PDXSX: The Blog

Booyeah!  You’ve polished your resume, pulled together a fantastic portfolio, collected letters of recommendation, selected the ideal organization you want to work with, nailed your three (3) face-to-face interviews, fired off your handwritten thank-you letters and accepted your offer. Congratulations, you have just landed your very first professional job out of college!

Can you feel the glow?  Right there in your tummy?  In your smile; the one where you can’t hide your teeth?  That is pride, baby.  Sweet, delicious pride, decanted from the unfathomable saccharine in the Zinfandel of Professional Success.

Yet the professional world remains a prickly and fickle place.  Your performance will be measured and analyzed on Day One, not only by your new boss but also by your colleagues, who view you as an untested liability that will require plenty of supervision and ramp-up time before you become a valued member of the team.  This is especially true if you have selected a career in client-services or agency life (PR/ADV/Design).  Arguably, this perception will hold true in every career where you are the “new guy,” no matter how much previous experience you have.  New Guys are the lowest lifeform on the workplace totem pole (poll).  Just sayin’.

Some advice is pretty straightforward. You probably already learned most of it from previous jobs.  But for your career, this advice is even more important. For the first 90-days, show up 30-minutes early, leave 30-minutes late.  Try not to take any sick days for this initial period.  Always try to under-promise and over-deliver on any commitment.  Bring your supervisor options, not problems.  Be a team player.  But don’t make your colleagues look bad.  Ever.  Believe it or not, they are your first contacts.  If you play your cards right, they may even be your path to your next career iteration.

Now, here are five strategies great strategies for building job security and becoming a valued team member, brought to our attention from The Journal of Healthcare Management 48:3 (May/June 2003).  They even work in a down economy – maybe they work better BECAUSE of a down economy.

1. Understand the requirements of your organization
2. Understand the requirements of your clients
3. Find ways needs are not being met and meet them
4. Make your colleagues aware of your value
5. Ask yourself, “Am I happy do I continue to be valued here?”

Today we’re are going to address your first strategy for success.

Understand the requirements of your organization

Sounds simple, right?  You go to work.  Do your job.  Smile. Cash your paycheck. And everything takes care of everything else!  Hooray!  Just like you always knew it would be.

Then again, perhaps this game isn’t as simple as you had thought.  Your first month or so at your new organization will be quite a learning experience, but you won’t really have the big picture just yet.  You should plan to develop a good internal network and find a good mentor if one hasn’t already been assigned to you.  Set a goal for yourself to meet with your selected mentor for a business lunch at least twice a month.  In addition, plan to speak with another peer over coffee or on a break at least once a week.  The goal is to seek out information for yourself rather than waiting for information to come to you.  Remember this word: proactive.  Learn about the organization, who are its biggest clients?  Which clients are the most fun?  Which clients are the most challenging?  Have any clients left recently?  Why?  Has the organization resigned some accounts lately?  How come?  What are the goals of the organization for the next year, three years and five years?  How do you fit into that picture?

In finding a good mentor, you’ll want to identify several types of people.  Unlike the movies, no individual mentor knows everything.  There is usually someone in every successful organization who knows everything, and that is the boss.  But unfortunately, the boss isn’t very accessible as a mentor.  They are far too busy making sure they know everything, in order to properly steer this vast ship, the USS Workplace, into a safe harbor.

So pick a couple people from different departments to approach.  You don’t have to tell them they are your mentors, you just need to form relationships or get to know some of your colleagues from different departments who can help you understand the smaller pieces of the total picture.

via SpringfieldPunx

The best mentors are: Intelligent, kind, thoughtful, have many contacts inside and outside the organization, well liked, admired, very knowledgeable about your field, will have your best interests at heart, sincerely want to help you succeed and understand that your success will ultimately help them continue to be successful.

A mentor doesn’t always have to be a senior officer or someone with more tenure or professional experience (although most are), sometimes great mentors are subordinates who will actually tell you the truth.

It will fall to you to approach a potential mentor.  Ask them to coffee.  Ask them how you can help make their job easier or if there is something your department could be doing better which would make life easier for their department.

Finally ask people for feedback.  Ask your supervisor or boss how you are performing and if you are meeting expectations.  Actually listen to what they say.  If the information isn’t what you had in mind, don’t argue with them or make excuses.  Don’t get upset.  If you are confused or uncertain, ask for suggestions on what will help you meet their expectations and be more successful.

Sometimes it’s hard to listen to constructive criticism.  Once you have heard it, ask around.  Ask your mentor what they think and how they might handle your situation.  If you truly want to be successful and it shows, people will be more than happy to help you be successful.

But if you aren’t really interested in what people have to say about your performance or how to be more successful at your workplace, you’ve probably stopped reading this post already.

Just don’t email us and say, “I wasn’t successful in my career because I didn’t understand what the organization’s requirements were.”

Make the ask.  Desire to be successful.

Tags: career, proactive, tips & tricks, value

This entry was posted on September 8, 2009 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.