Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Stalker Networking

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  Networking is how things get done in this world, and if you want to get ahead, you have to know how to cultivate relationships with people who are in a position to help you.  Meeting such individuals is often a brazen act – you walk up to someone at a conference and introduce yourself, you send an e-mail to a stranger asking for an informational interview, or you invite a long-admired potential mentor to lunch. 

But like everything else, networking taken to an extreme can be dangerous, and lately I’ve been hearing horror stories about people who just can’t put on the brakes when it comes to their networking activities.  The worst phenomenon is something I call stalker networking, and this is where you meet a contact and then proceed to nag that person incessantly for the next several weeks or months.  A friend of mine approached me recently with this dilemma.  He had generously granted a half-hour informational interview to a recent college grad, and she latched onto him like mold on cheese, constantly e-mailing him and calling his work AND cell phones to inquire about job opportunities.  This went on for a really long time until my friend was so frustrated he was looking for any excuse just to get rid of her.

Folks, it’s better to do no networking at all than to be perceived by a potentially valuable contact as a nuisance.  I urge you to remember that contacts are busy, and are balancing the needs of a whole lot of people who are higher up on the priority list than you.  Be respectful of their time, and don’t expect them to bend over backwards to help you until you’ve established a rapport and they know they can trust you.

The Benefits of Being “Out” at Work

Thanks to Penelope Trunk for sharing a great post from Nina Smith over at Queercents.  In recent years, I have met many gay colleagues who felt more comfortable being out of the closet at work, then with, say, their parents.  Smith maintains that gays who are out at work have stronger careers.  She herself developed a closer and more genuine relationship with her boss after the older woman asked her outright and Smith answered honestly. 

Says Selisse Berry, Executive Director of Out & Equal Workplace Advocates:  “We know that when employees bring their whole lives to work, they are happier, more productive, and have decreased rate of turnover.”  This makes sense because it’s hard to come across as a “normal” when people don’t know a thing about your personal life. Or worse yet, you get pegged as the person defined by work and nothing else.

David Stocum, a Life Coach who specializes in working with members of the gay community writes, “Among the benefits of coming out is a potentially more pleasant environment with less stress and more mental energy to devote to your work. You also are less likely to have resentment and workplace conflict. All these factors combine to yield overall improved job performance, which you could expect would lead to more steady career growth, better advancement opportunities and a more successful career, not to mention the improvements in mental and physical health.”

According to Smith, proposed federal legislation aims to end discrimination against employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, but laws with the best intentions are limited in by realities of the workplace. Discrimination from employers and repercussions from homophobic co-workers are complex and slippery to squash with laws; social acceptance among colleagues will remain a personal journey.

And what happens when colleagues see the real you? Kirk Snyder, author of The G Quotient writes, “The more people who get to know us as good neighbors, talented co-workers and company leaders, the less homophobia there will be in the world. Bigotry of any kind is rooted in fear of the unknown, so by coming out and being ourselves, we are changing the world.”

The New Inane E-mail Forwards? YouTube Videos.

Just when you thought the fad of forwarding silly or inappropriate joke e-mails to colleagues had run its course, along comes YouTube.

don’t get me wrong:  I think YouTube is the greatest entertainment invention since Nintendo.  My favorite YouTube video is the Montgomery Flea Market commercial, which I must have watched 100 times.  But there’s a time and a place, and unless you’re working for a communications firm and it’s your job to keep on top of things like popular videos, please refrain from sending tasteless clips to colleagues, or god forbid, your superiors.

Just the other day, my friend told me about a guy who works for her, who apparently e-mailed the whole group a video of turtles having sex, set to the typical music of a porn video.  What possessed the guy to think that this was remotely a good idea?  If he simply couldn’t keep his YouTube find to himself, didn’t he have ex-fraternity brothers he could share it with? 

Just like your Facebook and MySpace pages, e-mailed video content makes a statement about you as a credible professional.  Don’t blow it because you think the office deserves a good chuckle. 

Impact of Motherhood on a Woman's Career

As some of you know, I am expecting my first child in March.  And while I don’t intend for WCW to suddenly become a regular forum to discuss either my pregnancy or parenting experiences, since I began this journey I have made a few observations about professional women and the impact of the decision to have a baby.  Among those that have affected me already:

• My ambition is going to have to be tempered:  There are only so many hours in a day, and ideally, you want to spend at least some of them on good, solid parenting.  Since I currently work 50-60 hours a week, this means that something on the career side of the equation is going to have to give.  It’s more important to me to give my child the best possible start in life than to pursue any and every business opportunity that comes knocking.

• I will have to work with a laser focus:  If I thought it was challenging to balance a marketing communications consulting gig with a career as an author and speaker on twenty and thirty-something business issues, I’m in for it when it comes to raising a child.  Once the baby is here, I’m going to set specific days and times to get work done when I’m lucky enough to have childcare available.  I’ll need to be extra selective about how I choose to spend my work time and my level of efficiency in completing projects will need to reach an all-time high.

• I will need to modify my definition of success:  At the beginning of my career, I based my success on how quickly I climbed the corporate ladder, and how much money I made.  Later, I prided myself on selling books, growing my expert platform, and helping as many people as possible.  In the future, though, I can see defining success by how well I’m able to sustain the momentum I’ve spent the last 9 years building, while giving our new addition the stable and happy home life that eluded me as a child. 

Professional women with children – please feel free to weigh in on how you adapted your career to suit your new duties as a mom!

The Zagat Approach to Self-Assessment

I really like Marci Alboher’s Shifting Careers blog over at the New York Times, and this week, she shares a great self-assessment exercise from career coach Michael Melcher.  Since people are always asking me where to start when considering a career switch, I think Melcher’s “Zagat Approach” is worth mulling over. 

Melcher suggests that you begin by doing structured interviews with five to 10 people who know different facets of you.  You can ask friends, family members, colleagues, and people whose views you respect but whom you rarely speak to. Create a short questionnaire (six to eight questions) with questions like:

·         What are three things I do really well?

·         What are three things I don’t do so well?

·         Based on what you know about me, what job or experience have I liked the best in the past?

·         Based on what you know about me, what job or experience have I liked the least?

·         What are three things you can imagine me doing?

·         What’s something you can’t really imagine me doing?

·         How do I get in my own way?

If you casually ask people in your circle for advice about your career, they will probably give some helpful feedback. But if you use a questionnaire and go through items one by one, they will give answers that are more balanced and far more insightful. People give better answers when they are trying to be good interviewees than when they are trying to be good friends.

When you’re done, write up the results. When he undertook the process for himself, Melcher created a Zagat’s-style review of his potential coaching future, with entries like, “My best skills are ‘creative thinking’ (Henry R.) and my ability to ‘articulate hunches’ (Tom H.), combined with ‘balanced right- and left-brain thinking’ (Tania T.).”

By interviewing a number of people and summarizing the results, you use the collected subjectivities of your respondents to create an overall objectivity that can give insight to your questions and help you get unstuck.

Troubleshooting Airport Delays

I fly from Chicago to New York City quite a bit.  I always have, or at least, I always have since I made my home in New York after college.  And, truth be told, it makes me a little uncomfortable to think of how many hours of my life I’ve wasted twiddling my thumbs in the LaGuardia airport, delayed by weather. 

Last week, a few buckets of rain in New York resulted in spending more than five hours in the American Airlines terminal (yes, that’s the one with no food).  My Blackberry was out of juice (see tip 2) and so I had the opportunity to do quite a bit of people-watching.  Hundreds of hapless business travelers, red with frustration, were on their cell phones yelling to their assistants or significant others or children or whoever.  There were probably about a dozen heart attacks in the making in that airport. 

I’ve done this enough times to have some suggestions regarding business travel through the onerous air traffic hubs that are New York LaGuardia and Chicago O’Hare, and while I was stuck recently I decided to write them down for WCW.  They are:

• Surrender to a higher power:  Global warming has made the U.S. one of the most volatile countries in the world weather-wise, and if the planes aren’t flying, they aren’t flying.  There isn’t anything you can do about this, so instead of railing against God or the system or whatever, tell yourself that the situation is what it is and look for ways to make the best of it.   

• Get all your work done for the next week: In anticipation of something like this happening, do not pack your power cords in your luggage.  Keep them with you, and when faced with a delay of several hours, plug in and proceed to complete all the work-related tasks you’ve been procrastinating on, or haven’t finished because you’ve gotten distracted by the pull of Halo 3.

• Ring all the people you owe phone calls:  I’m not a huge phone person, and when I’m at home, sometimes I’d rather do anything else.  And at home, there are lots of options.  At the airport, not so much.  Getting stuck is the perfect opportunity to scroll down your contact list and touch base with folks you haven’t connected with in a while.

• Forget about standby and go get a beer: If the weather is bad and all the flights are delayed, you can bet that everyone has the same idea to try to get on the first plane to leave the terminal.  Unless you are a really, really, preferred member of the airline in question, your chances of getting one of the prized empty seats are slim to none.  Leave the hand-wringing to the 100 people ahead of you on the list waiting for their names to be called.

• Give into a guilty pleasure:  Personally, I can’t bring myself to purchase a People Magazine or US Weekly unless I’m feeling incredibly sorry for myself.  But once I find an excuse, reading those scintillating pages indeed makes time fly.  Think about an activity you’d normally feel guilty about doing during work hours, and engage with abandon.

• Cut your losses and leave:  Is it worth it to toss and turn in the airport all night, or should you just go back to your place of business and expense an extra day in the hotel?  Unless you have a pressing reason to get home as fast as possible, it’s often easier and much less stressful to get a good night’s sleep in anticipation of clearer skies.

4 Ways to Know It's Time to Go

Career expert Michelle Goodman has written a handy article on how to determine if your job can be saved, or if it’s time to throw in the towel.  Michelle says that suffering from a chronic case of the Mondays doesn't necessarily mean you should dust off your resume and start looking for greener pastures.  Some workplace woes are fixable. The trick is knowing which ones and how to mend them.  Here are four scenarios to consider:

• The magic is gone:  So you've been at your job a couple years and now you're bored.  Instead of pissing and moaning, says Cynthia Shapiro, author of Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn't Want You to Know -- And What to Do About Them, try to tap into what you originally appreciated about your gig and company.  If you come up empty, take a long, hard look at your job: Has it changed for the worse since you started? Has the company? Have you changed, perhaps outgrowing the work? If the answer's yes to any of these, it's indeed time fly like the wind.

• “I think my boss hates me” syndrome:  What if you are doing a heckuva job, only to be snubbed when your boss hands out the plum projects, pay raises, and promotions?  If no matter how hard you shine, you're ignored or sidelined by management, it's time to wake up and smell the pink slip. "That is not just job ennui," says Shapiro.  "That is danger -- you're in the exit lane."

• The Titanic is sinking:  When the company's in trouble, your job is too. If you haven't been paid in three weeks or the CEO's starting to blog about how the company's willing to do anything to boost profitability (translation: layoffs ahead), make like the Lutz family in "The Amityville Horror" and get out now.

• Your health is failing:  "If you tell someone you're in an abusive relationship with a guy and he's making you physically ill, they're like, "Get out, get out,'" says Penelope Trunk, author of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success.  "But if you tell them your job's making you sick, they say, 'I know, I hate my job too.'"  If Sunday night dread is costing you a small fortune in doctor's visits and prescription drugs, it's high time you got out of Dodge.

This is a terrific barometer, but I would like to add the caveat that if you are a chronic job-jumper and find yourself looking for a way out once again, you might want to do some soul searching.  A pattern of unsatisfying work experiences could mean that the problem lies not with the jobs or the companies, but with you.  Remember that you take yourself with you and think hard before you decide that it’s time to go.

30/20 Vision Radio Show: Live this Tuesday

Just wanted to let everyone know that the first 30/20 Vision talk show will be live on BlogTalkRadio this coming Tuesday, October 16^th, at 1PM ET. This monthly series is for the 20-something woman who wishes she had a couple of big sisters to clue her in on the ins and outs of life after college. I will join my friends and fellow young authors Christine Hassler (20-Something, 20-Everything) and Lindsey Pollak (Getting From College to Career) as we dish about everything from careers and relationships to celebrities and news of the day.

On Tuesday’s show, we will answer the question: “what should I be when I grow up?”  We’ll be chatting about our own experiences and also giving advice on how to assess yourself to determine the career that’s best for you.  Click here to listen live or subscribe to the podcast!

Al Gore and the American Dream

So Al Gore was just awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for  being "probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted" to combat climate change, according to his citation. (The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was also a joint winner of the Prize). 

Gore’s Prize was a blow to U.S. President George W. Bush and his widely criticized environmental policy, ironic considering that Gore lost the bitter 2000 presidential election to Bush by a hair.  "The Nobel Committee's recognition of Vice President Gore shines a bright light on the most inconvenient truth of all - the selection of George Bush as president has endangered the peace and prosperity of the entire planet," said fellow Democrat John Edwards, a 2008 White House contender.

After Gore won the popular vote for president nationwide but lost a crucial Florida vote recount battle, he was forced to reinvent himself.   He became an environmental dynamo, winning an Oscar in 2007 for his documentary film "An Inconvenient Truth” and now, one of the most important honors that a human being can receive.

Seven years ago, there were moments when Gore probably felt like his career was over.  He had failed, and his lifelong goal of becoming president was out of reach.  It says a lot about this man that instead of disappearing from public view, he swallowed his pride and used his celebrity to promote a cause that was dear to his heart. 

Today, many would argue, myself included, that Gore made more of an impact on the world as an environmental crusader than he ever would have as president, and that he realized his true potential only when faced with the greatest setback of his life.  For those of you who have nourished a dream that hasn’t come to fruition, Gore’s story should provide hope and inspiration.  There’s special work out there for you too, even if it’s not originally what you had in mind.

Incidentally, Gore is now being courted by some Democratic supporters who think he should make another go of it in the 2008 presidential race.  He probably won’t do it though.  He has more important things on his mind.

Review: Jason Alba's I'm On Linked In - Now What???

I’m very pleased to share this review of my friend and colleague Jason Alba’s new book, I’m on Linked In – Now What??? I have known Jason for over a year, and I can say with all seriousness that he is one of the best networkers I know. He knows everyone, and if he doesn’t know someone, he wants to meet them. He’s a big advocate of helping his friends meet contacts too, even going so far as to send out introductory e-mails for us. It’s for this reason, that, although there are lots of people talking about LinkedIn these days, I’d be most inclined to believe that Jason knows most what he’s talking about.

The book launches with an explanation of the key concepts behind LinkedIn, such as profiles, searching, degrees of separation, recommendations, LinkedIn groups, and LinkedIn answers. Like everyone with a few contacts on LinkedIn (I have more than 150), I am familiar with most of these components, but Jason’s overview thoroughly convinced me that I need to bite the bullet and start paying attention to LinkedIn answers. This service, which allows you to ask and answer business-related questions of your network and beyond, is low-hanging fruit when it comes to establishing your personal brand and meeting new clients who will deliver solid revenue.

Toward the end of the book, Jason also calls out some practices that breech LinkedIn etiquette, which are great to review, because after all, it’s possible to commit an offense innocently and seriously damage the e-reputation you’ve crafted so carefully.  For example, you might be thinking that you’d rather share your e-mail address directly, so that people don’t have to go through the official LinkedIn introduction process, but a simple thing like putting your e-mail address in the name field could get you suspended.

Whether you’re a LinkedIn junkie or not, you should pay close attention to the section on Internet Etiquette. Here, Jason offers universal tips such as to avoid sarcasm, to refrain from chastising or preaching to others, and to consider cultural differences among users. You’d also be wise to make a note of the compendium of free resources you can use to make your LinkedIn presence work more efficiently and effectively for you.

Aspects of this book are both useful and appropriate for everyone – from the wide-eyed college graduate to the jaded serial entrepreneur. Jason consistently emphasizes exactly what LinkedIn should be used for, and where you’d be better off with a different kind of service. He has been there and done that, and as such you have no problem accepting and appreciating his honest, practical, and straight-shooting viewpoint.