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 Annie 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 for 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 simple. "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," Gostardan 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 cell 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 me at work
·Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work
right ·At work, do I have the opportunity to de 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 all 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 net 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 net 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 you want to give up a job wholesale, you should evaluate ______ from it.