Likelihoods

I may have mentioned that I'm retired. I don't expect to ever work formally, for a paycheck, ever again. So it might seem odd that whenever I see an article about how to land a job, or how to keep from getting fired, or how to advance in your career, I read it. The reason is simple. I'm never sure how to go about those things. I wasn't sure about it when I did it before, and I'm not sure now. It's not that I don't know the buzzwords; it's that I don't know how to apply them. I no more believe in their efficacy than I believe that if I pull really hard on my Rockports (preferred footwear of the retired), I will fly. It seems impractical, improbable, and just not gonna happen. But I still read them. When I come across an article in the Sunday paper, I give it a quick scan, and if it looks promising -- which is very easy to do -- I put the section aside for later reading.

Thus it came to pass that this week, in addition to the sections I always read -- Business, because it's interesting, and World Affairs, because it's perplexing -- I put aside the Jobs section ("The Unpaid Payoff of a Between-Jobs Job") and ("Preoccupations: Finding a Job of His Own Dreaming"). The latter was particularly seductive, as it details the experience of a fellow who was out of work for six months, did all of the right things, and then, somewhat through happenstance, made a connection, pitched a concept, and, almost to his own surprise, was hired. Gee, I think, reading that, why can't I do that? That I don't have to doesn't remove the question. I don't think that anything short of discovering that I'm Bill Gates sole heir, and he's feeling poorly, would do that.

This is a long standing problem of mine, but over the years I've gotten a couple of insights into how people get employed, stay employed, and get promoted. (By this rate, I should have it figured out by the time I'm 125... or so.) If you're willing to hear them from someone who freely admits that he, personally, isn't very good at them -

One is that you don't have to love what you do. It helps, surely it does, but you don't have to feel that the sun rises and sets on it. In fact, you can despise it. Despising it makes it harder to do the things you do need to do, but it doesn't make them impossible. If you can do the job, do it competently and thoroughly, that's enough.

Another is that you have to have a pretty good sense of how what you do contributes to the success of the company. That part gets exponentially harder, the bigger the company. I worked for EDS and I worked for IBM, both big companies, and I rarely had the sense of how what I did affected them. For the longest time (for which read: still, a little), I blamed my managers for this, and you know what? It doesn't matter. It probably was their fault, but it was my problem. That second part, I never got. I was going to say here 'until I got the sense of how I mattered...', but the truth is, I never did. Nevertheless, I can say that it's important, for two reasons. One, it helps you survive the nasty days when you really don't want to go do it, if you think: but they need me, and this is why. I'm not going to say it makes you want to spring out of bed, but it helps. And Two (the important one), it allows you to identify your 'selling proposition'. "Here's why you guys have me; here's why you need me. " Okay, that second part is a little tough when you're one of hundreds of cubicle drones - but if you've done the first part, it's a little easier for you than it is for others. And if you've got that selling proposition, what you've got is what makes you unique, and desirable. Its the raw material that can become, directly or indirectly, part of what you present when you decide (or it gets decided for you) that its time to look somewhere else. It is the what of who you are, the thing that identifies you to people who could care less about you, personally, but do care about what you can do for them.

A side comment. I read once of a salesman who figured out that for every $100,000 in sales that he sold, he made twenty cold calls that went nowhere. He talked himself into thinking that every one of those calls was worth a $5,000 sale -- so when he did make that big sale, it was expected -- but if he didn't make the cold calls, he couldn't expect it. Now, I think 'how silly is that' -- but for him, it worked.

Is there more? Oh, yeah. For one, attitude. I used to work, while I was in the Air Force, with a captain who was known as General Jim, because our feeling was that this guy was going places. Not because he was bright, or energetic (though he was, much as I didn't want to admit it), but because he exuded the sense that he was going to go someplace. Some of that was a certain smarminess -- he never met a colonel or general that he didn't like -- but most of it was this projected sense of inevitability. I'm the person you need, he seemed to say, and most times, people agreed with him. He was there, he was smart, he was eager, and he was ambitious. People liked that. I hated it... but even hating it, I recognized it. I don't think it's key to advancement, but people like having subordinates who are upbeat. (Fortunately, this can be faked.)

Another useful skill is the ability to publicize yourself. I never particuarly cared for the idea of blowing your own horn -- it seemed silly to me; after all, knowing what I was doing was the job of the group's manager -- but I have to admit that part of that feeling was because I wasn't very good at it. That had two components -- I didn't know how to bring myself to people's attention who needed (from my perspective) to hear about me, and I didn't know how to flag things so that when they did hear about me, they heard good things. Sometimes, I lucked into those opportunities -- I was invited/commanded to attend a recurring meeting with my manager's manager's manager, so he got to know who I was -- but usually, I didn't. And part of that was that I scorned people who volunteered for things that I considered a big waste of time. What I never did was think about the idea that maybe those further up the organization thought them a waste of time, too -- but they pushed them, which mean that if I wanted those people to think kindly of me, I should push them, too. How to do that without losing my soul was something I never figured out, but I think it's a skill you need when you're in an environment where your future can be affected by the actions of people who have no idea who you are.

And then theres the question of figuring out whats important to those people. Maybe next time. Enough for now.