Fire Your Boss (2 page)
Authors: Stephen M. Pollan,Mark Levine
Tags: #Psychology, #Self Help, #Business
My name is Stephen M. Pollan. I’m an attorney and life coach. In the more than two decades I’ve been a personal consultant, I’ve helped hundreds of people land the job of their dreams. And I’ve continued to do that in the past couple of years, during what all the experts say is a horrible job climate, in what those same experts say is one of the worst job markets in America: New York City.
I have a unique practice. I take what, for lack of a better term, I call a holistic approach to my clients’ money lives. I believe it’s vital to look at financial and work decisions in context. For example, I have new clients get complete medical checkups before we launch into long-term planning, since there’s no point in taking steps to financially prepare for a long life unless you’re taking care of your health as well. I ask clients about their relationship and parenting needs and wants, since I think it’s essential for job and family to mesh as smoothly as possible. When I meet with clients, we talk about investing, relationships, real estate, insurance, wishes for parents and children, personal spending, work problems and goals, hobbies, and life dreams. I believe a comprehensive, all-embracing approach to both life and work offers the greatest rewards. I don’t adhere to any particular school of investing, believe in any one philosophy of business, or preach a specific approach to real estate. All I care about is helping my clients set their goals, and then achieve them. Because my clients’ success is my sole aim, and because my holistic approach requires me to deal with very personal issues, I get quite wrapped up in my clients’ lives.
The past three years have been very traumatic for my clients and me. Most of my clients live and/or work in New York City. The attacks of September 11 and their lingering aftermath offer physical and psychological reminders of the impermanence of modern life. A local economy already reeling from the bursting of the Internet stock balloon suffered even more damage on September 11. Up until then most of my clients had been feeling secure at work. Sure, there were crises in individual companies or industries that led to terminations, but the economy overall was strong enough to create other job openings. And many of my clients, having spent the 1980s and 1990s turning “networking” into a lifestyle, were expert at landing new jobs. In the past three years, however, those tried and true techniques they had mastered suddenly stopped working. That’s when they came to me for help.
Confronted with clients in need, and not having any deeply held allegiance to the traditional rules for finding jobs and thriving in the workplace, I started working with my clients to develop new techniques. Since all I, and they, care about is whether the approach works, we felt free to pursue contrarian and iconoclastic ideas. The result is an admittedly radical new seven-step approach to work that flies in the face of conventional wisdom.
The essential first step in winning the job of your dreams is to fire your boss…and hire yourself. In other words, you need to stop letting your boss, or company, or anyone else for that matter, dictate the course of your work life, and take charge of your own present and future. It’s ironic, but Americans, who are usually so obsessed with taking charge of large and small aspects of their lives, cede control of their work lives to others.
Think I’m overstating the case? Let’s go back to the beginning of your work life to see how much control you’ve given away. What did you major in when you were at college? Was it a field you found interesting or one your parents encouraged you to pursue because it fit their perception of you, the image they wanted to convey of their child, or one they believed would be lucrative? I’m not ashamed to admit I left college after two years to go directly to law school, not because I wanted to be a lawyer — I wanted to go into radio — but because my working-class Jewish parents desperately wanted their son to become a professional.
Maybe you’re more independent-minded than I was, withstood parental pressure, and studied a field in which you were generally interested. In that case, how did you get your first job? Did you study various industries and companies and determine which best fit your needs and wants? Or did you take the first job you, or some contact of your professors or parents, found?
Having gotten your first job, how did you determine the path of your subsequent work life? Did you work up a long-term general plan for what you’d like to accomplish, or did you just get blown from job to job, company to company, industry to industry, based on decisions made by your superiors or personnel departments?
Finally, who’s in charge of your work life today? Do you have a plan for what you’ll be trying to accomplish this year, next year, and long term? Are you proactively seeking out new opportunities both at your current employer and outside the company? Or are you pinning your present and future to the decisions made by your boss and his or her boss, or to the whims of interviewers, or worse yet, résumé screeners?
Wendy Rosenfeld,
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a willowy, auburn-haired forty-two-year-old, has never really been in charge of her work life. Despite her love of, and talent for, writing poetry, Wendy majored in journalism in college at her parents’ insistence. As her father asked her once, “I don’t see any want ads for poets in the paper, do you?” She landed her first job at a local newspaper thanks to the intervention of a neighbor who was a major advertiser in the publication. Because the lead reporter at the newspaper hated going to evening meetings, Wendy was given the local politics beat. After three years of covering council and board meetings, she was offered a job in the district office of the area’s state senator. She took it because she wouldn’t have to work nights or weekends. For the next six years she answered phones, filed, and wrote correspondence. When the state senator ran for Congress and won, he offered Wendy an equivalent job in his district office. The manager of the office left three years later and the congressman promoted Wendy to office manager. Five years later, when a job putting together the monthly mailing opened at the congressman’s Washington, D.C., office, he offered it to Wendy, who accepted. But recently, Wendy’s boss decided to run for the U.S. Senate and asked Wendy to help set up his campaign headquarters back in New York. Having moved back in with her family temporarily, she came to me for help determining if she could afford to buy an apartment. After a few minutes I told her the first thing she needed to do was take charge of her own work life by developing and writing her own plan. By taking the time to plan her future, and by committing that plan to paper, Wendy would no longer find her work life governed by either her boss or fate.
For most of American history people didn’t look to derive emotional satisfaction from their jobs. Work was to put “bread on the table.” Emotional and spiritual satisfaction came from family, home, church, community, and hobbies. In the 1960s and 1970s, baby boomers rebelled against this approach. They perceived this division between financial and emotional motivations as dehumanizing. They criticized their “organization man” fathers as leading hollow lives in which they did meaningless work. In response, baby boomers created a new work concept: the career. This was a work path offering not just financial, but also emotional and spiritual, satisfaction. Boomers looked for work meaningful to them so they could lead more satisfying lives. The result, however, has been anything but.
The search for work that offers both financial and psychological satisfaction has left most people with neither. Having made such a strong commitment to their work, people today are working longer and longer hours. Meanwhile, they are spending less and less time at home, with their family, in church, in their community, or pursuing their hobbies. And despite this incredible time commitment, their income isn’t secure. The pursuit of a “meaningful” career has backfired, leading baby boomers to envy the lifestyle of those gray-flannel-wearing fathers they used to criticize.
The second step in my program to win the job of your dreams is to kill your career. It may sound counterintuitive, but the best route to emotional satisfaction is stop looking for it at work. Instead, look for a job that provides as large and secure an income as possible. Look for emotional satisfaction in your personal life. If at some point in your life your need for income is reduced, you can make concessions to achieve some kind of unified “career.” Until then, abandon the unhealthy notion of career and return to the far healthier concept of job.
Sean Shanahan is a forty - five - year - old graphic designer who bears a striking resemblance to the English film star Ronald Colman and who likes dressing as if he’s off to a shooting weekend in the English countryside. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Sean studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. After graduating, Sean looked for work. He eschewed the advertising and publishing industries and instead looked for work with design firms. In the past two decades Sean has worked for four different design firms. He has continued to place a priority on pursuing interesting projects, despite frequently being offered “corporate” work that was better paying. Recently, Sean jumped to a start-up firm that specialized in Web design projects. But after a year the firm is still struggling. Sean is working nearly sixty hours a week. He lives alone and has little or no social life. Promised bonuses are yet to appear. Sean came in to see me to discuss rumors he has heard that one of the firm’s three main clients is about to go under. Meanwhile, he received a call about a job opening at a cable television network for someone to create logos for special news and entertainment programs. It would offer him a much higher income and he wouldn’t need to work as many hours. Still, he’s uncertain. “I don’t know if I want to be someone who creates graphics like ‘Homicide in the Heartland,’ ” he said to me. I told him I thought homicide made sense, and it was his career he should kill.
Most Americans have spent their lives believing there’s justice in the workplace. We’ve been led to believe that people who show up on time and do their jobs will be safe, as long as the company can afford to keep them on. We were taught that if you show up early, stay late, and do your job well, you’ll be rewarded for it, either through promotion or with pay increases. It’s an accepted belief that everyone, management and staff, has the company’s interests at heart, and, as a result, open and honest debate about how things 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.
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.