Winning (23 page)

And that’s the problem with being stuck. Frustration builds and builds until people generally do something stupid—they quit.

Don’t do that. It is much, much easier to get a job
from
a job. I would even go further and say, not only should you stay put, you should work harder. Nothing will get you a new job faster than terrific performance in your old one.

Gerry Roche, senior chairman of Heidrick & Struggles, and one of the most respected headhunters in the United States, says that even if you feel stuck, if you are performing well, two outside observers are likely to know—headhunters and competitors.

“Great performers are like the masts of the tall ships,” Gerry said to me recently. “We can see them over the horizon, and we are always trying to bring them in—to our port.”

By contrast, the worst kind of job seekers are those Gerry called “perennials.”

“These types are never moving up fast enough or they can’t stand their jobs, so they are always out there with their résumés and their phone calls, hounding us or hounding companies to hire them,” he said. “These people pretty quickly get themselves labeled.”

Obviously, if you’re stuck, you need to put feelers out there to let people know you are thinking of moving. Just don’t make it your purpose in life, or you’ll undermine your effort, and worse, you’ll take your eye off your best hope for getting unstuck—your performance.

The third special case is finding a job after you’ve been let go.
Last year, I had lunch with a former GE executive (let’s call him Charlie) who had once worked for me in a staff position before moving into operations. After several promotions, he landed in a job where he struggled for a couple of years to meet his numbers. Finally, in his early fifties, he was let go.

Charlie’s career, however, hardly ended. After a few months, he became a partner at a high-technology company, starting part-time and quickly being drawn into a full-time role. From there, he was asked to join several corporate boards, and he also started teaching at a well-known business school.

Five years after being let go, he told me, his work was more fulfilling than ever.

I asked him how he’d come back so strong.

“Listen, I screwed up,” he said. “My boss and I had agreed to clear-cut objectives, and I missed them. I waited too long to let go of two direct reports who weren’t delivering. I didn’t take costs out fast enough when the downturn was approaching. I was just too optimistic.
*

“I told my wife I was going to get it, and I did.”

Charlie’s rational response floored me because usually after people have been let go, they become very defensive.

Defensive—and depressed.

Both conditions, albeit natural and common, are what kill you when you go out to get a job again. An employer can pick up low self-esteem across the room, and people want to hire winners.

But how do you act like a winner when you feel like a loser?

I asked Charlie that question.

His approach, he said, was to draw on what he called his “reservoir of self-confidence”—his strong family and his store of positive feelings about himself and his achievements in the past. He used that internal capital to stay connected with business colleagues and to network for new opportunities. He also used it to stay active socially and in community activities.

“At first, maybe people were looking at me differently and talking about me because I wasn’t working anymore,” Charlie said. “I tried not to pay attention to that.”

The goal, if you’ve been let go, is to stay out of what I have always referred to as “the vortex of defeat,” in which you let yourself spiral into inertia and despair.

One reason why people often get sucked into the vortex is that they wait too long before they start looking for another job. This is a tricky matter. It makes a lot of sense to take some time off after you are let go—say, a month or two—to reflect and compose yourself. On the other hand, the longer you wait, the more likely you are to start doubting yourself, and the more likely it is that prospective employers will think something is wrong. You just don’t want any hole in your résumé to be too gaping.
*

Prospective employers will, of course, ask you about why you left your last job. Come right out and say you were asked to move on. Every manager in the world knows what “I resigned” or “I left for personal reasons” really means.

Just as important, take responsibility for your departure, like my friend Charlie did in our conversation. His ownership of the situation made him infinitely more appealing than the typical kind of defense I heard a hundred times. “My boss was really difficult” or “They don’t care about customers as much as I do” or my favorite, “It was all politics there. It never mattered what you did; all that mattered was who you knew.”

Compare that to Charlie’s approach—even recognizing that he is on the far end of rationality! When he got back into the job market, he didn’t blame a soul but himself. He told interviewers what he learned from the experience, and what he would do differently in his next job. “I’m determined to be more externally focused from now on,” he said, “and I will definitely move faster on underperforming people. One of my objectives is to prove I don’t make the same mistakes twice.”

If you’ve been let go, you never want to present yourself with a swagger. But you do need to project realism and optimism. Draw on your reservoir of confidence. Say what happened, say what you’ve learned, and never be afraid to ask, “Just give me a chance.”

Someone will.

Due to my vintage, I belong to a very small club—people who have spent their whole careers at one company. When I got my degree from graduate school, in 1961, that was the norm. Today, statistics show that college graduates change companies multiple times in their first decade out and newly minted MBAs do the same.

I can’t say if that’s good or bad, it just is. People are very hungry to hurry up and find the right job.

Here are some thoughts, though.

First, finding the right job takes time and experimentation and patience. After all, you have to work at something for a while before you know if you can even do it, let alone if it feels right.

Second, finding the right job gets easier and easier the better you are. Maybe that sounds harsh, but it’s just reality. At the end of the day, talented people have their pick of opportunities. The right jobs find them.

So if you really want to find a great job, choose something you love to do, make sure you’re with people you like, and then give it your all.

If you do that, you’re sure to have a great job—and you’ll never really work another day in your life.

T
HE PREVIOUS CHAPTER
of this book was about finding your right job. This chapter is about getting your next one.

Now, not everyone in business wants to get a bigger and better job, but a lot of people do. If you’re among them, this chapter is for you, whether you are hungry for your first promotion or your fifth.

I was there once. When I started my career at age twenty-four, I had no idea where I was going or how I was going to get there, but I was filled with ambition.

The drive to make something of myself had started pretty young. I had my first job at age ten, as a caddy at a country club near my hometown of Salem, Massachusetts. Through high school and college, I held one job after another, from bartender to teaching assistant. By the time I graduated from the University of Illinois with a PhD in chemical engineering in 1961, I was eager for the real thing.

The job GE offered me seemed like a good deal. I would be working in the lab developing a new plastic, and if it succeeded, I saw a chance to get out in the field and sell it. Best of all, the job was in Massachusetts, and it paid the most of any offer—$10,500.
*

Believe me, I wasn’t thinking about a
career
at that point. If I had, I would have surely taken the offer I had received from Exxon, where a chemical engineering degree really meant something. But forget it—Exxon was in Texas! At that point in my life, the fact that I had gone to school in Illinois already made me feel like I had traveled halfway around the world.

Over the next thirteen years at GE, I got four promotions. Each one felt terrific. I liked having more responsibility, making bigger deals, building bigger plants, and managing more people. It was really only in 1973 that it dawned on me that I had a shot at the company’s top job—and that I wanted it too. In an act of complete cockiness, I put that down on my performance evaluation under the question about career goals.

Eight years later, I got my wish.

So, how did that happen? How does a person get promoted?

The first answer is luck. All careers, no matter how scripted they appear, are shaped by some element of pure chance.

Sometimes a person just happens to be in the right place at the right time, and he meets someone—at an airport or a party, for instance—and a career door swings open. We’ve all heard stories like that.

Sometimes we don’t even know luck is good until well after the fact.

An old golfing friend of mine, Perry Ruddick, remembers being sorely disappointed when he was passed over for a promotion that was in France early in his career at the investment bank Smith Barney. He thought he had missed out on his best shot at making a name for himself in the company, not to mention the glamour of Paris in 1966.

As luck would have it, two years after Perry would have left for the assignment abroad, another position at the company came open in New York, and he got it. In his new role, Perry, then thirty-two, got to run the company’s investment banking operations, and with a team of forward-thinking young bankers, he helped guide the company successfully through a challenging period of consolidation in the industry.

To make a long story short, Perry was vice-chairman of Smith Barney from 1985 until his retirement in 1991.

But luck can also break the other way. Sometimes careers stall for no reason at all except bad timing. At the very least, careers can zig and zag for reasons beyond your control, like an acquisition or divestiture, or a new boss with very different ideas about your future. Occasionally, you miss out on a promotion because of office politics or nepotism. Such setbacks can be terribly disheartening—enough to make you ask yourself, “Why the heck should I even try?”

Don’t go there.

In the long run, luck plays a smaller role in your career than the factors that are within your control.

While I never sorted these factors out while I was working, I have thought a lot more about them lately because audiences ask so many career questions. They come in every variety:

 

• “I like my staff job at headquarters, but I want to move into operations. What do I need to do to convince my boss I can make the change?”
  
 

• “I don’t have any chemistry with my mentor, but she’s really important at my company. How can I get ahead when I don’t have someone pulling for me?”
  
 

• “I’m in manufacturing, but I want to move into marketing. Will I ever get out of the factory?”
  
 

 

Career concerns, incidentally, are not confined to any one country or type of industry. In China, with its nascent market economy and “egalitarian” culture, business people are fiercely curious when they ask: “What does it take to get ahead?” And the same question has come at me in Portugal, France, Denmark, and even Slovakia, where capitalism is less than fifteen years old.

I think the same answer applies everywhere.

Basically, getting promoted takes one do and one don’t.

 

• Do
  deliver sensational performance, far beyond expectations, and at every opportunity expand your job beyond its official boundaries.
  
 

• Don’t
  make your boss use political capital in order to champion you.
  
 

 

These imperatives are not everything, of course. There are four other dos and one other don’t, and we’ll look at them in turn, but first let’s focus on the two big ones.

THE POWER OF POSITIVE SURPRISE

When most people think about delivering sensational performance, they imagine beating agreed-upon performance goals. That’s all well and good.

But an even more effective way to get promoted is to expand your job’s horizons to include bold and unexpected activities. Come up with a new concept or process that doesn’t improve just your results, but your unit’s results and the company’s overall performance. Change your job in a way that makes the people around you work better and your boss look smarter. Don’t just do the predictable.

I learned this lesson for myself my first year at GE, while I was still working in the laboratory, developing a new plastic called PPO. A vice president was coming to town, and my boss asked me to give him an update on our progress. Eager to impress both of them, I stayed late at work for a week, analyzing not only the economics of PPO, but of all the other engineering plastics in the industry. My final report included a five-year outlook, comparing the costs of products made by DuPont, Celanese, and Monsanto, and outlined a clear route to a competitive advantage for GE.

My boss and the VP were surprised, to put it mildly, and their incredibly positive response showed me the impact of giving people more than they expect.

I would see this dynamic again and again over the next forty years.

Take the case of John Krenicki, who made everyone around and above him look better by expanding his job’s horizons.

GE sent John to Europe to manage its $100 million silicones business in 1997. It was by no means a plum assignment, but it gave John a chance to run his own show. The business, while No. 2 globally, was a weak No. 6 in the European market, mainly because its biggest cost—raw materials—had to be sourced from the United States. It just could not compete with the local players.

Back at headquarters, everyone would have been happy if John had grown silicones by 8 to 10 percent a year by pulling the usual levers: on-time delivery to existing customers, finding new ones, and developing new products. But John had bigger ideas. He proposed building a new plant in Europe to produce his key raw material.

The price tag was well over $100 million. We said, “No way.”

But John couldn’t accept that there wasn’t a solution to his cost bind. He tried a long-shot approach. Expanding his job’s horizons, he entered into talks with several of his European competitors in search of a partner who would bring local sourcing and technology expertise to the table in return for GE’s global strength.

After a long year of negotiations, John found what he needed, a silicones joint venture with the German company Bayer, with GE holding a majority stake in the new company.

I recently asked him about this experience.

“It was just persistence, I guess,” he said. “I knew we had to become self-sufficient somehow. If we had just kept doing things as usual, even if we grew the business by a reasonable amount, we would have never broken out.”

Today, the European silicones business is No. 2 in the local market, and with a recent acquisition, its sales are more than $700 million.

As for John, he was promoted in 1998 to CEO of GE Transportation, and in 2003 to CEO of GE’s $8 billion plastics business.

YOUR OWN WORST ENEMY

If exceeding expectations is the most reliable way to get ahead, the most reliable way to sabotage yourself is to be a thorn in your organization’s rear end.

Of course, no one sets out to do that. But it happens, and every time it does, you force your boss to use his political capital in order to defend you.

At this point, probably most people are thinking, “Who me—make my boss use his political capital? Never.”
*

Well, think again.

You can have the greatest results in the world, but if you don’t live your company’s values and behaviors, you run the risk of this happening.

Take the case of an extremely smart and capable employee I’ll call James. We hired James into our business development program at headquarters. This two-year, up-or-out program was designed for MBAs who had been with consulting firms for three or four years and wanted to get off that track and into operations. To test them, we put them in short, intense field assignments, transferring GE’s best practices from business to business. In most cases, one of our businesses would “steal” these MBAs from the program within a year and place them in meaningful operating positions.

James was about thirty-two when we brought him in from a top-tier consulting firm where he had worked since graduating from business school. He was European, articulate, and as I said, very bright, with excellent experience consulting in several industries. We figured at least three GE businesses would be fighting over him within six months.

A year came and went, and no one would touch him. I couldn’t figure out why until I sat in on his first performance review with his boss and the HR team. There I learned that James came into the office at ten or eleven each day and left late, at 8:00 p.m. or so. Those were plenty of hours to put in, and that kind of schedule was fine—for an individual contributor. We had people in R & D who liked to work at night, for instance, and people in sales who came and went according to the needs of their customers in three time zones.
*

James’s hours, however, were not going to make it in a company where line managers generally showed up at 8:00 a.m. or earlier, and every meeting and work routine revolved around that.

But James didn’t seem to care about GE’s routines. He had his own way of doing things.

I saw that dynamic up close when James called my assistant and asked for an appointment. When we got together, after a few minutes of chitchat about his career, the real reason for his visit became clear.

“Would it be OK,” he asked, “if I flew my own plane to my meetings in the field?”

I told him he was nuts. “Do that
only
if you want to piss everyone off,” I said. “Your hours have already gotten you in enough trouble. That kind of showing off is going to kill you around here. It’s not our culture.”

“But I’d pay for the gas!”

“This is not about
gas
!” I said.

Despite James’s disconnect with our values, he did land a job in operations. Because of his brainpower, energy, and background, I put him in charge of a relatively small, troubled business we had acquired in Europe. Two American transplants hadn’t worked out. Putting James there was a classic corporate “stuff job,” in that I stuffed him (despite my misgivings) down the throat of the business.

It didn’t work. GE’s European business culture wasn’t any more amenable to James than its American one, and eventually he had to leave the company.

In the end, there wasn’t a person left with any desire to spend political capital on him.

By contrast, take the story of Kevin Sharer, who started in the same business development program as James.

Before joining GE, Kevin had received a degree in aeronautical engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy, served a four-year stint on nuclear attack submarines, and worked for two years at McKinsey & Company. Without question, he was as smart as James in terms of IQ. He was also industrious and, like James, ambitious, the latter of these traits mitigated by his maturity. Kevin knew that GE valued teamwork; he was the ultimate team player. He showed up early, worked incredibly hard, and never looked for personal credit.

Kevin worked in business development for two years and spent the next three years in operations. By that time, he was so universally respected we made a huge bet on him by offering him a position as one of the company’s one hundred vice presidents, running our marine and industrial turbine business.

Unfortunately, the same day that we tried to promote him, Kevin told us he had decided to leave for a huge opportunity at MCI. We tried desperately to keep him, but he was determined to run his own show. He left MCI a few years later to become COO of Amgen, and in 2000 was appointed its CEO. In the years since Kevin joined Amgen, the company’s market capitalization has grown from $7 billion to $84 billion.

It was obvious from the beginning that Kevin was a star. He had everything going for him, starting with performance. And you can be sure no one ever had to expend a drop of political capital when they mentioned his name. No wonder his career has consisted of one promotion after another.