Fire Your Boss (6 page)

Over the more than twenty years I’ve been coaching people, I’ve learned that recording your ideas and plans on paper is essential. Writing everything down not only offers a chance to refine your thoughts, but also gives you a map you’ll be able to refer to in the future. Whenever I counsel entrepreneurs, I tell them their business plan is vital, not just because it helps focus thinking and efforts, but because it provides a blueprint for future success and failure. The same is true for putting your own work plan in writing. For instance, by noting the skills and achievements you need to remain a viable candidate for alternate paths, as well as the ways you’re planning to acquire those skills and achievements, you can continually refer back to them, to ensure you’re still on course and your chosen techniques are working.

The final form your written work plan takes is entirely up to you. It can remain just the page on which you’ve recorded your thoughts and ideas. Or it could be handwritten in a small notebook you carry about, or recorded as a word-processing document, or as an outline on your laptop or PDA. Paul, for example, kept his work plan as a word-processing document on his laptop computer. Jenny, on the other hand, handwrote a “mission statement,” and kept it on her refrigerator at home so she could see it every morning. The most important thing is that your plan spells out your self-definition, the alternate paths available to you, the skills you need to add, and the way you intend to add them, all in a form to which you can repeatedly refer.

If you remember back to chapter 1, Wendy Rosenfeld had come to see me about buying an apartment. When she told me how her work life had involved repeated job changes and moves based on the needs of her boss, a politician, I told her she needed to fire the congressman and elect herself as boss of her work life.

Wendy began by developing her own job description. Although in the course of her work Wendy had done everything from answering letters to managing an office, she realized that her most recent role had been her most valuable: putting together the congressman’s monthly mailing to constituents. She and I worked on developing a general description of exactly what that involved. After removing the jargon and focusing on the verbs, we came up with this: “I gather, compile, and present information of interest to a specific audience in an attractive package that also presents my client or employer in the best possible light.”

Wendy and I then brainstormed about other roles that fit her self-generated description. She also spoke with her sister. Together we decided that besides putting together constituent newsletters, Wendy could prepare promotional brochures for companies or organizations, put together annual reports, or develop sales materials for manufacturers.

Next, Wendy gave herself a performance review. Some quick informal research on Capitol Hill showed her that she was earning about the same amount as the other congressional staffers who put together constituent mailings, and that her career had progressed at a comparable rate. However, a quick visit to the career office at her alma mater showed her that she was earning less than she would if she were putting together almost any other kind of promotional material, whether brochures, annual reports, or sales materials. All of those areas would also offer a quicker pace of salary advancement. The only way she would be paid less or be on a slower track was if she were preparing fund-raising materials for not - for - profit agencies or organizations. Those other areas put more emphasis on the ability to use more sophisticated graphics.

Wendy then defined her alternate courses. She realized she could earn more, quicker, by working in corporate communications. Alternatively, she could work in development for not - for - profit agencies or organizations and have greater stability than in politics or in corporate communications. Wendy decided to take a night class at a community college to learn a page-layout program and investigated taking some graphic-design courses in order to add the skills she needed to keep both her options open.

Finally, Wendy put her work plan in writing by preparing an outline on her computer, noting her job description, the alternate paths open to her, the skills she needed to add, and how she planned to go about acquiring them. She printed out the outline and hung it over her desk at home. (See the box on page 44: Wendy Rosenfeld’s Work Plan.) When she brought me a copy of her outline, I congratulated her on firing her boss.

If you’ve followed the steps I’ve outlined in this chapter, you deserve my congratulations as well. If you do nothing else I talk about in this book other than this first step, you’ve nonetheless made tremendous progress. By firing your boss and hiring yourself instead, you’ve done what most Americans dream of but don’t believe possible: you’ve taken control of your work life. From now on, you will be the one who determines your work future. That’s nothing to sneeze at. But to go on and lead the life of your dreams you need to take the next step: kill your career. If you’re ready to seize your own happiness, move on to chapter 3.

MARK TAPLEY IS
no longer depressed. For years he had felt that he was living a catch-22. Having grown up in a very poor home with an absentee father, he was determined to provide the kind of life for his children that he himself hadn’t experienced. An accountant, Mark labored at his profession, moving up to partner in a large firm and earning enough to buy a lovely sprawling home with a pool for his family. He could send his kids to the best private schools and summer camps. Unfortunately, he was a stranger to them. Mark was spending so much time at the office to provide for his children that he was depriving them of a father in the process. It was a cycle he couldn’t figure out how to break…until this past year. Now he’s home for dinner every night and spends every weekend with the family. He and his wife have had to cut back on the summer camps, but now they’reall going away together for two weeks in the summer. All it took for Mark to break the cycle was for him to take the second step in my workplace philosophy: he killed his career and got a job instead. It will work for you as well.

There is a way to get more satisfaction from life.

You can make a difference in the world.

It’s possible to achieve the personal and spiritual fulfillment you’ve always wanted.

Ironically, it’s by giving up the notion of career that you’ll actually accomplish the goal that careers were created to meet.

The period from the end of World War II until the mid-1960s was an age of both prosperity and conformity. Whether he actually wore a gray flannel suit or went to work in overalls, and whether he lived in the city, the country, or the rapidly growing suburbs, your father probably strived to put physical as well as emotional distance between himself and his work. That was certainly true for the father of Sean Shanahan, the graphic designer I wrote of back in chapter 1.

Sean’s father saw his home as a refuge from his job with the telephone company and signaled, both verbally and nonverbally, that he really didn’t want to talk about work once he came home. Sean’s mom was a full-time homemaker who really did turn their house in Brooklyn into a sanctuary and refuge. For Sean’s parents there was a sharp divide between work life and personal life.

If you’re like most of my clients, you grew up, like Sean, seeing the downside to this divided life. Perhaps your dad seemed not to like what he did for a living. Sean believed his father was unhappy working as an executive with the telephone company. Maybe you sensed your mom had ambitions that weren’t fulfilled. Sean believed his mother would have gone to nursing school had she not started a family so young. Most of my clients consciously set out to be different from their parents. Whether male or female, they — and probably you — went looking for meaningful work, work that was satisfying, work that made a difference.

Instead of getting a job — which was what your dad called work — I’ll bet you looked for a career. Instead of feeling you had to choose between fulfilling parenthood and fulfilling work, you probably decided you could have both. Instead of work being a means to an end, you wanted it to become an end in itself. By taking a different approach than your parents, you believed, you would lead a more emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually rewarding life. That was what Sean believed. For most of his working life, he assiduously chose “art over commerce,” as he put it, trying to reap psychological rather than material rewards.

However, that’s not the way things worked out for him, nor for most of my clients. Maybe, like them, you succeeded in avoiding the sharply divided life of your parents. But unfortunately, if your experience was anything like my clients’ experiences, it turned out to be a life that was mostly work. Because you were pursuing something “meaningful” or something you found “rewarding,” you tended to spend most of your day at work. Nine to five, five days a week is for those who are punching a clock, you thought. You have a calling, and so you’re at the office from eight to eight, and you bring work home on the weekend too. Besides, there’s now the not-so-subtle pressure from your boss to stay on the job until your work (and the work of the two people who were laid off) is done.

When you are home, in an effort to make the most of your limited time together you schedule “quality” family events. You, your partner, and maybe even your children coordinate schedules via cell phone during the day, instantly compensating for late meetings at the office or impromptu playdates after school. On the weekend your life is a whirlwind of home repairs, chauffeuring kids, and taking care of the things you didn’t have the time for during the week.

What’s really troubling, however, isn’t that you’re so tired or that your life is so hectic. The real trouble is that your work isn’t as satisfying as it should be. It’s certainly not rewarding enough to justify the sacrifices you’re making in your personal life.

Sean’s dad had a job that might not have been “meaningful,” but he was home for dinner with the family every night and could spend Sunday afternoon playing catch with the kids. His mom might have had to let go of some of her ambitions, but she was able to pick her children up after school every day and make a big family dinner on Sundays. Sean feels he has no personal life to speak of. He finds himself working even longer hours, isn’t earning as much as he believes he should, and has no job security. Earlier this year Sean confessed to me, “I’ll never be Ward Cleaver, but I do envy some of the lifestyle of my parents.” I told him he wasn’t the only one.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not calling for a return to the
Leave It to Beaver
lifestyle…unless that’s what you want. Instead, I’m suggesting you take a different approach to work, one that offers a better chance of getting both the financial and psychological rewards you’ve wanted. What’s that approach? I’m suggesting you stop living to work and instead start working to live. Rather than looking at work as an end in itself, view it as a means to an end: a way to generate the money you need to have a happy life. It’s time to kill your career and get a job instead. (See the box on page 51: Definitions and Earliest Known Use.)