Be Motivated and Let Your Boss Know It

Published by dale.beermann on July 15th, 2007 in Career Development, Entrepreneurship | 10 Comments

I have my dream job. I'm not too presumptuous to think this means that I know the secret of getting to where I am, but I did make it here and I do suppose that means I did something right. I recently started reading Employee Evolution, and having a somewhat unique perspective on being a twentysomething who isn't frustrated with where they are, I thought the rest of the readers may find my thoughts interesting. Looking back on things, I believe that I made two decisions that had a direct influence on how my career has developed. They have taken me through two different jobs and a failed side project. Today, I'm a co-founder at Sharendipity, a small startup where I'm finally excited to come to work every day.

Both decisions stem from the same basic idea: differentiating yourself. I'm sure that there are hundreds of other posts out there giving career advice about how you should differentiate yourself from your coworkers. However, a lot of the posts I've read talk about actually getting the job. But once you've acquired the job you need to know how to avoid the doldrums of everyday office work. I wish I could say that these points were part of my great plan but they're only afterthoughts:

Retrospective #1: Take your skill set seriously

My first job out of school was at a medical imaging company. I was pretty happy when I got it since I wasn't working for a defense contractor or writing financial software. At the time, it really was the job that I wanted. I'd say that the complaining started about six months into it. It wasn't just me though; everyone complained to each other. We all thought that we weren't getting what was owed to us. Some of us were probably right, but surely not everyone.

One of the problems I saw was that of motivation. I worked with a lot of twentysomethings but only a select few really took their job seriously. Those that didn't take things as seriously spent a lot of time browsing the Web and doing whatever else it is that people do to waste their time at work. However, the select few were doing something else; they were building their skill set and along with it their reputation. They took home a paycheck every other week just like everyone else but they were also on their way to bigger things. Looking back on it, this is a principle that I've unknowingly been applying since long before I started working.

Towards the end of my undergraduate career, I started to realize that I wasn't going to get the job I wanted. I thought I had done the right things; the internship, decent grades, etc.. The problem is that college gives you the skills to start a career, not to improve it, and chances are that it's not the career you really want. So, I went to graduate school. I wanted to study computer graphics and at the time I couldn't think of a better way to learn it. Looking back on things, this may have been the best decision I ever made.

The skills I learned in grad school landed me a job at the medical imaging company doing 3D visualization. I was pretty happy that I'd made it there, but I wasn't satisfied. I wanted to get noticed. So, I took on the hard problems and I taught myself things that would let me take on even harder ones. I never stopped working on my skills. If I was bored at my desk, I'd go look for tutorials on the Web to teach myself new things. The result was that I was able to begin building a reputation for myself based on my abilities (I'm sure some of you will comment that our society is not a meritocracy; I simply disagree. Please read on.).

Still, I wasn't able to build a reputation just by working hard. There were two big differences between those that got noticed for their work and those that didn't. As I mentioned, the first difference is that a select group of people actually did deserve recognition because they worked for it. Still, not all of them received the recognition they deserved. The second big difference was that those that were noticed were the ones that let management know they deserved it.

Retrospective #2: Be vocal

The second important decision that I made was to begin speaking up, not only about my concerns but about my accomplishments as well. At my first company I saw that a lot of people were complaining to management, myself included, but complaining is a bad way to be vocal; it gets interpreted as being petty. An interesting thing about complaining is that if you back up your complaints with your accomplishments it seems to get interpreted as expressing your concerns rather than just complaining; it shows that you care. I realized that, in my limited experience, the best way to be vocal is by being vocal as an expert and you can't do that without a solid skill set.

A Final Thought: Work for small companies, but not too small

As Devin pointed out in an earlier post, working for a company of four people can be really hard. As a first job, I think a company of fifty to a few hundred people would be a good place to start. In a large company, it seems fairly rare that upper management is going to be concerned about the lowest levels of the food chain, and a little less rare that your boss is going to point you out to upper management just because you did something well. Still, it's important to be vocal to the right people and it's easier to do that in a smaller company.

The distance between you and the executives makes a huge difference because they are the ones that will be able to pull you up. If you're working to impress middle management, you'll only go as high as they can go. On the other hand, if you're making yourself known to the higher-ups you'll be able to follow them where they go. If they happen to be entrepreneurs, this really means a lot because when they go start the new company they're going to need good people to help them out. After all, working at a fairly small company, together with a few good decisions, was what eventually landed me my dream job, and I couldn't be happier.