Ben felt an unease at work that he couldn’t explain. When he had started at the company, everything had been fine. But over his first few months, things had changed. His supervisor was no longer friendly toward him. His co-workers barely acknowledged his presence. The owner wouldn’t even look at him when passing through, while showing customers the company’s products and processes. What was worse was that Ben knew that he was the problem. Everyone else seemed to get along fine. Ben’s problem was that he didn’t know what he was doing wrong or how to improve things. No one seemed to want to help. He needed the job. But more and more, the job felt as if it didn’t need or want him. If things didn’t change soon, Ben knew he was on his way out.
Advice
You can get advice, welcome and unwelcome, from a lot of sources. No sooner are we walking and talking, than we’re ready to tell others what to do and how to do it. Indeed, one of the great satisfactions of a job is not to have someone tell you how to do it. It’s your job, and you generally know quite well how to do it. You don’t usually want anyone else’s advice to get your own job done. Let others stick to their own jobs and keep their nose out of your business, right? Yet a time can come when you need job advice and should be ready to seek and accept it. The hardest person on whom to get a perspective is often oneself. We can so easily see the small faults of others, when we can’t see our own much larger faults. That’s human nature. We look outward on others more so than inward at ourselves. Know when you could benefit from a little advice. Know when you need advice and should be taking it. Then, seek sound advice and prepare to accept it.
Reliability
Don’t listen to just anyone. Oh, sure, hear out those who give you unsolicited advice. But when you encounter someone who has a lot of opinions with no real experience, take their advice with a grain of salt. Sound advisors generally earn their wisdom through hard experience. Success is a great teacher, even more so when it follows frequent failure. Jobs are not speculative arenas. Employers need employees to get things done. If you need or could use some advice on how to do better in your job, then seek reliable advice based on real-world experience. Listen to those who themselves have gotten things done. And listen to those who have supervised and guided others toward getting things done. Learn from those who have the wisdom to share, not from the foolish who would misguide you.
Experience
I wrote this guide out of several substantial work experiences, indeed, out of a half century of working in various fields. Those fields were varied enough to give me perspective on everything from farming, manufacturing, and retail, to medical, academic, technology, and professional fields. I’ll spare you the details, but for highlights, I was an employment lawyer representing both employers and employees, personal-injury and civil-rights lawyer, and law professor teaching, researching, and writing about employment law and employment discrimination law. I’ve represented and advised personnel managers, written personnel handbooks, and litigated their terms in disputes between employers and employees. I’ve also served thousands of pro bono clients dealing with employment and other common issues. I’ve also run my own businesses with employees, managed facilities and workforces for others, and served as board president of schools and charitable nonprofits managing programs and workforces. In that work and volunteer service, I’ve learned enough to share how to do well or do poorly in a job, and what makes the difference.
Evaluation
I have one other relevant experience that gives me the confidence to share this guide’s advice. I spent about a decade and a half supervising a couple dozen highly skilled professionals, under circumstances where I had the obligation and opportunity to regularly read their evaluations by the hundreds of individuals whom they served. I have read tens of thousands of handwritten evaluations of workers whom I supervised. I thus have in my experience a catalog of every imaginable plaudit and complaint about workers, not just whether they show up on time to get their basic work done but also whether they care about their work and the people and employer whom they serve, their knowledge, skill, and ethics, and the demeanor, character, and attitude they express. After a while, you think you’ve seen and heard it all, but then, you see something new that you hadn’t seen before. Let me share some of that insight with you.
Distance
Trust me: it’s hard to give job counsel to someone whom you supervise. After all, you work with them every day. You generally like and respect them, even if you know that they need to change their ways. You don’t want them to think that you’re being arrogant, bossy, and high minded. And you want them to remain committed, confident, and engaged. It’s much easier to give and take advice from afar, through a resource like this guide. Here, I can tell you exactly what I think, no holds barred, because I won’t run across you in the lunchroom and worry how after hearing my stern advice, you might go home, yell at your spouse, kick the dog, and scold the kids. And here, you won’t take the advice so hard, either, because you can always pretend that it’s for someone else, not you. Our distance makes it easier. So, read on, heeding at-times stiff but necessary advice.
Trust
After all, at some point, you have to trust someone. We don’t work in a vacuum. The workplace adopts customs, culture, and norms. While workplaces can differ significantly in those attributes, they also tend to share common culture and norms, particularly within fields and sectors. Your ability to get on in your job, with reasonable compensation and security, generally involves complying with customs, navigating culture, and respecting norms. No one is necessarily going to come up to explain these things to you. You must instead have a discerning eye. When you can’t seem to figure it out or want to be sure that you’re on the right track, that’s when you should be listening to others whom you have reason to respect and trust. Take a little counsel early, and you can save yourself a lot of time and trouble later. Take a little counsel late, and you can save your job.
Reflection
Each chapter of this guide ends with a few reflection points and questions, followed by the chapter’s key points, to help you think more deeply about, and help you remember, the chapter’s points. In that vein, consider here whether you’ve had a reliable guide for job success. If so, who was that guide? What attributes did they have, like long years of experience or a natural well of common sense? How did they help you most, with specific job issues or instead with a better general way to approach your job? Did their advice change your relationship toward them, either improving or straining it? Do you have someone to whom you would like to give job advice, if they’d be willing to listen to it? Have you thought intentionally of what job advice you’d give to yourself?
Key Points
We need advice because seeing your own faults on the job can be hard.
Seek and accept sound and reliable advice, not uninformed opinions.
Listen to advisors who have experience, not the inexperienced.
Listen to advisors who have a history of evaluating employees.
If you don’t take advice well, get help from a distance, like this guide.
At some point, you’ll need to trust someone for job advice.
When you get good job advice, reflect on it deeply and remember it.