The Business of You

The culture of an organization has the power to inspire employees to move mountains and to support each other in a way that, when executed correctly, creates one of the most defendable competitive advantages of all.

Take Zappos, for example. They provide a service (online shoe shopping and recently expanded into other apparel) that is rather commoditized and not overly extraordinary. However, they have been wildly successful and disrupted their industry. The backbone to Zappos’s success is an amazing culture that creates a world-class customer experience able to breed loyalty. This has driven remarkable growth through word-of-mouth marketing.

Winning cultures in the business world are those in which team members share a purpose through a clear vision and set of values, are committed to learning and growing, trust each other, and communicate effectively.

A strong personal culture can have a similar effect on your career. With a dynamic personal culture, you can continually improve and harness a built-in advantage over others vying for the same roles. You will be able to generate more output through a consistent approach to conquering your daily responsibilities, in addition to being viewed internally as an ambitious team player.

You have already established your purpose by following the steps laid out in the earlier chapters of this book. For your personal culture, your attitude is the underlying driver. A strong, positive attitude will propel your performance each day and weigh heavily on how you are viewed within your organization. Those who excel in the workplace master the management of their attitude. Top performers with a strong personal culture bring positivity and consistently exude confidence—while embodying ownership in everything they do.

A positive and collaborative culture is a pillar of highly productive businesses. Companies will dedicate significant resources to foster an environment that supports this kind of culture. Their efforts consist of conducting regular employee satisfaction surveys, recognition programs, formalized social events, team-building activities, and even strategically configuring the office space, all aimed at building a positive culture.

You should make similar investments of time and energy to enhance your own personal organization’s culture—the attitude you bring to the office every day. As you start to pay attention to your attitude, it will become abundantly clear that it is a major driver in your output. Think back over the last two weeks and isolate the days where you were most and least effective. Why do you think that is? If you dig deep enough, you may find that you were in a great mood on the productive days and had something that derailed your mood on the less-than-productive days.

Another important way attitude plays a role in your success is how you interact with and are perceived by other team members. Like it or not, perception plays a major role in important employment decisions (like transfers and promotions). How you are perceived within your organization could ultimately help or hurt your chances of being awarded the next “big project” or advancing up the ranks. Even in today’s tech-driven business world, business is still a people sport. Your performance is important, but if you are difficult to work with, you’ll be held back. People want to work with team members they can get along with. It also helps if that person is an eager go-getter who is willing to jump in and help rather than not carry their weight.

Think about it in this way: At times, the workplace can be like a desert island (a confined space where you are stuck with people). In each case, a group of people works toward a common goal—on the desert island it is to survive, and in the workplace it is to meet the company’s objectives. If you were stranded on this hypothetical desert island, choose which of these people you would prefer to be stranded with:

Most of you would select the self-starter. First and foremost, the self-starter will be willing to do whatever it takes to help survive. And for less functional reasons, it’s likely that the griper’s defeatist attitude will eventually annoy you, bringing you down and impacting your ability to survive.

Given the impact attitude has on your day, we should do our best to manage it effectively. Become more mindful of the attitude you project daily. We all have days when we are not ourselves, and that is OK. The key is to work on this skill (and yes, your attitude is a skill that you can improve on) to increase the number of days where attitude is up rather than down. Let’s look at a couple of different strategies to cultivate a positive attitude.

Have you ever noticed that when your day starts off with some good news, then the rest of the day often follows suit? It would be great if we could manufacture good news every morning, but we know that is not realistic. What you can create is a morning routine that starts you off on a positive trajectory.

This strategy is centered around designing your own success routine to start your day off right—putting yourself in the best position to have a positive and productive day. This is possible by creating emotionally healthy habits that help you feel good, ultimately bringing that energy to your work every day.

How can you start your day off right and set the tone for your attitude? Find things that make you feel happy or create a sense of accomplishment. Finding what works best for you will take a bit of trial and error. Experiment. Try something new each morning and note how you feel immediately afterward and in the hours that follow. After a while you will find activities that cascade positivity into your morning and, hopefully, that generates productivity throughout the day. Now, that sounds like a lot to ask from a simple morning routine, but don’t worry, because it does not have to be a grand thing. Step back and identify activities that make you happy. This strategy aims to create balance by starting your day off with something joyful to encourage a productive momentum early in your day.

Take my morning routine, as an example. Currently I like to start my day off with a morning workout. After my workout (which makes me feel energized and accomplished) and before getting ready for the rest of the day, I commit ten minutes to reading a book or an article for pleasure. The demands on my time during business hours are such that I rarely have a quiet moment to read something that isn’t work related. With that done, I arrive at the office feeling a small sense of accomplishment, and it helps me start off on a positive note to prepare for the daily rigors of my job responsibilities.

Be disciplined and block off time to do whatever you need to do to get in the right frame of mind. On the days when I don’t follow my routine, I feel completely off. Once you create the habit, you will wonder how you survived without it.

It is great to start off on the right foot, but we all know the reality of the workplace. Eventually there will be days that beat you down and take an emotional toll. Have you ever had a day where you get hammered with a series of rough emails or bad news and start to feel your frustration growing to the point where you know that your productivity is completely shot? Of course you have; you are a human in today’s workforce.

The most successful people find ways to take setbacks in stride, learn from them, and persevere. On the flip side, those who fold at the first sign of distress don’t stick around long enough to reap the benefit of persistence. Most people fold because they have not learned to utilize basic tools to help build the emotional fortitude required to fight on.

What happens when a series of bad things occur is that negative thoughts begin to ping-pong around in your head. If left unchecked, they will pick up momentum and dominate your thoughts. Your reality becomes distorted by blowing these issues (minor ones in many cases) into bigger problems. As these issues grow, you will likely become fixated on the negative and unable to focus on anything else. Eventually you will spiral into an unproductive state. The key to combating this is to break the vicious cycle.

Unfortunately, we all will face many setbacks in life and in our careers. The good news is that you can develop the skills necessary to grow from these setbacks. Remember, you can take valuable learning away from any situation.

When you start to feel your attitude (if not your emotional state) slipping, take a moment to reset. Resetting means slowing down the growth of negative thoughts in your head and getting back to a realistic perspective. If you don’t, even things that are not negative will start to appear as issues to you. And that is not a productive mind-set to be carrying around.

Resetting can be as simple as getting away from your desk and the source of your growing frustration. A couple of other common, effective tactics are:

None of these approaches require a significant amount of time. Within a few minutes you can potentially break the negative cycle early and be back on a productive track. Just like starting your day off on the right foot, experiment to find what helps to bring you back to center, and keep that in your tool kit as a way of breaking the negative cycles that naturally occur in work and life.

Sometimes we get to a place where issues have piled up (whether we failed to step away and break the cycle early or just got hit with a perfect storm of issues) to the point where we need a bigger tool to break the cycle. At this point, the emotional part of the brain is driving, and it is going a million miles an hour and navigating like an idiot (fixated on all of the negative things that can happen). If you get to this point, it can help to forcibly take the wheel from your mind’s emotional side and hand it over to your logical side.

The starting point for effective management of your emotions is awareness. Begin the shift from emotional to logical by assessing what you are feeling. If something unfortunate happened, what emotions are you feeling? Are you hurt, angered, upset? When you recognize your feelings, you use different parts of your brain, initiating movement of your mental activity from the temporal lobe (emotional) to the frontal lobe (higher mental functions).

Now that you are aware of your emotional state, it is time to formally acknowledge your feelings. If you are upset (and in a private place), it’s okay to say out loud, “I am pissed off!” The other part of acknowledgment is to give yourself permission to feel. Acknowledge that it is perfectly normal to be upset from time to time. You are human. This acknowledgment (verbalized or written) creates additional space between emotion and logic. With the feelings clearly out there, you have taken a big step forward and are getting closer to focusing on developing a solution.

By shifting to seeking out the source, you are now getting into the early stages of finding a resolution. If you are upset, find out why you are feeling this way. In most cases you already know the answer and don’t need to research deeply to figure it out. In other cases, a combination of things might be in play. Either way, identify the sources and clearly outline why they have caused you to feel this way.

As an example, maybe you are upset because you were you passed up for a promotion, and the position went to someone you deemed as a less qualified internal candidate. Take the time to go deeper into what you feel. Ask yourself why getting passed up is upsetting. In this example, maybe you are envious, or harbor feelings of inferiority, or even a combination of both.

Step back and sift through your feelings. Look deeply and try to get a firm grasp on each of them. This is not a race, and don’t stop the sifting at the superficial level, like I’m upset because I wanted that job. Obviously, that is the case; but what else is behind your feelings?

Once you have isolated the true sources of your feelings, it is time to shift toward an objective examination of the situation.

Finally, examine the facts behind the situation that generated your feelings. As difficult as it can be at times, mindfully remove your biases from the interpretation of the facts and clearly identify the indisputable ones.

You believe Jenny is an underperformer. How did you come to that conclusion? Upon further review, you remember that Charles, who works with Jenny, has complained about working with her. Now, question the depth of this data point. Were Charles’s complaints a thorough assessment of Jenny’s skills and competencies? Likely not. It could be a personality difference, or even Charles venting because he is envious. Either way, this is a flimsy stance and would not constitute an indisputable fact.

In this case, you may not like the decision to promote Jenny instead of you. You may have been completely qualified, but it does appear that you can make a case that the promotion of Jenny had merit. After going through this exercise, you may still feel a little slighted, but you have pulled logic into the equation and now you are in a better position to process and accept the reality.

Remember that your mind makes quick, emotionally based decisions and then rationalizes them after the fact. You need to evaluate the story you are telling yourself. Often people in these types of situations will fixate on a single emotional quality of the employee being promoted (a less seasoned employee, the luck of the draw, being on the right team, being on projects with high visibility, favoritism, etc.), and it will feel unfair and upsetting. They will rationalize their anger or envy by using the one performance data point they have, which, in this case, is Charles’s complaint. Without understanding the facts surrounding his complaint, you use it as the main proof point behind your hypothesis of injustice. Exacerbating the situation, you go and vent to a friend or a trusted colleague. How do you think the colleague is going to respond when you are emotional and presenting your case with your slant? Of course they are going to agree with you. They want you to feel better, and agreeing with you is the path of least resistance.

Once you have collected all of the facts, it should be clear whether or not your feelings are valid. There will be times when you won’t be right, and others when you have every reason to be upset. Either way, it is OK to have those feelings. The most important thing is how you respond to them.

The last step in the process is to determine where you can go from here. This means defining the actions you are going to take to improve how you feel or improve your current situation.

IF YOUR GOAL IS TO GET THE PROMOTION YOU WANTED, YOU SHOULD CHANNEL THOSE FEELINGS INTO WHAT YOU CAN DO TO GET IT IN THE FUTURE, BECAUSE THAT IS ALL YOU CAN CONTROL.

Continuing to use the promotion example, let’s look at attempting to make the best of the situation. Getting angry or trying to right a wrong by stomping into the manager’s office and unleashing a rambling, incoherent vent session may make you feel better in the near term, but it is not going to improve your long-term prospects. If anything, it would likely be damaging to them. Focus on what you can control. Jenny has been promoted and you cannot change that. All you can control is how you respond to this situation. If your goal is to get the promotion you wanted, you should channel those feelings into what you can do to get it in the future. Meet with the manager and share your aspirations. Ask what you need to do to achieve that next promotion. Ask if there were things you could have done differently during the vetting process that would have improved your candidacy, and then ask yourself the same questions. Turn this situation into a positive learning experience that improves your chances to get promoted by bettering yourself and making it known to your manager that you are ambitious. Constructive approaches are best.

The struggle is most people don’t take the constructive approach, which ends up compounding the problem. Often, they will sit and mope or, even worse, act out. Their performance suffers and their boss begins looking at them in a less-than-positive light. The constructive framework approach is a powerful way to bring your emotions and actions back into a productive direction. As you become more adept within this framework, whether as an influential peer or as a manager, you will be called upon to help work through emotionally charged situations. With this skill you can have a far-reaching impact at work, laying the foundation for being a true organizational leader.

All of us start with different levels of optimism. Some people naturally have a sunny disposition, while others seem to have consistent clouds following them—and the rest of us fall somewhere in between. However, we do have the ability to improve and control this to a certain extent.

Why do you think companies participate in corporate retreats, host happy hours, or have employee appreciation activities? When executed properly, these events improve relationships and build camaraderie among the team members. Similarly, you can actively work on your attitude and strengthen it like any other skill. Optimism reconditioning is kind of like hitting the gym to strengthen your mind’s ability to see the positive in situations.

The concept of learned optimism was defined by the psychologist Martin Seligman as the idea in positive psychology that a talent for joy, like any other, can be cultivated. Learning optimism is done by consciously challenging how we process information and manage our negative self-talk.

The brilliance behind this concept is that our perspectives can be reshaped. Our brains are conditioned toward confirmation bias. If we have a negative view of our workplace, we will likely find more things wrong with it (and neglect the positive elements) to confirm our stance. As we find more “evidence,” we solidify and deepen the roots of our negative stance.

The reverse is also true. If you have a more optimistic perspective, you will be able to identify and substantiate the positive elements of your work environment.

One way to do this is to begin or close your day by jotting down three things that are positive about your work. There are no limitations. These three things could be related to your responsibilities, what your company does for its customers, the skills you are developing, and so on. Perform this exercise for a couple of weeks and you will start to see an influx of the positive elements of the job across all situations.

As a result, you bring a more positive energy to your day and the office. To further develop your optimism, shift that exercise to focus on other parts of your life as well. Finding a deeper appreciation and gratitude in all avenues of life will further perpetuate an optimistic mind-set in your career.

Also pay close attention to your self-talk. If you are being unreasonably negative to yourself, you may be unwittingly undermining your own success. Use the same positive strategy as above if you start to feel overly critical of yourself. Step back and highlight three things that you do well.

Quick tip: There are work environments that are harmful to your development and potentially to your well-being. If you are in one of these poor work environments, I’m not saying that you should attempt to will yourself into believing that it is a positive one. The purpose of the exercise is to see things as half full instead of half empty.

We all have a competitive drive within ourselves, some more than others. This competitiveness can be channeled to enhance productivity and our overall satisfaction with our jobs, even if that competitive energy is focused on simply competing with ourselves. Businesses tap into this by using gamification as a tool.

A popular example of using gamification to engage customers is the McDonald’s Monopoly game. They use it to encourage additional consumption of their products by adding a game component to their packaging (Monopoly game pieces). Ultimately, customers increase the frequency of their visits to McDonald’s and find some joy in participating in the game.

In his book Happier, the former Harvard professor Tal Ben-Shahar describes his research that showed that employees who keep score have more fun and are more productive, even in the most repetitive jobs. He found, for example, that people who kept track of the number of boxes sorted each hour and then made a contest of it for each hour were far more productive and happy.

Now look at your job and your daily responsibilities. Think about how you can leverage this score-keeping technique to your benefit. Could you track the number of customer contacts each hour or day? Or the number of files audited and filed each hour? It may require that you get a little creative, but spend some time to think about what else you could measure and track to compete with yourself.

Try it for a couple of weeks and monitor your results. I am willing to bet you will be pleasantly surprised at the impact it has on your productivity and mood. When you are keeping score, make sure to celebrate personal bests and even reward yourself for big milestones met.

One of the other key elements for a strong business culture is ownership. In cultures with a high level of ownership, team members take complete responsibility for their performance and embrace the results of their efforts, regardless of the outcome.

This kind of attitude is what makes for highly productive businesses and, also, highly productive team members. Strong leaders will share the overarching plans for the organization, engage the staff for objective planning, seek regular feedback, and provide a reward system to reinforce these ownership-oriented behaviors. These activities are designed to raise the overall level of ownership within the organization. Likewise, there are things you can be doing to enhance your levels of ownership and make yourself a stronger contributor—and ultimately better positioned for that next level.

Throughout this section we will look at defining characteristics that make up ownership at the employee level. Ownership is a buzzword you will hear around the workplace very often, but it is not easy to distill down into a simple form. If you were to ask a coworker to describe what ownership is, they will likely have a difficult time articulating it. However, most people are quick to recognize it when they see it in the workplace.

Your mind-set will play a huge role in determining your career fate. Benjamin Franklin said it best: “Diligence is the mother of good luck.” If you want to get ahead in your career, you must be willing to work smarter and harder than others. If you embrace this early on, you will run laps around your competition in the office and accelerate your own personal development.

This mind-set means taking pride in going the extra mile. The difference is focusing on putting the best product out there rather than being fixated on finishing the project as quickly as possible. This is a common mistake of employees at all levels. They find themselves scrambling to complete a task or project without considering the end goal and the quality of the product delivered. They focus on completing a task on their checklist and fail to take into account how they will be viewed if their output is sloppy. Take pride in your work product and be committed to seeing a project all the way through to completion. Here are some key characteristics of employees who embody a strong ownership attitude:

These characteristics sound simple enough, though way too many people in the business world are not willing to put in the work to take ownership. If you fully embrace the behaviors listed above, you will get noticed very quickly and establish the reputation of a strong employee.

There is only so much time in the day, so be prepared to work on your development outside of business hours. Schedule it and be consistent. It is easy to come home from a long day at work and plop down on your couch. Most people do exactly that. Those who want more find the discipline to complete their objectives. Figure out when and how you work best to make certain your development happens.

For example, I find it difficult to sit locked in to one task for long stretches of time. That probably speaks to my short attention span, more than anything else. As a result, I find that when structuring my time to work on a large project (like writing this book while running multiple companies), I am more productive when I block off one or two half-hour sessions each day to lock in on the task at hand. Using this approach, I pulled together my first draft of the book in five months while going through one of the most demanding work stretches in my career. Once I get rolling during one of those thirty-minute sessions, I often keep going for a longer time. Scheduling these short windows helps me get over that initial mental block or procrastination tendency.

Another element of the ownership mentality is expecting to put in longer hours than most of your peers—especially when you are working on a deadline. You should make sure to do everything in your power to meet all of the deadlines in front of you. I’m not saying you are required to stay late daily and work on weekends, but avoid being the person who runs for the door every night at 5:00. In every business role, there will be times when you need to go above and beyond to get the job done, and put in those extra hours to bring the project home. Ultimately, let the work dictate the time and the extra effort required.

Your manager is very aware of the hours you are keeping. If you are consistently coming late and leaving early, or are unwilling to dedicate extra time when the team is nearing a big deadline, you will appear uncommitted to the team, and it will be detrimental to your career.

A MANAGER’S VIEWPOINT

Strong managers will not be completely focused on the exact number of hours an employee is working. They should be more concerned with output and meeting deadlines. They let the work be a guide for the necessary hours in the office. There will be times when you will need to work late, but there will be times when things are quieter, and an in-tune manager will encourage you to take advantage of this slower time and get out a littler earlier.

Be conscious of the fact that this viewpoint is not a prevailing one with most managers. It is unfortunate, because they are taking a very shortsighted approach to this. Anyone can sit and fill a workday. Most strong leaders would rather have someone who cranks out a ton of work and is extremely efficient.

Long hours come with the territory if you are ambitious, but you will need to find balance and adequate time to recharge. You can’t work nonstop without taking a break, because your body will break down and/or your productivity will suffer.

Before we leave the coverage of the ownership mind-set, it is worth taking a moment to review what is not an ownership mind-set, and a couple of things to avoid. Beware if you find yourself uttering the words “That’s not my job” or “I am too busy.” Underneath those words is a selfish mentality. It reflects that you’d prefer to do the minimum and take little pride in the quality of your work. People with this kind of mind-set are usually quick to draw a line in the sand on where their responsibilities end and are unwilling to help or care past that career-limiting line.

If you want a funny example of cautionary tales, just search online for the annual “not my job” awards. You will find gems like this:

The picture above is worth a laugh, but it is amazing how many people do these types of things on a smaller scale and less publicly every day. Ultimately it undermines their ability to be successful.

Ownership is embodied in and revealed through the quality of everything you do. At the workplace, top performers own and take responsibility for each element of their job.

Those who thrive are mindful of how they interact with others on email, at the office, and on the phone. This means proofreading every email and using a professional tone and vocabulary in all correspondence.

When completing a project, remember that it’s not just about the content. How have you packaged and formatted the project? Does the formatting convey a sense of professionalism? Apple has mastered the packaging and presentation of their products. If you bought an iPhone recently, you can attest that when you open the box, it is an experience designed to reinforce the elegant high-end nature of Apple’s products. You should do the same thing when packaging your work product, if it’s a project or presentation. If you are not overly skilled at formatting and design, ask a friend or colleague with skills in this area to help you build a template. You want the format and packaging of your project or presentation to give the impression that you put a tremendous amount of time and energy into it. If the packaging conveys that, you will more likely than not get the benefit of the doubt when your manager or customer is reviewing your work product. You should be proud of every aspect of your output.

To develop a reputation as someone who is eager to contribute and learn, you will need to ask for more opportunities. Know how and when to ask for more opportunities. Showing initiative sometimes requires you to go outside your job description. If something needs to get done, be willing and eager to jump on it. It demonstrates your ambition and it provides you with a learning opportunity. When you have downtime, ask your manager if there is something you can help with. Perhaps there is a project that you have been eager to participate on; if there is something that will help you develop a new skill, offer your services. Ask for permission to see if your peers could use your expertise and assistance on their current projects.

Be careful to know your limits and do not take on too much. Your can-do attitude can be exploited. People of the lazier variety could take advantage of your willingness and try to pawn off work that is clearly their responsibility.

Be mindful of your workload and do not go overboard with your initiative and overcommit. That is another recipe for disaster or burnout.

If you are completely buried, don’t go around asking for projects to demonstrate your go-getter mentality, because you will be setting yourself up to fail and not complete the projects on time or at the desired quality. In your meetings with your manager, be honest about your bandwidth. If you are buried with work and your manager asks you to take on another project, make sure to accurately sum up your current position using a positive tone. For example:

“Currently my time is consumed with projects x, y, and z. However, in __ days, I will be wrapping up projects x and y, freeing up some capacity. If this is a higher priority, I can adjust and delay the completion of projects x, y, and z by __ days. Let me know your thoughts on how to best proceed.”

We will talk more about managing your brand later in the book, but this type of accountability is a key element of how you are perceived within the organization. Volunteering for projects will help you to establish a reputation internally for being ambitious and a team player.

There are people in the workforce who do the exact opposite. They will burn more time working on ways to hide from a project than they would completing it. This is lazy and doesn’t make sense. You are going to be in the office anyway, so you might as well have a full day and learn something new whenever possible.

Remember, when you are assigned a project, you are being given a potential gift—an opportunity to learn, grow, and bolster your resume. Do not roll your eyes or sigh when it is assigned to you. It demonstrates a poor attitude, and that will stick with you for your tenure at the company.

Showing initiative is a very easy way to differentiate yourself. When growth opportunities or promotions are available, believe me, you will have a major leg up on your peers when you exemplify ownership on a consistent basis.