Most of us – unless we come from a very wealthy family or win the lottery – spend a great deal of our adult lives at work. Certainly, I have. The great thing about work is that, beyond getting a paycheck, you can learn an awful lot. Even if some of that learning is accidental and not the kind of learning you expected when you started working.
I might be able to save you some time and energy; and perhaps even help you avoid learning the hard way – the way that I usually did.
Here are ten things you need to know, sooner rather than later, about work.
Thing One: People Aren’t Thinking About You as Much as You Think They Are
We tend to spend a lot of time worrying about what other people are thinking about us. Especially if we have high standards for ourselves, we tend to be our own worst critics. We magnify any criticism we get and even obsess over it. In my first job, a partner at the consulting firm where I worked gave me the following feedback about my writing, in an offsite for the whole office with approximately fifty people in the room: “Schneider has a high fog index.” It wasn’t meant as a compliment. It took me about five years after that to write anything at all.
Here is the good news: it turns out people aren’t actually thinking about you all that much. Nobody at that consulting firm actually cared about my high fog index other than me. Most people are only half-listening to what you say most of the time, they rarely read that long email that you just sent, and they don’t even notice how you dress (in my case, that’s a good thing).
There is a book I highly recommend by Roger Rosenblatt called Rules for Aging . Rule number two is “Nobody is thinking about you.” Rosenblatt says, “I promise you- nobody is thinking about you. They are thinking about themselves – just like you.”
Thing Two: Your Reward for Great Work will be More Work
I hate to over-generalize, but there are three kinds of people in any organization. There are people who actually step out of their comfort zones and get things done, there are people who critique how that first group of people are doing, and then there are people who “just do their job” and nothing more. I know I don’t work where you do, but am I wrong?
Let’s assume you are in the first group. There will be those rare occasions when someone tells you what a great job you are doing; you may very well get more money if your efforts are eventually connected to the success of the organization (or you may not); but mostly you will just keep going. Because that’s who you are.
Your greatest reward for your great work will be that you are asked to do more work. Because, as a simple matter of math, there are never enough people in that first group relative to groups two and three.
It’s best not to be too cynical about this. Take it as a compliment. Sometimes the “more work” is great work. You may not need the rewards as much as you think – and you still have everything you’ve learned along the way by doing the hard work and taking some chances. No one can ever take that away from you.
Thing Three: Your Work is Never Done, Your Team is Never Perfect
I was once running a small marketing department in a small software company in Cincinnati. At one particular high point when I was proud of what we had achieved together as a team, I uttered the following sentence in a non-thinking kind of way, “Well, we’ve really made it. I can’t think of any way we could be any better as a team.” The three or four people in the room with me gave me strange looks.
Inside the next year, the entire team fell apart and unraveled.
My pronouncement was, at least as far as I can remember, the single stupidest sentence that I ever said at work. I was like George W. Bush on that aircraft carrier with the Mission Accomplished banner during the middle of the Iraq War.
Thing Four: Influence Matters More Than Authority
Don’t get me wrong. A bit of authority can be a great thing. Sometimes even the most intransigent of people will do something you’ve asked for just because they are a little bit afraid of you. Which can help get things done that need to get done.
But I will take having influence over authority any day of the week. The kind of influence that can only be acquired by working hard, building relationships and trust, learning the business, and being willing to speak the truth in a thoughtful way. With that kind of influence, you can get an awful lot done with a relatively small amount of money and time. Plus, you’ve built relationships that will last throughout your whole career.
You will know you have that kind of influence when your opinion and concurrence are sought on the things that really matter, without you having to ask. It can take some time and some significant attention to building trust to get to this point, but if you believe in the mission it’s worth doing.
Thing Five: Energy Matters More Than Time
Especially in today’s workplace, there is never enough time to get everything done. Very few organizations that ask managers to do more while “streamlining” their management ranks ever take the time to think through the daily workflow of the surviving managers. The time demands are infinite and a great sorting-out of what is really important must occur in order to sift through all of them.
But your most important resource isn’t actually time, it’s energy. Have you ever felt totally overwhelmed but then gone for a run, or a walk, or to a yoga session – and then suddenly felt like you could take on the world again? Have you ever shown up for work after another fitful night’s sleep only to be energized by a great group of people or a small but very meaningful act of kindness from someone at work? If so, you know what I mean.
Energy matters more than time, because you can generate more energy and renew yourself, whereas you cannot manufacture time. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz wrote an excellent book on this very topic, The Power of Full Engagement.
Thing Six: Talent Matters More Than Money
Money is always a constraint, but in organizations which have any amount of scale you can normally find discretionary money for the project that you really need to get approved. It may take some time, it may require you to clarify in succinct terms the rationale for the project, and perhaps you will even need to find somebody to help you create the full business case. But the money is usually there to be found and allocated.
The bigger issue is talent. Because you will likely need “A level talent” to accomplish the innovation that you are recommending. And that A level talent is most definitely already assigned to something else important.
The good news is that once you find the talent, it will also help you attract the money.
Thing Seven: Ideas Are Fragile
The odds are very high that you are working in a flawed organization that needs to be improved. And improvement only comes by having great ideas that are implemented well.
In my experience, unless Steve Jobs is running your company (and he’s not), here is the best way to come up with great ideas – have a lot of ideas, some of which are bad. Then develop a process for inclusively and rigorously and honestly sorting through all of the ideas. Then once you select the best ideas, test them “on the ground” as quickly and cheaply as possible.
There is one thing that you must avoid which will destroy this process, and that’s killing ideas prematurely. And, unfortunately, there are many ways for ideas to get killed prematurely, for example,
- “We tried that before and …”
- “We tried that at XYZ company where I worked ten years ago and it was a disaster.”
- “We don’t have enough money for that.”
- “You don’t have enough experience …”
- “You just don’t understand …”
It turns out that a new idea is a very fragile thing. Many of them sound crazy on the surface. When Southwest Airlines started, they decided not to serve meals on planes and not to have pre-assigned seating. Two things that all the other airlines were doing. Everyone, including their own customers, thought they were crazy. But meals on planes and pre-assigned seating didn’t fit their operating model, which depended on reliability at a low cost. Southwest Airlines became more valuable over time than any other airline on the planet.
Hold your ideas lightly, don’t crush them, and treat them as the precious things that they are.
Thing Eight: Some Impossible Problems Can’t Be Solved
As I’ve mentioned there is always more work to do than there is time to do it. Prioritizing what to work on, and if you in a senior role what others should work on, can be difficult. Great companies are built by solving nearly impossible problems that others cannot solve. In one place I worked, we realized that our value proposition was very strong, but that our process for doing monthly updates to our customers’ big data warehouses was too labor-intensive and error-prone.
Once we automated that process, which took about five years, everyone was happier – our customers, our employees, even our CFO- everyone except our competition. It was a big problem worth solving.
But there are other kinds of nearly impossible problems that challenge businesses that are actually, in fact, impossible problems to solved. They need to be left for the next generation of technology to evolve or the next generation of customers to develop – or the next generation, period.
There are no easy formulas for sorting out the nearly-impossible problems that you should solve from the genuinely impossible problems. But through experience, including working on some impossible problems that aren’t solved, you can learn to recognize the difference.
Thing Nine: The Zone of Indifference Could be Your Next Opportunity
There are all kinds of problems that organizations have that no one is working on. If you stay engaged and awake and work there for a while, you will discover them. I once worked for an organization that had a fantastic customer base and excellent products, but no one was working on how to innovate beyond the current value proposition. The conventional wisdom was that we didn’t have the money for new market or product innovation; but the real story was that innovation is risky and the prevalent culture didn’t honor risk-taking.
So, I nominated myself to be the innovation guy and spent the next ten years mostly having a good time at work. And it was the easiest job in the world to get, since everyone else thought I was crazy to want it.
Thing Ten: Not Everyone at Work Really Loves You, and That’s OK
I’m lucky enough to have one of those spouses who actually wants to hear about my work day. When was in the middle of one especially challenging job, I would inevitably begin my daily updates with “So-and-so at work really loves me, but …” It didn’t take long for my wife to suspect these reports weren’t actually accurate. After all, she knows me too well to believe that everyone loves me. And she thought it was hilarious that I was trying to pull off this ruse.
The reality of work-life is that no matter how hard you work at it, more often than not, not everyone is going to even like you, let alone love you. Respect you can hope for and civility you should expect; but universal acclaim is not likely in the cards.
And that’s perfectly okay. It’s better to make sure that you feel good about what you are doing. In fact, it’s extremely important that you feel good about what you are doing. It helps you live with yourself, and hopefully you will be living with yourself for a long time.
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