Most of us at some time will get into
what I will call an “ugly job”

And in this economy many businesses
are just getting less fun, so there is
more “ugly” to go around.

But if your job is not so bad that
it’s causing lasting psychological
damage to you — it’s just kind of miserable –

Here are some reasons why you are not making a bad decision to stay, and may in fact start to feel good about hanging in there.

1) The best reason to stay:  If the job is serving your desired outcome.

Let me give you a personal example.  My desired outcome was to be the CEO of a public company by the time I was 45. 

At one point in my career I was in a job that I loved.  I loved my boss. My boss loved me.  I loved my team, my team loved me.  We were a high performing team.  It was fun to go to work in the morning.

But one morning I woke up and realized that this job was no longer serving my desired outcome.  (heavy sigh.)

I had “finished” what I needed to do in this job, and realized that spending any more time in it was burning “career capital”.

So I moved into a job that became the ugliest 6 months of my career. 

It was a business that was losing $50M/quarter.  We had to do a major turn around, but my job was to drive a new strategy, re-build a worldwide marketing organization, build and re-inspire a sales channel globally, and personally manage a large global team. 

For the first 3 months, people from pretty much every function and level, from all over the world called to yell at me.

As ugly as this job/situation was, it was serving my desired outcome way more than the job that I was so happy in. (damn!)

So that is the first thing you should think about: What is your long term desired outcome?

And is this ugly job building, neutral, or draining the career capital you need to get your outcome?

You can survive or even enjoy an ugly job much better if you are doing it on purpose, for a good reason.

2) YOU become more impressive in a struggling business.

If your job is ugly because your business is shrinking, this may seem like an automatic reason to jump ship, but be careful as you could be missing out on a great opportunity.

People who only spend time in successful growing businesses don’t have as much to offer as people who have done real work and made a difference in challenging situations.
 
In a growing business, although you can report that you were part of a great success, it’s harder to claim what you specifically did to create that success, vs. what the business did thriving on its own while you were present.

Achieving in a struggling business sets many things in your favor:

1. Less people will be in your way – there will be less competition to take on bigger responsibility.  You can create more opportunity and career capital for yourself than you could in a more crowded, growing, “good” business.
2. You can define the results that you achieved, in a more compelling way – this is what I personally fixed and the great result achieved vs. here’s how we all grew 40%.
3. You develop critical skills for creative thinking, executing with lean resources, and sticking to ruthless priorities.
   This makes you a more effective leader in any business than someone who never needed to be as creative, flexible, and accountable. 

3. Patience has a pay-off.

If you are feeling impatient for a promotion or “something better” look really hard not only at what you are learning in the moment, but what you will learn by sticking around. 

Companies dislike a candidate’s “jumping around” not only because they feel like you might jump again, but because you didn’t stick around long enough to learn the most important stuff, which makes you the most valuable.

I have found that it takes about 3 years to really learn what you can learn in a job.  Year 1 to learn the basics, year 2 to do stuff, and year 3 to live with what you did and either build on it or recover from it. 

It might not take 3 years, but that last phase is the critical one. 

You will be worth more if you stuck around to deal with the consequences of your actions.

Closing thought:
Whatever your situation, be in it On Purpose, and it will feel better and have a bigger payoff.

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Top Brand Myths:

• Brand is a Marketing job.
• Brand is about your “look” – your logo,
  your colors, etc.
• You build your Brand by advertising it
  (and spending lots of money)
• A good Brand = a logo you see all the time

Top Brand Truths:

• Behaviors communicate Brand.
• Consistent behaviors develop Brand Value.
• Brand Value builds Shareholder Value

An example:  Brand = Customer Care

If you want your company to be known for providing excellent customer service – having marketing do an advertising campaign with inspiring examples of great customer care will backfire if:

• You have bottomless voice menus instead of people answering phones
• You have sales reps or support staff that are not trained well enough to know how to serve customers
• You have support processes which are hard to navigate, or punish the customer
• You have a website that is slow, confusing, or does not easily accept feedback
• You do not respond to customer feedback
• You have annoying, complex, internally focused contract/licensing processes

Brand is not just a Marketing Job.

Another example: Brand = Innovation

If you want your company to be known for innovation, and you have marketing produce an exciting video that plays in your lobby, it will backfire if you:

• Make people sit in old, ugly, or generally beige furniture, to watch the video.
• Have an archaic process to greet and manage visitors to your company.
• Do not make room in your budget for new initiatives and ideas that may or may not pay off.
• Are not demonstrating new thinking in customer service, and communication processes.
• Are not using the latest technologies and social media to gather the best thoughts & feedback from the rest of the world.
• Do not have development programs in place to motivate your most talented and creative  employees.

Brand is not just a Marketing Job.

So what should you do?

CEO’s/Companies who want a strong Brand need to:

1. Make it a priority.  Realize it is the only thing your competition can’t eventually copy, and that it’s your most effective insurance for the execution of your strategy.

2. Explicitly connect your Brand and your strategy.  How you execute your strategy is as important and valuable as what you do.

3. Galvanize your team to stand for something – decide/define what the company really stands for.

4. Develop and commit to “brandable behaviors” to support it, for every function in the company, particularly those that touch the outside world in any way.

5. You need to involve employees across the company, and make sure you can sell it “inside” too – or you will never get the consistent behaviors necessary to build the Brand.

6. Incent and measure the whole organization to reinforce those behaviors, so they are consistent.

7. Remember it doesn’t need to cost a lot of money to build a strong Brand. (behaviors are free)

Don’t just delegate it to Marketing (and Marketing is not free!)

Marketing is just one voice in chorus across the whole company who needs to do its part to promote the Brand once it’s defined and committed.

But you can’t just market yourself into a strong brand, you need to behave it.

And you need to behave it consistently across the whole company.

• Behaviors communicate Brand.
• Consistent behaviors develop Brand value.
• Brand value builds Shareholder value

Did I mention that Brand is not just a Marketing job?

More:

Building Your Company’s Brand

Building Your Personal Brand

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The Lead:

You will achieve more success
if you clarify the main point
for all of your communications,
and make it the first thing you say.

(You can stop reading here.)

“Don’t bury the lead” is good age-old advice, but not just for journalists and marketers.

How often do you get an email where the request for you to do something is so obscured or so near the bottom that you never see it?

How often are you in a meeting or a conversation where the point is revealed long after you have lost interest?

It’s an easy trap to fall into:

We all like to share the context of whatever we are talking about so we can show how cleverly we got to that point.

Sometimes we just have interesting stuff that we want to use to “warm up” the audience with before we spring the main point on them. Or we think the main point will have more impact as a closing statement than an opening one.

Or sometimes we are just lazy and disorganized and don’t really know what our main point is in the first place.

It makes a real impact if you force yourself to clarify your one main point and say it up front.

It also saves time!

We waste a lot of time communicating things that just don’t matter.

So it’s also helpful to train the other people around you to do this too!

Some ideas to Lead with the Lead:

(So you’ll get more done, build credibility and save time.)

An email:
Subject: I need your decision on [this issue] by 3pm on Tuesday.

Body:
My recommendation is “NO”.
I’ve provided the information below.

A negotiation:
I often use this approach when I am negotiating.  The fishing and the dancing around really bore and irritate me, so I start with:  This is exactly what I want or this is exactly what I can offer.

That then starts a long discussion where the other party is negotiating and I just keep repeating my main point.  (By the way, this works almost all the time.)

A Yes or No question
YES.
…
or  NO.

If you stay in the habit of burying the lead you will lose opportunities, sacrifice credibility, and burn time.

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Be careful what you measure…

BMW serves as a good example
of a company that measures service vs.
providing it.   But many companies fall
into this trap.  Does yours?

Here is an example of what I mean:

My last car service:

• I felt bullied by the sales and service people when they told me, as they do each time, that I “have to give them a 5” when the survey people call.
• That is not service for me.  It’s gaming the measures for them, (and torturing me).
• In my last car service, they failed to reset some system.  A warning light came on, and I was forced to go back.  It really screwed up my day.
• When they realized it was their fault, I got only a cursory, “sorry about that”.
• After telling them, “you know, when the survey people call, I am not going to give you a 5 this time” and giving them several opportunities to make it better – “is there something you would like to do for me to improve my experience”? – there was no response.
• I then gave the low scores on the phone survey – by the way, the survey taker/process is designed only to ask the questions, not to offer any service when someone is upset.
• Later I got a call from my service guy. It was clear he was forced to call me to follow up on his low score. But the call was about him giving me a hard time because I got him in trouble. (more torture for me)
• As much fun as that was for me, I decided to give them another opportunity.  I said to him – “actually I was going to call you because I need two other [small things], can you help me?”
• Now here was a chance to provide actual service, when no one was watching or measuring.  He assured me he would call me back later that afternoon to let me know if he had the part so I could stop by on my way home.
• I never heard from him again.
  

Do your measures and service processes serve your customers or torture them?

Example:

Do you measure the speed of closing problems?

This is a very typical measure.  But it’s important to understand that this measure can cause you to ignore customer problems, because your service staff is motivated to close out problems quickly, vs. take the time to actually fix them, because spending that time would result in a poor measured result.

So you end up with a backlog of problems that could have been fixed, unhappy customers, and sparkling measures for speed of closing problem reports.

Instead try:

• Measuring the number of problems whose root cause has been resolved.
• Or measure the number of customers who report their problem has been solved to their satisfaction.
• Or look for customers who have multiple open issues, or issues open for long time periods and just call them!

Question:

Is your service staff trained in following service processes or in providing service?

In my example above, at every step, people were correctly following a process, resulting in my getting more and more tortured.

Customer service people who are trained in processes often delight in not-helping customers when they confident they are correctly following the process.

This is particularly infuriating to customers who want to be made to feel like someone at your company cares about the suffering you are inflicting.

Instead try:

• Training people on the right triggers to throw out the process
• Then have them ask “What do you think we should do to make this better for you?”
• And give them the ability to act.

Another idea:

Involve your customer service people in creating great service.

In the BMW example I would have each dealership manage a contest for their service team to get together and come up with three new ideas for how to provide outstanding service.  You could pay $1000 each for the best 10 ideas.

Instead of putting $10k into a survey, where you have sales and service people training the customers to give the right answers, which are of no real use to you anyway, you could be motivating Actual Service!!

The existence of the contest alone would inspire thinking about service, and you get much better ideas when you involve the people who actually do the work in coming up with the best way to improve it.

Getting it Right

Look at what you measure and then look at the dark side of it.
If you were going to game the measures to come out looking good what would you do?
What non-intended result would occur?  Because it will…

People like to make customers happy.  Let them.

At the very least, if you are not serious about providing actual service, don’t torture your customers with surveys and processes that only annoy them, and give you a false sense of your greatness.

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