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Strategy 1: Stop Watching the Clock
The hands on the clock tend to move more slowly when you watch them. Boredom is stultifying. Rather than kill time and wait for the day to end, your challenge is to find ways to get more involved—to enlarge your job without merely adding more work. The key is to think qualitatively, not quantitatively. Not more, but better.
How? For starters, keep your eyes and ears open for new projects that interest you. Or, better yet, invent a project that solves an organizational problem and gets your juices going.
A retail store manager used her company’s national sales meeting to get a better handle on what was going on throughout the company. Because her interests were advertising and marketing, she focused extra attention on talking with people from those departments to learn more about their needs and goals. When she learned they wanted to investigate the home shopping market, she volunteered to do the research. This gave her a chance to study an interesting new trend, demonstrate her creativity and initiative, showcase her research and writing skills, and establish contacts with the right people. And, should the company decide to move ahead with the idea, she’s also positioned herself to be a part of it.
This required the manager to do some extra work. But because she hopes to use the new knowledge to make a job change within the company, she considers the effort worth it. Some doors might now open that were previously closed.
In general, try to take a synergistic approach that involves other people in healthy and productive ways, recommends psychologist Laurie Anderson in Oak Park, Illinois. For example, if you need to free up your schedule to make room for new duties, try delegating tedious responsibilities to an employee who’d appreciate them.
“What’s boring to you may be developmental to someone else,” Anderson says. “Try looking for someone in the organization who’d like to learn the things that no longer interest you.”
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Anderson tells the story of a staffing professional who was burned out on recruitment and a trainer who’d overdosed on training. The two split their jobs in half and traded responsibilities so that both could enjoy new growth. The staffing professional was surprised to find how much she liked training. In fact, she liked it so much that she decided to become a trainer full time—a career direction she’d never anticipated.
Developing creative, synergistic solutions not only moves you out of a stuck position, it also enables you to build stronger alliances through shared responsibilities.
Strategy 2: Learn to Take a Compliment
It always feels good to know that you and the work you do are appreciated by others. Unfortunately, compliments tend to be few and far between, whereas criticism is never in short supply.
Why is there such a discrepancy? A president of a well-known commercial bank notes, “Every time I tell someone they’re doing a good job, they ask me for more money. Then they end up getting mad when I tell them I can’t give them a raise right now.”
The president is caught in a classic Catch-22. No matter what he does, he’ll be the bad guy—either for not noticing and praising employees’ work or for praising it without simultaneously reaching into the company coffers for more funds. Unless he starts handing out raises and bonuses along with his compliments, he can’t win.
The same no-win situation tends to surround performance appraisals. Many managers are reluctant to overpraise their subordinates because of the money demands that inevitably follow. As one shipping supervisor complained, “If I’m doing such a great job, how come I only got a three-percent raise?”
There are two sides to every story. Managers should praise people for a job well done, even if they aren’t planning to follow up with
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financial rewards. Meanwhile, employees should learn how to accept compliments for what they are: a show of appreciation.
Unhook the compliment from the salary demand so that you can feel good about the praise rather than angry about the money. As a professional, you can’t think like an hourly employee who gets something extra for every bit of extra effort. That was a hard line to draw for a successful litigation attorney who left the “fast track” for the “mommy track” when her third child was born.
As a partner, she’d shared equity in the firm’s profits. On the mommy track, she remained a partner in name, but was paid an hourly consulting fee instead. In the sixth year of that arrangement, she took on a big case that demanded more than her usual three-day workweek. She pitched in willingly because her kids were in school all day, and achieved an outstanding result.
Her partners were so thrilled, they celebrated with a champagne lunch, toasted her accomplishments, and praised her abilities to the skies. Within weeks of the verdict, she decided to renegotiate her deal. If she was going to work as hard as the partners, she wanted her equity partnership reinstated. The partners listened, acknowledged her accomplishment, and questioned whether she was ready to commit once again to a full-time partnership. When she balked, they balked. Finally, they compromised by increasing her hourly consulting fee. Although better than nothing, the outcome didn’t please her. “What’s the point of knocking myself out for these guys, when no one appreciates my contribution?” she grumbled.
After this response, you can be sure the partners won’t be so lavish with their praise next time around.
Strategy 3: Pat Yourself on the Back (Occasionally)
Perhaps you’d consider it a luxury to have someone at work say, “Thank you. Good job,” once in a while. If so, you’re not alone.
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Many people feel their work is taken for granted. Certainly, colleagues and bosses can be competitive, and some customers are a royal pain in the you-know-where. But although those people might not be handing out recognition awards on your behalf, you can still feel good about yourself if you recognize and acknowledge your own strengths and achievements.
Despite the common complaint that egotistical braggarts with inflated notions of their own potential fill the workforce, the reverse is often true. Personally, I’ve seen hundreds of self-critical people who constantly undervalue their own abilities and sell themselves short. Because they’re so hard on themselves, they need more praise and approval from others than often is forthcoming. The result, inevitably, is some kind of hostile dependency on the person (often a boss) perceived to be withholding. In fact, however, the problem is that the person is withholding praise from himor herself.
To get out of such a rut, one competent trainer realized she needed a more objective way to evaluate her own capabilities. So she’d read and reread her seminar evaluations from customers, in which she was routinely praised for her patience, good humor, and informative style. Whenever she felt bad about herself, the evaluations would remind her that she truly was a good and competent person.
Another demoralized marketing manager (who was relegated to the gulags during a corporate reorganization) put her abilities in perspective by compiling a portfolio that showcased her greatest achievements. She included newspaper articles describing some of her more successful ventures, and some glowing letters of recommendation from managers and colleagues. Then, she consolidated that information into an impressive resume. Although she knew it might be a year or more before she’d actively job hunt, putting those documents together was very reparative. Whenever she felt isolated in her role, she used the material as a professional mirror that reflected her real skills and accomplishments.
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