Category: Professional Survival Tips

Categories
Professional Survival Tips Tales from the Workplace

How to Be Someone People Want to Talk To

At a company I worked for, I was part of a team that was physically split up around the country. So, while we worked together and completed tasks as a team, it didn’t have the same kind of camaraderie that can only be fostered in a shared physical space. (On the other hand, it didn’t have the special kind of animosity and passive-aggressive resentment that can also be pressure-cooked into existence by a shared physical space, but that’s for another post.) To help bond the team, my manager arranged travel to get us in one place and have dinner. We met, and it was pleasant, but before entrees were served, my manager asked us all to share something about our lives that none of our teammates knew yet. After listening to everyone’s stories and telling my own, I understood why the maxim “be interesting and be interested” makes its way into so many motivational speeches.

Be Interesting

Being interesting does not come naturally to most people. In the age of the internet in every home and every pocket, it’s getting harder to share an experience that truly piques the curiosity of listeners. As such, being interesting takes practice – not unlike stand-up comedy. You have to test your material on different audiences, gauge responses, adjust, refine, and hone until you kill every time.

There are very few people who can kill on-the-spot with unrehearsed material. This is why Billy Crystal hosted the Academy Awards for so many years – it’s supremely difficult to be bullet proof in front of a live audience so consistently. For the rest of us, we need to prepare a few killer anecdotes just in case we’re forced to share in either a group or one-on-one setting. Those anecdotes should be tailored to the audience, factoring in size, relationships, age, and general tastes.

For my part, I’ve got a killer story that takes roughly 20 minutes to tell depending on how much crowd control I have to do, like answering questions, quelling heckles, and parking listener’s stories that they’re reminded to tell by my story. I’ll usually ask to go last because people tend to get intimidated after hearing my epic tale or they just want to explore more of the context of my story, which derails the purpose of the ice breaker. With that said, I always try to deliver it as if it’s the first time, and I think my enthusiasm really helps to augment the experience.

What makes for an interesting story? Really, any topic can be interesting as long it can be tied to a broader observation of the human condition and the storyteller is invested in the telling. Of course, I recommend choosing stories that are readily relatable instead of topics around something like Applied Physics. On the other hand, you never know if you’re going to be speaking to a group of engineers at a bar. So, boning up on Applied Physics might be clutch. Whatever your stories are, just make sure that they have meaning for both you and the listener. They may forget the details of your story, but they’ll remember how your story made them feel. And that makes you interesting.

Finally, it’s important to practice telling stories well, because when you tell a story poorly, that signals to the listener that you haven’t taken the time to ruminate over the event and distill it down to the important parts, which people normally do when events or topics mean something to them. And if it doesn’t mean something to you, then it will mean less to the listener.

Be Interested

With so many poor storytellers around, it can be more difficult to be interested than it is to be interesting. As a good listener to a bad storyteller, it is exhausting to practice active listening, nodding, uh huh-ing, and trying to help the speaker find the momentum and arc of their story. But, if you want people to talk to you, then these listening skills are the price of admission.

People in customer-facing positions will tell you that one of their coping mechanisms is to find something about the customer that they can like. I’ve heard that some sex workers also employ this tactic. If you can’t like the customer even a little bit, then the job is going to become intolerable very quickly. I think about that when I listen to a poorly told story. Even if the story is unrelatable, meaningless, or seemingly pointless, I try to find that one nugget of value to hang on to so that I can be interested.

Workplace Application

Soft skills are the lubrication between employees that make working with each other easier and more effective. By that, I mean that your work life will be more enjoyable if people like working with you, especially your managers and associates in other departments with whom you may not interface much. Being an effective communicator and a trusted listener are indispensable skills that make you valuable to your coworkers. People will involve you in interoffice politics, managers will be more likely to mentor you, and you’ll just have an easier time slipping into positions that can benefit you.

I know I’ve benefitted.

Categories
Professional Survival Tips Tales from the Workplace

How to Survive an Impending Layoff

Unless you are extremely lucky, have only worked for yourself, or have always been part of the family that owns the business you work for, you will probably be laid off at least once in your life. If your company is at least halfway decent, then you’ll receive an appropriate amount of notice so that you can prepare for the separation. Even better companies will have some kind of severance package relative to your title and time with the company to help with your transition. By and large, if you are personally targeted for a layoff, then there is very little you can do to avoid it.

I wish this article could be one of the many “lifehack” pieces floating around the internet that really could save you from a layoff if only you used this “one weird trick”. Unfortunately, layoffs are usually rooted in cold, hard metrics. Financial projections weren’t met, and the company needs to free up operating expenses. Sometimes that means trimming away the high earners. Other times that means slimming down teams across the board. It could also mean cutting whole departments and business units that aren’t profitable. In these cases, there’s very little an employee can do once deadlines to meet goals have passed.

And yet, people do survive cuts. Not only are some employees dodging the layoff, but some that were scheduled for layoffs have been saved. What are they doing differently than those that are being let go?

Go Beyond Your Job Duties

Working more is probably the most straightforward but also most onerous layoff-prevention technique. When we negotiate salaries before accepting a position, we expect the salary to match the tasks expected of us. So, to go beyond those required tasks makes the salary unfair, and there’s no one to complain to, because we voluntarily took on more work as layoff-prevention. This is why I have no qualms about asking for a high salary and letting the hiring manager negotiate me down, but I digress.

Being a highly visible and recognized contributor is a great argument for keeping you when others around you are low achievers. A coworker of mine shared her experience of surviving a deep cut in her department where everyone but her was let go. When she asked her manager what saved her, he told her that it was because she was always volunteering for assignments, looking for ways to contribute. Yes, doing this will probably paint you as “the employee who doesn’t say no” and may actually slow your career growth since you’ll become indispensable in your current role, but you’ll have to weigh that possible outcome against a layoff. Like many situations in life, there is a balance you have to find for yourself.

Ask Someone Who Can Save You to Save You

The success rate of asking to be saved is probably very low, especially since the numbers have been crunched and your position has been determined to be expendable. However, if the decision comes down to either letting you go or your equally-at-risk coworker, then it doesn’t hurt to pull your manager aside and make your case. I actually don’t have any faith in this tactic working, but I just wanted to share an incredible story I was told and needed a preamble.

A company I had just joined had recently gone through a relatively large reduction in force – something like 20%. One of the employees affected was the general maintenance guy. One day, before the layoffs took place, he noticed the CEO waiting outside the lobby and asked him if he needed a ride somewhere. The CEO accepted the offer. While driving to their destination, the two men made small talk, and the CEO asked the maintenance guy how he liked working at the company. The maintenance guy confessed that he was part of the layoff, and he worried about how he’d provide for his family without this income. Later that week, the maintenance guy was no longer scheduled for separation.

That is an amazing story, am I right? Of course, I am. Just don’t count on this working for you.

Become a Political Animal

Of all the tactics that I have seen insulate people from layoffs, political machinations are the most despicable. I believe this because politics has nothing to do with an employee’s value to the company as a worker, but instead as someone who has personal value to a small group of decision makers. All companies suffer from intra-office politics to some degree, but one company I worked for was blatant about it. Year after year, the same incompetent people kept ducking the reaper’s scythe while the nose-to-the-grindstone types kept getting cut. One employee who was directly responsible for a $300,000 loss because he didn’t manage a promotional giveaway correctly not only dodged a layoff but dodged any kind of negative repercussion because he knew all the right people.

I further despise political employees because they often supplement poor performance with their connections and relationships, allowing them to do less actual work. This can only lead to resentment growing within the ranks and a distrust for management for tolerating. There’s a reason why many employee guidelines frown upon (if not forbid) fraternization between managers and direct reports.

To wrap all of this up, I don’t think there’s any sure-fire way to prevent a layoff from affecting you. Even becoming a political player doesn’t always save you, especially when you’re out-maneuvered by a coworker. All you can do is demonstrate your value every day and hope that’s enough.

Categories
Professional Survival Tips Tales from the Workplace

5 Reasons Content Writers Need an Editorial Calendar

As an all-around creative person, I was never a big planner when it came to writing. Copywriting for my day jobs was always assignment-based, so I usually didn’t have much time for research. I just learned to turn around compelling copy in a short amount of time. When it came to personal blogging, I only wrote when I felt like it. Granted, when I was younger and people on the internet usually kept their disagreements contained in that realm, I felt like writing often – even if it meant sharing unpopular opinions. These days, writers need to consider a lot of variables that could end up hurting them in the future. And it’s that kind of calculus that kills inspiration, which is one of the many reasons why an editorial calendar is a necessity.

1. You Will Always Know What to Write About with an Editorial Calendar

For me, this is the most important function of an editorial calendar. Marketers need to constantly create valuable content to fight for mindshare and eyeballs. So much time is spent thinking up and researching appropriate and relevant topics that it doesn’t make sense to restart that process every week. Even something as small as a tweet can be paralyzing if you’re trying to craft something impactful on the spot. Instead, building an editorial calendar for the year (or whatever cycle works for you) helps you create these topics while you’re in the mindset of topic research and creation. I think of it like meal prep days for the health-minded. Yes, you could prep your meals every day, but doing all of the preparation on one day reduces all of the repetitive actions, like washing and portioning, to one day instead of multiplying them by five days. Creating the topics ahead of time and aligning them with events throughout the year will ensure that your content is relevant when you need it to be.

2. Editorial Calendars Give You a Complete View of Your Content

As a content creator, it’s easy to lose yourself in the individual pieces your creating without realizing the pattern you’re creating for your audience. For instance, if your company or brand is multifaceted, but you’re mostly focusing on only one aspect, then you’re only being partially effective. It’s in our nature to write what we know best, and we may neglect other topics without realizing it. Even if we have an equally strong grasp across all the relevant topics, it’s still important to know that we’re covering them with the proper amount of marketing at the appropriate times. Some lines of business are responsible for only a small percentage of revenue; you should devote a similar amount of marketing to them.

3. Stay on Schedule with an Editorial Calendar

Knowing when to write content is just as important as knowing what to write. An editorial calendar allows you to align with your company, customers, and industry. The calendar I created has different columns for internal events, external events, promotions, official holidays, and unofficial recognized days. For social media managers looking to raise brand awareness without burning out their audiences on self-promotion, aligning social posts with current trends is a good solution. An editorial calendar will help you identify those topics ahead of time.

4. Keep Stakeholders Informed on Marketing Activities with an Editorial Calendar

Every department in a company serves a specific and distinct purpose. As such, there is always a danger that departments will silo themselves off from other departments, eliminating the possibility for synergy. A socialized editorial calendar can address these visibility issues for marketing. When Sales knows what Marketing is promoting, then Sales can complement that promotion with their call-down efforts. Likewise, Sales can provide input on the editorial calendar by suggesting lines of business to promote based on lead and opportunity performance. Finally, the editorial calendar is proof of performance for leadership whenever they wonder just what the heck Marketing is doing spending their days on social media.

5. Stay Motivated to Create with an Editorial Calendar

This point is more philosophical than practical, but motivation is a large part of content creation. Most likely, the products and services of your company don’t change very quickly. Or, at the very least, they don’t change fast enough to match your personal desire for fresh topics. That’s when you need to start managing burn out, because it will show in the content you produce. But, while the subjects of your marketing may not change quickly, the way you market them can. Preparing those angles of attack early on can give you something to look forward to when you’re stuck in an off-season that doesn’t inspire you.

BONUS: Keep Historical Marketing Records with an Editorial Calendar

It’s not enough to just perform marketing; you must also measure marketing. What campaigns were effective last year? Should you try them again? You don’t want to recall previous years’ marketing activities from memory. On top of that, what about turnover? What happens when someone with a piece of the tribal knowledge separates from the company? Is that information just gone for good? No, keep as much marketing knowledge as possible saved in central location to minimize these knowledge gaps. An editorial calendar is good start.

Are you using an editorial calendar? If so, then how so? Is it for your personal or professional writing? Let me know in the comments below!

Categories
Professional Survival Tips Tales from the Workplace

The Here-to-Work Mindset

For most people, the natural reaction to a day job is revulsion. It’s something that must be done as upkeep, like doing laundry, but is otherwise a meaningless use of time. That was my mindset for too much of my professional career. To be fair, a lot of the jobs I worked were not what I wanted to do in life. Can you blame college students working retail when their minds drift during their shifts? No one goes to college expecting to make retail their career – at least not as anything less than management. For entry-level jobs like this that are designed to give new workers experience in the workforce, I can appreciate the clock-watcher mentality. Just do your time, clock out, and then go do what you really want to do. The danger is when that mentality carries over into your career.

Job Expectations are Nebulous

In a perfect world, job descriptions would encapsulate everything an employee is responsible for and nothing else. The nature of work, however, is fluid. Problems arise, requirements change, locations fall through, personnel turn over, and any other variable can conflict with assigned tasks. In those circumstances, an employee can either fall back on the constraints of their job description or stretch to meet goals.

I think we’ve all worked with the kind of people who only do the bare minimum on the job. They show up to work, do just enough to keep their jobs, and go home. When there’s a crisis, they’re slow to help if at all, and they’ll complain about “extra” work so much that it’s sometimes easier to leave them out of the crisis management altogether. They’re just going to depress and annoy others, and too much time will be wasted combating their negativity. I’m ashamed to admit that I was that employee for too far into my professional career.

While working at Newegg, that mindset was completely turned around by a colleague of mine who was the Creative Director at the time. A problem had arisen that would require extra work for him and his team. I grumbled in sympathy, but the Creative Director simply said, “No problem. I’m here to work. What do you need?” In that moment, my outlook on work completely changed. I was supposedly there to work as well, but I found myself resisting work, minimizing work, and escaping work. The work was still there to be done; I just made sure it wasn’t me doing it.

But after hearing the Creative Director’s words, I realized that work is fluid, and it ebbs and flows. Rather than fight it, I should swim in it and learn its tide patterns. There are only so many hours in the day, and the work being demanded of me wasn’t going to take over my life. In fact, I discovered that I enjoy my job the most when there’s a lot of work to be done. Don’t be afraid of work; embrace it. Be here to work.

The One-way Ratchet

There are limits to the here-to-work mindset. While the nature of work is fluid, the nature of companies is to wring more productivity out of employees without more compensation – or at least not commensurate compensation. And sometimes accepting more work or providing more value only results in setting a new minimum expectation of performance. In those cases, resistance to work makes sense.

As a product content writer as one of my professions once upon a time, my manager’s manager asked me to give her a demonstration of how I write the product content. Thinking that she just wanted a high-level view of what I do for visibility purposes, I gave her a cursory example, rushing through the process, and glossing over some steps. Honestly, who wants to watch someone research and write about products in real-time? Unfortunately, I would later find out that she was actually timing me, and my demonstration was going to be the baseline for my expected productivity.

When I think about that moment, it always reminds me of this scene from Schindler’s List:

When you’re in that kind of environment, resistance to work and productivity is to be expected. But it should be used as a tactical maneuver, not as a default behavior. It should also go without saying that if tactical work resistance is necessary, then it’s time to look for a new job. If your current company doesn’t reward being-here-to-work, then they’ll miss you when you’re somewhere-else-to-work.

Categories
Professional Survival Tips Tales from the Workplace

The “Right” Work Experience

I learned far too late in life that not all work experience is equal. It isn’t enough to simply come to work, do work, then go home and call it a job well done. That may be fine at wherever you work now, but your career is not a contained element within your current job. When you leave (or are separated against your will), then you may be in for a rude awakening at your next employment when concepts, processes, and software are all foreign to you. There is a language to business, and you need to be fluent in it at all times.

Work Experience Stagnation

I spent several years working at a large international B2C company that focused on IT products. Placed in a role where I managed site content, I was immersed into the many homebrew applications the company had created for this task. Some of the processes to display the content where I needed it to be were bizarre and byzantine. One process created a container for the content. Another process placed the container onto the site. Yet another process created content to be placed inside the container. Keep in mind that there was no documentation for any of this. Instead, instructions were passed down as tribal knowledge.

I had just come from a previous company where I was updating databases in SQL to publish site content, so these scratch-built applications weren’t that difficult to deal with in terms of process flow. In fact, I became very proficient within the environment, able to explain its quirks, limitations, and workarounds clearly and with ease. I eventually architected major changes to the platform that made it much easier to use and allow for richer content to display on the site.

Yet, despite the advancements I had achieved with our content applications, I never felt like I was working with a proper CMS. In fact, it wasn’t even something I could share as valuable experience when talking to recruiters.

Recruiter: “What CMS do you use?”

Me: “It’s proprietary.”

Recruiter: “Oh.”

There is a sliding scale of acceptable software experience, and it’s important that you stay within those parameters. I’m sure the applications vary with industry, but there’s a reason why you continue to see Adobe programs listed on marketing job listings instead of any of the off-brand programs. That’s not to say that value can’t be found by using similar applications, but you must recognize the learning curve that comes with any new environment. Employers will.

Beyond the technology experience, I also wasn’t being exposed to common business practices that other similar sized companies were doing. There were no one-on-ones, rare team meetings, and I was never part of strategy sessions. New work just seemed to fall from the skies. In fact, I was given very little attention unless there was a problem. In which case, people I’d never seen before would show up at my desk with complaints. On one hand, this was good, because it allowed me to focus on internal side projects that eventually earned me a promotion. On the other hand, when I finally moved to a company with more team dynamics and required more reporting and proof-of-performance, the experience was jarring. It took me a little time to get into the same gear as everyone else.

I think everyone feels a little bit of imposter syndrome when they start a new job, but I think I was actually an imposter. I sat during meetings, nodding my head, pretending to understand the concepts and terminology, but making mental notes to Google these things later. Of course, I adapted to the situation and became a top performer, but that doesn’t mean the transition between jobs wasn’t unnecessarily difficult.

Balancing Work Experience

I’m a big proponent of self-education, and the internet provides us with endless training material. It’s easy enough to buy necessary programs and watch online tutorials. Furthermore, joining business-focused social networking sites like LinkedIn or similar groups on Facebook can lead you to various reading material on how modern business is conducted. So even if your current job isn’t using best practices, that doesn’t mean you’ll be ignorant of them. And once you know they exist, perhaps you will be the changemaker at your current workplace.

However, none of this is to say that self-training works in all cases. I’m sure there are industries that require on-the-job experience using very expensive and very exclusive software. But in those cases, I’m sure the industry is so esoteric that alternative experience doesn’t exist, meaning that any experience you’re getting in that industry is the “right” experience.

Fortunately for me in the marketing field, I spent a lot of my non-day job hours working on WordPress sites and writing hundreds of articles for various publications. Of the nearly 2000 articles on my entertainment news & reviews site, www.workingauthor.com, over 800 of them are written by me. That’s been a significant weight to help balance the scales in my favor when looking for a job.

You work for your job, but make sure your job is working for you, too. If it isn’t, then take steps to protect your career. That’s the only way to survive in the professional world.