On Careers
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10 Ways to Make Your Employees Love You
Continue reading… 2 CommentsLast week, I wrote about ways to make your boss love you. This week is a similar list for managers, offering ways to gain the respect and affection of your employees. Confining myself to 10 turned out to be hard—there are so many ways to manage badly and so many things that it's important to do well. So here are 10 to start off with, and I hope people will add more:
1. Let's open with the big one: Don't be a jerk. Yelling, disparaging people, defensiveness, shooting the messenger, and publicly berating someone are all off limits. Good people have options, and few of them will want to work for a jerk.
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Will a Mess-up Mean a Job Loss?
Continue reading… 3 CommentsOne of the most chilling comments I've ever heard in the workplace was when an executive muttered: "We don't recover our wounded."
I remember thinking, "If that worries you, imagine how the practice is viewed by your employees."
The late Earl Long, eccentric governor of Louisiana, was assured by a follower that although he'd gladly support Earl when he thought he was right, he couldn't on one occasion because the governor was wrong. Long replied, "You crazy [expletive deleted], I don't need you when I'm right."
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How to Survive Job Insecurity
Continue reading… 0 CommentsIn the military, and especially as a fighter pilot, I have tons of job security. What's it like to not really have good/great job security? How do people function—not to mention buy a car, house, etc.—without knowing they will have a job six months from now? Obviously, if you do a good job at work and aren't a dirtbag, your job security is higher (theoretically), but it's not like what I have.
Hmmm, no job security and no one trying to kill me, or job security and people trying to kill me? Which one shall I take? (Reality is, of course, that the military would not be a good fit for me. I mean, exercise? As a job requirement? Plus, I'd have to join the right branch of the military in order to have the right color uniform, although me dressed in white, Navy-issued pants might just be the trick to scaring away the enemy.)
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How to Make Yourself Lucky
Continue reading… 4 CommentsDo you ever find yourself eyeing your distant dreams and hoping plain old dumb luck will bridge the gap? If you do, you're wasting your time.
Dumb luck does happen, of course. People do occasionally stumble into their wildest dreams completely by chance. And people get hit by lightning, too. But not a lot.
"Strategic luck," on the other hand, can play a critical role on the path to success. It's a product of focus, persistence, and putting yourself into situations where luck can strike. It's a calculated numbers game.
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When to Let Sloppiness Slide
Continue reading… 2 CommentsI had a pointed moment of clarity last week. I finally realized why all of my great ideas at work were falling upon deaf ears. I have been making lots of process improvement recommendations lately to help our team (and its several new members) operate more efficiently. In my previous role at a huge manufacturing company, managers ate up this kind of stuff. But for some reason, it was being met with total and utter indifference in my new job.
The problem, you see, is that I failed to recognize the difference in the two companies and their managers. My new job is in a growing market, where sales is all that matters. Sure, it would be nice to clean up the back office, but nothing should get in the way of sales efforts. If I'm training new hires or standardizing our product delivery methods, I'm taking away from valuable selling time. This means even tremendous process improvement ideas are essentially useless.
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The 30-Second Entrepreneur
Continue reading… 1 CommentMore people than ever want to start their own company. That's great. About six months ago, I wrote down about 100 things I learned over about 25 years of starting companies. Here are two of them.
23. To sell many, sell one.
To build your company, you have to sell multiples. You can't just sell one. Anyone can sell one. Your family will buy, and maybe even a college buddy will give you money for your new widget. The trick is to sell the second one, and get paid for it. But before you can sell many, you have to sell that one single customer. When you talk to venture capitalists, they are obnoxiously insistent on waiting until someone buys. Everything else is "classroom." -
10 Ways to Make Your Boss Love You
Continue reading… 26 CommentsWant to become your boss's favorite? Here are 10 habits that, if cultivated, will have your boss showering you with lavish praise:
1. Keep track of everything your boss puts on your plate, so she learns that she doesn't have to follow up to make sure thing are getting done. Give her the peace of mind of knowing that if she talks to you about it, it's either going to get handled or you'll bring it back up with her for follow-up.
2. More broadly, have your act together. Stay on top of things, ensure your boss only has to tell you something once, don't let things fall through the cracks, and generally be someone she can rely on. Often employee complaints of micromanagement can be traced back to problems in this area, and fixing this stuff can fix the micromanagement.
