"Business people could learn a lot from athletes," he used to say. "An athlete trains himself very carefully, grooms himself for the competition he's got to face. He also studies himself. He's always weighing himself, testing his wind, his strength. He looks for weak places in himself and then tries to strengthen them. He looks ahead to competitors he will come up against, tries to find what their strengths and weaknesses are. He drills himself for every possible situation: if this happens, he will do that. An athlete really prepares. But people in the business world mostly just grope around, taking whatever comes to them. Why aren't they as careful as athletes? A business career is just as tough as an athletic career--and it lasts a lot longer."
Why don't people take stock of themselves as jobholders, strengthen their weak points, plan and prepare for future competitions? Perhaps the reason is that people are intimidated by the business world's complexity. So many factors influence job success or failure that it is hard to arrive at a reasonable plan of preparation and self-testing, the way an athlete does. I agree that it is hard. But it is not by any means impossible.
You can take stock of yourself right now by asking yourself the eight questions below. The questions will help you identify weaknesses--and once having identified them, of course, you should immediately get to work and start supplying what is missing.
The end result will be preparation: an increased ability to with stand shocks and to grasp opportunities. I don't mean that you will be shock-proof. Nobody is. The best-trained athlete has a bad day once in a while, loses his cool, and makes mistakes. You are not immune to misfortune. No matter how well prepared you are, you are still going to be hit by bad luck once in a while, and you are also going to make mistakes. We all do.
But bear this in mind; rarely is anybody's job security threatened or career damaged by one mistake. What puts you in jeopardy is a long history of making mistakes. By regularly taking stock of yourself and keeping up your strengths, you can greatly improve your chances of keeping your paycheck and eventually winning bigger ones.
These are the eight key questions:
1. Is your education adequate for your present job and the jobs you hope to rise into? More specifically, how does your education compare with that of other men and women around you, or those doing similar work in other companies?
Remember that any of those people, even if they aren't direct competitors today, could come up against you in some future race for a coveted job in your field. Educational attainment counts when management tries to decide on job candidates. I've seen many promising careers stalled because of a weakness in this area. Indeed, I know of at least one company that used education as a key criterion in deciding whom to lay off during a cutback. Several hundred white-collar people were to get the axe. In trying to decide which ones, the company rated each employee on the basis of what was called "value to us," or VTU for short. Your numerical VTU score determined whether you stayed or went. Educational accomplishment was heavily weighted in making up the score.
So seek extra education even though it means some hardship. Sure, the hours of study seem long and onerous; the fees are hard to bear; the course looks difficult; you feel you can barely understand the textbook after a hard day at the office. No matter. Do it anyway. You should never forget this one point: you may not be willing to put up with the hardship, but there will always be somebody who is ready to put up with the hardship.
2. Are you staying abreast of technological changes that bear on your work?
I know a woman who worked for the same company for many years and believed she was invincible. On the face of things, she seemed to have a point. She had risen over the years to the job of head bookkeeper, and she boasted-accurately, for all I know--that she knew more about the company's financial affairs than the president did. "There's no way they could ever let me go," she would say when conversations turned to worried speculation about the company's future. "I'm needed too much."
Holding this dangerous belief, she scorned the idea of updating her technological training. When word processors and other mysterious pieces of equipment began to turn up in accounting departments in the 1970s, she didn't bother to familiarize herself with the hardware and its uses. She even stayed away when the company she worked for offered employees a free word-processor training course on company time.
A day came when all the knowledge that was in her head--knowledge that she alone had once commanded--was stored in magnetic tapes, disks, and other electronic memories. The information could be retrieved by anybody who knew how to use the equipment, including a junior bookkeeper who had troubled to take the offered training.
The head bookkeeper was no longer indispensable. Her salary was high, but the company did not really need to pay it. It was only a matter of time before someone realized this and acted on it. During a period of sagging earnings, the company president ordered a weeding-out of higher-salaried people whose grand paychecks could not be justified. The head bookkeeper today holds a job behind the cash register of a cafeteria.
The moral: listen, read, and act. We live in an era of bewilderingly rapid technological change. It is your obligation to yourself to be constantly aware of changes that are affecting or will one day affect whatever work you do. Talk to others in your field; listen carefully when they tell of new technologies they have encountered or read about. Do your own reading, particularly publications devoted to your field, all trade and professional journals. Pay attention to developing new technologies that bear on their readers' lives. Ask yourself whether you are prepared for the changes that may creep over your job next year or ten years hence--and if you are not prepared, do something about it before you get beached.
Many companies offer free or low-cost training to employees who want to learn new technologies. In addition, companies that sell new technologies--IBM, GTE, Xerox--continually offer seminars for employees of customer companies. Many professional societies also offer training courses to their members from time to time. For example, consider the National Shorthand Reporters Association, a society of people who record court trials and business meetings. This work once was done entirely by hand; then two great technological advances occurred. The first was the technique of tape recording, and then came video recording. In each case, the association set up workshops to help its members learn to handle the unfamiliar new equipment.
If you have even a faint suspicion that some such technological wave is going to wash over you, get yourself the needed training as fast as you can. (If that is impractical for some reason and if there is no alternative, as a last resort you can get yourself transferred to a different kind of work.
Don't be hesitant about asking your boss's cooperation in your attempt to prepare for technological change. If you approach the situation in the right way, you score points for yourself by requesting the company's help.
Avoid two things. First, don't phrase the request so as to make it sound like a personal indulgence; "I wonder if I could have a few days off. There's this seminar..." Second, don't phrase it in terms of what you feel is owed to you: "Seems to me the company has a responsibility to help employees stay on top of things... After all, you get to go to a lot of seminars and study groups ..."
Instead, the main point to concentrate on is that you want to make yourself more valuable to the company--and to your boss. Try to put this point across in an easy and natural way: "Big changes are coming. It seems to me we might be in trouble around here if nobody understands this new equipment. I've done some studying in my spare time, but I feel I need some hands-on training. GTE is offering a three-day seminar next week ..."
Some companies are more open to such requests than others, of course. Perhaps you work for a small company that simply cannot afford to grant employees a lot of time off or pay many tuition bills. This may make your campaign harder, but it should not discourage you.
In a situation like this, the best approach is to research all available educational offerings thoroughly before going to your boss with a request for help. Don't just go up to him or her with a vague ambition: "I feel I need some more accounting courses... I was hoping the company would help me." Instead, find out exactly what is available at local schools, colleges, and other institutions. Find out what it will cost. Figure out how much of that cost you can carry yourself. Determine whether the course will overlap with working hours and if so to what degree. Shop around until you have put the best possible package together. And then, and only then, go to your boss with a statement of precisely and specifically what you want and why.
If the company still won't help you, take the course anyway.
3. Are you sure the job you are doing is the job your boss and those above him want done?
In a time of fast change such as the present, organizations adapt raggedly and unevenly. One part of the organization may stay abreast of the changes and perhaps even a step or two ahead, while other parts lag behind to various degrees. This can have a profound and upsetting effect on people's jobs.
Examine the job you've been doing. Perhaps you were given your basic instructions by a previous boss. Your present boss may have different goals, different instructions from above, or simply a different way of looking at things. He or she hasn't yet given you any new instructions--perhaps doesn't realize they are needed, or hasn't figured out what the new procedures should be. Whatever the cause is, you might be doing your job wrong.
Or perhaps your entire group or department has failed to keep up with change. You may be doing precisely what your boss wants, but he or she may be wrong. The work being delivered by your team is not being received gratefully upstairs.
Whatever lies behind the problem, your job is in jeopardy if you no longer produce what needs to be produced.
I recall an episode that took place in a medium-sized insurance company. In the early 1980s this company was troubled, as were many of its competitors, by a growing problem in collecting premiums. Laid-off people couldn't afford to pay, and alarming numbers of policies were lapsing. Struggling to maintain headway in this tough environment, the company had begun to experiment with a lot of innovations designed to help both its straitened policyholders and itself.
Top management wanted weekly reports on how these innovations were working. One set of reports was supposed to come from a small team of people headed by a man. I will call him Joe Prince. His chief lieutenant was a young woman. One of the main duties of her job, as she saw it, was to prepare those reports.
As time went by, however, she saw that she could relax. Joe Prince was an affable fellow who preferred delivering reports in person rather than in written form. His practice was to gather the relevant figures informally and then, just as informally, give the gist to his superiors at lunch or over drinks. This seemed to satisfy everybody. The young woman stopped preparing reports and was glad to have the extra time.
Then Joe Prince was recruited away from the company. A new man named Henry Barker was moved into Joe's office. Henry Barker was a taciturn, somewhat cold man, not very well liked by the genial top-management group but admired for his superior grasp of complicated insurance industry problems. He and the young woman developed a courteous but not friendly relationship.
Nobody in top management bothered to tell him about the reports his group was supposed to produce. Perhaps nobody really needed the information for a time; it wasn't missed. But then, suddenly, a senior vice-president realized he needed it for a forthcoming presentation. Where was it?
Henry Barker was called upstairs for a painful interview. He then went back downstairs and loaded all the blame on the young woman.
"You knew you were supposed to turn out those reports!" he shouted. "You were hoping you could duck the work and I'd never find out about it, right?"
"No, that isn't true. Joe Prince-"
"Never mind Joe Prince! It was your responsibility to stay on top of things like this...
She was not fired right away. But Henry Barker made her life so miserable from then on that a blowup was inevitable. It came a few weeks later, and as far as I know she has been jobless ever since.
You must protect yourself against such changes in and around your job. The best protection is communication, and a close second is alertness. Talk often with your boss and with others who depend on or have some practical interest in what you do. Keep asking if you are actually doing what people want done.
You don't have to ask it so often as to make a nuisance of yourself; nor should you ask it in such a way that you seem to be soliciting words of praise. Just once in a while, when a natural moment comes, say to your boss: "There are several different ways to put this kind of report together. I've been doing it this one way all along, but it occurred to me that maybe you'd find another way more useful for your purposes. Do you have a few minutes ... ?"
Never get so comfortable in a routine that you fail to notice changes happening or impending. Never stop asking, looking, and listening.
4. Have you made yourself known as somebody who is willing to take on extra work and increased responsibilities?
One of the least loved figures in the business world is the time-server--the man or woman who plods through each day with no real sign of interest, does exactly what is required, never any more, and is out the door within ten seconds of closing time each afternoon. Don't ever let yourself become that kind of drone. In good economic times companies tolerate such people because they don't actually do any harm. They perform their assigned work more or less reliably if well supervised, and in many operations they are the bulk of the work force. But they are always among the first to be let go in troubled times, and as a rule they get no more than routine rises and promotions.
The person who attracts attention is the one who shows interest in the work, the one who doesn't mind taking on an extra burden once in a while. It has never been known to kill anybody to stay in the office once in a while for an unscheduled and unpaid half-hour. It has been known to help people's careers a great deal.
If your boss asks you to take on some irritating little task and indicates that there is no hurry, don't do what most would do: put it off, hope it gets forgotten, then reluctantly tackle it after a second or third reminder. Surprise your boss by doing it right away, even if you have to stay late to fit it into your schedule. Then march into your boss's office the next day, conduct some other business, and on your way out pause at the door and say, "Oh, by the way, I took care of that problem about the missing order forms.
That is the kind of subordinate who gets somewhere.
I would even counsel you to take on trivial, personal chores if your boss or some other executive asks you to. Suppose the executive vice-president stops by your desk and says, "Listen, I wonder if I could ask a favor? My daughter arrives at the airport tomorrow evening around six, but I'll be tied up at a meeting till a couple of hours later. I wonder if you could meet her and take her to some nice place for dinner--on me, of course. I know it's an imposition, and if you can't make it, of course I'll understand."
Like hell he will understand.
Don't whine, don't grimace, don't squirm, and don't make excuses about the studying you've got to do. Just smile pleasantly and say, "Sure, it'll be a pleasure."
Some would object to this as apple-polishing. (There are also, of course, some less elegant phrases to describe it.) Some would consider it beneath their dignity. Some would huff, "I'm hired to work in the paralegal department, not to be a baby-sitter!" This is true, perhaps. To do such favors for a superior may needle one's pride a little. But is your pride really so tender that you would favor it over your job security?
If the executive vice-president made a routine out of asking such favors--if he tried to turn me into his family's regular airport meeter--then I would seek some polite way of letting him know he was going too far. But if he rarely asks such favors, what do you really lose by saying yes?
Remember that your turn will come someday. If all goes well, you too will rise to high executive status. Then you can ask subordinates to do favors for you.
5. Are you an innovator?
It is not enough merely to become an expert in your job. Many people can do that, and most can at least become fast and efficient in carrying out job routines. What brings you to management's attention is the ability and willingness to reach out beyond routines. Keep asking: "Is there a better way?"
This requires that you keep your brain turned on all the time--a feat that most people seem to find difficult, though there is no good reason why it should be. Keep needling yourself: "Why am I doing it this way? Because my predecessor told me to? Did he learn it from his predecessor? Is it done this way because it's really the best way, or is it just a matter of bureaucratic habit?"
In the 1950s and 1960s, many companies formalized their need for bright new Ideas by establishing highly publicized suggestion awards. If you were an employee with an Innovative idea, you were invited to write it down and drop it in a suggestion box, and if your idea was adopted you received some kind of cash award, a testimonial dinner, and a handshake from the board chairman.
Suggestion boxes can still be seen here and there on plant and office walls, but there are no longer many companies that actively promote suggestion programs in the manner of the 1960s. The programs ran into all kinds of problems. There were disputes about the size of awards and the originality of ideas. In many companies the suggestion box turned into a repository for radical political manifestos, generalized gripes, and various kinds of unsigned obscenities. "The whole thing was more trouble than it was worth," says the personnel director of one company that long ago took down its suggestion boxes.
With boxes and formal programs dismantled, employees in many companies have seemed to get the feeling in recent years that their bright new ideas are no longer wanted.
This is definitely not true. The fact that something is not formally solicited doesn't mean it is not wanted.
Indeed, if your company has no active, formal program going, that very fact should spur you to greater alertness. For it means that not many people in the company will be actively trying to think of innovations and improvements. Anybody who does come forward with a useful new idea is going to be welcomed. The reward is likely to be considerably greater than a $250 check and a free dinner. The reward will be improved job security and increased chances of pro motion.
One good way to develop innovations is to concentrate your attention on problems that crop up in your work. What is there that frustrates you? What doesn't seem to go right?
Most people, coming up against a problem, react by picking it up and taking it to a superior in its raw state: "Boss, we've got a problem." What you should do is go one step further. Go to your boss with the problem and a solution.
You may be able to find an innovative solution by brainstorming. This is a technique that has been a bit oversold in some business circles. It doesn't work at all for some men and women, and it works only intermittently for others. But it has been known to produce startlingly good results. The basic idea of it is to turn off your brain's critical function temporarily. Pondering a given problem, you list every solution that comes to mind, including silly and outlandish solutions. You deliberately avoid saying, "No, that's too goofy, it won't work."
For maybe it will work after all. This is the theory behind brain storming. Most people criticize and discard their own good ideas too quickly. As a brainstormer you may conceive the same idea that has occurred to a lot of other people, but you will be the only one who thinks it all the way through.
Marie N. is one woman who had this experience. She worked out a way of color-coding customers' order forms so as to save enormous amounts of clerical time in a warehouse operation. "The idea came to me through brainstorming," she recalls. "I had this wacky idea of telling the customers to pay in Monopoly money--you know, with different denominations in different colors. That way we could tell at a glance how big the order was. I laughed at the notion, but then I thought, 'Wait a minute!' I went on thinking about color, and finally 1 arrived at a system that I thought could really be made to work. We tried it, and it did."
And Marie N. won a promotion not long afterward.
6. Do you look as though you mean business?
Grooming is important in the business world. That is a statement of plain fact. You may wish it were not so, and you may feel the unwritten rules of good grooming are silly. "After all," you say, "what counts is what goes on inside my head." Perhaps you are right. But if you want to argue the point, argue it with a friend in private. Don't assert it publicly by putting your job on the line.
For the fact is, whether we like it or not, grooming very definitely affects success and failure in business. For every nine people who love you for your inner self, there is always going to be one who objects to your careless grooming. That one person could be somebody with influence over your present and future security.
Remember, too, that people tend to make much more fuss about something wrong than something right. It's human nature. Customers are quick to take pen in hand when they are dissatisfied, but you don't often receive letters saying how nice everything is. And so it is with grooming. Well-groomed people don't get many direct compliments; they are taken for granted as part of the natural business environment. But ill-groomed people invite comment. "That fellow Jenkins," the chairman will say to the president, "do you suppose he never heard of shoe polish?"
Jenkins's job is not as secure as it might be.
Dress neatly, in the mode that is prevalent in your particular place of work. If the men are all in suits and the women in suits and dresses, then you had better attire yourself the same way. If more casual wear is prevalent, all right-but make sure you never let yourself get so casual that you cross the borderline into sloppiness. Try always to look clean and crisp, even if you wear blue jeans. Perhaps it would be fun to be a maverick, but the fun is not worth the risk. You cannot afford it. You can be a clothing maverick only if you become so valuable to the company that you literally cannot be replaced.
Very few men or women ever reach such high standing, as was illustrated some years ago in a large international company. Until comparatively recent times, the grooming rule for male office workers in this company called for conservative suits, white shirts, and muted ties, all spanking clean and meticulously pressed. There was one man who disregarded these specifications and got away with it. He was a scientist of world repute. He habitually showed up for work in rumpled cord pants, a baggy tweed jacket, and shirts that looked as though they had been cut from potato sacks. Nobody said anything to him. He was the only one of his kind. He could not have been replaced at any price.
Two young physicists tried to copy him. They, too, wanted to announce their lofty intellectual status by ignoring the rules that applied to everybody else. Their rebellion did not last long. Their superior called them into his office and pointed out that the company could find a lot more young physicists where they came from. They were quite replaceable, he assured them.
A secure salary check is not something you give up lightly. The two young men instantly changed into conservative suits, white shirts, and muted ties.
It is also an excellent idea to pay attention to other aspects of the way you look. Cartoonists like to portray the typical successful business person as a cigar-smoking fat man, but the indications are that this is no longer an accurate reflection of real life, if it ever was. Today, successful business people are more likely to be those with lean, trim bodies. Several studies have demonstrated this. In one survey of fifteen thousand male executives, a distinct relationship was found between high income and a flat belly. The more overweight a man is, the study demonstrated, the lower his salary is likely to be.
A similar study of women in business was carried out by a University of California psychologist. She found a remarkable correlation between slimness and success. "In the upper executive offices of American business," she wrote, "fat women are almost as rare as they are on an Olympic track team."
The lesson is obvious. Pay attention not only to your clothes, but to your weight and other elements of your health. For if you are crisply groomed, if you stand erect, if you have a look of robust health and energy, then you look as though you mean business.
7. Are you staying interested?
An occasional boring day or even week is nothing to get alarmed about, but if you are a victim of chronic boredom, then something is wrong.
Job monotony is not only a symptom of things going wrong but a cause of further problems. As a symptom, it indicates that your job has become too much of a routine, with too little challenge and too little in the way of a future. This may or may not be your fault, but in any case you should do something about it. As a cause of trouble, job monotony leads you into a generalized slump. It always shows. You stop innovating; you stop showing any willingness to make extra effort; you may even lose interest in your appearance.
Don't just succumb to boredom. If it happens to you, don't just shrug and say, "This is what life is like behind a desk." It may be like that for some; perhaps it is for most--but it isn't supposed to be. When you feel boredom creeping up on you, treat it for what it is: an illness.
Assess the reasons behind it. Perhaps you are in a specialty that is becoming obsolete, or perhaps you are in a department or task group that your company is gradually abandoning. In such a case you should begin immediately to think about learning new skills and getting yourself transferred. Or perhaps the reasons lie inside yourself. You may simply have grown too comfortable in a daily routine, and what was once comfortable is now growing monotonous. Or you have neglected to see to your own continued education and growth; you have been doing the same thing too long; you need new worlds to conquer.
Continued education and training are excellent medicines against boredom. Look around; see what is being offered in your community. See what your company itself offers. Talk to your boss; find out if he or she has anything to suggest. As we've noted before, you score points by showing an eagerness for growth.
8. Can you justify your salary?
This is a question you should ask yourself often during your career. It is perhaps the most difficult question of all, for the answer is usually more than half subjective. It is a feeling: "Yes! I'm worth every nickel and then some!" If this feeling hits you strongly, that is a very good sign. But there are also some ways to get at the question objectively.
Some kinds of jobs can be evaluated financially more easily than others, of course-sales jobs, for example, or certain jobs that involve collecting money. Auditing agents of the Internal Revenue Service can justify their salaries partly on the basis of the amount of tax money they bring in each month.
But other jobs are less easy to measure in that way. Service-oriented and general management jobs command salaries that often seem to be arrived at arbitrarily. If you are in such a job, how do you know if you are genuinely earning what you get in that biweekly envelope?
There are two informal tests you can make:
- Find out what others are getting in similar jobs-by checking help-wanted ads and by talking to people inside and outside your company. If you find your salary is within the prevalent range, then you can assume you are getting what the world considers a fair price for your work. If you find you are overpriced--which can happen because of too-long seniority or random dislocations such as a fit of corporate generosity in some long-vanished boom-then your job may be in jeopardy. In that case you had better go to work immediately to strengthen your position.
- Listen to the feedback from upstairs. Do people ever compliment you on a job well done? This won't happen every week or every month, but does it happen at least sometimes? If they don't compliment you directly, do they do it indirectly by such means as asking your advice, asking you to take on special assignments, or making pleasant remarks about you to other people? (These remarks are likely to reach your ears in one way or another, for in all organizations there is a very lively kind of communication that is the opposite of malicious gossip. I've studied it, but few others have. It doesn't even have a name. Call it the good-news network. It springs from the fact that most people, on most days, enjoy being the bearers of good tidings.)
You can fool other people for a short time, but not forever.
