1964 Visibility, Part 1 - an unwritten book

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

I was cleaning out the den file cabinet, and found some notes I had made on a book I'd planned to someday write. I have no memory of my impetus. It must have been a very long time ago, because the topic was apparently important to me then, but is nothing but a passing interest now.

The topic was how to get ahead at work. You don't get promotions and raises from doing a good job, or by making a contribution. If I learned nothing else during my years with the company, I learned that. You can do a mediocre job, and still get rewarded primarily for being visible.

I know this is true. I did ok with The Company, but if I'd been more visible, or more accurately, more visible in more generally approved ways, I'd have done better. Poor Jay was a superstar among his coworkers, highly respected, he was the source of all knowledge, the person to go to for answers and assistance. His own work was almost perfect ("almost" only because he would always stubbornly sacrifice schedules to quality). But he was otherwise completely invisible, and constantly passed over.

Ok. From my notes, these are the things you have to do to get the rewards:

1. Be visible.
2. Be indispensable to management.
3. Take credit for everything you reasonably can, blow your own horn.
4. Get on the right projects, avoid the dogs. All you need is one important project that you can then use to avoid dogs, because "...it will impact this big important, blah blah...".
5. Stay educated, take classes whenever they're offered.
6. Stay aware of everything around you - future projects, office politics, etc. Be the one in the know.
7. Produce weekly accomplishment (not activity) reports, and request frequent 1-1s with management. A few months before an evaluation, request an interim (how am I doing so far, and how can I improve?) evaluation.
8. Notice areas for improvement, and make formal suggestions.
9. Do not work overtime, ever!, except in rare cases when management has requested it for a specific purpose. Then volunteer. Constant overtime, accepting more work than you can complete in a workday, smacks of poor time-management, and leaves you unavailable in a crisis.
10. Don't step on the toes of loud equally-visible people. Be diplomatic.
11. Arrive every morning at the earliest "start time", but don't come in earlier than that. The people who make decisions are often early, and will notice you, but coming in too early means either you're working overtime (see #9), or you will be perceived as leaving early. Try to walk in from the parking lot with, or a few feet ahead of, your manager.
    

Of all of these, "Be visible" is the most important.

(I'm not saying I was so wonderful. I did ok. I could have done a lot better had I taken my own advice, but a lot of this stuff requires a cynicism I don't have. I respected myself too much. I did 2, 5, 7, 8, and 9.)

Of the things you could be assigned to or volunteer for, some are higher visibility than others, and therefore get you more goodies than others. In order of decreasing visiblity:

Visible

• Presenting
• Reporting
• Tracking (planning, scheduling, resource management)
• Innovation
• Problem solving
• Productivity
• Contributing to quality-ensuring procedures
• Teamwork
• Teaching
• Enabling others
• Customer relations

Invisible

If everything you're doing is in the bottom six, you're stuck.

You might say, "Hey, I'm in a customer relations department! I'm very visible to my immediate management chain." Fine. But in a large US corporation, sales is highest on the budget and passing-out-goodies ladder, and customer service is the lowest. You might be the biggest frog, but you're in the smallest pond.

Copyright mine. If you want to write the book, I'll be happy to consult.
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