“ What is the recipe for successful achievement? To my mind there are just four essential ingredients: Choose a career you love, give it the best there is in you, seize your opportunities, and be a member of the team.”
—BENJAMIN F. FAIRLESS, CHAIRMAN AND CEO OF U.S. STEEL (1952–1955)
IN THIS CHAPTER, you will learn a series of practical, proven, simple, and effective ways to get paid more money for what you do and get promoted faster to higher levels of authority and responsibility.
These methods and techniques are used by the highest-paid and most successful people in our society. When you begin to use them yourself, you will put your entire life and career onto the fast track. You will make more progress in the next few years than the average person makes in 10 or 20 years of just plodding along with the crowd.
Your choice of a career, and a job within that career, is one of the most important decisions you ever make. Unfortunately, most people drift into their jobs, accepting whatever is offered to them at the time and then allowing other people to determine what they will do, where they will do it, how they will do it, and how much they will be paid for it. The company and the boss become very much like an extension of the mother and the father. There begins a natural inertia and momentum that carries most people onward through their careers, month after month, and year after year.
But by now you’ve learned that this is not for you. Your goal is to get a great job that you really enjoy and that pays you the very most that you can possibly earn in exchange for your mental, emotional, and physical energies. The good news is that, no matter what your situation, you are not trapped. You have free will. You have choices. There are countless things that you can do with your talents and abilities, and there are numerous places where you will be appreciated more, paid at a higher rate, and promoted faster than you ever have up until now.
Because of the dynamism and the rapid rate of change in our economy, a person starting work today will have many different jobs in his/her career. Fortune magazine reported recently that more than 40 percent of the population will be contingency workers or “free agents” for much of their careers. That is, they will seldom have a long-term, lifelong job with a single company or organization.
One of the biggest mistakes you can ever make is to ever think that you work for anyone else but yourself. We have moved from an era of lifelong employment to an era of lifelong employability. No matter who signs your paycheck, you are your own boss, completely responsible for every part of your work and personal life. In the long run, you determine how much you get paid and everything that happens to you. You are responsible.
The top 3 percent of Americans view themselves as self-employed, no matter where the work and no matter who signs their paycheck. This attitude of self-employment makes them more valuable to their companies and, as a result, they get paid more and promoted faster.
From now on, see yourself as a consultant or free agent to your existing company, determined to justify the amount they are paying you every single day.
This is perhaps the most important step of all in your career. Take the time to analyze your personal talents and abilities. Look deep into yourself to decide what it is that you really enjoy doing. What are the activities that interest you and hold your attention? In the past, what have been your peak experiences and your most enjoyable moments?
You have been designed by nature to do certain things and perform certain tasks extraordinarily well. You have been engineered for success from the very beginning. You have within you deep reservoirs of talent and ability that you have never tapped into up until now. You have the capacity to be, have, and do virtually anything that you can put your mind to. But you must accept the responsibility of deciding exactly what it is you want and then dedicating yourself wholeheartedly to achieving those goals.
Here is a great thinking tool for you. For the rest of your life, practice zero-based thinking in everything you do. Zero-based thinking requires that you draw a line under all of your previous decisions up until now and ask yourself this question: “Is there anything in my life that I am doing today that, knowing what I now know, I wouldn’t get into again today, if I had to do it over again?”
The fact is that in times of turbulence and rapid change, and for the rest of your life, you will always have at least one answer to this question. There will always be at least one thing that you are doing, that, knowing what you now know, you wouldn’t get into again, if you had to do it over.
How can you tell if you are in a “zero-based thinking” situation? It’s simple: It’s called stress. Whenever you experience chronic stress, unhappiness, anger, or dissatisfaction of any kind, it is almost always because you are in a situation that, knowing what you now know, you wouldn’t get into again today if you had to do it over.
Apply zero-based thinking to your current or most recent job. Knowing what you now know, would you take this job again, under the terms and conditions that you are now working? Would you take this job and work for this particular boss? Would you go to work for this company? In this industry? At this salary? Or in this position? If the answer is no, your next questions are, “How do I get out of this situation, how fast, and how do I avoid getting into this situation again?”
You can also apply zero-based thinking to each part of your life. Apply it to your relationships: Is there any relationship in your life, personal or business, that knowing what you now know, you wouldn’t get into again today if you had to do it over?
Is there any investment of time, money, or emotion that is holding you back or weighing you down, that knowing what you now know, you wouldn’t get into again today?
The reason zero-based thinking is so important is that until you deal with the dissatisfactions of the present, you cannot move onward and upward to create the wonderful future that is possible for you. In deciding what you want, imagine that you could have any job at all. Imagine that all jobs and positions are open to you. Imagine that there is a job out there that you would really enjoy doing, hour after hour and day after day. One of the great success secrets is for you to decide what you really enjoy doing and then to find a job doing that one thing or combination of things.
It is interesting to note that you will always be paid more and promoted faster when you are doing something that makes you happy, something that fills you with joy and satisfaction. In fact, unless your work really makes you happy, you will never be able to develop the commitment, passion, and dedication necessary to rise above the difficulties, challenges, and setbacks that every job or career contains.
And when deciding what you really want in a job, be purely selfish. Listen only to yourself, to your inner voice. Decide what you would really enjoy doing personally before you start thinking about what might be possible.
My brother left high school and worked at odd jobs for a couple of years. One day, he decided that he wanted to become a landscape architect. He spent the next three and a half years in a technical school learning landscape architecture. He worked with landscape architects on the weekends and during the summer. Finally, he got his degree.
Two years later, he realized that landscape architecture was not what he had expected. Instead, he decided that he wanted to be a lawyer. He was clear that this was the career for him. It took him five more years of hard work in night school and his afternoons and weekends before he managed to get a degree in law. Today, he has a thriving legal practice, he is doing work that he really enjoys, and he is making a wonderful living.
The point is this: You may have to put in a lot of effort and make a lot of false starts before you find the ideal career for you. But it all starts with you sitting down and deciding what it is you really want and then getting started.
Each year, and in each economic cycle, some industries are growing and expanding and absorbing many thousands of people. These industries are offering incredible opportunities for men and women who want to get ahead more rapidly than the average person.
At the same time, other industries have flattened out or are actually declining. These industries continue to hire to replace the workers that they are losing, but as a result of automation, technology, changing consumer preferences, and competition, these industries are not likely to grow in the years ahead. Your job is to begin by separating the high-growth industries from the low-growth industries.
You can make more progress, get paid more, and get promoted faster in a high-growth industry or a fast-growing company in a couple of years than you might in five or ten years in a slow-growth or declining industry.
Once you have identified a high-growth industry, do your homework. Find out which companies in that industry are growing the most rapidly. Remember, 20 percent of companies in any industry make 80 percent of the money and 80 percent of the profits. They have better leadership, better market positions, better technology, and better futures. These are the companies where you want to work.
See yourself and your skills as a valuable resource, like money, and view the market as a place where you are going to invest yourself to get the very highest return on your mental, emotional, and physical energies. Be purely selfish when it comes to committing your life and your work to a particular company in a particular industry.
A woman came up to me in one of my seminars recently and asked me what she could do to get paid more and promoted faster in her current job. I asked her what she was doing. She told me that she was working for a manufacturing company. As it happens, the company had tough competition from the Japanese, who offered similar products at lower prices with equal or better quality. As a result, the company had not grown in 10 years. I told her that there was very little future in a company or an industry that was in decline. If she was really serious about getting ahead in her career and in her life, she should join a faster-growing company in a more dynamic industry.
She wrote to me later to tell me that she had taken my advice. She was now earning 40 percent more after one year with a new company than she was earning after several years with the old company. Not only that, she had been promoted twice and was on the fast track in her career.
According to Theodore Levitt, an influential economic scholar and former dean of Harvard Business School, the most valuable asset that a company has is its reputation. Reputation is defined as how a company is known to its customers. If you are interested in working in a particular industry, ask around and find out which companies have the best reputations for quality, service, innovation, and leadership. Even within your own company, parts of the company may be growing and expanding while other parts of the company may have leveled off or are declining. Your goal should be to invest yourself where the best future is possible for you.
J. Paul Getty, the great oil billionaire, once wrote a book on success titled How to Be Rich. In it, he recommended that you find a company that you want to work in and then go to that company and be willing to take any job it offers you. Get your foot in the door. Once you are inside, you will have a chance to perform and to move up rapidly. This is a good strategy.
This is one of the most important decisions that you ever make. Choosing the right boss can help your career and help you get paid more and promoted faster than almost anything else you do.
Look upon accepting a job as the equivalent of entering into a business marriage, with your boss as your spouse. He or she is going to have an enormous impact on how much you get paid, how much you enjoy your work, how rapidly you get promoted, and every other part of your work life.
When you are looking for a job, you should interview your boss carefully to make sure that this is the kind of person you would enjoy working with. This should be someone whom you could respect and look up to. This must be someone who is friendly and supportive and on whom you can depend to help you move ahead as rapidly as possible in your own career.
It’s a good idea to talk to other people who work for that boss. Check his or her background. Ask around and see if you can find someone who knows him or her personally and who will give you a candid assessment of the person.
The best bosses have certain qualities in common. First of all, they have high integrity. When they make a promise, they keep it. When they say they will do something, they do it exactly as they said. When they promise you a review or an increase, they follow through, right on schedule.
The best bosses also take the time to be clear when they delegate a task to you. They discuss it with you and ensure that you know exactly what you are expected to do, and when, and to what standard of quality.
The best bosses are considerate and caring about their people. They are interested in you as a person as well as in you as an employee. They want to know about your personal life, your family, your spouse, and children. They want to know about the things that concern you and that affect the way you think and feel at work. This doesn’t mean that a good boss is a father or mother, confessor, or a nurse maid. But a good boss sees you as a whole person with a life apart from your work life.
You can always tell the quality of your relationship with your boss by how free you feel to speak honestly, openly, and directly to him or her about things that are bothering you. When you see your boss coming, you feel happy and comfortable rather than nervous or insecure. Perhaps the best measure of all is that when you are working with the right boss, you laugh a lot at work. You enjoy yourself and you feel valuable and important as an employee and as a person.
Here is another place that you must practice zero-based thinking on a regular basis. Review your current job situation. Would you take this job, working for this boss, knowing what you now know, if you had to do it over? If the answer is no, you should seriously consider changing your position and finding a boss that you like and respect.
A friend of mine found himself working for a critical and demanding boss in a medium-size company. He liked the company. He liked the products and services that the company offered. He liked his co-workers. But his boss was making him miserable. So he looked around within the company and selected a boss who was completely different. He then arranged to transfer out of his department and into the department where he was working under the better boss. This decision changed his career completely. As a result of working under a great boss, he performed at his very best. He was paid more and promoted faster and in a few years was a manager himself.
Fully 85 percent of your success in work, no matter how intelligent or skilled you are, is going to be determined by your attitude and your personality. Your success, how much you are paid, and how fast you are promoted will be largely determined by how much people like you and want to help you.
Well-known psychologist Dr. Daniel Goleman has written several books on the subject of emotional intelligence. His conclusion is that emotional quotient (EQ) is more important than your intelligence quotient (IQ) in determining how successful you will be at your job. Just think about it: People who are positive, cheerful, and optimistic are always more liked and valued than people who are critical, pessimistic, and negative. Positive people are the first hired and the last laid off or fired.
One of the most important determinants of your career success will be how well you perform as a part of a team at every stage of your work. The very best team players are those who are cheerful, positive, and supportive of others. They have high levels of empathy and consideration. They are the kind of people who others want to be around and to help.
Research shows that a positive, cheerful person is more likely to be paid more and promoted faster. This kind of person is more readily noticed by supervisors who can accelerate his or her career. In addition, a positive person is supported by his or her co-workers and staff. There seems to be an upward pressure that drives a positive person forward at a faster rate.
The critical determinant of a positive mental attitude is how you function under stress. Anyone can be positive when things are going great. But it is when you face difficulties and setbacks that you show yourself, and everyone else, what you are really made of. As the saying goes: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”
People with positive mental attitudes look for the good in every person and every situation. They look for something positive or humorous. The positive person tends to be constructive rather than destructive. And the good news is that a positive mental attitude is something that you can learn by practicing being positive, every single day, especially when it is most needed. Look for the good in each person and situation. Seek the valuable lesson in each problem or difficulty.
It is absolutely amazing how many people hold themselves back, year after year, because no one has ever taken them aside and told them how important their external appearance is to getting paid more and promoted faster.
I have personally studied the subject of image in business for many years. I have read dozens of books and articles and taught thousands of people. I can tell you with great assurance that how you look on the outside is going to have a major effect on how far you go and how fast you get there.
The first rule is that you should always dress for success in your job and in your company. Look at the top people in your industry. Look at the top people in your company. Look at the pictures of the men and women in the newspapers and magazines who are being promoted to positions of higher responsibility and pay. Dress and groom the way they do. Pattern yourself after the leaders, not the followers.
There are specific colors and color combinations that are more acceptable than others in business. Buy a good book on professional image, read it from cover to cover, and then follow its recommendations in your career.
There is a lot of talk today about casual dress. But the people who are allowed to dress casually at work are back-office people. They are not people who deal with customers. They are usually not people upon whom the future of the company depends. Even in Silicon Valley, where it is a badge of honor to dress down completely, the young executives keep tailored suits in their offices, and they wear these suits when customers or investment bankers visit. They know the importance of dress.
My rule is this: If you are a person with a future, don’t dress like a person without one. Dress like you are going somewhere in your life. And if everyone around you decides on casual dress, this is all the better for you. You will stand out and look better to everyone who can have a positive influence on your career.
Remember, companies want to be proud of the employees whom they introduce to their customers and their bankers. You must look like the kind of person an executive would be proud to introduce to another executive as being a representative of your company.
The rule is this: People judge you in the first four seconds. They will then grant you approximately 30 seconds more before they make a final decision and store this judgment away in their subconscious minds. After that, it is very hard for them to change their first impressions. From then on, they will seek out evidence to prove that their first impressions were correct and will ignore evidence to the contrary. You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.
People are extremely visual. Fully 95 percent of the first impression you make will be determined by your clothes and grooming. One rule for proper dress says that you should spend twice as much on your clothes and buy half as many. No matter what others might say, human beings are very strongly affected by the dress and external appearance of other people. Your goal is to dress so that you look really good in every business situation.
Your grooming is very important as well. Always strive to look like a winner at work. Look like a valuable and important person. Look like you are a person with a great future who is going somewhere with the company.
One of my clients came to me, after many months of frustration in working with a sales prospect for his company, and asked for my advice. He wanted to know why he was working so hard and selling so little. I politely told him that his appearance was such that he did not come across as trustworthy or credible to his prospective customers. He was a nice guy, but he was tripping himself up by the way he appeared on the outside. He was wearing a full beard, and research shows that people with full beards come across as having something to hide. They are not trusted.
He asked me what he could do specifically to change his appearance, and I told him. “Shave off your beard,” I said. He was shocked. He wrestled with his choice of facial hair. Nonetheless, he shaved off his beard completely. The following Monday, he went back to see the prospect he had been calling on for six months. The customer’s response was so totally different toward him that he was amazed. After six months of going back and forth without result, the client decided to buy and gave him a deposit check for $30,000 to seal the deal that very day.
You are a wonderful person with a wonderful future in front of you. It is important that everyone who sees you recognizes this fact in the first four seconds.
Develop a workaholic mentality. There is nothing that will bring attention from the important people in your work life faster than for you to get a reputation as a hard, hard worker.
Everyone in the company knows who the hard workers are. The hardest workers are always the most respected in any company of value. They are always paid more and promoted faster for a very simple reason: They get more work done in a shorter period of time. They are more valuable to the company. They set a better example and they are the kind of people whom bosses are proud of and want to keep more than anyone else.
Two extra hours of work each day is all you really need to become one of the most successful people of your generation. You can get this extra two hours by coming in an hour earlier and staying one hour later. In most cases, this will expand your day slightly but it will expand your career tremendously. You can gain extra time by working through lunch rather than taking a 60- to 90-minute break in the middle of each day.
The top people in every field work more hours than average people. The studies show that the top 10 percent of money earners in America work 50 to 60 hours per week. In addition, they work all the time they work. They do not waste time. When they arrive at work early, they immediately start in on important tasks. They work steadily throughout the day. They do not make small talk or chitchat with their coworkers.
This must be your work style as well. Work all the time you work. Do not surf the Internet, make personal phone calls, read the newspaper, or chat about the latest football game or television program. Work all the time you work.
According to Robert Half International, the average person today works at less than 50 percent of capacity. The other 50 percent is spent idly socializing, making personal phone calls, conducting personal business, starting late, leaving early, and taking extended coffee breaks and lunch hours. Only about 5 percent of people in the world of work today actually work the whole time. Everyone else is functioning somewhere below his or her potential, and in many cases, far, far below.
Imagine that your company is going to bring in an outside company to assess all the staff in terms of who works the hardest, all the way down to who works the least hard. Make it your goal to win this contest even though it is just imaginary. Your job is to be ranked as the hardest-working person in the entire company within 12 months. This will help you to get paid more and promoted faster than almost anything else you can possibly do.
The average person today only works about 32 hours per week after all coffee breaks, lunches, and traveling time has been deducted. Of these 32 hours, the average working person then wastes half the time on tasks of low value, producing only an average amount of work. Wages and salaries are eventually watered down to compensate for the low level of work that is actually being done. But this is not for you. When you start work, hit the ground running. Avoid time-wasting activities, and especially, time-wasting people.
When someone tries to distract you from what you are doing, smile cheerfully and say, “Well, I’ve got to get back to work!” Keep repeating these words, over and over, “Back to work! Back to work! Back to work!” If people want to talk or shoot the breeze, tell them that you have to get “Back to work!” and that you would be pleased to chat with them at the end of the day. In most cases, they will go waste someone else’s time and never come back.
The unavoidable fact is that life is a contest. You are in competition with everyone else who wants to be paid more and promoted faster. There is a race on and you are in it. Your job is to move yourself into the pole position and move ahead faster than anyone else.
Fortunately, there are proven and tested ways for you to come out ahead. One of the most important is for you to continually ask for more responsibility. Volunteer for every assignment. Go to your boss at least once every week and ask him or her for more responsibility.
I stumbled onto this method of rapid promotion many years ago when I was working for the chairman of a large conglomerate. Every week, I would go to him and ask him for more responsibility. For the first few weeks, he responded politely but did not give me anything extra to do. Finally, he asked me if I would perform a particular task for him, “When you have a spare moment.”
This was my chance! It was Friday night and he had asked me for a complete report on a prospective investment. I immediately went to work. I worked Friday evening and all day Saturday and Sunday. On Monday morning, I came in early and got one of the secretaries to type up the report so it looked great. I was ready, well in advance.
At 10:30 that Monday morning, he called my office and asked me if there was any way that I could get him the numbers that he had requested on Friday. The bank had called and unexpectedly asked him for the details so it could make a decision. I went straight to his office with the report and put it on his desk. He looked at it, looked up at me, and then picked up the phone and called the bank. As I sat there, he concluded a major loan reading from my analysis. From that day on, my career took off. I started to get more responsibility. I became his “go-to guy,” and my entire future with that company moved onto an upward trajectory.
Most people in the world of work do only what is asked of them. But this is not for you. Your job is to keep asking for more work to do, and whenever you are given a new responsibility, fulfill it quickly and dependably. Develop a reputation for being the kind of person who, if you want to get something done, tackles what is given to you.
There are fewer things that will help you get paid more and promoted faster than a reputation for speed and dependability. Be the kind of person your boss can count on to get the job done fast. Whatever it takes, treat every assignment that you receive as if it were a test upon which your future career depended.
A young man in a large company told me this story. It was time for the annual United Way campaign in his company but no one would volunteer to head it up. All of the other managers avoided this job because it was so time-consuming.
But the young man saw it as an opportunity to perform for senior people in the company. He leaped at the responsibility and did an outstanding job getting everyone in the company to contribute to making the campaign a success. In the course of running the campaign, he was able to meet with almost every senior manager in the company and give each a chance to get to know him.
As a result of the success of the campaign, the president of the company was given a special award and written up in the newspapers as one of the top executives in the community. Within six months after the campaign ended this young man had been promoted twice. A year later, his previous manager, who had avoided this responsibility, was working under him.
This is one of the most important success principles you will ever learn to put your career onto the fast track. The future belongs to the askers. The future does not belong to those people who sit passively, wishing and hoping that their lives and their work will somehow improve. The future belongs to those people who step up and ask for what they want. And if they don’t get it, they ask, again and again, until they do get it.
When you are applying for a new job and you are offered a particular salary, ask for more at the very beginning. Most bosses have a salary range in mind of 10 percent to 20 percent above what they are offering. If they like you enough to offer you a job, they are often willing to go 10 percent or 20 percent above their first offers just to get you in the first place.
Once you have a job, ask your boss what you have to do to qualify for an increase. There is no point in working really hard if you do not know exactly what it is that you have to do to get paid more and promoted faster. You have to be doing a good job on something that really matters to your boss. Go to your boss and ask, and ask again if you are still not clear.
If you want an increase, you must ask for it. And the way you ask is by building a case, as a lawyer would build a case, for the amount that you want to receive. Instead of saying that you need more money, as most people do, you use a different strategy. Put together a list of the jobs that you are currently doing and the additional experience and skills you have developed since you were hired or since your last increase. Explain the financial impact of your work on the overall operations of the company and the contribution that you are making as a top employee.
Present all this information to your boss and tell him or her that, based on all of this, you would like an increase of a specific amount of money per month and per year. In many cases, you will get the increase simply by asking for it in an intelligent way.
In some cases, you will get less than you requested. If this happens, ask what you will have to accomplish in order to get the rest of the increase that you have asked for. If your request for an increase is turned down, ask exactly what you will have to do to get the increase you requested, and exactly when that increase will be payable. Be specific. Be clear. And don’t be afraid to ask.
The question of “asking” is a major question in human relations today. People are afraid to ask because they fear rejection. They fear being told “No.” But think about it this way: Before you ask, you have nothing. If you ask and the person says no, you are in exactly the same position that you were in before. But in many cases, the person will say yes and your whole future can be different.
Sometimes people are afraid to ask because they feel that they don’t deserve it. They feel that they are not good enough to be paid more than they are currently receiving. But an interesting thing happens when you begin asking for what you want. You actually begin to feel more deserving and more valuable. You begin to think in terms of why you are entitled to the money rather in terms of why not.
If you are not happy with your current job, ask to be transferred to a different job. If you are not happy with the way you are being treated, ask to be treated differently. If you are not happy with any part of your work life, ask for it to be changed.
Of course, you should ask politely. Ask courteously. Ask in a warm and friendly way. Ask cheerfully. Ask expectantly. Ask confidently. And ask persistently, if necessary. But be sure to ask. The future belongs to the askers, and the more you ask for the things you want, the more likely you are to get those things. Just try it once and you will be amazed.
Once I had a secretary working for me named Diane. Diane had been fired from a bank before she came to me and she very much needed a job. I was able to hire her for only $800 per month (in 1986). After two months, because she was doing such a good job, I increased her salary to $1,000 per month. And after two more months I increased her salary to $1,200 per month. This amounted to a 50 percent increase in a very short time.
After Diane had been working for me for about six months, she told me she would like to talk to me about her compensation. We arranged a time where we sat down, closed the door, and discussed her pay. She told me that she had been thinking about her salary and that she had decided that she would like an increase.
I had expected this and I told her that I was prepared to give her another $200 per month increase—to $1,400 per month. She thanked me for the thought and then told me that she had done a good deal of research in the marketplace and she had concluded that a person of her skills and abilities was worth $1,800 per month. That was the amount that she wanted.
I was surprised. I sat there looking at her and she stared back at me without blinking. Then I thought about how quickly she had learned every detail of my business. She had taken additional computer courses in the evening, on her own time, so that she could handle the bookkeeping and word processing. She had introduced herself to our customers and was handling customer service problems. She had worked on herself to become more valuable in every area.
As she sat there, I realized that she was worth the extra money. To replace her, I would have to pay as much, if not more, to someone else. I agreed to her request and gave her the increase to $1,800 per month. She thanked me with a big smile and went back to work. I just sat there shaking my head.
Here’s the point. She did everything exactly right. She carefully prepared her timing and her request. Then she stepped up and asked for exactly what she wanted, giving good, solid reasons for a 50 percent increase in pay. And I paid it willingly.
For the rest of your career, you must develop the habit of asking for what you want on every occasion. Ask at the beginning of the job, ask in the middle, and ask at every stage. Ask for more responsibilities, ask for more money. Ask for more rapid advancement. But be sure to ask.
Your character is your most valuable asset. It is the critical factor that others use when evaluating you for higher pay or more rapid promotion.
The key to character is truthfulness. No matter what, always tell the truth, in every situation. When you give your word, keep it. When you make a promise, fulfill it. When you say you’ll do something, no matter what it costs, be sure to do it.
An important part of character is loyalty. Lack of loyalty is one of the biggest, most fatal mistakes that a person can make in business. When you are loyal, you never complain, condemn, or criticize your company, your boss, your products, your services, or anything else about your work. Even if you are unhappy for some reason, you keep it to yourself. You always support the people you work with, and you demonstrate complete loyalty to the person who signs your paycheck.
Shakespeare once wrote: “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” Be true to yourself and then be true to everyone around you. Never compromise your integrity for anything.
The good news is that when you live with complete integrity, inside and outside, you feel wonderful about yourself. You have greater self-confidence and higher self-esteem. You feel positive and powerful. And most of all, you earn the respect, trust, and loyalty of all the people around you. Always guard your integrity as a sacred thing.
Future-orientation, the essential attitude for leadership, requires that you develop a long-term vision for yourself and for your career. After 50 years of research, Harvard government professor Dr. Edward Banfield concluded that the most successful men and women in our society have “long time perspective.” They think 10 and 20 years out into the future and they make their decisions each day based on this long time horizon. And so should you.
The most important concept in future-orientation is idealization. This requires that you idealize or imagine your ideal future career in every respect. Project yourself forward three to five years and imagine that your life was perfect and that you were doing exactly the right job for you.
Again consider the answers to these questions. If your work situation were perfect, what would it look like? What would you be doing? How much would you be earning? Who would you be working with? Where would you be working?
Once you have idealized your perfect job, ask yourself about the kind of person you would need to become in order to get and keep that job. What kind of skills would you have? What new talents and abilities would you have to learn and develop?
Practice what is called gap analysis on your job. Look at the gap between where you are today and where you would like to be in the future. What changes should you begin making, right now, in order to fill this gap? What would you have to do to work yourself into the kind of job you want?
One of the qualities of leaders in every field is that they think about the future much of the time. It is important that you think about the future as well, because that is where you are going to spend the rest of your life. The more you think about the future, the more optimistic and positive you will be. The more you develop a clear vision of where you want to be in the years ahead, the more likely it is that you will take the steps each day that will make your vision into your reality.
Think about the future of your company as well. Look at the cycles and trends in your business. Think about where your company is today and what your company needs to do to be successful in the future. The more future-oriented you are in your position, the more you will be paid and the more rapidly you will be promoted. The more future-oriented you are, the better decisions you will make and the more positive impact you will have on your company’s operations. The more future-oriented you are, the more you will feel in control of your life, your career, and your personal destiny.
People who have clear, written goals and who know exactly what they want in each area of their lives accomplish vastly more than people who are not sure or who are unclear about what they want.
Perhaps nothing can help you to be paid more and promoted faster than for you to become an intensely goal-oriented person. Fortunately, the skill of setting and achieving goals is something that you can learn quite quickly and then develop through practice, day after day. You can refer back to the goal-setting exercises in Chapter 3 and apply them to advancing your career.
Your ability to get results is the single most important determinant of how much you are paid and how rapidly you are promoted. Results are everything. Study after study has found that within two years of leaving college or school, your education has little or no impact on your career. From that point on, all that matters is your ability to perform and get results for your company.
Many people start off with limited education and skills but, as the result of focusing single-mindedly on results, they accomplish vastly more than people with great educations and lots of advantages. This must be your strategy as well.
Here is an exercise for you: Make a list of all of your job’s tasks and activities. Take this list to your boss and ask your boss to prioritize the list.
What does he or she consider to be more important or less important on your list? From that moment on, always work on the tasks that your boss considers to be more important than anything else.
There is no better way to get paid more and promoted faster than for you to be working, all day long, on the tasks that are of greatest concern to your boss. The best days of your working life will be when you are working on those tasks that your boss considers most important. And the good news is that, the more you accomplish important tasks, the more important tasks you will be given to accomplish.
Your life and work will be a continuous succession of problems. You will have to deal with problems all day long and into the evenings. This is your job. Whatever your title, you are a problem solver.
Where there are no problems, you are unnecessary. The work can be automated and done by a machine. And the more that minor problems or activities are automated, the more important and valuable you become in solving problems of greater complexity.
The only interruption in this continuous flow of problems will be the occasional crisis. If you are living a normal life, you will have a crisis every two or three months. Your ability to deal effectively with the inevitable and unavoidable crisis is a key measure of your intelligence, ability, and maturity.
Solution-oriented people are the most valuable people in any organization. You can change your mind from negative to positive in a single moment by taking your thoughts off of the problem and focusing them on the solution. Instead of asking or worrying about who did what and who is to blame, you should instead ask the question, “What do we do now?”
The more you focus on finding solutions, the more solutions you will find. The better you get at solving problems, the bigger the problems you will be given to solve, and the more money, power, and position you will be given to go along with the size of the problems.
Your entire career will ultimately be determined by your ability to solve the problems that you meet at your level. And when you do, you automatically get moved up to a higher level, exactly as you get moved to a higher grade in school when you have passed the exams at the previous grade.
Here is a method you can use for the rest of your career to deal effectively with any problem that comes along:
1. Define the problem clearly. What exactly has happened? Get the facts. Get the real facts. Not the apparent facts or the obvious facts, but the real, true facts of the situation. It is amazing how much time and energy are wasted attempting to solve a problem when the people involved are not even clear on what the problem is in the first place. Keep asking, “What else is the problem?”
2. Identify all the possible causes of this problem. How and why did it happen? Sometimes this exercise alone will point to the correct solution.
3. Identify all the possible solutions. The more possible solutions you can come up with, the more likely it is that you will come up with the ideal one. Keep asking, “What else is the solution?”
4. Make a decision to implement one of the solutions. In most cases, any decision is usually better than no decision at all. A poor decision vigorously enacted is better than a brilliant decision that sits on the shelf.
5. Assign responsibility for carrying out the decision. Who exactly is going to do what, and when, and to what standard?
6. Set a schedule of reporting and a standard to measure whether the decision has been successful. A solution without a deadline or a standard is really not a solution at all.
7. Take immediate action. Implement the solution, or have it implemented, and resolve the problem.
Become solution-oriented in your approach toward life and work. Become the kind of person to whom people bring their problems because you always have a solution. The more you focus on solutions, the smarter you become. The more solution-oriented you become, the more and better solutions you will come up with. You can put your entire life and career on the fast track toward being paid more and promoted faster by becoming an intensely solution-oriented person.
Being idea-oriented means continually looking for faster, better, cheaper, easier ways to get the job done and to get the desired result.
The good news is this: You are a genius! You have more natural intelligence and creativity than you have ever used in your entire life. But your creativity is like a muscle: If you don’t use it, you lose it. And the more you use your mental ability to generate ideas, the smarter you become, and the more and better ideas you generate to use in every part of your work.
The most successful people in every business are those people who are always coming up with new and better ideas, new and better ways to achieve the goals of the company. And no one is smarter than you. No one is better than you. No one has more natural creativity than you have, just as no one has more or different muscles than you. It is all a matter of how often and how long you use your creative muscles in your life and your work.
Here is one of the greatest idea-generating methods ever discovered. More people have become successful with this method than any other creative-thinking method in America. It is called mindstorming.
In mindstorming, you take your major problem or goal and you write it in the form of a question at the top of a page. You then generate 20 answers or more to this question. For example, your question could be, “How can we reduce the time and costs of this activity by 20 percent?” Then, alone or with others, you develop 20 answers to that question. At the end of this exercise, you select at least one of the answers and take action on it immediately.
For the rest of your career, whenever you have a big challenge, problem, or goal, write it as a question at the top of the page and then discipline yourself to generate at least 20 answers to your question. This single exercise alone will change your life. It will dramatically increase your intelligence. It will activate your creativity so that it runs all day long. It will actually make you smarter and increase your IQ. By practicing mindstorming on a regular basis, you make your mind stronger, faster, and more flexible than ever before. Just try it once. You will be amazed.
The more ideas you come up with to improve the operations of your business, the more you will be paid and the faster you will be promoted.
Relationships are everything. Your level of success, your rate of promotion, and your pay will be largely determined by the number of people you know and who know you in a positive way.
Birds of a feather flock together. People like to pay and promote people who they like and feel comfortable with. The more people like you and enjoy your company, the more doors they will open for you and the more obstacles they will remove from your path.
A recent study found that companies were much more likely to lay off people with negative personalities even though those people might have been technically superior to others. In a 20-year study of hiring and firing trends, fully 95 percent of people who were let go by their companies were let go because of personality problems. Poor social skills are the number-one obstacle to getting paid more and promoted faster.
The key to becoming a people-oriented person is for you to practice the golden rule in everything you do. Treat other people the way you would like them to treat you. Offer to help other people to do their jobs whenever you see an opportunity. Practice being courteous, kind, and considerate when you deal with other people, especially people who work in lesser-paid positions than your own. Thomas Carlyle once wrote, “You can tell a big person by the way he treats little people.”
Continually expand your network of contacts in every way possible. Join your local business associations and attend every business function related to your field. Introduce yourself to other people and find out what they do. Ask good questions and listen carefully to the answers. Make your network of contacts wider and wider so that you are eventually known to a great number of the key people in your industry.
Many people have transformed their careers by getting to know other key people in their industry. As a result, when positions came open, they were remembered, offered interviews, and eventually the jobs. Many people have gone from doing a good job at one place to becoming a senior executive with higher pay and stock options at another place just because of a contact or friendship that developed at a business or association meeting.
In your work, become a friendly, helpful, and cheerful person. Express gratitude to people on every occasion. Say thank you to anyone who does anything for you, either large or small. Go out of your way to compliment people on their traits, possessions, or accomplishments. As Abraham Lincoln said, “Everyone likes a compliment.”
Treat each person in your company as if he or she were one of the most valuable customers of the business. Treat your boss, your co-workers, and your staff as if they were all valuable and important people. When you make other people feel important, they will look for every opportunity to make you feel important as well. And when you are liked and respected by all the people around you, all kinds of opportunities will open up for you to be paid more and promoted faster.
Dedicate yourself to lifelong learning. Set yourself apart from the crowd by being the person in the company who is learning and growing at a faster rate than anyone else.
The fact is that most of your knowledge and skill today has a half-life of about two and a half years. This means that within five years most of what you know today about your field will be obsolete or irrelevant. In order to survive and thrive in a fast-changing world, you will have to continually upgrade your knowledge and skills, at a faster and faster rate, just to stay even, much less get ahead.
The highest paid 10 percent of Americans read two to three hours each day in their fields just to keep current. They are continually taking in information from every possible source. As we move at hyperspeed into the information age, the top people in every business realize that they must stay ahead of the wave of change or they will be bowled over by it. Today, you have a very simple choice. You can be a master of change or you can be a victim of change. There is very little middle ground. Your job is to be a master of change by continually learning to be better and better at what you do.
The first is for you to read at least one hour each day in your chosen field. Reading is to the mind as exercise is to the body. If you read a good book on your field for one hour each day, that will translate into about one book per week. One book per week will translate into roughly 50 books per year. Fifty books per year will translate into 500 books over the next 10 years. The very act of continuously reading in your field will make you one of the most knowledgeable and highest-paid people in your business in a very short time.
The second key to continuous learning is for you to listen to audio programs in your car as you drive from place to place. The average car owner sits behind the wheel 500 to 1,000 hours each year. That is the equivalent of three to six months of 40-hour weeks that you spend in your car, or one to two full-time university semesters, according to the University of Southern California. You can become one of the most knowledgeable people in your field by listening to educational audio programs rather than music in your car.
The third key to continuous learning is for you to take every good course and seminar in your field that you can find. The highest-paid people I know will actually travel from one side of the country to the other in order to take an intense two- or three-day seminar that can help them in their careers. A good book, audio program, or seminar can give you ideas and insights that can save you years of hard work, as can good Internet research. From now on, become greedy for new knowledge. In the final analysis, nothing can help you to get paid more and promoted faster than becoming one of the most knowledgeable and competent people in your field.
Resolve to be the best at what you do. Resolve today to join the top 10 percent of people in your field. Look around you at the top people and realize that no one is smarter than you and no one is better than you. If people are ahead of you today, it is because they are doing things differently from you. And whatever anyone else has done, you can do as well, if you just learn how.
The way that you become one of the best people in your field is for you to, first of all, identify your key result areas. These are the skill areas where you absolutely, positively have to do an excellent job in order to be successful in your field. There are seldom more than five to seven key result areas in any job. Your ability to perform at an excellent level in each of these areas is the key determinant of how much you are paid and how fast you are promoted.
Once you have identified your key result areas, ask yourself this key question: “What one skill, if I developed and practiced it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on my career?” This is the most important question you will ever ask and answer for your career. If you do not know which one skill can help you the most, go to your boss and ask him or her. Ask your co-workers. Ask your spouse. But whatever it takes, you absolutely must find out the answer to this question and center in on the one key skill that can help you the very most if you master it at a high level. Then, set the acquisition of this skill as a goal. Write it down. Make a plan to master this skill. You then work on it every single day. This simple exercise is so powerful that it alone can change your life.
Set standards of excellent performance for yourself in everything you do. Develop a reputation for quality work. If you are a manager or supervisor, demand quality work from everyone who reports to you. Remember the old saying, “Good enough seldom is.”
In the final analysis, no one will care how fast you did the job. All people will care about is how well you did the job. Resolve to become absolutely excellent at what you do, and do your job in an excellent fashion. Set this as your standard and never compromise it for the rest of your career.
In business, customers are everything. The essential purpose of a business is to create and keep customers. Profits in a business are the result of creating and keeping customers in a sufficient number and at a reasonable cost.
Customers pay all salaries and wages. Customers determine the success or failure of companies and of everyone in the company. Sam Walton once said, “There is only one boss—the customer—and he or she can fire everybody in the company from the chairman down, simply by spending his or her money elsewhere.”
The definition of a customer is someone who depends on you for the satisfaction of their needs, or someone who you depend upon for the satisfaction of your needs. By this definition, your boss is your customer. Your co-workers are your customers. Your staff members are your customers. And of course, the people who buy your products and services are your customers. Everyone is dependent on someone else for something. Who are your customers? Who are your key customers?
Your success in your life and your career will be largely determined by how well you serve and satisfy the customers in your life. And the more and the better you satisfy your customers, the more customers you will be given to satisfy.
There are four levels of customer satisfaction in your business. The first is to meet customer expectations. This is the minimum for survival.
The second level is for you to exceed customer expectations, for you to do more than the customer expected. This is the key to growth and profitability.
The third level of customer satisfaction is for you to delight your customers, to do something that causes them to light up with unexpected pleasure.
The highest level of customer satisfaction is where you amaze your customers, where you do things that make them so happy that they not only want to buy from you again, but they want to bring their friends as well.
Every single day, you should be looking for ways to exceed expectations and both amaze and delight the people who depend upon you at work. Your ability to serve and satisfy your customers will get you paid more and promoted faster than anything else you can do.
This is the key to your financial future. This is the key to growth, success, and rapid promotion. The most important people in every organization are intensely focused on what they can do to increase the profitability of the company. And the greater effect your work can have on profitability, the more important you are and the more you will be paid.
There are two ways to increase profitability in a company:
• Increase revenues by selling more of the existing products and services or by developing new products and services that can be sold to more customers.
• Decrease the costs of providing the products and services to the existing market, thereby increasing profit margins.
The best combination is for you to be continually looking for ways to increase sales and revenues while reducing the costs of delivering those products and services.
Fully 80 percent of all products that will be in the market in five years do not exist today. The rate of turnover and change is extraordinary. You must constantly be looking for new products and services, and new combinations of existing products and services, that you can bring to the market to maintain and increase revenues for your organization. One good idea is all you need to change your entire career.
At the same time, you should be looking for ways to reorganize, restructure, and reengineer every part of your work so that you can get the job done faster and at a lower cost than before. Squeeze out every extra penny of expense. Examine every single cost to see if it cannot be decreased, downsized, or eliminated in some way. Many executives have found that they can cut the cost of producing a product or service by 50 percent, 60 percent, and 70 percent while increasing the speed at which that product or service is brought to the market. And so can you.
The key people in any organization are those who are the most concerned with the overall profitability of the company. And when you become a key player in affecting profitability in some way, you come immediately to the attention of the key people who can most help you in your career. Your ability to increase profitability in some way is one of the very fastest ways for you to get paid more and promoted faster.
Power is a very real and important part of organizational and business life. Your ability to acquire and use power in your career is essential to your long-term success. Let me explain.
Power, in its simplest sense, means control over people and resources. Power means that you have the ability to influence things that are done or that are not done. There are two major forms of power: positive power and negative power. Positive power is where you use your influence to help the organization achieve more of its goals, faster and cheaper. Negative power is where people use their positions or influence to improve themselves at the expense of the organization.
There are three forms of positive power that you should develop. The first is called expert power. Expert power arises when you become very good at doing something that is important to the company. As a result, people look up to you and respect you for the value of the contribution you can make.
The second form of power is called ascribed power. This is where you are liked and admired by others because of your ability to be a team player, to get along with others, and to help others to achieve their goals and do their jobs. Ascribed power arises when people like you and want you to be successful. This comes from your attitude and your personality more than anything else.
The third kind of power is position power. This is the power, authority, and ability to reward and punish that goes along with a specific title. Every title or position has some of this power attached to it. As you develop expert power and ascribed power, you will be given position power. The people above you and around you will want you to be in a position of influence because you have demonstrated that the more influence you have, the more and better results you can get for the company. This is the very best and most important of all powers for you to develop and build.
And the more you acquire and use your power in a positive and constructive way, the more power you will attract to you. More people around you will support you and help you. The people above you will give you more resources. You will be more respected and esteemed by others. And you will definitely be paid more and promoted faster.
Action orientation is the most outwardly identifiable quality of a high performer. He is constantly in motion. He is always doing something that is moving himself and the company toward the achievement of its goals.
Resolve today to develop a sense of urgency. Develop a bias for action. Develop a fast tempo in everything you do, because the faster you move, the more you get done. And the more you get done, the more experience you get and the more competent you become. The faster you move, the more energy you have. The faster you move, the more valuable you become to your company and to everyone around you.
Only 2 percent of people in our society have a sense of urgency. And these are the people who eventually rise to the top of every organization. When you develop a reputation for speed and dependability in everything you do, you attract to yourself more opportunities to do more things of greater and greater importance.
An average person with an average background who moves fast and continuously will eventually run circles around a genius who moves slowly and carefully. Your goal is to develop the reputation for being the person who, if somebody wants a job done fast, is trusted with the task. This will open more doors for you and get you paid more and promoted faster than almost anything you can possibly do.
Today, the primary source of wealth is talent and ability. All the money and resources flows to the men and women who demonstrate that they can get the job done and get it done quickly and well. When you begin to practice these techniques to get paid more and promoted faster, you will put your career onto the fast track. You will move ahead more rapidly and more dependably than anyone else around you. You will move upward and onward, and you will make your life and career into something truly extraordinary.
1. Imagine that everyone in your company was going to be rated in terms of who worked the hardest. How would you score?
2. What steps could you start taking on a daily basis to upgrade your knowledge and skills?
3. Which of your tasks contribute the greatest value to your company?
4. What are your boss’s most important concerns and priorities?
5. Who are the major time wasters in your office and how could you avoid them?
6. What are the types of tasks that need to be done quickly and well in your company?
7. What one action are you going to take immediately as the result of what you have learned in this chapter?