by Jack Welch
But how do you find the right job?
The first answer is simple: you endure the same gummy, time-consuming, up-and-down, iterative process that all working people go through. You take one job, discover what you like and don’t like about it and what you’re good and bad at, and then, in time, change jobs to get something closer to the right fit. And you do that until one day you realize—hey, I’m finally in the right job. I like what I’m doing, and I’m making the trade-offs I’m willing to make.
Yes, trade-offs, because very few jobs are perfect. You may love your work with every fiber of your being but wish the money were better. Or you may only like the work, but love your colleagues. Regardless of its dimensions, the right job for you exists.
My goal in this chapter is to make finding that job a somewhat shorter and, hopefully, less mysterious process.
How?
Luckily, most jobs send out signals about how right they are for you—or not. Those signals apply to jobs at every level of an organization; you can be right out of school, a middle manager trying to move up, or a senior executive looking for a top job. Of course, there are special situations in the job search process that require separate consideration—finding your first job, finding a job if you’re stuck in a situation, and finding a job after you’ve been let go. We’ll consider those at the end of this chapter.
But first, let’s look at the general signals—both good and bad—of job fit.
* * *
IMAGINE YOU ARE CONSIDERING A NEW JOB…
* * *
SIGNAL
TAKE IT AS A GOOD SIGN IF…
BE CONCERNED IF…
* * *
PEOPLE
You like the people a lot—you can relate to them, and you genuinely enjoy their company. In fact, they even think and act like you do.
You feel like you’ll need to put on a persona at work. After a visit to the company, you find yourself saying things like, “I don’t need to be friends with the people I work with.”
* * *
OPPORTUNITY
The job gives you the opportunity to grow as a person and a professional, and you get the feeling you will learn things there that you didn’t even know you needed to learn.
You’re being hired as an expert, and upon arrival, you will most likely be the smartest person in the room.
* * *
OPTIONS
The job gives you a credential you can take with you, and is in a business and industry with a future.
The industry has peaked or has awful economics, and the company itself, for any number of reasons, will do little to expand your career options.
* * *
OWNERSHIP
You are taking the job for yourself, or you know whom you are taking it for, and feel at peace with the bargain.
You are taking the job for any number of other constituents, such as a spouse who wants you to travel less or the sixth-grade teacher who said you would never amount to anything.
* * *
WORK CONTENT
The “stuff” of the job turns your crank—you love the work, it feels fun and meaningful to you, and even touches something primal in your soul.
The job feels like a job. In taking it, you say things like, “This is just until something better comes along,” or “You can’t beat the money.”
* * *
A WORD ABOUT PAY
Before we talk about each of these signals in more detail, a few thoughts about money, the elephant in the middle of the room during any job discussion.
There is nothing worse than a guy who has made some money along the way opining that money shouldn’t matter to people who are picking a job. So I won’t do that. In fact, I’ll tell you that of course money matters—it matters a lot.
When I took my first job, I had several offers, but the one from GE was $1,500 a year more than any other. Coming out of graduate school, I was broke. That $1,500 felt huge, and it made a difference in my decision. A year later, I got my first raise from GE. When I found out that it was exactly the same amount as everyone else in my unit, my fanatical belief in merit pay made me say, “Forget this place!” But I didn’t quit until I found another job at a chemical company in Skokie, Illinois, which was going to pay me 25 percent more. I ultimately ended up being persuaded to stay with GE, but I wouldn’t have if the company hadn’t matched my salary offer in Skokie.
Because there is no way to disentangle money from decisions about job and career, the best you can really do is come to terms with how much money matters to you. Just remember, it can feel very noble to say that you don’t care about being rich; it’s another thing to live with that decision over the years, especially as mortgages and tuitions start to pile up.
There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting money or feeling indifferent to it or anything in between. But if you’re not honest with yourself about those feelings during the first years of your job journey, you’ll end up doing a lot of second-guessing later.
Now on to the signals of job fit, which have been listed in no particular order, since they all count.
PEOPLE
That said, the first signal concerns people, because everything else about a job can be perfect—the task, pay, location—but if you do not enjoy your colleagues on a day-to-day basis, work can be torture.
This may seem obvious, but I am surprised how often I meet people who have taken jobs in companies where they do not share the organization’s overall sensibilities. By that, I mean a range of values and personality traits and behaviors, from how intense people act, to how comfortable they are with confrontation, to how candid they are about performance, to how much they laugh at meetings.
If you join a company where your sensibilities don’t fit in, you’ll find yourself putting on a persona just to get along. What a career killer—to fake who you are every day.
I know a woman—we’ll call her Claire—who is an MBA who became a manager for a nonprofit after graduation. At first, Claire thought she had the perfect job—she could use her business skills to run an organization and still “make the world a better place,” to use her words.
But several years later, Claire was at her wit’s end. Her colleagues made every decision at a snail’s pace. “It doesn’t make any difference if we are picking where to have lunch or coming up with a marketing plan,” she recounted. “Nobody can ever feel ‘not heard.’ Everybody has to reach consensus. It’s driving me crazy! This organization has all the right intentions, but nothing ever gets done.”
Finally, Claire decided that she could no longer tolerate the sensibilities mismatch she felt in a nonprofit environment, and she began to search for a consulting job in the private sector. She identified one firm in particular that was known for its pro bono work, and she consoled herself with the notion that she could work there and still keep one foot (or toe) in the “virtuous” world.*
The problem was, the firm wouldn’t hire her. “You haven’t worked at the same speed or with the same kind of intensity we require,” they told her. “We need someone who can hit the ground running.” Basically, they said, “We need someone like us.”
Claire is still at her nonprofit job, resigned to stay there and make the best of it. The sad thing is, she said, “I found ‘my people’ at that consulting firm,” but it was too late. “They just didn’t see I could be like them.”
You too need to find “your people,” the earlier in your career the better. Even if a job seems ideal in every other way, without the presence of shared sensibilities, it’s not ideal for you.
OPPORTUNITY
The second job-fit signal concerns opportunity, as in, how much does the job offer you to grow and learn?
Without doubt, it can be very appealing to take a job where you suspect you will have no problem hitting it out of the park. Surefire success has its rewards—in the soul and the pocketbook.
But any job you take should feel somewhat challenging going in. It should make you think, “I
can do most of the work, but there are certainly skills and knowledge this job requires that I don’t have yet. I’m going to learn something here.”*
In other words, any new job should feel like a stretch, not a layup.
Why? Because stretching, growing, learning—all these activities keep you engaged and energized. They have the effect of making work more interesting, and they keep your head in the game.
Yes, a stretch job increases the possibility of you screwing up. That’s why you should also make sure you join a company where learning is truly a value, growth for every employee is a real objective, mistakes aren’t always fatal, and there are lots of people around whom you can reach out to for coaching and mentoring.
Incidentally, stretching doesn’t—and shouldn’t—just happen at the beginning of a person’s career.
Take the case of Robert Bagby, who runs the brokerage firm A.G. Edwards. Bob says that he has twice taken on real stretch jobs—twenty-six years apart. The first time was when he began as a broker for another firm in Kansas City. The second time was in 2001, when he was named chairman and CEO of A.G. Edwards.
“At first, being a broker—my God, I had no idea what I was doing or why I had taken the job,” Bob said recently. “The phone was like a dangerous weapon. I was afraid to touch it.” Within a few months, though, Bob had learned enough new skills to start to excel. He came to love the brokerage business, and soon enough, his territory expanded and promotions started rolling in.
He didn’t feel out of his element again until the A.G. Edwards board picked him for the top position.
“It was that same feeling again,” Bob says. “There’s no pretraining to be a CEO. All your past history, and all your past successes, they don’t really matter anymore. You have to earn your respect all over again.”
Bob’s promotion to CEO couldn’t have come at a more challenging time. The Internet bubble had burst, and the market was collapsing after 9/11. Bob had to oversee the firm’s first workforce reduction and redirect its culture.
“I’d say it took a year for me to get on solid footing again,” he said. “Things are really back to normal—it’s fun now.”
Bob’s story, like so many others, illustrates that you shouldn’t be afraid of a job that feels too big at the outset. If you’re any good—which is why you were hired or promoted in the first place—you’ll grow into it, and be better for the experience.
OPTIONS
If the opportunity signal is about finding a job that allows you to grow and stretch while you are there, the options signal is about finding a job that helps you if you leave.
Working for some companies is like winning an Olympic medal. For the rest of your career, you are associated with great performance and success. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company is like that. Because it is known to hire the world’s top MBAs for their intelligence and intensity, and because of its reputation for intensive training, its alumni always get attention in the job market. By the same token, when I was in my early days of hiring in Plastics, we were always trying to hire people away from DuPont, and we considered it a real coup when we did. It may not have been true, but we had it in our heads that if you got a DuPont engineer, you were getting the most cutting-edge knowledge of processes and techniques.
Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and Johnson & Johnson also have enormous “employee brands,” which is to say, their people get a real credential just by working there for a few years. Even putting my biases aside, GE is also in this category. Today, five of its former employees are CEOs in the Dow Jones 30. Many more are currently CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and thousands more are executives at companies around the world.*
Obviously, you cannot let the employee brand phenomenon totally drive your job decisions. You could end up at a highly respected company only to discover your boss is terrible or your job responsibilities are limited. But these kinds of situations are less likely at the kind of good companies we’re talking about.
You may be thinking that I am writing off small companies with this advice. Not true. Some small companies offer experiences and exposure that cannot be beat. You get a chance to manage people earlier in your career, run projects or units sooner, not to mention negotiate acquisitions and work more closely with the CEO and the board. When you’re ready to move on, you won’t have the credential of a prestigious company, but you will have a lot of mileage. That really counts at all kinds of places—especially other small companies, venture capital firms, and entrepreneurial start-ups.
There is a second part of the options signal.
Some companies open—or close—doors for you because of their reputation. Others do that because of their industry.
Back in the 1960s, being in plastics was a ticket to the future. The industry was booming, with new applications being developed every day. In the ’70s, because of the energy crisis, you had job offers coming out of your ears if you had a degree or work experience in geology. And of course, people who got involved in high technology and finance in the late ’80s and ’90s had a good, long run of it.*
At speaking engagements, I am often asked what industries I would recommend to college grads and MBAs today. I tell them to look into companies doing business at the intersection of biology and information technology. And I suggest they learn everything they can about China because it will permeate every aspect of business in their lifetimes.
This reminds me of something said by a very successful executive I know of who served in the air force before he began his business career. He is frequently contacted by headhunters, and he says his first questions about a potential job are just like those he asked as a fighter pilot assessing situational awareness.
“When I was on a mission, I would always ask, ‘What’s our altitude? What are the weather conditions ahead? Where is the enemy?’ I think it’s the same thing in business,” he says. “You need to know the same kinds of things about a job or an industry. Are you getting yourself into a turnaround situation? Are the economics fatal? How tough is the competition? Has the industry peaked, or is it just getting off the ground? Are the expectations of me reasonable or am I walking into a time bomb?”
Now, you can ask these questions and find that the job you like has a problematic future. The airline industry has very tough economics and relatively low pay, especially for managerial positions. The hospitality and publishing industries are likewise not very flush.
Still, some people just love the romance of air travel, the adventure of the hotel business, and the excitement of creating books. If you are one of them, of course you should enter these fields; just do so with your eyes open. Every job you take is a gamble that could increase your options or shut them down.
OWNERSHIP
A few years ago, a manager I know was visited in her office by the son of a business acquaintance. He was about to graduate from Harvard, and he needed career advice about two worlds she was very familiar with—investment banking and management consulting.
The student, hair combed neatly and dutifully dressed in a suit, came prepared with a list of questions. What was the difference, he asked, between the major consulting firms? What kind of assignments could he expect during his first year on Wall Street? And so on.
The manager had worked in consulting before joining a consumer goods company and had many acquaintances in investment banking, and so she answered each question thoroughly. She watched as the senior took careful notes, but she could tell he wasn’t particularly curious about anything she said.
In fact, after a half hour or so, he thanked her politely and stood to leave.
As he was doing so, he tucked his pad inside a folder, which the manager noticed was completely covered with intricate drawings of cars.
“Wow, those are amazing! Who did them?” she asked.
Suddenly, the senior was filled with energy. “I did—I’m always drawing cars,” he said. “My dorm room is covered with posters and paintings of cars—I subscribe to every car magazine! I’
ve been obsessed with cars since I was five years old. My whole life, I’ve wanted to be a car designer. That’s why I’m always going to car shows and NASCAR races. I went to Indianapolis last year—I drove there!”
The manager shook her head in disbelief.
“You’ve got to go work in Detroit,” she said. “Why in the world are you thinking about consulting or banking?”
The senior deflated as quickly as he had come to life. “My dad says the car business is not what I went to Harvard for.”
For the next few minutes, the manager tried to change the student’s mind, but she quickly realized she was getting drawn into family dynamics that were none of her business. She was not surprised a few months later when she bumped into the young man’s father and he proudly told her that his son was working eighty-hour weeks at a Wall Street firm.
Look, over the course of our careers, we all take jobs to meet the needs or dreams of other people—parents, spouses, teachers, or classmates.
That’s not necessarily wrong, unless you don’t realize you’re doing it. Because working to fulfill someone else’s needs or dreams almost always catches up with you. I know someone who literally became a doctor because his entire childhood his mother—a Polish immigrant who loved the American Dream—introduced him by saying, “And here’s my doctor!” He didn’t hate the profession, but you’ve never met anyone more eager to retire.
Similarly, there are countless stories of people who take jobs because their spouses want them to travel less. Then what invariably happens is that the compromising partner loses out on a promotion because of curtailed mobility. Sometimes, blame gets flung everywhere. Other times, it just sits there and simmers.