CHAPTER 9

EXPLORE NEW PATHS TO SUCCESS

GET MANAGEMENT TO NOTICE YOUR WORK

Al Dea is the founder of the consultancy Betterwork Labs, where he helps leaders redesign their workplaces to help employees thrive. (I introduced him briefly in Chapter 3.) But years before starting his consulting practice, he was an analyst at Deloitte.

In Dea’s first year there, he felt like he was doing great, hitting all his quantitative goals and impressing his managers with his work ethic. Then annual performance reviews came around—and he was shocked to receive a lower rating than he’d anticipated.

Dea was bold enough, or maybe just desperate enough, to take one of his managers aside and ask what he might have done wrong. The manager must have seen how distraught Dea looked, because she agreed to teach him how to navigate his career so that his contributions would never go unnoticed again. The lessons he learned from that manager sparked his interest in career development and in teaching other professionals the unwritten rules of success.

The first tough lesson Dea learned: Hard work is not enough. “It’s just the unfortunate world that we live in,” he said. “Being able to proactively manage your career is really, really critical.”

Specifically Dea learned that he needed to be his own “brand manager,” meaning he was in charge of making sure other people saw and cared about his accomplishments. Otherwise, he said, even if “you do really great work, nobody knows about it.”

That’s especially true at large organizations (like Deloitte) where just about everyone is a high performer and individual accomplishments can get lost in the shuffle. Something as simple as emailing your manager at the end of the week, month, or quarter with an itemized list of what you’ve accomplished and how you’ve added value can help.

Similarly, Dea said, you’ll want to know exactly how your performance is being evaluated, so you can tailor your brand management strategy and make sure you’re emphasizing what the higher-ups care about. Is it sales revenue? The number of deals closed? The success of new and creative initiatives? Find out what the goals are and show how you’ve met them.

Dea spent the next year managing his career this way, and he was delighted to receive the top performance rating the next time around, and the time after that. Word spread to his colleagues that Dea’s consulting career was taking off like a rocket ship. People started coming to him for advice, the same way he’d sought counsel from one of his managers years ago.

Understanding what you want from your career enables you to identify and pursue opportunities that will propel you forward.

Talking to these colleagues, Dea quickly realized that most people had no idea how to navigate their careers. It wasn’t that they didn’t care about their professional development—these were highly intelligent, educated, and ambitious people. The problem was that no one had ever told them how to do it. It was an unnecessary source of stress and anxiety for a large chunk of knowledge workers.

Dea realized, too, that if he could deconstruct career management into a series of simple steps, he could help struggling professionals all over the world feel more in control of their professional futures. In 2015, midway through his tenure at Deloitte, Dea founded MBASchooled, a platform geared specifically toward guiding prospective, current, and former business school students toward their career goals.

Dea told me that his mission—with MBASchooled and Betterwork Labs—isn’t just to teach people how to hack the system so that they get the performance reviews, promotions, and raises they deserve. It’s also to give them the tools to figure out what they really want out of their careers.

“If you don’t have a good understanding of what it is you’re actually doing,” he said, “or what you’re learning or how you’re growing, sometimes it can be hard to spot opportunities when they come up.”

It’s the difference between gliding along and taking assignments that come your way and actively seeking out projects and jobs that will help you continue to build your skills and knowledge.

Dea even has a framework to help his clients do just that. He recommends pausing to reflect after every project and asking yourself the following three questions:

1.   What did I do?

2.   What impact or outcomes did it drive?

3.   What’s something new I learned from this experience?

The main purpose of this exercise is to help you keep track of your learning and development. But once you’ve gained some clarity around what you’ve achieved, you can also relay that information to your boss.

Now there’s a term for framing your work in a way that attracts management’s attention: “personal branding.” It’s a term that leaves a lot of people nauseated because it sounds exactly like self-promotion. But if you ask Tom Peters, who popularized the term in a 1997 Fast Company article, it’s really about distinguishing yourself through your unique skills and knowledge.¹

Speaking to Wendy Marx for a 2021 Fast Company article, Peters recommended a few paths to building your personal brand, including reading broadly and growing your professional network as much as possible.² Both strategies will help you pinpoint today’s most pressing business problems and how your work contributes to solving them.

Ultimately, learning to be your own brand manager and understanding how performance is evaluated will help you get recognized for the value you add to your organization, just like it helped Dea get recognized. And while the nature of your job won’t change, you may find that you feel a whole lot better about it.

You can draw a clear parallel between this chapter and the chapter on meaningful work. Just like it helps to know that your work is benefiting clients or customers, it also helps to know that your work is being acknowledged by your managers. In both cases, the point is to avoid feeling like you exist in a cubicle-shaped vacuum where the only person who knows or cares about your work is you. Instead you’ll want to remind yourself that other people depend on you and that you and your work have unique value.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF COMPANY RESOURCES

Sometimes it’s on you to get management to notice your work. But sometimes when you’re dissatisfied with your job, the best and least obvious place to get guidance is your current workplace.

Your organization may offer career development resources that can help you get unstuck—many of which will be free to you as an employee. And some organizations are ramping up these offerings amid the Great Resignation as a way of keeping existing staff engaged (and trying to prevent them from running out the door).

Consider: LinkedIn surveys found that 50 percent of executives said they expect their recruiting budget to decrease in 2021, while 66 percent expect their learning and development budget to stay the same or increase.⁴ In other words, executives are planning to invest in developing their current staff, perhaps even at the expense of finding and bringing on new talent.

Meanwhile, the workforce education technology space is exploding, as companies like Walmart, Starbucks, and Disney link up with startups that help employees earn certificates and degrees in fields like cyber­security and retail management.⁵

Here are just a few examples of career development programs run by some top startups and more established organizations:⁶

•   Professional services firm KPMG runs a business school that teaches employees technical skills, business knowledge, and leadership skills.

•   IBM runs an apprenticeship program that allows individuals with no technical background to earn certificates in high-demand areas such as cybersecurity and engineering.

•   Bank of America partners with Columbia Business School to run the Women’s Executive Development Program, which offers development sessions and leadership coaching.

•   Beauty startup Glossier provides management training and leadership coaching in partnership with ThinkHuman.

•   Fintech startup Brex has a Mentorship Marketplace, which pairs company leaders with employees for six months of professional development.

It’s worth finding out if your employer offers anything like these and whether you’re eligible to participate.

Internal Mobility

Another way to take advantage of company resources and improve your career is through internal mobility programs. “Internal mobility” simply means switching roles or teams within your current organization, and employers across industries are increasingly open to it.

According to LinkedIn data collected in 2020, internal mobility is up some 20 percent since the onset of COVID-19.⁷ That’s likely because employers either were hesitant to bring on new staff during a recession or couldn’t find any new candidates to fill open roles once the job market got hotter. So they looked to existing talent to take on those challenges. (It’s worth noting that internal mobility was becoming more common even before the pandemic. Another LinkedIn survey found that job changes within companies increased 10 percent between 2015 and 2019.⁸)

In my interviews for Insider, I’ve spoken with a number of business leaders about their organization’s internal mobility resources. MasterCard, for example, launched an initiative during the pandemic to match current staff with side projects that would help the company meet its goals and would help employees develop new skills.⁹ Now the company has a program called Unlocked that matches employees with projects and training that align with the employees’ interests.¹⁰

Meanwhile, Unilever uses popular talent management platform Gloat to connect employees seeking new opportunities with hiring managers looking to fill new roles.¹¹ Consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton uses a similar internal system, and as of summer 2021, 98 percent of employees had completed a profile.¹²

This is all to say, if you’re antsy to do something different in your day-to-day work, but aren’t sure whether it’s time for a big career move, the solution could be simpler than you think. Switching to a new role or team is an option that could benefit you and your employer.

Making the move successfully is a matter of showing how your current job skills and responsibilities are solid preparation for the new role. I’ll caution that this process may require more effort and planning than you’d ideally like. For example, you may have to go through additional interviews with your prospective new managers. But it will probably take less effort and planning than moving to a new organization or industry. Not to mention, you may accelerate your career trajectory in the process.

A 2016 LinkedIn study found that professionals who have worked across job functions (for example, marketing and business development) are more likely to become executives than those who have specialized in a single area (for example, just marketing).¹³ But professionals who have changed industries are slightly less likely to reach the executive level.

So if you’re aiming for the C-suite, know that trying something new just might improve your chances, in addition to releasing you from the doldrums of your daily work.

Exploring a variety of roles in different departments can prepare you for a managerial career and perhaps even a C-suite position.

Perhaps that’s why you’ll hear plenty of business leaders and workplace experts talk about the death of the career ladder. That’s the traditional path leading directly from, say, associate to vice president to managing director. Former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has been credited with coining the term “career jungle gym” to describe the nonlinear trajectory that has supposedly supplanted the career ladder.¹⁴

Proponents of the jungle gym strategy argue that the most successful professionals hop from one department to another in search of learning opportunities, even if their next step doesn’t seem like the logical upward move. Libby Leffler, the former Google and Facebook exec we met briefly in Chapter 7, described her career this way in an Insider interview: “I wasn’t only focused on the next level up. I was really always drawn to things that intrigued me, gave me the chance to learn as much as I could, and gave me the opportunity to learn something new, with plenty of room for experimentation.”¹⁵

To be sure, certain organizations and industries are more conducive than others to these kinds of lateral moves. You might have more room to experiment at, say, a tech company than you would at a law firm where you’re trying to make partner. But I want to encourage readers not to discount the possibility of trying something new because they’re afraid of derailing their career (or their earning prospects). At plenty of organizations and in plenty of industries, taking the initiative to do something different is applauded, and can lead to long-term gains in salary and prestige.

Intrapreneurship

Still another option for capitalizing on company resources is to exercise your entrepreneurial muscles within your current organization.

Even if launching a startup is your ultimate career goal, quitting your stable job to build a business from scratch isn’t always possible right now. In the meantime, one path to scratching that itch while mitigating the considerable risk that comes with business ownership is “intrapreneurship.” Intrapreneurs act like entrepreneurs in that they’re building something entirely new, but they’re working within the confines of a more established organization, meaning their employer is footing the bill for the venture.

Some companies have very explicit intrapreneurship (also called “corporate innovation”) programs.¹⁶ At Home Depot, for example, the OrangeWorks innovation lab is designed to evaluate emerging technologies that could change either the customer experience or corporate operations. It’s possible that your employer might have a center for intrapreneurship, too. Or your employer might have plans to build one, in which case it’s better you find out in advance and apply.

Yet even at organizations that don’t have official intrapreneurship programs, there are ways to make your job more intrapreneurial. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at University College London and the chief innovation officer at ManpowerGroup, offers a few potential strategies, such as focusing on selling new ideas and being more proactive instead of waiting for colleagues and managers to suggest projects.¹⁷

Many intrapreneurs have gone on to launch their own companies, having grown their skills and tested their ideas in a relatively low-risk context.¹⁸ Intrapreneurship can help make your current job more exciting, too. Research suggests that employees who engage in certain types of intrapreneurial behavior—specifically creating new businesses for the organization and helping the organization keep up with industry evolutions—are more engaged at work compared with those who don’t.¹⁹

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU HATE YOUR BOSS

For many people, the main obstacle to taking advantage of company resources and thriving professionally is their boss. In fact, bad managers have gotten meaningfully worse during the pandemic and the resultant shift to remote and hybrid work.

HR software platform Humu assessed managers’ capabilities and found that while those who ranked highest continued to do great work throughout the pandemic, managers who ranked lowest got worse—specifically at communicating, listening, and soliciting feedback.²⁰ Some managers weren’t even aware of just how inept they were. In a 2020 report from management software provider 15Five, 84 percent of leaders reported feeling that they were successfully supporting employees during the pandemic, compared with 69 percent of employees who said the same.²¹

A manager who’s inept, or who’s hard to get along with, can darken your entire work experience. I spoke with someone in that very position—we’ll call her Barbara—who’s considering leaving her job because her bosses don’t seem to acknowledge her value.

Barbara, who requested that I use a pseudonym to avoid jeopardizing her position at work, works at a small sales firm in the New York City area. She generally likes her colleagues, enjoys her work, and knows she’s good at it, based on her own perception as well as sales numbers. She brings decades of industry experience. But her bosses rarely recognize her efforts or results; she hears from them much more often when they think she’s done something wrong.

Barbara told me how much this disregard for her talents and contributions bothers her, enough to make her think about looking for a new role on a daily basis. “The more time I spend in that type of environment, the harder it is to maintain a good opinion of myself,” she said. “Your own opinion gets worn down.”

She also told me that she wishes she could be like some of her colleagues, who let their bosses’ slights roll off their back instead of taking it personally. “I need to have a thicker skin,” she said.

The problem is, that’s not her personality. Barbara is highly sensitive to what other people are thinking and feeling—it’s part of what makes her so good at her sales job. So in a way Barbara feels doubly burdened. There’s her unfavorable relationship with her bosses, and there’s the constant tension between how much it bothers her and how much she thinks it should bother her.

How to Handle a Horrible Boss

The most effective strategies for dealing with a horrible boss today aren’t so different from prepandemic tactics. They’re just more salient now that there are so many horrible bosses out there, many of them lacking in self-awareness. Here are a few ideas.

Seek Camaraderie

Humu found that people with bad bosses who also felt validation and support from their colleagues were less likely to quit than people with bad bosses who didn’t have this support network.²² At least they knew that their boss wasn’t targeting them specifically and that they weren’t the problem.

So don’t hesitate to talk to teammates about their experiences with your boss—and even ask for their advice on dealing with tirades, or micromanagement, or flakiness. Just be sure not to fall into the trap we covered in Chapter 6, in which commiserating about work ends up making you feel worse.

Learn to Predict Your Boss’s Behavior

Start paying close attention to your boss’s mood and behavior—you’ll quickly notice some patterns. And being able to predict when your boss will have a meltdown, or when your boss will give the green light on seemingly any request, can help you better prepare for and weather the inevitable storms.

“A lot of mistakes come from expecting people to change,” Chamorro-Premuzic said. It’s highly unlikely that your boss will wake up one day, realize the error of their ways, and start acting more benevolently or rationally. So stop hoping your boss will.

Instead you’ll want to get a better handle on your boss’s triggers. For example, does your boss seem especially irritable around the time a big project is due? Or peeved when you give a wordy presentation? Or maybe you’ve noticed that turning in a report late really sets your boss off. In that case, your boss probably cares about brevity and punctuality. These things might seem trivial, but being aware of them can help you avoid unnecessary conflict and grief.

Once you can anticipate your boss’s irritable behavior, Chamorro-Premuzic said, “you are in a much better position to avoid it.”

Minimize Interactions with Your Manager

As for Barbara, the most practical path to happiness seems to be redesigning her workday so that she interacts with her bosses as infrequently as possible.

In the meantime, she can also incorporate other coping strategies, like trying to emulate her coworkers who seem not to let their bosses’ behavior bother them. It’s not her natural inclination, but it’s certainly one she can strengthen.

She can also start exploring other job options—a path Barbara has thus far resisted because she worries that “the devil that you know is better than the devil that you don’t.” (What if, she wonders, she ends up earning less money or having more conflict in her next role?)

But Barbara told me she feels most engaged when she’s out in the field trying to close deals as opposed to sitting in the office with her bosses breathing down her neck.

“I feel more like myself,” Barbara told me. “I feel good about myself.” Barbara went on: “It hits on all the things that I enjoy. I’m a good talker, I’m fun, I’m a lively person.” These qualities shine through when Barbara is on her own, so it makes sense that she should try to spend more time in that setting.

For Barbara, it won’t be terribly difficult to interact less with her bosses, since her sales job doesn’t require that she or her bosses sit in the office all day every day. But for those with more traditional desk jobs, it might be more practical to add some positive interactions with other colleagues, to balance out those distressing feelings with something lighter. (This is a form of relational job crafting, which we learned about in Chapter 7.)

Even seemingly trivial tweaks—lunching with some colleagues whose company you enjoy or scheduling a 15-minute coffee chat with a colleague whose work you admire—can meaningfully elevate your mood and feelings of self-worth.

To be sure, avoiding your bosses whenever possible is more like a Band-Aid than a solution to the root problem of managerial negligence. But if we’re talking about what’s within Barbara’s control or yours, a Band-Aid may very well be the best bet.

REMEMBER THIS

•   Sometimes hard work isn’t enough. You’ll also need to make sure your managers know about your achievements and the value you’re adding to the business.

•   Look into career development opportunities at your current organization, whether that means switching teams or participating in (free or subsidized) leadership coaching.

•   Lots of people hate their boss. But if you can learn to predict your boss’s behavior, you’ll be in a better position to handle—and eventually avoid—your boss’s blowups.

TRY THIS

DISSECT A RECENT ACHIEVEMENT

Dea shared with us three questions that you should ask yourself after completing a project. Here they are again:

1.   What did I do?

2.   What impact or outcomes did it drive?

3.  What’s something new I learned from this experience?

Think about the last project you completed at your current job. Maybe it was a report summarizing new data; maybe it was a pitch presentation with a bunch of company executives. With this project in mind, write down your answers to Dea’s three questions.

Email those responses to yourself (or take a photo of the page where you wrote them by hand). They may help guide the next career development conversation you have with your manager.