basis. He kept this business going for two years and made a lot of money. Before getting started he had studied five years of weather information for his area to find out how much snowfall he could expect. He had also checked what people paid other kids for clearing away snow. Then he worked out a snow season contract, lined up twenty kids to work on an hourly basis as needed, and solicited neighborhood residents for the business on a guaranteed basis. Later, in high school, he had organized another small business, and again in the Army. Each time the task required sensing a need or getting the idea, studying possibilities and prices, recruiting and organizing his "employees," and selling the service.
As he remembered these experiences, he quickly perceived that his best skills going back to childhood included management, organizing and marketing. He then found himself with the choice of becoming a guerilla type leader (on the streets), with all the uncertainties and possibilities involved, or trying for management in a good private company where his skills were also needed but where good pay and increasing opportunities could be developed with reasonable certainty. He never before had seen that second option. He said that was because while he knew he was a leader he had not been aware of his management and marketing skills. Our project had helped him to get a handle on his best skills and change his attitude from frustration about lack of dependable opportunity into perception of it.
This is an example of what is sometimes called "bridging." When you know what your best skills and talents are, you are better able to bridge your way through changing how your skills are combined to a different or improved career that continues to give you growth opportunity and fulfillment. Knowledge of how to "bridge," and what you have to bridge with, takes much of the fear out of progress and change. But the facts of your job and talents change from week to week and month to month you get better at some things; you read a book that gives new insights; you meet someone whose challenge causes you to gain a new viewpoint; you complete a course, seminar or training pro¬gram; you get to know better some person who can influence your career development.
You need to be aware of how your job is changing and your talents are growing. The way to do that is to keep track of important events related to your career. A loose leaf Career Progress Book (about 5.5 x 8.5"), and three sheets from it in your pocket, make a tool for progress available to you at all times. This Progress Book augments your Career Journal. Develop the habit of using it each week. Sometimes you can write as little as one line a week, perhaps "Nothing much happened last week." At other times you will be able to report to yourself that you were as-signed a new responsibility or task, or that you met a major department head for the first time and that you seemed to hit it off. Sometimes you might write in your Progress Book that a movie you saw, a book you read, or a conversation you had gave you the key to solving a problem; an additional task could open the door to perceiving a whole new world; you might recognize the wisdom of learning to use the typewriter, or avoid using it; you might complete a task, save a particular sum of money, buy something you long wanted; you could get your own apartment or decide to share one; you might start or finish a training program or decide you need to get to know someone better.
Because your job or career is the largest single segment of your life, it affects all the rest of it. And the reverse also is true. So your Career Progress Book has entries that are both personal and job-related. When you make entries every week (some find that too hard, and do it once a month, but more often is better) you will soon be able to observe your up and down cycles which we all have. You could choose to ignore them, but ignoring them cuts off your ability to use them. When you get to know your cycle times of high creativity and productivity, for instance, you can often shift routine and risk less activities to low cycle times and use high cycle times for activities requiring more creativity and energy. But that's only one benefit which can come from keeping track of your progress. We have daily and monthly cycles of energy and effectiveness, and your Progress Book can help you to identify them.
Goal Setting
Now that you know your best skills, talents and strengths, it is easier for you to set short-term and longer-term goals and also to change them as you see fit. You cannot change your mind until after you've made it up; you cannot modify a goal or objective until after it is chosen. It is customary for people to set self-defeating goals; this gives evidence of their "humanity," fallibility enables them to feel sorry for themselves, and provides opportunity to indulge in the time-consuming effort of trying to learn from their mistakes.
That's the traditional approach that seemed to work well enough for centuries. But it's not the kind of goal set¬ting we're talking about. We're suggesting that you set your goals and objectives for the short term, so you can quickly see results, how your strengths and your achievements relate to the way you want to grow. You can use a four-step formula to plan your progress over the next six months.
For the first step, use your imagination to take yourself six months into the future, and look back. Write down on a Career Progress page what you would like to look back on as having accomplished. Go into a fair amount of detail savings, weekends away or vacation, relationships, leisure time activities, things to buy, job duties and responsibilities, etc. Dream it; see it as happening in your fulfilling life. At the start, dream as wild as you like.
The next steps bring this "dream" closer to reality. The second step is to flip your imagination to three months from now. What must you have done by then to be halfway toward your six-month goals? Write those activities down. Then re-examine your six-month goals and try to decide if they appear attainable. Where it seems they are not, because of circumstances only you can know about, modify them. This brings you closer to reality.
Third, come closer in your imagination to a time one month from now. What must you have done during that month to be a third of the way to your three-month goals? The detail here is likely to make you reconsider the feasibility of some of your three and six-month goals; where that happens, modify your goals again.
The fourth step is now. What must you do now to get started towards your goals? List those things as best you can, modify your one, three and six-month goals as you think best, and get going on what you must do in the next few days. But be sure, in addition, to keep a record of what you have done, what you have started.
When you develop these lists you possess a kind of barometer which you should check from time to time to find out how you are progressing toward your goals. At the end of the first month, you'll find you're progressing faster in some activities, and slower in others, than your original plan indicated. Then you should do a little more imaginative dreaming. Leap one month ahead and imagine what you would need to have done by that time to achieve your three-month objectives. The experience of your first month will influence you to make some changes, perhaps shorten¬ing the time for some goals, lengthening the time for others, maybe dropping some of the three- and six-month goals, maybe adding one or two based on your new
circumstances.
When you deal with your realities and dreams in this way you can influence many circumstances, and take advantage of many situations that might otherwise bring you great frustrations and disappointments. Your "Six-month Goals" pages should be inserted at the back of your Career Progress Book. Each month you should look at your progress facts, "leap" forward a month and look back with your imagination, then modify or otherwise correct your goals again. At the end of six months you will find that doing this enables you to gain more fulfillment and progress than you previously thought was possible (Keep it up, and by the time you are in your mid-twenties or even sooner you may want to make 12-month and five or ten-year goal plans.)
Support System
You will find it easier to reach your goals if you work with a small group that meets regularly. A member of one group that has met regularly for three years, at first weekly for lunch and now once a month (sometimes by telephone conference), reports that all seven members have far exceeded their growth expectations. And they claim that a major cause for this kind of personal and career growth has been the climate of mutual support these meetings established. Each member is constantly concerned with the best for each of the others, each is alert to events, news and relationships that could help one or more of the others, and all the members know that each is unique and has a special kind of excellence.
We call this kind of recognition and mutual helpfulness a "Partnership of Excellence." And we suggest that you consider initiating your own group that can develop into a Partnership of Excellence. This is a working life (or college life) extension of the Job Co-op idea. You could start with seven to ten men and women about your own age, perhaps at your place of work, perhaps some members of your high school or college Job Co-op, perhaps including some from your neighborhood. At the beginning try to meet once each week at the same time, and do this for a least four weeks as a starting experiment. An hour should be long enough for the "business" part of this meeting, so it could be during lunch or at someone's house in the evening.
What you do at these meetings may seem too simple to many people, but it works: each of you takes a turn at relating your greatest achievement of the past week. As each person speaks, the others listen and may ask for further details on the activity (but no "why" questions) to gain clarity on what happened. For some, the activities presented will remind them of ways to help the person to have more fulfillment. Write those thoughts down. When all have had their say, go round your circle of partners and present your thoughts or helpful suggestions. Not everyone will have a helpful idea every time, but over several meetings it is likely that each one will be given some helpful ideas or introductions. Another thing to remember is this: when you meet on a weekly basis most achievements of the past week will be not very important, but occasionally one will be. And if you have written down your goals and objectives, you'll sometimes be able to speak of achieving one or more of those objectives.
What you will have in this "Partnership of Excellence" is a support group to help you cope with changes and difficulties, and also help you to achieve your objectives.
Work Relationships That Help You
Relationships in the work arena are important to your growth and progress. Doing a good job, and just keeping your nose to the grindstone, is usually the most dependable way to be ignored and overlooked. Supervisors are busy, and they are generally pleased to let well enough alone when effective work causes them no problems. They must give so much time to mistake-makers that they often don't have time to notice how good and unusual a job their best employees are doing. We've designed a simple system you can use to get around this very human condition of oversight.
As you know, you cannot get power until after you plug in to power lines. The power lines in the organization where you now work are relationships with people. You may not identity who they are immediately it usually takes two months or more. When you get the power-line people to know you, learning and growth opportunities come more easily and you can avoid being overlooked. So one of your* tasks is to identity the power-line people and their relationships to your advancement. You'll need one page for that, and about ten names, in your Career Progress book.
You sometimes have to look hard to find out how and where you can "plug in" to a power-lines person. One man who found the Assistant to the President unreachable, was able to make contact with him through the company library--since the Assistant was in charge of the library. For a young woman, access to a power-line person became possible because both of them were collectors of old shaving mugs. Usually the organization's chart of management responsibilities will give clues to where power-line people are likely to be, although a title and position on the organization chart often don't show how much power a person has. For new employees access to power-line people usually is through their assistants, secretaries, associates or relatives. Hobbies, athletic, church and community activities frequently provide access to power-line people.
You don't just go up to a power-line person and say "Hi, I'm Mary Brown in your production department." You first seek out ways to identify some of the person's background, interests and activities. Then one of the ways you might reach him is to get your own supervisor to let you deliver something to him. Or you might consider sending a carefully-worded note with an item of interest to him. For instance, suppose you find out that power-line person is really interested in trout fishing. Just once, when you spot something about trout in a newspaper or magazine, you could clip it and send it to him with a very short note along
these lines: "I heard you might be interested in seeing this clipping. If I spot any more I'll send them along if you like." Then sign your name and give your section or department and phone number.
You must know about the person with power to block your advancement. Another one to know about is the person who can be most influential in getting you a promotion or a transfer from one department to another. A different power-line person may be the one who can help you get a pay increase.
You don't have to "brown-nose" or "polish the apple" of a power-line person in order to get ahead. You do have to play the "politics of productivity," or do the kind of job that brings you the reputation of being dependable. This means doing a good job where you are being especially good when you are applying your motivated skills, and both putting up with and doing a reasonable job at other activities that are parts of your job. It also means keeping records of what you are doing, as we've said before, and occasionally bringing them tactfully to the attention of your immediate supervisor. This last task must also be done carefully. But you can be overlooked if you are reliably helpful rather than being difficult and requiring frequent supervision. So, as a dependable employee, you need to take some action that gets your reliability noticed.
Communicate
One easy way to communicate your reliability and progress is with the aid of your Career Progress Book. Toward the end of your first month in the working world, begin to summarize the most significant of your work-related achievements, especially as they have enabled your supervisor to be worry-free. You should try to get at least four, and up to ten items. Complete your list at the end of the month either in clear handwriting or on a clean typed page (be sure to have a copy of it for yourself), then ask for a ten-minute appointment with your supervisor to discuss how you're doing. At that meeting tell her you're trying to keep a list of the best things you feel you've done. Say you'd like her to check it out with you and correct you where necessary so you can learn to do better. Then give her your list. If she fully agrees with you and says only, "you're doing fine; keep it up," you will at least have helped her to be aware of the activities in which you are doing best. Whatever more she says can only be helpful.
After doing this for a couple of months during which time you'll also have an opportunity to get acquainted with several other people in the organization, including some power-line people you will be ready to ask about the possibility of assignments or tasks that will get you a promotion. You can be sure that discussing these "reports on your effectiveness" with your supervisor will result in his thinking of you as an out-of-the-ordinary employee. A desired side-effect will be that your supervisor starts to speak about you with other supervisors and says, "he (or she) is a comer."
If you request advice from a power-line person about what you have to do to get a promotion, and tell him you have written these monthly reports, the power-line person is likely to ask for a copy. Give him a copy and keep one your self, or else be sure to ask that it be returned. The power-line person may suggest another appointment in a week or so, and in the meantime check your reporting accuracy and look around for possible openings that could mean your promotion.
All that doesn't sound like very much to do, and it isn't. It doesn't take a lot of extra time. But it does require you to be alert to the sensitivities of the people around you, to get along with them, to keep records of your own actions,and to communicate clearly with superiors in your organization. Not everyone can or is willing to do all these things. But if you want to grow in your own way, and have greater fulfillment in what you do, these steps are much more de-pendable than the usual approach of "hoping for the best," or "letting nature take its course."
Your Skills Identity
When you are aware of the motivated skills that combine to make your skills identity and clarify your growth directions, you can strongly influence your own development. But not all the time. There will be changes in the structure of your organization: perhaps your supervisor will be promoted before he's had a chance to recommend you for promotion; or your entire department could be wiped out by a reorganization or a shift in location. You need to be ready for these changes, and prepared to take advantage of them. This means keeping your Job Power Report up to date, revising it about each six months until you've had some four years of experience. And it means letting your former contacts know about your progress every six months or so. This doesn't mean you're hunting another job, but it does imply that you are open to suggestions when the right opportunities come along. It also means that if you should lose your job for any reason you'll have a list of people to contact for future help.
It is very important to keep in touch with your skills identity. Another way to keep it very much alive is through a new computer matching system that can instantly relate what U.S. Labor Department officials call your job characteristics with those of specially analyzed job openings. The Department of Labor has been testing this system for several years, and expects to have it in every State Employment Security Office by 1985. While it has some limitations, it is over fifty percent more effective than present government placement techniques.
This computer system, called Manpower Matching Systems has a Job Analysis Vocabulary (JAV) and a Detailed Experimental Computer-Assisted Language (DECAL). These enable jobs to be categorized into 39 broad fileds of work, and both applicants and jobs to be matched in greater detail than ever before. Key words are used to analyze jobs submitted by employers and to develop descriptions of individuals. The description includes a person's interests, aptitudes, temperaments, physical demands (e.g. can you work only in a damp climate), work conditions, education, trainings. These words are listed in a "thesaurus of occupational and educational descriptors." As job orders come in from employers, they are coded and put into a computer. The person registering with an Employment Security office is referred to a specially-trained interviewer, who describes his or her skills and traits and encodes them for the computer matching. When fully operating, Manpower Matching Systems will make it possible for you to wait while the computer tries to match your coded information in several different combinations against all jobs in its memory bank until a match is found. And it can keep working on this kind of matching as long as necessary, or just once for an "instant" job opening possibility.
Manpower Matching Systems is a new and most valuable development. At the present time it is necessarily centered on employer needs, and applicants who fit those needs. That's the way our economic system works, now. But an increasing number of men and women are becoming aware of the fact that this traditional view does not give sufficient consideration to the person, and that personal fulfillment in the world of work is possible. Manpower Matching Systems is an important movement in that direction,but it doesn't start with the person.
It is possible now, in the 1980's for individuals to present their job requirements based on motivated skills and obtain jobs that reasonably fit those skills. There's not much chance of ^perfect match, but the less pleasing parts of a job can be reduced when the employer knows he will have a more effective and satisfied worker as a result of respecting the skills identity the motivated skills pattern of the person.
When you keep watch on yourself, your growth, and how your job changes or can change, you have a better chance to maintain the benefits derived from working through this book.
The United States has inherited traditional hiring practices from feudal and plantation times. Then, hiring and promotion for special tasks was by recommendation to the landowner. He made all the judgments about how well a person would do a job, and the person was rarely, if ever, consulted. Nobody thought the employee had any way of judging what he could do well. Employers today continue to take on themselves as the old landowners the task of judging who can do what and how well. Recommendations still account for 80 percent of the jobs filled. But the difference now is that the employee is not only better educated and able to talk and write about his experience, but he can also give the information that was missing: what he can do well and enjoyably, his motivated skills.
As our System to Identify Motivated Skills (SIMS) has gained increasing acceptance over the last fifteen years, doubts have disappeared about whether or not the person knows more about himself than the supervisor or employer. Regardless of what an employer says a person can do well, only the person knows which tasks or activities give him satisfaction and which don't.
Because you know your motivated skills, you can identify which tasks you are most likely to do well and enjoy-ably. You cannot make sure you have more of those activities in your work unless you discuss them with your employer from time to time. Both you and your employer will gain from that communication, because you will have more opportunity for growth and your employer will have opportunity to gain through better use of your skills. Already some employers are seeing these values, and encouraging their employees to identify their motivated skills. Smith Kline Corporation, the Atomic Energy Commission and Exxon are among the pioneers of this very new approach that can help all employees come closer to finding fulfill¬ment through their work.
Manpower Matching Systems can increase its effectiveness by relying on applicants (not interviewers) to provide motivated skills information for translation into job-matching characteristics. But such radical modernization with prime consideration for the person hood of applicants' needs rather than for the employers' needs-would require a serious policy change at the U.S. Department of Labor; after all, its budget is based on how many jobs it fills, rather than how many persons it gets into fulfilling jobs.
You will recall that we began this book by saying there is excellence in each person, and the skills-structure of that excellence starts to reveal itself early in life. You do expect some kinds of skills and talent to show early in music (Isaac Stern, Liza Minelli, Mozart) and athletics (Hank Aaron, Mark Spitz, Chris Evert). In mechanics, invention and aviation there are early achievers also: Henry Ford (he fixed clocks when he was 6), Igor Sikorsky, Thomas Edison. The early signs of later achievements are not only in these visible occupation people but also in everyone. Here are some more people whose lives prove it: Werner von Braun first built a working rocket when he was age 13. Euell Gibbons,author of Stalking Healthful Herbs and other foraging books, created a candy bar of foraged hickory nuts and hackberries when he was 5. You might already know about India's Prime Minister, Indira Ghandi's childhood. When she was about seven her favorite game with her family servants was to sit them in rows in the kitchen, stand on a table in front of them, and talk at them until she was too tired to speak. How's that as a start for a powerful politician! Then there's Houdini, the great magician. It's a fact that he played with locks and padlocks on chests, trunks, doors and boxes when he was a child of seven.
In the field of poetry, Robert Frost's first published poem appeared when he was twelve. In education, the son of an illiterate Argentine packtrain driver fell in love with learning and managed to read when he was four. Domingo Sarmiento opened more than 1,000 schools in his lifetime. In mathematics, a Swiss journal studied 93 leading mathematicians. It reported that 35 favored a math career before age 10, 43 before age 15, 11 more before age 18. Paul de Kruif studied 24 distinguished medical doctors. At an average age of 14 1/2, he says, medicine became a clear vocation for them. As final examples, take Grandma Moses, the artist whose works became famous after she reached 80. The first of her painting efforts started when she was 7, with sheep dip for paint. And take Malcolm X, who demonstrated his ability to talk and persuade others when he was 11.
Now that you've worked your way through this book you are not surprised by the stories about these famous people and their early starts. You know that you also have excellence in you, and that you can patiently pursue your own right to happiness by applying your motivated skills in your work and in other activities of your life. You also know that when you have problems and frustrations they are a part of living and growing you can immerse yourself in motivated skills activities. The strengths you express then will help you to cope with difficulties, surmount them or otherwise benefit from them. You can say to other jobless and troubled young men and women, as St. Paul did, "Stir up the gifts of God that are within you." Because you have done it, you know they can do it too, and you know the benefits that result from doing it."
Now that you know your lights, let them shine ever more brightly and be thankful.
Maybe that's too sermon-like an ending for this book, so here's another one. Very few people find their vocations in childhood. But virtually all children demonstrate skills that turn out to be career strengths later in life. Each person has some kind of excellence in him or her. Nobody is a "nobody." Each person is important in this world, and we all have the power to make an impression if we know the best that's in us and how to use it.
The path is not easy, but it is no more difficult than taking the traditional hit or miss approach to living. It takes less time, too, when you know what you've got, how you can change it, and where you're going. And the rewards are greater more job satisfaction, more opportunity for growth, and usually more of the financial rewards if you should want them.
When you take the plunge into this new kind of self-understanding your new knowledge prevents you from kidding yourself any more. But perhaps the increased fullness of living that this knowledge lets you earn is worth that loss.
