DULY NOTED …
YOUR CAREER IS MORE THAN ITS HIGHS AND LOWS — FOCUSING ON THE DETAILS IN BETWEEN IS KEY
At some point in your career, you’ll go through the highest of highs and lowest of lows. You’ll get the job you’ve dreamed about for years only to be let go after six months after a few fudged expense reports for lunches with friends. You’ll land a huge client and later find out that they had never intended to purchase your goods or services in the first place.
While it’s tempting to base your definition of career success on hitting the peaks and avoiding the valleys, some career experts caution against taking an all-or-nothing approach to assessing your job. Instead, they suggest that you focus on the ordinary days so you can truly determine whether or not you enjoy — and are good at — what you do.
“I think that we spend far too much time celebrating our victories and just as much time mourning our losses,” says Sharon Fannon, a career consultant in New York. “It’s important to have benchmark moments throughout a career and you certainly will be judged on the things you do well, but it isn’t the only way to determine whether or not your job has value.”
Surviving the fall
Fannon, who worked in the HR departments of Rutgers University and the University of Wisconsin, says she had a recent client who was on track to hit new sales highs for the third and fourth quarters of 2017, only to learn that the product she had been selling was sold off to another company. Instead of transferring her to the new owner, she was simply laid off.
“It was a huge crash for her. She had made the product so viable and so attractive to potential clients that all of a sudden, there was a value attached to the product that hadn’t been there before. And when it came time to acknowledge that new, higher value, the company did so by simply letting her go while they enjoyed the profits from her work,” Fannon says.
Since this particular client came to Fannon in the middle of her job search, she was very focused on that recent experience. “She had a huge chunk of her resume that dealt specifically with this product and the fact that it was sold to another company for $14 million dollars,” Fannon says. “This all may look good to someone who is impressed by the basics but a smart employer will look at that and think ‘apparently you weren’t valuable enough to keep around.’ I helped her change her resume so that her work on building the product, her day-to-day responsibilities and rituals that led to increased sales, was front and center.”
Hand-in-hand approach
Thomas Wietecha, an executive coach in Los Angeles, says it’s almost impossible to separate the work from the end result since we only remember the work that went into the good, not necessarily the mediocre. “This goes all the way back to when we were in school. We won’t remember studying really hard for a chemistry test unless we received an A-plus or maybe, an F. No one remembers how much they studied for a test when they ended up getting an 81,” he says. “No one cares about the middle of the curve.”
As a result, Wietecha says employees don’t put too much value in the work they put in to get to the middle. Still, Wietecha says it’s worth examining the paths that lead to all your work results since an examination of the minutiae can lead to some interesting insights. “The devil’s in the details, right? It’s the minutiae where the magic happens. It’s the small little things like following up on emails or making sure a proposal is in your potential client’s hands at 4:59 p.m. the day you speak on the phone instead of 9:01 a.m. the next morning,” he says. “The 4:59 guy reads it on the train and is ready to move the next day. The 9:01 guy received similar proposals at 7:15, 8:45 and probably 4:59 the previous day. It’s the little things — finishing up a proposal before your potential client expects it — that create success.”
Deep understanding
James Evans says he began scanning in his 2018 calendar book last month to track his mileage. Inadvertently, he scanned in his notes for the day and began understanding the importance of the smaller things he was doing to attain the larger wins, not just at work but also in his personal life. “I’m a ridiculous note taker but I’d take notes and then do nothing with them,” says the 29-year-old pharmaceutical sales rep based in Sarasota, Florida. “Once I scanned everything from this year in, I had a pretty clear account of the things I did that worked and the things I did that didn’t.”
Career consultant Fannon says note takers make the best employees because when they read over their notes, they’re constantly assessing their work. “People who track what they do and how they do it, as well as what others do, are the candidates who learn from their own mistakes. What’s a better attribute in an employee than that? All those mistakes? They happen during the 9-to-5 moments. Maybe there’s a choice to make an extra follow-up phone call or to send someone a small gift to let them know you appreciate their business,” Fannon says. “Or maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe someone writes ‘Joe Smith called about next year. Email him some info on that inventory app I.T.’s working on and start talking renewal.’ And when Joe Smith goes with your competitor, you’ll remember you never sent the inventory app info, and you might just have some insight into why he might have made that choice.”