One of the key points that is easy to overlook when moving too fast on this issue is who you need to talk to. It is most likely not the head of HR, unless the solution you're proposing has to do with HR. Most people think they should approach someone in HR, since HR does the hiring. But in actual fact you need to target your approach to the senior officer of the department or area in which you wish to work.
Your goals are to find out who that person is, who her gatekeeper is, and how to get the attention of both of them for five or 10 minutes. This in itself may require a couple of coffee meetings with other people in your network, or perhaps with people in the company itselfâpeople you don't even know but who you could call out of the blue to get pointed in the right direction. Think of the principle of the cheetah described in Chapter 1. Waiting and preparing in order to hunt carefully is a better use of your time than starting immediately and wandering aimlessly.
Case Study: The Dental Firm
Recently I delivered a speech at an annual meeting of a Swiss-based dental technology firm. As I was describing this very point, the concept of hunting down your own job, the senior vice president of the U.S. division of this company stood up and asked if he could interject. Naturally, I said “sure.” He proceeded to ask the assembled group whether they were familiar with the company's vice president of research and development. Yes, everyone knew him. I held my breath. “Well,” he said, “that's how he got his VP job. He called me one day out of the blue and pitched me on some ideas and told me about some trends that he foresaw in the market which intrigued me. I wanted to hear more, so I invited him in. That's how he got his job.”
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This concept represents the art of leveraging the hidden job market. It does not refer to jobs being surreptitiously passed on to cronies in some secret way. This job market is hidden in the same way that a landscape is hidden when you drive past it in a car. You might be traveling faster, sure, but details are lost through speed and height; all you see is blur. When you take the same route by bike, you travel slower, but you see not only trees but the types of trees. You sense subtle changes in climate and terrain, and all things become clearer, including the shortcuts. It's ground-level work that helps the connections get made. It's somewhere between a science and an art: remarkably effective, yet maddeningly unquantifiable. It's slow, yet it's fast.
KEY POINTS TO TAKE AWAY
â¢
Slow
needs to happen even during transition.
⢠Building a gazebo refers to the act of undertaking a physical activity in which body and mind are focused on a plan of action that is unrelated to life and its current problems; it's a form of blue-skying.
⢠Gazebo-building/blue-skying allows for indirect thought, which helps identify alternative methods to describe and market yourself.
⢠Exercise delivers similar benefits to those of gazebo building and should be considered an essential component of transition as it is in all phases of life.
⢠An unemployed professional can expect to be out of work one month for every $10,000 she earns or expects to earn annually. This piece of bad news can actually help set a pace and a style of job hunting with better pay-off.
⢠Lethargy and depression can be warded off simply by taking the time to plan the events required for the work of looking for work. There's too much to do to get depressed.
⢠The business of looking for work: People in transition who make 100 cold calls or send 100 résumés to 100 addresses may satisfy themselves that they've put in a good day's job hunting, but in fact they've done nothing. They're like people in sales who randomly make cold calls and think the more the better. A more enjoyable and effective approach is to do lunch with people from your network.
⢠The “hidden job market” refers to the concept of pitching your own job to senior officers rather than waiting for a want ad.
COOL DOWN
Identify Your Gazebo
⢠What types of activities do you like to do that encourage creative blue-skying?
⢠Identify these tasks and schedule them as part of your transition strategy.
⢠What term or sentence could you use to describe your work in a memorable way?
⢠Remember, other people who are not in your line of work will find great interest in the things you consider normal or boring.
⢠Does your line of work appeal to certain demographics, e.g., sports enthusiasts, frequent travelers, parents? What can you do to upsell your interest factor during conversation?
⢠Practice your unique identifiers until you can deliver them with confidence and credibility.
⢠When do you think the best time to meet with people for formal interviews would be? 10:30 a.m.? 9:00 a.m.? 4:00 p.m.?
⢠Who could you ask to find out?
⢠When is your preferred time to exercise? Morning? Afternoon? Schedule this into your daily schedule for at least four days out of five.
⢠What system will you use to time manage your transition period? Microsoft Outlook? A DayTimer? Your PDA?
⢠Keep in mind the work of finding work is a job unto itself. It requires planning and
slow
thought just as any other job would.
⢠Where would you like to work next?
⢠What do you value?
⢠What does your next job look like?
⢠What hours and conditions would suit you best?
⢠What do you wish to achieve in your next job?
⢠What companies interest you?
⢠What industries interest you?
⢠What departments interest you?
⢠Use the answers from these questions to target your next possible employer.
⢠Research the company or companies you wish to work for.
⢠Research the executives and officers.
⢠Set to work, like a detective, to find out how you can get 15 minutes with these people.
⢠Remember, company executives are looking for “bright sparks” who can either make the company money or save the company money. Which can you do?
⢠How can you sell your ideas to them?
1
Burg, Bob,
Endless Referrals
, Third Edition, McGraw-Hill, 2005
2
Fox, Jeffrey,
Don't Send a Résumé: And Other Contrarian Rules to Help Land a Great Job.
Hyperion Books, 2001, p. 87
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WE ALL WORK SO HARD
FOR THE GOOD OF OUR CHILDREN,
WHO WANT US TO PLAY
.
CHAPTER 11
THE FAMILY
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If there was ever a need for
slow
in the business day, it most definitely has to be where family is concerned. No matter what form your family takes: one parent, two parents, young kids, old kids, step-kids, sandwich families with elders in the house, even couples or singles with no kids at all, the ambient momentum of speed at work invariably filters through into home life.
TRYING TO BE BOTH A PROFESSIONAL AND A PARENT
It's tough enough getting through all of the challenges described in the previous chapters without having to deal with the emotional and logistical challenges of being part of a family. But children are shrewd observers. They need to be taught about the value of
slow
in action as well as concept. They need to be shown that, as a complement to their busy lives, they must include time for reflection, communication, and thought. Kids learn a heck of a lot through observation. Just as they learned to walk and talk by watching their parents or older sibling(s), so will they learn the value of work, rest, and discipline. If they see Mom returning emails at all hours of the night, or carrying her wireless PDA to bed, they, too will learn the repressive ways of the harness. This threatens to build another generation of hard-working people for whom creativity is pushed aside in order to fit a tight schedule into the day.
As we've seen throughout this book, jobs are changing. Employability, career determination, career preservation, flexibility, and “hunting ability” will be based on talents more profound than on how many emails a person can return. Plumbers and accountants, for example, will always be needed, but if a young future plumber or accountant is not shown how important it is to allow adequate time for doing things other than the tasks at handâmarketing and maintaining her business, for example, along with seeking out a balanced lifeâher business will not survive.
So this is what this chapter is about: How to
cool down
enough to ensure that families of any size and configuration can avoid getting lost upon the featureless sea of busy-ness.
DINNER: A TIME TO COOL DOWN
One possible
cool
approach to avoiding the challenge of remaining adrift in this sea is to use dinner as a safe harbor. Dinnertime often suffers when there are so many other activities and priorities that regularly interfere. But as I have demonstrated elsewhere in this book, the payoff to
cooling down
is not only in the immediate: What you eat is not the most important part of dinner; it's what you do with the time. You could even order in, or dine out, if budget allows.
Blue Flag Day
For a regular dinner to stand a chance against the pressures of busy workdays and busy evenings, you need to employ tangible tools. One interesting technique is what I call “Blue Flag Day.” This is based on a simple promise that you make to your family. “For two evenings during the Monday-to-Friday week, our family (whatever size or configuration) will dine together.” This could be put forth as a suitable compromise, one that recognizes the numerous demands foisted upon individual family members during the after-work and after-school periods: extracurricular sports, for example, as well as homework and socializing. These extracurricular activities are important in themselves, of course, but it's just too easy for people of all ages to fall prey to the temptation to quickly gulp down food and return to other diversions. At least with just two dinners a week reserved, the opportunity exists to balance scheduled events such as games, meetings, and practices with equally important family dinners together.
The best way for a family to implement and maintain this two-dinner workweek is to use the power of symbolism. Call it a blue flag day. Set it up on a calendar on the fridge and enter it into all the DayTimers, PDAs, and cellphone calendars of each family member: Identify the dates when these suppers are to happen and then highlight the two one-hour blocks in blue as a “must attend.” On the day of the dinner you can place blue placemats or napkins on the morning breakfast table to serve as an additional reminder of the upcoming evening get-together. During the blue flag dinners themselves, turn off the TV and put away all other personal devices such as music players and PDAs. Don't answer the phone unless call-display identifies the caller as a key person, for example, an extended family member who might be calling for help.
Now the use of this blue symbolism might seem extreme to some, and there are many families who might not need to go to these lengths in order to have a quiet, regular dinner. But there are many others for whom time and busy-ness have stripped away opportunities for regular togetherness and have inserted a habit of continuous busy-ness instead. For them, the use of imagery, in this case the color blue (it could be any other color or image), can be a powerful technique that will help reconstruct the concept of dinner as a tangible thing. Imagery helps to influence us through tangible means. This can apply equally well to single people who wish to maintain meaningful relationships with friends and partners or to large, extended families and everything in between. Relationships are based upon and reinforced by time together as well as time apart. Unfortunately, spending time in this way often gets pushed aside and is too often viewed as negligible personal time, just like lunch and exercise time.
As I said before, it's not the food that counts, it's the time. Blue flag dinners allow for essential things to happen:
⢠Talking about good things. Each family member is able to speak up about positive events or achievements of the day. They are able to be heard, and they are able to hear themselves talking about their ideas and issues. This is another example of dual mentorship: being heard, while hearing yourself speak.
⢠Talking about bad things. The dinner allows time and a safe venue for the outlet of pent-up frustrations.
⢠Learning about each other's days and issues.
⢠Learning about upcoming events and deadlines and ensuring all calendars are up to date.
Beyond these initial achievements, blue flag dinners offer other essential benefits that parents might find valuable:
⢠Observing subtleties. Family dinners, like all face-to-face interactions, make it easier to pick up on subtle facial gestures, eye movements, and other cues that might hint at deeper issues needing to be resolved.
⢠Mannerisms and social etiquette. Mastering social techniques such as how to correctly use a knife and fork, how to serve food and drink, or how to hold a conversation while eating are skills that are not taught in a cafeteria or food-court but may make or break a future work opportunity. There's no better place to learn them than in the supportive environment of a family dinner.
⢠The reinforcement of stability through regularity. As many family psychologists will attest, the ritual of regular family dinners has the potential to penetrate even the most cynical or confused teenage hide, to deliver a message of consistency and reliability about themselves and about their family. Though teenagers often fall prey to the desire to rebel, the knowledge that there is regularity in their world, even as they try to rebel against it, is a comfort they might not want to admit to but will be aware of all the same.
⢠Building attention spans and focus through routine. The concept of “attention deficit,” whether diagnosed as a disorder or not, is a growing phenomenon in North American kids. For some people there may indeed be clinical sources to this disorder, but for many others problems related to keeping focused might have something to do with the variability and pace of life itself. Part of the problem may be blamed on TV and video games, but what about the lack of evening routines? In infant years regular routines of feeding, bathing, and storytelling helped develop regular sleeping patterns and helped foster intellectual growth. However, as kids grow from infants into youngsters, regularity is cast aside to fit in more activities. I have already discussed in Chapter 1, the value of sleep, and in particular the chemistry involved in the winding-down hours prior to sleep. Might not the regularity and slowness of at least two dinners per week help to counter the same type of chemical chaos found in over-stimulated children?