April 6, 2011

How to Survive a Crappy Job Until You Find a Better One

A crappy job is no joking matter. Unfortunately, a plethora of people are spending more than one third of their time every week, month and year, working in such a job.

I’m not talking here about a job that’s just boring or unfulfilling. I’m talking about an entire work environment that’s psychologically debilitating. Think manipulative management, lack of ethics and sabotage of your advancement.

The logical and obvious step when you’re in a crummy job is to look for a better one (hopefully, a lot better) and to get out of there as soon as possible. You want to kill your job before it kills you.

Now, the practical challenge is that finding even a decent job, especially in some fields, can take 3 to 6 months and sometimes longer. So before killing your job, if you rely on it financially, you may need to tolerate it for a while.

As I often coach people in this kind of a situation, I want to share with you three of the most effective strategies I know for surviving a crappy job until you find a better one.

1. Reduce the Contact with Your Job As Much As You Can

Until you find a new and better job, you want to dedicate the least amount of time possible to your current one. Take plenty of days off, try to frequently get to work late and leave work early. This serves a triple role:

  1. It reduces your contact with a toxic work environment;
  2. It gives you time to relax, distress and recharge your batteries;
  3. It gives you more time to invest in looking for another job.

I’m a believer in integrity, but when you’re dealing with a crummy job and toxic relationships in the workplace, it is guerrilla warfare. Anything goes. So, use just about any tactic available to diminish the contact with you job.

This is a good time to catch every known type of flu out there, plus a couple of unknown types. It’s a good time to generally feel sick very often. On many occasions, you may not even have to fake it that much.

2. Set up Compensation Mechanisms

If your work causes you distress, exhaustion and lack of fulfillment, then you don’t want any other area of your life to add to this. On the contrary: in order to keep your mental and emotional balance, you want to compensate in your time away from work.

The period when you’re dealing with an almost intolerable job is a very good one to:

  • Develop nurturing relationships and use them for support;
  • Get involved in plenty of fun and relaxing activities (go to a spa, play some paintball, get plenty of sleep);
  • Do meaningful things in whatever free time you have (volunteer for a cause you believe in).

A particularly good idea during such a period is to eliminate as much as you can of the outside work responsibilities than can be stressful. Try to either dump them altogether or delegate them to somebody else.

Case in point: I’ve seen married people who in a period of real torment at work told their caring spouse about their work problems and asked them to take on more of the household responsibilities for a while, until they’ll be in a better job. If the spouse does care, they can help tremendously.

3. Stop Taking Work So Seriously

It’s crucial to realize the following point: when you’re set on leaving a job and will do so in a few months tops, apart from your short term check, the stake is pretty much gone. Being a good employee is no longer required. If you don’t, what is your employer going to do? Fire you?

First off, even if they do fire you, it will take months before your insolence accumulates, becomes evident and the decision to fire you is made. By that time, chances are you will already have another job offer.

Second of all, you’d be surprised how much shit you can get away with. I’ve met many people who are total assholes at work and they haven’t even come close to losing their job. They may get criticized by their boss or peers every now and then, but that’s pretty much it.

Fundamentally, surviving a crappy job is about strategy and attitude. Equipped with these two tools, you can deal with any job, for a while. And when you accept a new job, you’ve better not make the same mistakes again.

Image courtesy of Stepan Mazurov

Filed Under: Career, Lifestyle, Relationships Tagged With: , , , , , 3 Comments
December 2, 2010

Why Your Job Sucks

Many of my coaching clients are looking to improve something in their careers.

Some of them like their jobs and they just want to take it up a notch, some of them will tell my plainly at the first coaching session: “My job sucks; I want your help to get better at finding a better one, so I can get the hell out of there”.

My experience is that in the careers of many people, there is a big gap between the kind of job they want and the kind they have. Those big dreams they had somewhere in adolescence simply aren’t turning into reality.

If this is your case, I want to take the time and explain from my perspective why this is happening to you. In my communication coaching, I see certain causes manifest over and over gain. Here they are:

1. You Have No Clue What You Want

Unless you’re one lucky SOB, it’s practically impossible to have an extraordinary job if you don’t know what you want. When you don’t know what you want, you’re like a ship adrift being taken left and right be the wind of the moment. This is exactly what happens to numerous people.

I’m not going to say “try harder to figure out what you want”, that would be pretentious. I will say this though: “Try better!” Asking yourself “What do I want?” is usually not enough to get an unambiguous answer. Take a good personality test, get a 360 degrees feedback, ask yourself more specific questions or work with a coach.

2. You’re Head over Heals in Debt

Here’s a very ‘smart’ career move I repeatedly see people doing: You end up in a job where you earn a decent salary and immediately, you take a huge loan in order to buy a big house, a car, a second car, a huge fucking plasma TV and so on.

However, a few years later, once you get over the excitement of the money you’re making, you realize that you actually hate the job you’re in, it offers you no satisfaction it itself, and you want to change your professional field. The only problem is that you’re so far up in debt that you can’t afford the initial financial drop implied by a career change. Really smart Sherlock!

3. You Do Not Take Risks

Getting to a job you find truly fulfilling involves some bold moves. I’m talking about moves such as: quitting a job, asking for a raise, negotiating hard, saying no to a tempting offer, taking on new responsibilities, failing, exposing yourself to uncertainty or putting your foot in the door.

I find that most people are not willing to take the risks associated with these moves. They want to play it safe and make it big at the same time. Well, if this applies to you, I have some disappointing news: life doesn’t work that way. You need to take some risks if you want to get anywhere.

4. You Don’t Know How to Promote Yourself

This is something I keep saying ever since I started working as a communication coach: your professional skills are basically worth nothing if you don’t know how to sell yourself with high impact. It’s a skill required with your boss, your clients and potential future employers.

Promoting yourself is one of the critical people skills for career success. Many people discover this the hard way: by hitting a wall prematurely in their careers which prevents them from moving forward. The sooner you start consciously developing the people skill of promoting yourself, the better it will be for your career and your life.

Each one of these for reasons can be broken down into smaller ones. For example, some people have problems selling themselves at interviews, some at promoting themselves through networking. I’ll leave it to you to discover the nuances of your context.

I firmly believe that we now live in the best world we as human beings have ever lived. There are more opportunities than ever for you to have a prosperous and exciting career. It all starts with taking control of your own steering wheel.

Image courtesy of rashdanothman

Filed Under: Career, Inspirational, Success Tagged With: , , 5 Comments
October 27, 2010

The Worst Job in the World and the Way Out

One of the things I like about coaching is that it creates insights not only for the client, but also for the coach. I recently had a mind blasting insight during a communication coaching session about what is truly the worst job in the world.

It’s not pool cleaner or pig farmer. It’s rather a type of job than a job, which impairs people’s lives in a very cruel way and they often have no idea what’s going on. The worst job in the world, as I see things, is a warm job.

What Is a Warm Job?

You know: it’s not hot, it’s not cold – it’s warm. You may like the company and get along well with your colleagues, but you find the job kind of boring and it’s not really what you want to do. You don’t love it enough to say you have an awesome career but you don’t hate it enough to quit it.

There is a huuuge practical problem with a warm job, because a warm job keeps you stuck. If you truly hate your job, you desperately try to find a better one. I’m not a big fan of negative motivation, but I have seen cases where it helped people move forward to much better jobs.

However, if you have a job which is kind of OK but not really what you want, you will tend to stick with it for a long, long time. The worst job in the world is in my view a job that keeps you in your comfort zone without being highly rewarding, and this is exactly what a warm job does.

I know people who for the past 5-7 years or more, every time I meet, they tell me they would like a better job, as their present one is OK but it’s not exactly their dream job. Nevertheless, they are still in that same job. It is a warm job and it makes these people waste many years.

Escaping From a Warm Job

Because of the odd emotional dynamics it creates, a warm job is probably the hardest to get out of. This is precisely why I say it’s the worst job in the world. However, there are ways to motivate yourself and get out of it.

Working with people to help them improve their people skills and make meaningful career changes, I discovered 3 action steps work best:

1) Have a clear vision of what you want. Know your values, your motivations and your passions very well. This way, you will be fully aware when you are not in your ideal job, instead of just having a vague impression that you’re not.

2) Set big, bold career goals for yourself. You won’t get the motivation to leave a warm job until you make a firm decision to aim for the best job possible for you, to be all that you can be in your career. Big, shinny goals are a prerequisite for good motivation.

3) Set small action steps. I believe this is the most important part and what will truly get you out of a warm job. Small, step by step action steps create that continuous drive to keep moving forward. Set them daily and act on them.

For example, you may aim to spend 30 minutes each day looking for a new job on the Internet, and 2 hours each week networking with people who may be able to help you find a better job.

If you look purely at short term benefits, a warm job is certainly not the worst job in the world. However, if you look at things in perspective, a warm job is one hell of a way to sell yourself short. It’s important to keep improving (not only in terms of people skills) and keep moving.

Image courtesy of Steve Kay

Filed Under: Career, Inspirational, Lifestyle Tagged With: , , , 10 Comments
September 27, 2010

Quitting a Job with Style

I’ll tell you one thing many people seriously consider after working with me in a communication coaching program: quitting their job. I usually couldn’t be happier about this, as I believe that quitting a job is a natural part of career progress, which we often postpone unnecessarily.

Most people tend to find quitting a job as a delicate subject. They see all sorts of risks involved and they wanna do it right.

I think it’s a challenge to give generally applicable advice for quitting a job, as the context can vary a lot: some people quite a job because they absolutely hate it and they run like the wind, other people quit a job even though they love it, because an even better opportunity arisen.

However, I can think of 3 people skills principles which apply in most cases when quitting a job. They focus not only on doing it right, but on doing it with style. Here they are:

1. Don’t say you’re quitting your job at first

Many people are quitting their job for only slightly improved conditions, such as a slightly bigger salary or slightly more important responsibilities.

Often, if your employer knows about these extra benefits you want to leave for and values you as an employee, they will make you a counter-offer which you might want to consider. I have many examples of this happening and the employee deciding to stay after all, with improved working conditions.

This is why I believe in these cases, it’s best to not tell your employer directly that you’re leaving. Instead, tell him at first that you’re considering leaving and mention the extra benefits which are motivating you to do this.

Then, mention that you would like to stay with them if they make you a good counter-offer. Only if they do not, you can decide and announce firmly that you’re quitting your job.

2. Phrase it in the positive

One manifestation of good people skills I find highly valuable is talking about improvements rather than about solving problems. This technique works especially well when announcing that you’re quitting a job.

Preferably, don’t say: “I don’t like this job and I want to get the hell out of here”. Instead, say “I’m interested in a job which is closer to my passion and I think I have the best chances of finding one somewhere else”.

The main point is to talk about the improvements you aim to achieve through another job, rather than the problems you aim to get away from. This gets the best possible reactions from others and allows you to leave an employer without senselessly breaking the relationship.

3. Throw a farewell party

I bet you didn’t expect this one, did you?

Many times, people will quit a job although they get along well with most of their colleagues. Their reasons for quitting have to do with something else. So it makes sense to say goodbye to your colleagues in a fun, memorable way which communicates how much you appreciate them.

I call this a P-A-R-T-Y! You don’t have to through a big party and invite all the company. A small office, house, pub or club party with your dearest colleagues will do.

By the way: when I see ‘colleagues’ I’m including here your manager, clients, and collaborators – anyone you respect and have worked well with. Believe it or not, a farewell party when quitting a job can be a very good business networking and relationship building tool.

I believe it does make sense to try ending a work relationship on a positive note and good people skills will help you achieve this. At the same time, I think the best mental frame to have is that quitting a job is not a big deal.

With this mind frame, you can make quitting a job a simple, constructive and even enjoyable experience. Who knows, you might even make a hobby out of it…

Image courtesy of Stuck in Customs

Filed Under: Career, Communication Skills, People Skills Tagged With: , , 12 Comments