If you specialize narrowly, seldom looking out beyond the confines of your chosen corner of the business world, you can hope for a reasonable degree of success and security in good times. But when economic troubles loom, when crises develop, when companies are being shaken up, then it is the men and women of varied experience who come to the fore.
I urge you to do what Martin Shugrue did. When an opportunity arises to take on a new job assignment, don't just ask, "Is it a step up? Will it lead to more pay? Will I get a bigger office?" Also ask whether it offers a chance to learn something new. Will it expose you to some part of the company in which you've never set foot before? Will it enable you to understand functions and operations that have always been a mystery to you? If so, think seriously about taking it even if it seems like a lateral move, even if the work looks tedious and boring.
Benefits
Let's look at the advantages you get when you build yourself a background of wide-ranging experience:
KNOWLEDGE OF DETAILS AND PEOPLE: Very often the top management of a company will work out a grand design for improving earnings, getting the company out of a tight spot, or achieving some other goal. As everybody in business understands, however, a grand design is just a sheaf of paper until people take it over and bring it to life. Very large numbers of people may be involved, from managers all the way down to clerical and production workers--each taking some part of the design's broad intent and translating it into the details of his or her particular job.
Almost any time such a grand design is to be put into effect; there is a need for leaders of a special kind: people who thoroughly understand the jobs being done, understand the people, and understand the details. The wider your experience has been, the more likely you are to be seen as such a leader.
To illustrate, a medium-sized food-processing company decided a few years ago that there might be room in the market for a new, specialty breakfast cereal targeted at a particular category of adults. After commissioning a lot of market studies, talking to bankers about financing, listening to experts, and holding many secret discussions, the top management group made the decision to go ahead and introduce a new brand.
The grand design was complete. The problem was to find somebody who could turn it into reality.
Many well-educated, high-paid, respected people were available for the new brand manager's job. The advertising director was considered extremely competent in her field, but she knew nothing about production, shipping, or other areas in which problems always arise with a new brand. The production supervisor was also impressively bright and competent, but he knew nothing of advertising.
The company finally gave the job to a relatively young man who held a middle-management position in the marketing department. This was a man who had deliberately made his career an educational experience. He had originally been hired into the advertising department. Then, at his request, he had been sent out for a year as an on-the-road salesman, visiting supermarkets and learning about food industry problems from the retailer's special viewpoint. His old advertising job was not available at the end of the year because of a headquarters staff cutback, but he noted that production workers were still being hired. To everybody's surprise, he asked for a production-line job and spent a period with a blue collar instead of a white one.
And so his career went. Here was a man who knew people all through the company. He understood their jobs and the problems they faced. If the grand design contained some unreasonable expectations, he would be likely to spot that difficulty before it became a crisis. Conversely, he also had sufficient detailed knowledge to make the design bolder in areas where it didn't expect enough. The company's management felt he was the ideal man for the job.
Varied experience is so highly valued in certain situations that many companies make a formal policy of it. Procter & Gamble is one such company. People being groomed for brand-manager jobs and certain other positions at P&G must spend a year as on-the-road salespeople. It isn't optional; you do it or you don't move up. "That year on the road teaches you all kinds of things you wouldn't learn in a classroom," says one former P&G advertising executive. "For instance, you learn all the reasons why a supermarket manager will give Brand A a nice eye-level display but will tuck Brand B into a comer of the bottom shelf. You learn about that supermarket manager's problems. Years later you think about him when you're making decisions about pricing, packaging, and so on."
LEADERSHIP: A leader need not necessarily be loved but must be trusted. As a general rule, people trust somebody who has a thorough understanding of the work they do--somebody who has done that work or related work himself or herself. They tend to distrust anybody who is moved over them with theoretical or class room knowledge alone. Indeed, distrust may be too mild a word. Scorn is more like it: "Oh, sure, Elizabeth has a degree from one of those big business schools. Big deal. But what does she really know about the job?"
The more wide-ranging your experience is, the more likely you are to inspire trust through your actual, hands-on familiarity with the work being done.
This trust will grow in part from your own confidence. Knowing the job, you will know when it is being done well and when it isn't. You will know when it is reasonable to expect better performance. If the work deteriorates, you'll be able to say, firmly and confidently: "Listen, if you people don't cut the mustard I'm going to have to set up some hard new rules ..."
You cannot easily do that when you are not thoroughly familiar with the work. You can only think, "Well, it doesn't seem to be going as well as I hoped, but maybe they are doing all they can. . ."
FLEXIBILITY: A wide range of experience gives you, finally, the ability to jump in many different directions as unexpected opportunities and hazards come into view.
No matter how carefully you plan your career, you cannot know how its course may be affected by random events beyond your control. Your company may run into trouble; your boss may be transferred; an executive recruiter may phone you with a stunning proposition. There is no way you can foresee such events, any of which could profoundly change your life, thereby dropping your carefully drawn career plan into the wastebasket. Since you cannot foresee these workings of chance or fate, you cannot plan or prepare for any one of them specifically.
You can prepare for them generally, however, by equipping yourself with a wide variety of job skills.
With a richly varied background, you put yourself in partial control of your own luck. You immunize yourself against bad luck, and simultaneously you strengthen your ability to take advantage of good luck.
If your job is abolished in some unknowable future crisis, your varied skills give you a good chance of latching on to another job in a different part of the company. If unexpected technical changes or shifts in management philosophy make one of your skills obsolete, you have others to fall back on. You are in a position to neutralize bad luck, whatever form it may take.
Or suppose a piece of good luck drifts into view. A recruiter calls, let's say. He is looking for somebody with certain qualifications. His client company is prepared to offer that person a wide-open future and a high salary. The more varied your experience has been, the more likely it is that you will fit the recruiter's specifications. Or let's say your company wants to establish a new task group to confront some developing crisis. The broader your base of experience, the more likely it is that your mentor will be able to propose you as the group's leader. It is a matter of simple statistics: the more you know, the better equipped you are to grasp good luck.
Getting Experience
One excellent way to achieve this wide-ranging experience is to do what I've advised in other contexts: make yourself known as somebody who stands ready to take on challenges. Make sure your boss knows this about you, and make sure your mentor knows it. "I want to learn," your attitude should say. "I don't want to get too comfortable. Send me where I can be useful. Give me the chance to fail."
But that isn't all you can do. There is one other very effective way to get new tasks and responsibilities: simply seize them.
In any organization--business, military, government, whatever it may be--there are always problems that lie about unsolved. Sheer inertia keeps people from doing anything about them in some cases. "It's just something we've learned to live with," people will say, shrugging. In other cases, people may be scared away; the problem looks too formidable to tackle. In still other cases, a problem will persist because nobody has ever identified it clearly.
As an example of this last phenomenon--lack of clear identification--consider the story of a small Connecticut company that had a long-standing problem of low employee morale. The company's executives all assumed it was essentially a paycheck problem. Since the company was fighting for its life and no money was available for raises, the consensus was that nothing could be done about the problem until better economic times returned. The problem, therefore, was simply allowed to lie around and fester.
One young woman took it upon herself to find out what was really going on. Talking to employees at many levels of rank, she was surprised to learn that the size of their paychecks was not really a major concern. Most were glad to have any paychecks at all; they knew the company was struggling and were quite ready to wait until a more propitious time to ask for raises.
What, then, was the difficulty? It turned out that the employees' major complaint--the root cause of their low morale--was what they saw as management's aloof disregard for their comfort. They grumbled about a long list of mostly trivial inconveniences and indignities: an employee lounge and snack area were grimy and unattractive; some offices and work areas were poorly lighted; the employee parking lot was carelessly plowed when it snowed, and so on. The cumulative effect of these small problems was one big problem: a general perception of the top management group as distant and uncaring.
The indicated remedies were simple and inexpensive: a little paint, some new light fixtures, and a few guiding words to the man in charge of plowing. The young woman not only became a company heroine but, in the process, gained experience in a field that was new to her: employee relations. Not much later the company merged with a larger one. She was made assistant to the personnel director and eventually moved into the department's top job herself.
What she did is what you should do: seize tasks and responsibilities without waiting for somebody to assign them to you. Obviously you won't want to do this so often and arrogantly that you turn yourself into the office busybody. Just as obviously, you must be careful not to act in such a way that people fear you are trying to move in on their territory. It is a good idea to check with your boss before and during any such move.
Be careful and tactful--but don't be shy. When you see a problem that needs to be solved, jump on it and make it your own.
