They Don't Teach Corporate in College (26 page)

Once the problem is yesterday's news, take a moment to assess how things worked out before you move on to the next big thing. If you succeeded, think about what worked and why, and document everything for later use in performance reviews or discussions about your goals with your manager. Don't forget to promote your success as subtly as you can and to sincerely thank the people who helped you along the way. Return the favor by sharing your skills and resources to help your colleagues with projects in the future.

If you didn't succeed, don't look at the experience as a failure. You simply made an ineffective choice. Your career is far from over, so dust yourself off and prepare for the next challenge. As I mentioned in the section on risk-taking, if you think about why you didn't succeed and try a different approach the next time, you'll be 100 percent on track. Take responsibility for the choices you've made, but don't over-apologize. Believe in yourself and others will too!

I spent the first 10 years of my career in a dead-end job. At first I just felt lucky to get something, and then I got comfortable. I never set any goals with my boss, and never really grew my skill set. It was just more of the same. I just turned 34, and I realized I was still operating at a junior level. All of my friends have masters degrees or jobs where they have a lot of responsibilities. I'm working with all 25-year-olds. I'd tell my younger self to get with the program—figure out how to move up in this company or leave so I could move up somewhere else. I can't believe how much time I've wasted.

Harry, 34, Los Angeles

Use your job to your advantage.
Acquire valuable skills and experience that will help you achieve your personal mission. Set specific, reasonable, and attainable goals for your present position that relate to your long-term career strategy.

Determine what they need, and make sure you can provide it.
Ask yourself what your company and department need, and think about how you can use your unique set of skills and talents to aid them. Look for ways to generate and implement new ideas and make your accomplishments visible to others.

Take appropriate risks.
Situations in which you have to act on the fly are excellent opportunities to prove your value. If you're indecisive, you're likely to be perceived as ineffective, whereas if you take a confident stand, you will make a powerful statement about your career potential.

Learn to resolve issues effectively.
Practice the four steps of problem-solving:

1. Define the problem in concrete terms.

2. Generate as many potential solutions as you can.

3. Evaluate each solution.

4. Choose the best alternative by weighing the pros and cons.

Setting goals, generating visibility, solving company problems in the blink of an eye—these all sound great in theory, right? But when you're a newbie in the business world, you consider yourself lucky if you can just make it through the day without dropping one of the 10 plates you have spinning in the air. Besieged by a constant influx of new assignments, you can't even stop to consider how you're using your time. Forget about managing your career and monitoring your performance to achieve optimum results. Some days, work seems so out of control that you just want to put your head down on your desk and mutter “uncle.”

Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to live this way? What if you ruled your schedule instead of the other way around? What if you were the most effective person on the team, not wasting any energy hating the colleague who
never misses a deadline or the one who always leaves the boss's office with all of his questions answered? All of this is totally possible if you take the time to develop a few new habits. In this chapter, I'll cover how to make the most out of the eight-plus hours a day you spend at work—from effective time management and organization to making every piece of communication count. Internalize these skills by reflecting on them outside the office when you have a moment to breathe, and by planning how you can implement sanity-saving processes in advance. I think you'll find that the more proactive you are in managing your workday, the more you will actually achieve—without losing your hair or your bathroom breaks!

It took me a long time to get out of the mode of thinking that a corporate job is similar to school. When I first started working, I treated everything as though it was an assignment I would be graded on. I had no choice but to complete whatever was asked of me, because I would “fail” if I didn't. Eventually, I realized that I couldn't possibly do it all, and that I was going to have to prioritize if I was going to survive. Some things are just meant to slip under the radar. After all, if a task is relatively unimportant and no one will notice if it isn't done, is it really worth burning out over?

Leslie, 25, Ohio

It's impossible for one human being to do it all, and unless you want to spontaneously combust before the age of 30, you shouldn't try to. If you're thinking that you don't have any say in how you spend your time at work, consider whether this is a subjective state of mind or an objective reality. Is your boss really watching you every second of every day? Probably not—he's got his own work and schedule to manage. I don't care if you're inundated with assignments that could potentially keep you busy for the next decade, the only person who can truly control your schedule is you.

Here's the thing: struggling to get through each day by running frantically from one task to the next won't bring happiness or job satisfaction. You'll be exhausted, stressed, and unmotivated, and you won't have accomplished much in respect to your long-term career goals. For the first year of my career, I was so fried that you could see my hair crackling with electricity. I was so
anxious for every senior person to like me that I accepted assignments indiscriminately—like a dog scarfing down table food. Boy, was I earning my $25K salary! I thought that all those days of nonstop agita would certainly earn me a promotion, so naturally I was surprised when I was passed over. At the time, I didn't understand that in the process of doing seven million unrelated and unimportant tasks, I had neglected my professional development and hadn't acquired the core skills I needed to move to the next level.

As a general rule of thumb, you must manage your time strategically if you want your efforts to translate into personal fulfillment and career advancement. You can do this by organizing your schedule around your priorities. What makes a task a priority? Think back to the personal mission statement from
Chapter 1
and the goals you set in
Chapter 4
. For the most part, your priorities should focus on results and relate back to your master plan. Here's an example: My friend Lou's personal mission has always been to live on a farm, but he went to school for hotel management. When Lou started his first job as a hotel front desk attendant, his goal was to develop the skills and knowledge base needed to manage his own country inn. In keeping with this goal, Lou made it a priority to interact with and learn from the Guest Services staff. Several years later, Lou is living on a farm, and the visitors to the country inn he runs pay the mortgage. By leveraging his hotel experience, Lou was able to achieve his long-term vision.

Focusing on tasks that contribute to your big picture sounds like a good idea, but how do you do it? Let's look at the approach advocated by Stephen Covey, author of
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
. To paraphrase Covey, there are four types of tasks:

Category 1:
Urgent and important tasks that allow you to keep your job (crises, deadlines, pressing problems).

Category 2
: Non-urgent and important tasks that allow you to develop professionally and work toward a promotion (relationship building, new skill acquisition, opportunity assessment).

Category 3:
Urgent and non-important tasks that allow you to maintain your reputation as a team player (interruptions, certain emails and phone calls, certain meetings, certain administrative work for senior team members).