by Jack Welch
Amassing mentors. The third career do concerns mentors, a burning topic while I was at GE, and these days, wherever I speak.
People, it seems, are always looking for that one right mentor to help them get ahead.
But in my experience, there is no one right mentor. There are many right mentors.
I had dozens of informal mentors over the course of my career, and each one taught me something important. My mentors ranged from the classic older and wiser executive to coworkers who were often younger than I was.
Some mentoring relationships lasted a lifetime, others lasted just weeks.
One of the most meaningful mentors in my life never called himself my mentor, nor did I ever identify him that way. I thought of Si Cathcart, who was ten years my senior and a member of the GE board, as my friend. To my great sadness, he died in 2002.
Si was everything people look for in a great mentor—a person who cheered me on and challenged me in equal measure. His judgment about people was pitch-perfect, and I rarely made a big decision on hiring without running it by him first. During the toughest period of my career, when I was choosing a successor to recommend to the board, Si spent several hundred hours over the course of five years visiting all of the candidates and sharing his impressions with me.*
Si, the longtime chairman of Illinois Tool Works, was on the GE board when I became CEO. We played golf often and chatted on the phone regularly. Si used both these venues to push my thinking up unseen alleys and around blind corners. “Are you sure that guy’s not a phony?” he would ask. “Do you think that acquisition is still going to make you happy when the fanfare dies down?” Si always knew the right question to ask.
I had another great mentor in Dennis Dammerman, who was not only younger than me by ten years, but my subordinate as well.
I met Dennis in 1977, when I was named head of GE’s consumer products group. I arrived in the job knowing basically nothing about insurance or financing, the main activities of GE Capital, one of the group’s businesses. Dennis, whom I had hired as my financial analyst, had spent several years there.
For months on end, Dennis taught me something every single day. His patience was remarkable. Here was his boss asking him to define the simplest concepts—I barely understood types of debt in those days. After all, I had come from the manufacturing side of GE. When we wanted money, all we did was make a pitch to corporate, and if the proposal was good enough, they sent it. Suddenly, I was dealing with combined ratios, delinquencies, leveraged leases, and the like.
Dennis basically downloaded his brain into mine. He never called himself my mentor, but he was nothing less.
There were countless other mentors who helped me in my career, from the executive education teacher who tried to teach me public speaking when I was twenty-six, to the young woman in PR who tried to teach me the Internet when I was sixty. But let me just add to the list one more mentor that can work for everyone: the business media.
Business is like any game. It has players, a language, a complex history, rules, controversies, and a rhythm.
The media covers it all, and from every angle. From my earliest days in Plastics, I learned mountains about business just by reading every financial newspaper and magazine I could get my hands on. From them, I picked up what deals worked and which failed, and why. I followed people’s careers. I tried to understand what kinds of strategic moves were criticized and which were praised. I kept up with different industries, from chemicals to medical technology.
And I used what I read. I learned, for instance, about PepsiCo’s executive training program from an article in Fortune magazine. I was so impressed by PepsiCo’s model—which used the company’s own executives as teachers—that I built it into the foundation of our training program in Crotonville.
I didn’t believe everything I read, of course, and the more I knew, the more I realized that some articles were off the mark in their analyses. Regardless, I still believe the business media is such a good teacher that I am always amazed when I meet a young person who doesn’t just consume it. Don’t let that happen—this mentor is right there for the taking!
My point is that mentors are everywhere. Don’t just settle for the mentor assigned to you as part of a formal program. Those official mentors teach you the company ropes, but they’re just a start. The best mentors help you in unplanned, unscripted ways. Relish all that they give you in whatever form they come.
Don’t be a downer. The fourth and final way to help yourself get promoted is as hard or as easy as you make it—have a positive attitude and spread it around.
Yes, it’s nothing more sophisticated than that. Have a sense of humor, be fun to hang out with. Don’t be a bore or a sourpuss. Don’t act important, or worse, pompous. Smack yourself in the head if you start taking yourself too seriously.
In politics, people talk about each candidate’s likability factor, which is just another way of saying “personality appeal.” Both of those terms refer to something intangible, but they really matter—in politics and at work.
Obviously, being a congenial, upbeat person will not get you ahead by itself. You need everything else we’ve just talked about—great results, expanded job horizons, good character, visibility, mentors, and all the rest. But it is very, very hard to get ahead without being a positive person because, very simply, no one likes to work under or near a dark cloud. Even if the “cloud” is very smart.
I know it is not easy to always be upbeat. Life doesn’t always go your way. But every time you feel yourself spreading gloom at work, think of Jimmy Dunne.
Jimmy was a senior executive at Sandler O’Neill & Partners, the investment banking firm that was located on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower. On September 11, sixty-eight of the staff’s 177 employees were killed, including the company’s founder, Herman Sandler, and its lead partner, Chris Quackenbush. Overnight, Jimmy became the CEO of a company that was literally and emotionally decimated.
Jimmy was, of course, grief-stricken by the firm’s incalculable human tragedy, and distraught over the deaths of two of his closest friends, Herman and Chris. But today he will tell you that he knew one thing would prevent the firm from shutting down and the disaster worsening—a can-do attitude.*
“All I did after 9/11 was walk around, consoling people, talking about how we were going to survive and rebuild,” he said recently.
As he hired to replace Sandler O’Neill’s lost employees, Jimmy looked for people who were upbeat, positive, and as undaunted as humanly possible by 9/11. Skill mattered a lot; outlook mattered more.
“Success,” Jimmy says, “is so much about attitude.”
A positive attitude does not always come easy—and in cases like Jimmy Dunne’s after 9/11, it comes unimaginably hard.
If it’s natural for you, fantastic. If it isn’t, fight to find it and wear it all over yourself.
You can win without being upbeat—if every other star is aligned—but why would you want to try?
ONE LAST DON’T
The final don’t concerns setbacks.
Once or twice or more times than that, you will not get promoted. Don’t let it break your stride.
Of course, you will feel terrible, maybe even bitter and angry. But work like hell to let those feelings go.
First, and by all means, do not turn your career setback into the office cause célèbre. What a way to alienate everyone—your boss, coworkers, and subordinates. If you want to complain about your career, do it at home, at a bar across town, or wherever you go to worship. The people at work, while they know a lot about your case, should not be drawn into your emotional experience.
More important, even if you are thinking of leaving your company, try to accept your setback with as much grace as you can muster, and even see it as a challenge to prove yourself anew. Such an approach will serve you well whether you stay or go.
No one makes this point better than Mark Little.
Mark was the quiet, self
-confident, and well-liked engineering vice president of GE’s Power Systems when, in 1995, the business ran into serious quality problems. As Mark puts it, “I had just gotten the job, and, basically, turbine blades were cracking all over the world. It was a mess.”
Mark worked hard to get the business back on track, but when Bob Nardelli was promoted to run the entire Power Systems group, he decided Mark had neither the sense of urgency nor the engineering expertise for the job. He split the business and gave Mark engineering responsibility for just steam turbines, the much smaller and less important piece. Suddenly, Mark was in charge of one-third as many people and a product considered to be old, dull, and slow-growth.
“It felt like the end of the world,” Mark said to me recently. “I thought it was unfair, and I was mad as hell. I felt like I hadn’t created the problem, and I had done everything I could to fix it. Then I was punched in the stomach. I was angry and hurt, and I had to believe it was the end of my GE career.”
But Mark did an amazing thing. He stuck his chin out and got back to work.
“I just figured I was going to prove everyone wrong,” he said. “I wanted to show the whole world what we could do.”
Over the next couple of years, Mark energized his team to revitalize the steam turbine product line. He introduced new technologies and put in process disciplines, driving costs down to new levels.
“I made up my mind that I was not going to show my people that I was mad and hurt. I was going to go in there every day and do what was best for me and my people and for GE. And that was to refocus the business.”
In 1997, Mark’s results were so terrific and his self-confidence was so restored that when the much-larger position of product manager for all turbines came open, he approached Bob Nardelli and asked for the job.
The answer was yes.
“I’d say the main reason I got the promotion was because I surprised everybody with my results, my attitude, and my perseverance. I just never gave up.”
Today, Mark is the product manager not only for the turbine business, but for GE’s hydro and wind businesses as well, a $14 billion enterprise.
To get ahead, you have to want to get ahead.
Some promotions come because of luck, but very few. The facts are, when it comes to careers, you mainly make your own luck. You will likely change companies, maybe even professions, more than a few times over the course of your working life. But there are some things you can do to keep moving ahead. Exceed expectations, broaden your job’s horizons, and never give your boss a reason to have to spend capital for you. Manage your subordinates carefully, sign up for radar-screen assignments, collect mentors, and spread your positive attitude. When setbacks come, and they will, ride them out with your head up.
That may sound like a lot of stuff to do, but there are no real shortcuts.
Along the journey, you won’t get every promotion you want when you want it. But if you take the “long way,” eventually—and sometimes sooner than you expect—you’ll reach your destination.
Hard Spots
* * *
THAT DAMN BOSS
I’VE NEVER KNOWN A PERSON who didn’t light up at the memory of a truly great boss. And for good reason: great bosses can be friends, teachers, coaches, allies, and sources of inspiration all in one. They can shape and advance your career in ways you never expected—and sometimes they can even change your life.
In stark contrast, a bad boss can just about kill you.
Not literally of course, but a bad boss can kill that part of your soul where positive energy, commitment, and hope come from. On a daily basis, a bad boss can leave you feeling angry, hurt, and bitter—even physically ill.
If you’re like most people, over the course of a forty-something-year career, you will have a handful of great bosses, many more that are pretty good, and one or two total jerks—people who are so consistently awful they make you want to throw it in and quit.
Bad bosses come in every variety. Some grab all the credit, some are incompetent, some kiss up but kick down; others bully and humiliate, have mood swings, withhold praise and money, break promises, or play favorites.*
Occasionally, there are bad bosses who display several of these characteristics all at once.
How do these people ever get ahead?
Well, sometimes they happen to be very talented. They deliver the numbers or they’re extremely creative. They can have shrewd political alliances or maybe even a family member in high places.
Bad bosses, incidentally, tend to have longer lives in some industries rather than others. On the creative side, very talented writers, artists, and producers who get promoted to run projects are often given a pass on bad behavior because they are “geniuses.” Wall Street is also often a safe harbor for bad bosses. Top moneymakers are often thought of as irreplaceable, and they know it, making some of them even more insufferable.
But never mind industry specifics. The world has jerks. Some of them get to be bosses.
This chapter is about what to do when one of them gets to be your boss.
Now, this chapter won’t provide any hard-and-fast answers because each bad boss situation is unique. But it will walk you through a series of questions that hopefully will surface the right approach to your bad boss situation, “right” in the sense that it fits your goals in life and at work.
Before we look at those questions, though, let me state the overriding principle behind this chapter.
In any bad boss situation, you cannot let yourself be a victim. That theme has come up before in this book—most recently in the chapter on mergers and acquisitions—and, for many of the same reasons, it applies here too.*
I realize that a bad boss (like a merger) may make you want to bitch and moan to your coworkers, whine to your family, punch a wall, or watch too much TV with a drink in your hand. He may make you want to surf the Web or call headhunters, looking for jobs anywhere but where you are.
All in all, he may end up making you want to feel very sorry for yourself.
Don’t!
In any business situation, seeing yourself as a victim is completely self-defeating. And when it comes to your career, it’s an attitude that kills all your options—it can even be the start of a career death spiral. I have a friend, a financial analyst at a Wall Street firm, who bounced from one crummy job to another after he had a falling out with his bad boss and quit in a huff. Out in the market, with no recommendations, all he had was an “I was screwed” story of woe to tell prospective employers. Ultimately, five years later, he ended up with the same job he had started from, only at a less-respected firm and at about 60 percent of the pay.
Obviously, you shouldn’t always stay with a bad boss. Sometimes you need to get out. Regardless of your decision, avoid the pervasive victim mentality. You know what I mean. We live in a culture where parents sue fast-food restaurants for making their kids fat and cities spend millions of dollars a year to settle claims for injuries caused by uneven sidewalks and potholes.
Please!
Like every other unfortunate or unfair event that befalls you in life, working for a difficult boss is your problem and you must solve it.
To do that, ask yourself the following series of questions. The answers will help you navigate what is undeniably a painful situation. Painful—but yours to accept, fix, or end.*
The first question is:
Why is my boss acting like a jerk? Sometimes the answer to this question is a no-brainer. Your boss is acting like a jerk because that’s the way he is. He may be fine with customers and fairly reasonable with his own bosses and peers, but he treats everyone below him with the same kind of bad behavior—be it in the form of intimidation, belligerence, arrogance, neglect, secrecy, or sarcasm.
It is an entirely different situation if your boss is just impossible toward you.
In that case, you need to start asking yourself what you have done to draw his disapproval. That’s right—you need to ask yourself if you are the
cause of your boss’s behavior. Generally speaking, bosses are not awful to people whom they like, respect, and need. If your boss is being negative to you—and mainly you—you can feel pretty confident that he has his version of events, and his version concerns your attitude or performance.
You’ve got to find out what’s going on.
Start by asking yourself that question, but know that self-assessment is difficult, to put it mildly. Even with a huge amount of maturity and a cast-iron stomach, it is hard to see yourself as others do.
I know of an HR executive at a training center in the South who spent ten years administering 360-degree feedback programs and then delivering the conclusions to the individual being evaluated. “Seven out of ten people are completely stunned by what they hear,” she said. “When they get their feedback, they think I’ve mixed up the forms. They are convinced their colleagues must be talking about somebody else.”
The problem, the HR executive said, is that people generally overrate their performance on the job and their popularity with the team—most often by a factor of two or more.
Know that, then, as you conduct what is an admittedly difficult “mirror test.” Think hard about your performance, and press yourself for the ways you may have fallen short. Think about why your colleagues might not consider you a team player. In a state of forced self-loathing, gauge your personal productivity, your face time in the office, your contribution to sales and earnings. Maybe you open a lot of deals but never close them. Maybe you close a lot of deals but boast too much. Maybe people weren’t really “OK with it” when you blew a big account a few months back.
Finally, face into your attitude toward authority, because it just might be that the source of your problem with your boss is that you are, at your core, a boss hater.
Boss haters are a real breed. It doesn’t make any difference who these people work for, they go into any authority relationship with barely repressed cynicism. Who knows why—upbringing, experiences at work or home, political bent. It doesn’t really matter. Boss haters usually exude constant low-level negativity toward “the system,” and when they do, their bosses feel it, and they return the favor.