should be done is encouraged and viewed positively. I’m sorry to be the one to break the news, but none of this is true.
Following the rules is no guarantee of job security. Team players get terminated as quickly as lone wolves. And excellence isn’t a sure path to advancement. In fact, many bosses, threatened by excellence, will do their best to sabotage kick-ass employees. Management and coworkers usually act in their own self-interest, not in the company’s interest. As a result, disagreements with your boss, however honest and well intended, lead to trouble. Most people in the workplace want to get the most reward for the least effort, want to look good more than do good, and care more about their personal success and security than the company’s success and security.
Giving 110 percent and working hard for the company don’t help you succeed. The secret instead is to stop focusing on your own success and worry about your boss’s success instead. To paraphrase the old coaching cliché: there’s no I in job. Concentrate your efforts on helping your immediate superior meet his or her goals. The more you do for your boss, the more secure your job will be, and the more you’ll be rewarded. The better you make your boss look, the better you will look to him or her.
Janet Crosetti is used to dealing with double takes when people first meet her. The five-foot two-inch Korean American always responds by saying, “I know — I don’t look Italian.” The thirty-seven-year-old schoolteacher is married and has a six-year-old daughter named Molly. Janet worked in an urban school district when she first graduated college. Janet temporarily left the workforce to stay at home with her daughter. During that time, her husband Paul’s family business boomed, enabling them to afford a home in the suburbs. When Molly started school last year, Janet decided she’d go back. An enthusiastic junior high school English teacher brimming with ideas and energy, Janet was able to land a position in a district not far from her home. While her building principal has continued to be supportive, Janet’s department chairman has been giving her a hard time.
Janet and Paul came to me for some financial advice, and we then moved on to discuss her job situation. Janet told me about how she is trying to energize a department that is getting a little long in the tooth. She is constantly making suggestions, developing new and innovative lesson plans, trying to bring more multimedia into the department’s offerings. But despite all her efforts, her relationship with her department chairman is getting worse. She received the first mixed evaluation of her life and was starting to worry she wouldn’t get tenure in the district. I told Janet it was time for her to focus on her department chairman’s needs.
Stop Job Hunting and Go Job Fishing Instead
Believing job security would come simply from doing a good job, most people used to view job hunting as something they’d need to do only a handful of times in their lives. Everyone expected to go on a job hunt after college, but from then on it was supposed to be limited to times when there were economic or personnel upheavals beyond your control at the company. A new boss might come in and clean house to bring in his own people. Or maybe your route to promotion was permanently blocked by a peer who was promoted just above you. In any case, the job search was viewed as a reaction to circumstances.
In today’s job market being terminated isn’t the exception, it’s the rule. Employees now are like baseball managers: they’re hired to be fired. We’ve all become contingency workers. The constant turmoil in the job market, along with a down economy, has meant job searches are taking longer than ever. The old rule of thumb was a job search would last one month for every $10,000 you earned. Now job searches are taking two months for every $10,000. Today most people lower their expectations in
Following the rules is no guarantee of job security. Team players get terminated as quickly as lone wolves. And excellence isn’t a sure path to advancement. In fact, many bosses, threatened by excellence, will do their best to sabotage kick-ass employees. Management and coworkers usually act in their own self-interest, not in the company’s interest. As a result, disagreements with your boss, however honest and well intended, lead to trouble. Most people in the workplace want to get the most reward for the least effort, want to look good more than do good, and care more about their personal success and security than the company’s success and security.
Giving 110 percent and working hard for the company don’t help you succeed. The secret instead is to stop focusing on your own success and worry about your boss’s success instead. To paraphrase the old coaching cliché: there’s no I in job. Concentrate your efforts on helping your immediate superior meet his or her goals. The more you do for your boss, the more secure your job will be, and the more you’ll be rewarded. The better you make your boss look, the better you will look to him or her.
Janet Crosetti is used to dealing with double takes when people first meet her. The five-foot two-inch Korean American always responds by saying, “I know — I don’t look Italian.” The thirty-seven-year-old schoolteacher is married and has a six-year-old daughter named Molly. Janet worked in an urban school district when she first graduated college. Janet temporarily left the workforce to stay at home with her daughter. During that time, her husband Paul’s family business boomed, enabling them to afford a home in the suburbs. When Molly started school last year, Janet decided she’d go back. An enthusiastic junior high school English teacher brimming with ideas and energy, Janet was able to land a position in a district not far from her home. While her building principal has continued to be supportive, Janet’s department chairman has been giving her a hard time.
Janet and Paul came to me for some financial advice, and we then moved on to discuss her job situation. Janet told me about how she is trying to energize a department that is getting a little long in the tooth. She is constantly making suggestions, developing new and innovative lesson plans, trying to bring more multimedia into the department’s offerings. But despite all her efforts, her relationship with her department chairman is getting worse. She received the first mixed evaluation of her life and was starting to worry she wouldn’t get tenure in the district. I told Janet it was time for her to focus on her department chairman’s needs.
Stop Job Hunting and Go Job Fishing Instead
Believing job security would come simply from doing a good job, most people used to view job hunting as something they’d need to do only a handful of times in their lives. Everyone expected to go on a job hunt after college, but from then on it was supposed to be limited to times when there were economic or personnel upheavals beyond your control at the company. A new boss might come in and clean house to bring in his own people. Or maybe your route to promotion was permanently blocked by a peer who was promoted just above you. In any case, the job search was viewed as a reaction to circumstances.
In today’s job market being terminated isn’t the exception, it’s the rule. Employees now are like baseball managers: they’re hired to be fired. We’ve all become contingency workers. The constant turmoil in the job market, along with a down economy, has meant job searches are taking longer than ever. The old rule of thumb was a job search would last one month for every $10,000 you earned. Now job searches are taking two months for every $10,000. Today most people lower their expectations in
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