Do you wish you could attract better job opportunities, and stop wasting time with the undesirable options?
I see far too many professionals caught up spending time with low value opportunities…
These otherwise perfectly well positioned professionals – who are perhaps on the verge of big success – get misled. They end up draining their time, their energy, and much more importantly, their enthusiasm, by going after the wrong positions and wasting time working for the wrong people.
You might ask: What are these “wrong positions” and the “wrong people?”
Defining The Wrong Positions & People To Work For
The wrong positions are dead end jobs where you trade time for money. Jobs where you have no reasonable expectation of moving up or developing more lucrative skills – within the next six months of you starting the position.
That’s right, in the modern world, 6 months is about the right time-frame for some traction. Doesn’t have to be a promotion, but it has to be some level of growth – in responsibility, in scope, in projects, in contact, etc… For a high-value career, where you can move up fast and attain the top 10% of wealth, you actually need to break this six month threshold.
Ultimately, wrong positions are positions where you can’t grow fast. Simple enough… How about the wrong people?
The wrong people to work for are a little harder to define. At the risk of overgeneralizing, they tend to come in three forms:
1. Those lacking ambition
2. “Cheapos”
3. Petty People
Those Lacking Ambition
Small minds generate small results.
This terrible reality is compounded by the fact that in business, you are either growing or dying, turns those who lack ambition into a magnet for disaster.
Bosses, leaders and stakeholders who lack ambition… Those who are trying to maintain and continue in a “sustainable” and peaceful way of just clocking in, clocking out, making paycheck – these people are not meant for the capitalist system. They will lose.
Ambition, by its nature necessitates the individual to yearn for more, take risks, expand and improve. This is why, if you’re working for an ambitious boss, you’ll end up doing things that expand your skill set and give you new experience – to the extent that your boss believes you are useful to them attaining their career goals.
Ambition in a boss is the single biggest trait you should seek if you want to move up fast.
“Cheapos”
I grew up in a family that wasn’t poor by any stretch of the imagination. But my parents were mostly on fixed income, and approached money as a limited commodity.
In fact, when I was young (like 5), I remember having arguments with my parents about things I wanted to buy or do, and being confronted with excuses like “money doesn’t grow on trees” or “we only have so much of it”, to which I always answered “why not go out and get more of it then?”
Making ends meet and economizing is a losers game. This by no means is an invitation to spend frivolously and waste money. It is, on the contrary, an invitation to look at money as a means for making more money! In more primitive terms everyone can understand: “Economizing bad. Investing good.”
Same applies to your boss.
A boss who is focused on keeping budgets tightly controlled, and constantly wasting time on uncovering the cheapest deal, is guaranteed to create an environment where you will lose.
By the way – I’m not saying that the boss will lose. For instance I’ve heard that “the founder of Ikea is a super big cheapo“, who will walk three blocks early in the morning to the convenience store to buy a single can of coke to replace the one he drank from the hotel mini fridge! (The dogged determination is rather impressive…)
Point is: “Cheap” people aren’t always poor. They can run businesses and become ultra successful, and even hilariously wealthy. That’s not the problem.
The problem is, a cheapo boss will tend to see you more as an expense and less as an asset, simply by the nature of their relationship with money. They will over-emphasize the spending, and under-emphasize the earning, because in their mind, the pain of spending is bigger than the joy of earning.
That is a bad deal which you don’t want any part of…
Petty Bosses
You can up-manage a micromanager. You can placate a nagging boss. You can deal with an overbearing jackass. You can control a dumb boss. You can become indispensable and easily gain leverage over an incompetent one.
There are all sorts of personality faults that can be used to your advantage at best, and coped with or worked around at worst, when it comes to bosses.
But there is one personality trait that is so insidiously toxic, and so soul crushingly damaging, that it is a deal-breaker when it comes to working with a boss – or even a stakeholder with authority. That personality trait is pettiness.
Petty people who sweat the small stuff and focus on meaningless, little, naggy details about how you do your work, how you present, what specific minute you arrive and leave work, or what font you use in your emails – make horrible bosses.
They quickly devolve into petty tyrants, and create a damaging environment where all your energy is sapped and you start resenting your work, as well as your position in the hierarchy and your trajectory in life.
It’s also bad for business…
Petty bosses focus on the insignificant details of your work like the specific words you use in reports that no one reads or the colors you pick for the bar graphs on your presentation; causing a colossal waste of time. This also drains mental energy, making you focus on things that don’t matter and generate no new revenue.
Moreover, they start to evaluate your work using proxy metrics that can both be gamed, and be frustrating to game. For instance, they may measure the minutes you spend on the computer, or the number of words you type on your outgoing emails, or how many clients you call on a weekly basis – in an attempt to control your behavior, thinking that this control is going to make you do your job better and generate better results.
It won’t! It never has. It never will.
These are not only the wrong metrics to measure, but they are also counterproductive due to the impact it has on motivation and productivity. Time and again, every study shows that individuals who are intrinsically motivated (see Drive – by Daniel H Pink) outperform the coerced.
The best thing to do with a professional is to get their buy in about your goals, and set them loose to accomplish those goals.
If you work for a petty boss, you not only suffer their antics, but you will be habitually demotivated and associate work with misery. And, to top it off, you’ll build a track record of losses…
This is why, you want to avoid petty individuals like the plague and work for individuals who can take a step back, ignore the small stuff, look the other way on your minor infractions like your excessively long lunch meetings or your early Friday outs, and instead, focus only on the results you generate.
What Next?
Keep these three factors in mind – the unambitious, the cheapo and the petty – when you evaluate your next boss.
If you happen to have a boss who falls into either category, start your exit plan TODAY!
Just as success in your career compounds upward, failure spirals downward. And every single day you spend working for a bad boss hurts your future prospects, and sometimes that damage is even worse than the toxic damage of being unemployed.
Of course, I’m not suggesting you quit out of the blue and figure it out! Instead, I’m suggesting that you make an exit plan, leverage the fact that you are currently employed to get a better job, and actually find more meaningful, more lucrative and more rewarding work where you can build a growing career worthy of envy.
Whether you are unemployed, or employed with a bad boss, my recommendation remains the same. Success in your career is all about generating more options and boosting your market value – constantly.
If you want to grow your options and grow your career, upgrading your pay-grade switching to a high-value career path that keeps on giving more than it takes, start Launch Your Career today.