Fire Your Boss (9 page)

Spending so much time at work became a sign you weren’t a moneygrubbing hourly worker. You were a careerist. You didn’t have a “blue-collar attitude,” you had a “white-collar attitude.” That implied you were educated and a member of the elite, not one of the hoi polloi. Those added hours showed you were pursuing a higher calling than just money. You cared about the company. Then the rationale morphed again.

You spent so much time at work because everyone else did. No one left at 5:00 p.m. Fitting in meant working long hours. If you didn’t work those long hours, people looked at you somewhat askance. What’s wrong with you? they thought. Aren’t you ambitious? Aren’t you a team player? Don’t you love what you’re doing?

The fact is almost no one loves what he or she is doing today. But no one, other than those who work for the money, seems willing to admit it outside of my office, or his or her therapist’s office. What’s so good about being a loyal soldier at work? Loyalty cuts both ways, and most employers haven’t shown loyalty to their employees for decades. People today need to be free lances, not loyal soldiers; they do their best for their employer, but their prime loyalty has to be to themselves. (See the box above: Be Like a Real Free Lance.) Those who put the company’s interests ahead of their own are just as likely to be terminated…and less likely to get reemployed quickly. Those who work for the money are plenty ambitious. It’s just that their ambition isn’t to move up the ladder, it’s to be happy.

I ask you, isn’t it crazy to spend most of your time doing something you don’t love and for which you get little reward, when you could be spending that time doing something you do love and from which you’d get tremendous satisfaction? My message is to work as long as you must to do your job and collect your paycheck, and then go home and have a life.
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Not just any life, by the way, but have the life of which you’ve always dreamed.

7. Worried your boss won’t let you have time to have a life? After putting in practice the techniques I’ll offer in subsequent chapters, you’ll be able to work from nine to five…and still be your boss’s most valued employee.

In order to kill your career and get the life of your dreams you need to expand on the self-analysis you did a bit earlier in this chapter. Turn back to the page on which you’ve described and then expanded on the reason you work. Flip the paper over, and across the top of the page write, Ways to Get What I Want. Next, start listing all the various ways you can think of to obtain the goal you’ve determined is your reason for working. Don’t censor yourself. Be as open-minded and freethinking as you can. This isn’t a test and there are no right or wrong answers. Right now you’re looking for multiple options, not a single solution.

I’d love to help you think outside the box and come up with fresh ideas, but obviously that’s impossible in a book. Instead, why not turn to your family and friends for help? Pick people you know will be supportive of your goals, rather than someone who’s likely to shoot you down because of jealousy or some preconceived notions of who you should be and what you should do. For instance, if your mother criticizes your every move, don’t go to her for help in brainstorming. Choose your supportive friend instead.

Set aside a specific time for this conversation, perhaps after taking the person out to dinner or having her over for a home-cooked meal. That will ensure you get her undivided attention and she’ll feel a bit compelled to help you, since you’ve just fed her.

For an idea of how those dialogues could go let’s go back through the examples I used earlier and see what those individuals came up with in their conversations with me. I’ll take their stories through to the conclusion to show you what kind of successes are possible by killing your career. However, you don’t need to get that far along right now. Instead, focus on coming up with what you think is a surefire way to achieve your goal.

Julius Jackson determined he worked for respect. In particular, he wanted the respect of the African American community. While his position as an executive officer in the doormen’s union was inarguably deserving of respect, it obviously wasn’t providing Julius with the satisfaction he wanted. He and I worked together for hours on the telephone coming up with other ways he could get the respect he wanted. He jokingly told me he was too old (and short) for the NBA and couldn’t carry a tune or dance a lick, so sports and entertainment were out. Julius wasn’t much of a churchgoer, so he ruled out becoming active in a congregation. Getting politically active was one possibility, since he’d developed a number of political contacts over the years. The idea that seemed to strike the loudest chord was getting involved in charitable service. After a few months of exploration Julius joined the board of the local youth bureau in the New Jersey city where he lived. Drawing on his contacts with the building trades and local landlords, he eventually established a summer jobs and apprenticeship program for local youth. Today, Julius is still an officer of the union, but he’s happier than ever. His work with the youth bureau has won him kudos from the community. And he recently learned he will be honored as man of the year by a local chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi, an African American service-oriented fraternity.

Andy Welessa knew right away that he worked for security. With three children and a fourth on the way, and a good but not great job as a product manager with a consumer electronics firm, the thirty-nine-year-old Andy knew he wasn’t likely to achieve the kind of financial security possible for peers with smaller families. He told me his real drive was the physical security of his wife and children. Andy and I brainstormed about what he could to achieve that security. He could send his children to private schools or move his family into a different part of New York. The family could also make a more dramatic move to an area Andy perceived as safer. That’s what the Welessas did eighteen months after Andy first came to see me. Andy arranged a transfer within his company to a job as a manager at an assembly plant in a southern state. His pay stayed the same, but since the cost of living was so much lower, he and his wife were able to afford to buy a home. When last we spoke on the telephone Andy told me how much happier he is seeing his children run around a big country field rather than a paved school yard.

Nicole Cohen, the twenty-six-year-old trade-magazine journalist who had been traveling the world for her company, figured out why her wanderlust was still unsatisfied. Her dreams of traveling to foreign countries involved far more than just seeing the insides of airports, casinos, and conference centers. And the foreign cultures she longed to immerse herself in weren’t those of hotels and expense-account-oriented restaurants. Yes, she was physically traveling, but it wasn’t the type of experience she craved. Together, she and I came up with a number of ways she could achieve her goal. She could take a job with an airline or cruise line. She could work as a guide for an outfitter or a tour company. She could become a freelancer and work on travel articles for publications. We soon realized the problem with those options was that Nicole would still be traveling for business rather than pleasure, and she’d be unlikely to get to do what she really wanted. That’s why she settled on another option: going into public relations and traveling extensively on her own. After a yearlong search, Nicole was able to get a public relations job with a large hotel in Florida. The job requires her to work extended hours during the winter, spring, and fall, but offers most of the summer off. That’s time Nicole plans to use to travel.

Dan Connors’s desire to serve was being stifled by the demands of management. While he was doing well working as a top executive at a large New York City–based nonprofit agency, he felt something was missing. He knew he was helping his agency, which focused on the needs of poor New Yorkers, do good. It was just that his days consisted largely of managing personnel, meeting with the media, and lobbying municipal officials. He felt removed from the organization’s mission. Dan and I discussed other ways he could be of service without its involving work. He could take a more hands-on approach to developing programs in his agency, or another agency. He could go back to school for social work. That would take time out of his life and cost him a great deal. He could get involved in local politics, helping candidates who reflected his view get elected. But that could be even more frustrating than his work. Or he could work through his church to help the needy. Dan went to the board of his agency and explained that he needed to spend more time doing hands-on service to feel complete. He explained that he would no longer be able to attend meetings or events on Wednesday and Friday evenings, since that was when he would be working at a soup kitchen his church had established.

Andrea Lewis laughed when she said she wasn’t having much luck meeting the kind of people she wanted to meet at her job: “I guess the odds are pretty long for me to meet a classical - music - loving backpacker at a dentist’s office.” While she
had
met some very nice people and struck up a couple of friendships, the thirty-four-year-old Andrea still felt lonely. She and I tried to come up with some idea for how she could meet people who shared her interests. Even though she doesn’t play an instrument, Andrea has joined the local chamber music society and is helping out at concerts by taking tickets and seating guests. She has signed up for a poetry workshop at the local college. And she has joined a local organization that helps maintain hiking trails. She just had her first date in three years, with a man she met while cleaning a trail in a nearby state park.

Despite having, throughout his career, chosen work he thought would be artistically challenging rather than financially rewarding, Sean Shanahan still didn’t feel he was expressing himself fully through his work at the design firm. He and I talked of ways he could do just that. Sean thought about going back to graduate school for studio art, but he didn’t think having someone else tell him what to work on would be particularly fulfilling. He considered staying at an artist’s colony over his summer vacation, but realized that would be only temporary. Finally, he thought about turning his home office into a studio. It took only one trip to an art-supply store for Sean to be able to convert a space designed for work he brought home from the office into a space designed for him to do his own artwork. He has sworn off bringing work home over the weekend, reserving his perfectionism for his own work, realizing he could do acceptable professional work during the eight hours a day he spent at the office. At home he is spending time working on his own collages. He has finished six, which he plans to enter in a juried show.

By killing their careers my clients have succeeded in becoming much happier with their lives. Since they’re now not placing the burden of providing emotional as well as financial rewards on their work, they’re actually feeling better about their jobs. Not only are their expectations lower, but they’re no longer as emotionally tied to their offices. They’re able to leave work at the office when they come home at night. And by pursuing their nonfinancial goals through the nonwork parts of their lives, they’ve been much more effective at fulfilling those needs. They’ve won respect, found security, traveled, met people, and been able to express themselves, to a degree that wouldn’t have been possible if they had remained focused on having careers. What has worked for them can work for you. By killing your career and getting a job instead, you’ll be able to lead a far richer life.

Of course, it’s essential that your current or future employer not realize you’re now working to live, not living to work. That’s not as difficult as you might think. All you need to do is realize there’s no I in job.

AMY DORRIT HAS
become the apple of her boss’s eye. She’s now able to leave early on Thursdays to pick her son up from day care. During two recent rounds of layoffs, Amy has been assured she’s safe, despite her relative lack of seniority. And her last performance review was glowing. It wasn’t always this way. During the first year she worked at the law firm as an administrative assistant she felt besieged. Her boss, a young partner specializing in entertainment law, gave her nothing but grief, even though Amy was diligently doing her job, working overtime, and even offering suggestions to improve his efficiency. It was only after she stopped concentrating on doing
her
job and started focusing instead on what would make her boss’s work life easier that she began to flourish. Now an expert at shielding her boss from the other partners and at keeping the firm’s procedures from interfering with his work style, she’s as secure as anyone in the firm, even though she rarely stays late and is, in fact, constantly looking for other work. The same can be true for you.