Winning

by Jack Welch

  The hard reality is that there is no foolproof way out of the ownership bind. Especially as you get older, life and relationships can be complicated. Very few people have the total freedom and independence to take a job just for themselves. There are tuitions to pay, spouses with their own careers, and yes, inner voices saying what you should do with your life, even when you’re long past being a college senior.*

  That is why the only real defense against job ownership back-firing is to be explicit with yourself about the person (or people) for whom you are taking your job.

  Over the course of your career, your Detroit will surely call you at one point or another. If you can go, that’s great. If you can’t, make peace with the reasons why.

  WORK CONTENT

  This signal comes last in our chart, but it could just as easily come first.

  Every job has bad days or rough periods, and yes, there will be times when you work mainly to make ends meet. But in the very best job scenario, you love the work—at least something about it. It just excites you. The customers, the travel, the camaraderie at the Tuesday morning sales meeting, whatever—something about the job makes you want to come back day after day. Sometimes it is the sheer challenge of the job that turns your crank.

  Take the case of Joel Klein, the chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. (I’ve gotten to know Joel through my work with the school system’s Leadership Academy for new principals.) It is no exaggeration to say that Joel could have any number of prestigious, high-paying jobs as a corporate general counsel or CEO. As the assistant attorney general in charge of the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division in the 1990s, he took on Microsoft in a highly publicized battle, and later was chairman and CEO of the U.S. division of Bertelsmann, the global media company.*

  There is no glamour and very limited glory in the school reform job Joel accepted in 2002. It goes without saying he took a massive pay cut to become chancellor, but in taking the job, Joel also agreed to deconstruct an insanely bureaucratic system with about a million students in more than 1,300 schools and a $15 billion budget. He immediately encountered entrenched interests, including fierce union leaders who were hell-bent on keeping the status quo, but in the face of that, he remained steadfast. Virtually every day, Joel appears in one of the New York papers, and because everyone has an opinion on education, he is often the subject of editorials, both laudatory and critical.

  Joel could not love his work more.

  “Sometimes I ask myself, ‘What am I doing here? I could be eating a very nice, civilized lunch in a corporate dining room right now, and instead I’m in a high-crime school trying to get staff to work together to enforce our discipline code,’” Joel once told me. “But I grew up in public housing in Queens, and I’m a product of inner city New York public schools. I owe a lot to the principals and teachers who invested their lives in the system and changed my life and the vision of my opportunities. I’m lucky enough to be in a position to give something back. I don’t want to sound pompous, but this work feels more important than anything I’ve ever done.”

  On a much smaller scale, I know what he means about a job feeling meaningful. My work always felt really significant, even when (in retrospect) it was hardly that. I’ll never forget when I was a teaching assistant at the University of Illinois and I was asked to present my PhD thesis on dropwise condensation to an international conference on heat transfer that was being held in Boulder, Colorado. You would have thought I was in the running for the Nobel Prize. I was a nervous wreck before my lecture and practiced for weeks. When the big day arrived, I spoke—and received the polite applause I deserved. That didn’t stop me from rushing to the phone to call my mother in a state of complete exhilaration.

  To tell you the truth, I still remember the excitement of that day!

  Luckily, finding a job that touches your core is not hard. Such jobs are everywhere—every piece of work has the potential, since it only has to feel important to you. Shortly after I retired from GE, we were in Montreal, eating dinner at a small French restaurant, where we fell into conversation with a fellow tourist. Within a few minutes, we learned that this fellow was “the first mercury-free dentist in Quechee, Vermont.” You could feel the pride bursting out of his chest. I didn’t want to suddenly start a second career as a dentist, but his enthusiasm sure was infectious.

  As I said before, every job has its ups and downs. But if a job doesn’t excite you on some level—just because of the stuff of it—don’t settle. And don’t worry either about knowing when you find a job with meaning.

  You’ll feel it.

  THOSE SPECIAL CASES

  The job fit signals can be applied across pretty much all job situations, but a couple of special cases call for more specific discussion.

  The first is finding your first real job. For a few lucky people, this process is relatively straightforward. They’ve got great grades from a quality school and some impressive work experience along the way. These new graduates, out of college or recent MBAs, usually have plenty of options, and I hope the signals in this chapter will be helpful in choosing wisely.*

  Many people, however, do not get their pick of first job assignments. Their school record is only OK, their job experience not particularly special. That puts them in a position where they have to sell themselves to an audience that ranges from skeptical to downright negative.

  If you’re in that category, my strong advice is just be real and come clean.

  There is nothing less appealing than an applicant with a so-so record overselling himself with a lot of bravado or overeagerness. It’s just so phony, and experienced managers can smell the fakery a mile away.

  The best thing you can do is tell your true story. “OK, I know my grades aren’t that great,” you might say. “I spent a lot of time playing intramural sports and, to be honest, a lot of time with my friends. I definitely could have studied more, but I had other priorities, which probably weren’t the best ones. The reason you should still hire me is because I never give up on a challenge, I work hard, I believe in your product, and I admire your company, and I know I can contribute here.”

  While you’re telling your true story, act like your true self. If you are generally outspoken and funny, don’t act stiff and serious during your interviews. If you are a nerd, don’t try to act slick. The company should know what it’s getting, and you should show them, so you see how they react. I know of an MBA who tripped over a doorjamb on her way into an interview with three executives at a prestigious consulting firm. After scrambling back to her feet, she shook hands with her interviewers, saying, “And I’m Grace, the ballet teacher.”

  None of them cracked a smile, nor did they try to put her at ease after what was obviously an embarrassing moment. She ended up being offered the job; she declined.

  “They saw the real me, and I saw the real them,” she recalls.

  My main point is, when going after your first job, live in your own skin and be comfortable there. Authenticity may be the best selling point you’ve got.

  The second special job situation is when you are stuck in a position and see no way out. There are a slew of ways to get stuck in a job. There is nowhere to move up, since your boss isn’t going anywhere, and he has no interest in pushing you for a job in another division. You’ve been passed over for a promotion, and you’ve been told you are fine where you are, but you’re not moving on anytime soon. Your company promotes people only after a certain period of time—which is a long way off. You love your job but the money is bad, or the money is great but your job is lousy.

  This list alone could make you want to scream.

  And that’s the problem with being stuck. Frustration builds and builds until people generally do something stupid—they quit.

  Don’t do that. It is much, much easier to get a job from a job. I would even go further and say, not only should you stay put, you should work harder. Nothing will get you a new job faster than terrific performance in
your old one.

  Gerry Roche, senior chairman of Heidrick & Struggles, and one of the most respected headhunters in the United States, says that even if you feel stuck, if you are performing well, two outside observers are likely to know—headhunters and competitors.

  “Great performers are like the masts of the tall ships,” Gerry said to me recently. “We can see them over the horizon, and we are always trying to bring them in—to our port.”

  By contrast, the worst kind of job seekers are those Gerry called “perennials.”

  “These types are never moving up fast enough or they can’t stand their jobs, so they are always out there with their résumés and their phone calls, hounding us or hounding companies to hire them,” he said. “These people pretty quickly get themselves labeled.”

  Obviously, if you’re stuck, you need to put feelers out there to let people know you are thinking of moving. Just don’t make it your purpose in life, or you’ll undermine your effort, and worse, you’ll take your eye off your best hope for getting unstuck—your performance.

  The third special case is finding a job after you’ve been let go. Last year, I had lunch with a former GE executive (let’s call him Charlie) who had once worked for me in a staff position before moving into operations. After several promotions, he landed in a job where he struggled for a couple of years to meet his numbers. Finally, in his early fifties, he was let go.

  Charlie’s career, however, hardly ended. After a few months, he became a partner at a high-technology company, starting part-time and quickly being drawn into a full-time role. From there, he was asked to join several corporate boards, and he also started teaching at a well-known business school.

  Five years after being let go, he told me, his work was more fulfilling than ever.

  I asked him how he’d come back so strong.

  “Listen, I screwed up,” he said. “My boss and I had agreed to clear-cut objectives, and I missed them. I waited too long to let go of two direct reports who weren’t delivering. I didn’t take costs out fast enough when the downturn was approaching. I was just too optimistic.*

  “I told my wife I was going to get it, and I did.”

  Charlie’s rational response floored me because usually after people have been let go, they become very defensive.

  Defensive—and depressed.

  Both conditions, albeit natural and common, are what kill you when you go out to get a job again. An employer can pick up low self-esteem across the room, and people want to hire winners.

  But how do you act like a winner when you feel like a loser?

  I asked Charlie that question.

  His approach, he said, was to draw on what he called his “reservoir of self-confidence”—his strong family and his store of positive feelings about himself and his achievements in the past. He used that internal capital to stay connected with business colleagues and to network for new opportunities. He also used it to stay active socially and in community activities.

  “At first, maybe people were looking at me differently and talking about me because I wasn’t working anymore,” Charlie said. “I tried not to pay attention to that.”

  The goal, if you’ve been let go, is to stay out of what I have always referred to as “the vortex of defeat,” in which you let yourself spiral into inertia and despair.

  One reason why people often get sucked into the vortex is that they wait too long before they start looking for another job. This is a tricky matter. It makes a lot of sense to take some time off after you are let go—say, a month or two—to reflect and compose yourself. On the other hand, the longer you wait, the more likely you are to start doubting yourself, and the more likely it is that prospective employers will think something is wrong. You just don’t want any hole in your résumé to be too gaping.*

  Prospective employers will, of course, ask you about why you left your last job. Come right out and say you were asked to move on. Every manager in the world knows what “I resigned” or “I left for personal reasons” really means.

  Just as important, take responsibility for your departure, like my friend Charlie did in our conversation. His ownership of the situation made him infinitely more appealing than the typical kind of defense I heard a hundred times. “My boss was really difficult” or “They don’t care about customers as much as I do” or my favorite, “It was all politics there. It never mattered what you did; all that mattered was who you knew.”

  Compare that to Charlie’s approach—even recognizing that he is on the far end of rationality! When he got back into the job market, he didn’t blame a soul but himself. He told interviewers what he learned from the experience, and what he would do differently in his next job. “I’m determined to be more externally focused from now on,” he said, “and I will definitely move faster on underperforming people. One of my objectives is to prove I don’t make the same mistakes twice.”

  If you’ve been let go, you never want to present yourself with a swagger. But you do need to project realism and optimism. Draw on your reservoir of confidence. Say what happened, say what you’ve learned, and never be afraid to ask, “Just give me a chance.”

  Someone will.

  Due to my vintage, I belong to a very small club—people who have spent their whole careers at one company. When I got my degree from graduate school, in 1961, that was the norm. Today, statistics show that college graduates change companies multiple times in their first decade out and newly minted MBAs do the same.

  I can’t say if that’s good or bad, it just is. People are very hungry to hurry up and find the right job.

  Here are some thoughts, though.

  First, finding the right job takes time and experimentation and patience. After all, you have to work at something for a while before you know if you can even do it, let alone if it feels right.

  Second, finding the right job gets easier and easier the better you are. Maybe that sounds harsh, but it’s just reality. At the end of the day, talented people have their pick of opportunities. The right jobs find them.

  So if you really want to find a great job, choose something you love to do, make sure you’re with people you like, and then give it your all.

  If you do that, you’re sure to have a great job—and you’ll never really work another day in your life.

  Getting Promoted

  * * *

  SORRY, NO SHORTCUTS

  THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER of this book was about finding your right job. This chapter is about getting your next one.

  Now, not everyone in business wants to get a bigger and better job, but a lot of people do. If you’re among them, this chapter is for you, whether you are hungry for your first promotion or your fifth.

  I was there once. When I started my career at age twenty-four, I had no idea where I was going or how I was going to get there, but I was filled with ambition.

  The drive to make something of myself had started pretty young. I had my first job at age ten, as a caddy at a country club near my hometown of Salem, Massachusetts. Through high school and college, I held one job after another, from bartender to teaching assistant. By the time I graduated from the University of Illinois with a PhD in chemical engineering in 1961, I was eager for the real thing.

  The job GE offered me seemed like a good deal. I would be working in the lab developing a new plastic, and if it succeeded, I saw a chance to get out in the field and sell it. Best of all, the job was in Massachusetts, and it paid the most of any offer—$10,500.*

  Believe me, I wasn’t thinking about a career at that point. If I had, I would have surely taken the offer I had received from Exxon, where a chemical engineering degree really meant something. But forget it—Exxon was in Texas! At that point in my life, the fact that I had gone to school in Illinois already made me feel like I had traveled halfway around the world.

  Over the next thirteen years at GE, I got four promotions. Each one felt terrific. I liked having more responsibility, making bigger deals, building bigger plants,
and managing more people. It was really only in 1973 that it dawned on me that I had a shot at the company’s top job—and that I wanted it too. In an act of complete cockiness, I put that down on my performance evaluation under the question about career goals.

  Eight years later, I got my wish.

  So, how did that happen? How does a person get promoted?

  The first answer is luck. All careers, no matter how scripted they appear, are shaped by some element of pure chance.

  Sometimes a person just happens to be in the right place at the right time, and he meets someone—at an airport or a party, for instance—and a career door swings open. We’ve all heard stories like that.

  Sometimes we don’t even know luck is good until well after the fact.

  An old golfing friend of mine, Perry Ruddick, remembers being sorely disappointed when he was passed over for a promotion that was in France early in his career at the investment bank Smith Barney. He thought he had missed out on his best shot at making a name for himself in the company, not to mention the glamour of Paris in 1966.

  As luck would have it, two years after Perry would have left for the assignment abroad, another position at the company came open in New York, and he got it. In his new role, Perry, then thirty-two, got to run the company’s investment banking operations, and with a team of forward-thinking young bankers, he helped guide the company successfully through a challenging period of consolidation in the industry.

  To make a long story short, Perry was vice-chairman of Smith Barney from 1985 until his retirement in 1991.

  But luck can also break the other way. Sometimes careers stall for no reason at all except bad timing. At the very least, careers can zig and zag for reasons beyond your control, like an acquisition or divestiture, or a new boss with very different ideas about your future. Occasionally, you miss out on a promotion because of office politics or nepotism. Such setbacks can be terribly disheartening—enough to make you ask yourself, “Why the heck should I even try?”