Winning (25 page)

Jimmy was a senior executive at Sandler O’Neill & Partners, the investment banking firm that was located on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower. On September 11, sixty-eight of the staff’s 177 employees were killed, including the company’s founder, Herman Sandler, and its lead partner, Chris Quackenbush. Overnight, Jimmy became the CEO of a company that was literally and emotionally decimated.

Jimmy was, of course, grief-stricken by the firm’s incalculable human tragedy, and distraught over the deaths of two of his closest friends, Herman and Chris. But today he will tell you that he knew one thing would prevent the firm from shutting down and the disaster worsening—a can-do attitude.
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“All I did after 9/11 was walk around, consoling people, talking about how we were going to survive and rebuild,” he said recently.

As he hired to replace Sandler O’Neill’s lost employees, Jimmy looked for people who were upbeat, positive, and as undaunted as humanly possible by 9/11. Skill mattered a lot; outlook mattered more.

“Success,” Jimmy says, “is so much about attitude.”

A positive attitude does not always come easy—and in cases like Jimmy Dunne’s after 9/11, it comes unimaginably hard.

If it’s natural for you, fantastic. If it isn’t, fight to find it and wear it all over yourself.

You can win without being upbeat—if every other star is aligned—but why would you want to try?

ONE LAST DON’T

The final don’t concerns setbacks.

Once or twice or more times than that, you will not get promoted. Don’t let it break your stride.

Of course, you will feel terrible, maybe even bitter and angry. But work like hell to let those feelings go.

First, and by all means, do not turn your career setback into the office cause célèbre. What a way to alienate everyone—your boss, coworkers, and subordinates. If you want to complain about your career, do it at home, at a bar across town, or wherever you go to worship. The people at work, while they know a lot about your case, should not be drawn into your emotional experience.

More important, even if you are thinking of leaving your company, try to accept your setback with as much grace as you can muster, and even see it as a challenge to prove yourself anew. Such an approach will serve you well whether you stay or go.

No one makes this point better than Mark Little.

Mark was the quiet, self-confident, and well-liked engineering vice president of GE’s Power Systems when, in 1995, the business ran into serious quality problems. As Mark puts it, “I had just gotten the job, and, basically, turbine blades were cracking all over the world. It was a mess.”

Mark worked hard to get the business back on track, but when Bob Nardelli was promoted to run the entire Power Systems group, he decided Mark had neither the sense of urgency nor the engineering expertise for the job. He split the business and gave Mark engineering responsibility for just steam turbines, the much smaller and less important piece. Suddenly, Mark was in charge of one-third as many people and a product considered to be old, dull, and slow-growth.

“It felt like the end of the world,” Mark said to me recently. “I thought it was unfair, and I was mad as hell. I felt like I hadn’t created the problem, and I had done everything I could to fix it. Then I was punched in the stomach. I was angry and hurt, and I had to believe it was the end of my GE career.”

But Mark did an amazing thing. He stuck his chin out and got back to work.

“I just figured I was going to prove everyone wrong,” he said. “I wanted to show the whole world what we could do.”

Over the next couple of years, Mark energized his team to revitalize the steam turbine product line. He introduced new technologies and put in process disciplines, driving costs down to new levels.

“I made up my mind that I was not going to show my people that I was mad and hurt. I was going to go in there every day and do what was best for me and my people and for GE. And that was to refocus the business.”

In 1997, Mark’s results were so terrific and his self-confidence was so restored that when the much-larger position of product manager for all turbines came open, he approached Bob Nardelli and asked for the job.

The answer was yes.

“I’d say the main reason I got the promotion was because I surprised everybody with my results, my attitude, and my perseverance. I just never gave up.”

Today, Mark is the product manager not only for the turbine business, but for GE’s hydro and wind businesses as well, a $14 billion enterprise.

To get ahead, you have to
want
to get ahead.

Some promotions come because of luck, but very few. The facts are, when it comes to careers, you mainly make your own luck. You will likely change companies, maybe even professions, more than a few times over the course of your working life. But there are some things you can do to keep moving ahead. Exceed expectations, broaden your job’s horizons, and never give your boss a reason to have to spend capital for you. Manage your subordinates carefully, sign up for radar-screen assignments, collect mentors, and spread your positive attitude. When setbacks come, and they will, ride them out with your head up.

That may sound like a lot of stuff to do, but there are no real shortcuts.

Along the journey, you won’t get every promotion you want when you want it. But if you take the “long way,” eventually—and sometimes sooner than you expect—you’ll reach your destination.

I
’
VE NEVER KNOWN A PERSON
who didn’t light up at the memory of a truly great boss. And for good reason: great bosses can be friends, teachers, coaches, allies, and sources of inspiration all in one. They can shape and advance your career in ways you never expected—and sometimes they can even change your life.

In stark contrast, a bad boss can just about kill you.

Not literally of course, but a bad boss can kill that part of your soul where positive energy, commitment, and hope come from. On a daily basis, a bad boss can leave you feeling angry, hurt, and bitter—even physically ill.

If you’re like most people, over the course of a forty-something-year career, you will have a handful of great bosses, many more that are pretty good, and one or two total jerks—people who are so consistently awful they make you want to throw it in and quit.

Bad bosses come in every variety. Some grab all the credit, some are incompetent, some kiss up but kick down; others bully and humiliate, have mood swings, withhold praise and money, break promises, or play favorites.
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Occasionally, there are bad bosses who display several of these characteristics all at once.

How do these people ever get ahead?

Well, sometimes they happen to be very talented. They deliver the numbers or they’re extremely creative. They can have shrewd political alliances or maybe even a family member in high places.

Bad bosses, incidentally, tend to have longer lives in some industries rather than others. On the creative side, very talented writers, artists, and producers who get promoted to run projects are often given a pass on bad behavior because they are “geniuses.” Wall Street is also often a safe harbor for bad bosses. Top moneymakers are often thought of as irreplaceable, and they know it, making some of them even more insufferable.

But never mind industry specifics. The world has jerks. Some of them get to be bosses.

This chapter is about what to do when one of them gets to be
your
boss.

Now, this chapter won’t provide any hard-and-fast answers because each bad boss situation is unique. But it will walk you through a series of questions that hopefully will surface the right approach to your bad boss situation, “right” in the sense that it fits your goals in life and at work.

Before we look at those questions, though, let me state the overriding principle behind this chapter.

In any bad boss situation, you cannot let yourself be a victim. That theme has come up before in this book—most recently in the chapter on mergers and acquisitions—and, for many of the same reasons, it applies here too.
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I realize that a bad boss (like a merger) may make you want to bitch and moan to your coworkers, whine to your family, punch a wall, or watch too much TV with a drink in your hand. He may make you want to surf the Web or call headhunters, looking for jobs anywhere but where you are.

All in all, he may end up making you want to feel very sorry for yourself.

Don’t!

In any business situation, seeing yourself as a victim is completely self-defeating. And when it comes to your career, it’s an attitude that kills all your options—it can even be the start of a career death spiral. I have a friend, a financial analyst at a Wall Street firm, who bounced from one crummy job to another after he had a falling out with his bad boss and quit in a huff. Out in the market, with no recommendations, all he had was an “I was screwed” story of woe to tell prospective employers. Ultimately, five years later, he ended up with the same job he had started from, only at a less-respected firm and at about 60 percent of the pay.

Obviously, you shouldn’t always stay with a bad boss. Sometimes you need to get out. Regardless of your decision, avoid the pervasive victim mentality. You know what I mean. We live in a culture where parents sue fast-food restaurants for making their kids fat and cities spend millions of dollars a year to settle claims for injuries caused by uneven sidewalks and potholes.

Please!

Like every other unfortunate or unfair event that befalls you in life, working for a difficult boss is your problem and you must solve it.

To do that, ask yourself the following series of questions. The answers will help you navigate what is undeniably a painful situation. Painful—but yours to accept, fix, or end.
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The first question is:

Why is my boss acting like a jerk?
Sometimes the answer to this question is a no-brainer. Your boss is acting like a jerk because that’s the way he is. He may be fine with customers and fairly reasonable with his own bosses and peers, but he treats everyone below him with the same kind of bad behavior—be it in the form of intimidation, belligerence, arrogance, neglect, secrecy, or sarcasm.

It is an entirely different situation if your boss is just impossible toward you.

In that case, you need to start asking yourself what you have done to draw his disapproval. That’s right—you need to ask yourself if you are the cause of your boss’s behavior. Generally speaking, bosses are not awful to people whom they like, respect, and need. If your boss is being negative to you—and mainly you—you can feel pretty confident that he has his version of events, and his version concerns
your
attitude or performance.

You’ve got to find out what’s going on.

Start by asking yourself that question, but know that self-assessment is difficult, to put it mildly. Even with a huge amount of maturity and a cast-iron stomach, it is hard to see yourself as others do.

I know of an HR executive at a training center in the South who spent ten years administering 360-degree feedback programs and then delivering the conclusions to the individual being evaluated. “Seven out of ten people are completely stunned by what they hear,” she said. “When they get their feedback, they think I’ve mixed up the forms. They are convinced their colleagues must be talking about somebody else.”

The problem, the HR executive said, is that people generally overrate their performance on the job and their popularity with the team—most often by a factor of two or more.

Know that, then, as you conduct what is an admittedly difficult “mirror test.” Think hard about your performance, and press yourself for the ways you may have fallen short. Think about why your colleagues might not consider you a team player. In a state of forced self-loathing, gauge your personal productivity, your face time in the office, your contribution to sales and earnings. Maybe you open a lot of deals but never close them. Maybe you close a lot of deals but boast too much. Maybe people weren’t really “OK with it” when you blew a big account a few months back.

Finally, face into your attitude toward authority, because it just might be that the source of your problem with your boss is that you are, at your core, a boss hater.

Boss haters are a real breed. It doesn’t make any difference who these people work for, they go into any authority relationship with barely repressed cynicism. Who knows why—upbringing, experiences at work or home, political bent. It doesn’t really matter. Boss haters usually exude constant low-level negativity toward “the system,” and when they do, their bosses feel it, and they return the favor.

I’ll never forget a group of boss haters we had at GE headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut—a half-dozen or so guys who ate lunch together in the cafeteria every day. They labeled themselves “The Table of Lost Dreams.” Each of these employees was very talented. One had a real knack for turning just the right phrase. He had a background in journalism and worked in PR. Fortunately, the media found his cynicism appealing. Another was a labor-relations specialist who had a real affinity for the unions. His natural sympathies made him enormously effective in frontline negotiations.

All of the guys at the Table of Lost Dreams were very good at their jobs, and none of them managed anyone, so their defiance of conditions at the company was pretty much left alone. I wrote them off as harmless but effective curmudgeons who would have hated any work situation.

But tolerance is not usually what happens in these cases. Most of the time, leaders get sick of the undercurrent of whining and the energy-sapping effects of boss haters and manage them out—by showing them just what a bad boss really looks like.

Maybe this all sounds very unfamiliar to you—you’re basically comfortable with authority, and the rest of your self-examination has you coming up empty-handed too. Now what?

It’s time to find out what your boss is thinking.

Any kind of confrontation, however, is incredibly risky. Your boss may be waiting for just such a moment to dump you. In fact, he may have been hoping his negative vibes would eventually inch you into his office with the question, “So what am I doing wrong?” so that he can answer, “Too much for this to go on any longer.”

Still, you have to talk. There is no way around it. Just remember, before you go into that meeting, be prepared and have options in the event that you come out of it unemployed.

Then, go do it. Don’t be defensive. Remember, your goal is to uncover something your boss has not been able to explicitly tell you for whatever reason. Maybe he’s conflict averse or he’s just been too busy. Regardless, your objective is to extract from him the problem he has with your attitude or performance.

If you’re lucky, your boss will come clean about your shortcomings, and together, you can work on a plan to correct them and get your performance or attitude back on track. Ideally, as you give it your all to improve, his attitude toward you will as well.

Ironically, you are less lucky if you find out that your bad boss is satisfied with your performance. If that’s the case, he is being awful simply because he doesn’t particularly like you.

Which puts you in the same position as the people who work for bad bosses who act the same way…just because that’s the way they are.

For all of you, the next question is:

What’s the endgame for my boss?
Sometimes it’s obvious that a bad boss is on the way out. His own bosses have signaled as much to the organization; or he himself makes it clear he can’t wait to move on. In either case, survival is just a waiting game. Deliver strong results and have a can-do approach until relief arrives.

You are in a different boat if your bad boss is not going anywhere anytime soon.

More than a decade ago, I drew the chart below to categorize types of leaders, and to help me talk about who should stay and who should leave.

The chart split leaders according to their results—good or bad—and how well they lived GE’s values, such as candor, voice, dignity, and boundarylessness.

Type 1 bosses, in the top left corner, are the people you want to reward and promote and hold up as examples to the rest of the company. Type 2 bosses, in the upper right corner, have to go, the sooner the better, and usually do.

Type 3 bosses, in the bottom left corner, really believe in the company’s values and practice them in earnest, but just can’t get the results. Those individuals should be coached and mentored, and given another chance or two in other parts of the company.

Most bad bosses are in the lower right corner—Type 4—and they are the most difficult to deal with. They often get to hang around for a long time, despite their awful behavior, because of their good results.

Most good companies usually know about these people and eventually move them out.

But every company, even the good ones, keeps some managers in this quadrant for longer than they should. It’s such a dilemma for bosses at every level. They hear the grumbling down below, but they see the great numbers right in front of them.

Which leads to a kind of organizational inertia.

Take the case of a man I know of whom I’ll call Lee, who ran a thirty-person division of an international communications company. Formerly a successful writer himself, Lee created a competitive, almost frantic, environment in the office, with the staff churning out more copy than divisions twice the size. At the same time, he held the team to extremely high standards of creativity, a major plus in the eyes of headquarters.

But Lee had a mean streak a mile wide. His humor could be cruel, and he particularly let loose on young, inexperienced employees. He also reveled in his intensely adversarial relationship with the division’s unionized employees, which poisoned the atmosphere for everyone.

Lee held his staff in a kind of terrorized thrall. Many people liked the prestige of working in his high-performing division, but they hated his day-to-day nastiness. Top performers often stayed for only a year or less, but Lee was protected by the industry’s laws of supply and demand. There was always another young, ambitious writer or artist ready to sign up.

And so, despite the constant turnover, the organization’s top management let Lee stay and stay—until he suffered a heart attack. After he was gone, one of his former employees said, “It took an act of God to get rid of him.”

Usually, a bad boss with great numbers doesn’t have to die for senior management to replace him, but it can take a cataclysmic event to provoke action.

Take “Karen,” a senior-level boss at a money management firm. Karen managed fifteen fund managers and their teams—about two hundred people combined. The company was known for its ruthless, hard-driving culture, and Karen epitomized it. She worked eighteen-hour days. She publicly denounced fund managers who underperformed, occasionally reducing people to tears in meetings, and routinely belittled the support staff, snidely referring to them as “the Danielle Steel fan club,” since many were middle-aged women who read popular novels during their lunch breaks. When Karen’s bosses were around, however, her persona became thoughtful and caring, earning her the nickname of Sybil, after a woman with multiple personality disorder who was the subject of a best-selling book.