Suggestions for Your Work
Annie is a longtime secretary/receptionist for two senior vice presidents at a big company. They have been doing a lot of hiring lately, and almost all of the new middle-management personnel have been interviewed by one or the other of Annie’s two bosses, so naturally they come through her office first.
Some of these people are unbelievably rude. Either they treat Annie like a piece of furniture (no hello, no eye contact) or they think she is their errand (差使) girl. Lately, Annie’s two bosses have started asking her for her impressions of job candidates. So far this week, two have been discourteous (失礼的) and dismissive, so Altair gave both the thumbs-down. Neither is getting called back for the next round of interviews.
No one knows how common this is, but if you are job hunting, it’s necessary to be aware that the dummy at the reception desk may be anything but not "just a secretary".
Suggestions to Job Hunters
According to Annie Stevens and Greg Gostanian, two partners at a Boston-based executive coaching firm called Clear Rock, it’s not unusual these days for a hiring manager to ask everyone who meets a potential new hire to give an opinion of him or her. "One of the biggest reasons so many newly recruited managers fail in a new job is their inability to fit in and get along with the people who are already there," says Stevens. "So employers now want to get staffers’ impressions right at the start."
Adds Gostanian: "A lot can be learned from how candidates treat receptionists. If the jobseeker is rude, condescending, or arrogant, this might be an indication of how he or she would treat coworkers or direct reports."
Obviously, anyone looking for a new job would do well not to alienate the person who sits outside the interviewer’s door. Stevens and Gostanian offer these six tips fur getting off to the right start:
·Introduce yourself as you would to any other potential new colleague. Smile, shake hands, and so on. It seems odd that this has to be spelled out, but apparently it does; and, besides being a matter of common courtesy, ordinary friendliness offers a practical advantage. "Learning and remembering an interviewer’s receptionist’s name can only help as you advance in the interviewing process," Stevens notes.
·Don’t regard a receptionist or other assistant as an underling (部下) —at least, not as your own personal underling. "Always ask the interviewer if you need help from anyone else in the office where you’re interviewing, instead of seeking this directly yourself," says Gostanian. In other words, if you’d like to leave an extra copy of your resume, refrain from sending the interviewer’s assistant to the Xerox machine.
·It’s fine to accept if you’re offered a beverage, but keep it . "Don’t ask for particular brand names or expect to be brewed a fresh pot of coffee," Stevens says. And of course, need we add that dispatching anybody to Starbucks is out of the question
·Feel free to make small talk, but know that anything you say may well get back to the interviewer. "Don’t ask probing questions about the company or offer unsolicited opinions," Gostanian advises. No matter how hideous the office door, endless the hike from the parking lot, or inconvenient the wait to see the interviewer, keep it to yourself. Plenty of time for whining (抱怨) and grumbling after you’re hired.
·Don’t talk on your ceil phone in front of the receptionist, and try to put your BlackBerry aside. "If you have to make or take a call, leave the reception area," Stevens says. Preoccupation with wireless devices will mark you, she says, as "a cold and fixated person".
·Don’t forget to say good-bye. "Failure to say good-bye to someone you’ve just met reflects negatively on you," Gostanian notes. "You’ll come across as impersonal and uncaring." That’s hardly the image any job hunter wants to project.
How to Measure Your Work
Any job, like any relationship, has its difficult moments. And with the job market heating up, the temptations to change partners are growing.
As with any relationship, however, you really should assess the full value of what you’ve got before giving it up wholesale, because—let’s face it—regret really is a waste of your time.
Regardless of the main task of a job—be it bond trading, teaching, balancing the books, or cleaning hotel rooms—are there objective criteria that you can use to measure whether your job is wonderful or not
Workplace experts Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman have identified several. In their book First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, they offer a useful guide in the form of 12 questions:
·Do I know what’s expected of mc at work
·Do I have the materials and equipment I need to de my work right
·At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day
·In the last 7 days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work
·Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person
·Is there someone at work who encourages my development
·At work, do my opinions seem to count
·Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important
·Are my coworkers committed to doing quality work
·Do I have a best friend at work
·In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress
·This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and to grow
Buckingham and Coffman picked these 12 questions after looking for patterns among the responses of more than 1 million employees to workplace questions posed by the Gallup Organization over the years.
"We were searching for those special questions where the most engaged employees... answered positively, and everyone else... answered neutrally or negatively," they wrote.
Their reasoning: they wanted to identify the key elements of a strong workplace that can attract and retain talent.
Satisfaction with pay and benefits didn’t make the list not because they’re not important. Coffman said, but because they’re important to all employees, whether they’re engaged in their work or not.
So, assuming you feel you’re paid the going rate for your job, answering affirmatively to ail or even most of the 12 questions can be an indication that you’ve got a great job that you should part with only for very good reason. And if job satisfaction is important to you, then the promise of a bigger paycheck alone may not be reason enough.
When Coffman is asked what percentage of companies he thinks actually pass the 12-question test, his estimate is no more than 15 percent. But within a company, he said, individual departments may meet the test, even if the company overall doesn’t
Why The manager of a department makes all the difference. Coffman said when an employee quits, 70 percent of the time she’s not leaving because of the job, she’s leaving because of the manager.
One cautionary note: your job may not be as wonderful for you as you think if you answer a majority of the 12 questions affirmatively but the few questions that you can’t are among the first six. That’s because the first six questions make up the base on which job satisfaction rests, according to Buckingham and Coffman. If your current job doesn’t meet the first six criteria, you are more likely to be disengaged with your work and less productive than you could be.
Consider question three after all. Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best everyday "If you’re not able to use your gifts every day, you’ll be pretty frustrated," Coffman said.
Of course, job satisfaction isn’t a one-way street with a department either meeting your needs or not. In order to answer the 12 questions honestly, you need to know what it is that makes you tick and not blindly blame your department for any job dissatisfaction.
Do you know what it is you like to do and what you do best What kind of recognition do you like Public or private What are your values and do they square with your company’s goals How do you like a manager to relate to you
Otherwise, your career, like a string of bad relationships, can become a case of "different partner, same problems". If yon fail to say "thank you" to the receptionists, they will have negative impressions of you.