How Successful People Fail In New Jobs

I have seen really good people fail miserably in new jobs.  Jobs where by all rights they should have been successful.  Their failure is generally because they did not understand their new environment and had no personal equity to build upon.

The hardest thing to do in a job is to build personal equity.  It takes a very long time for people to know and appreciate someone’s style, learn their strengths, and, most important of all, learn to trust them.  Trust is a major component of equity. And new employees simply aren’t trusted until they start to prove themselves.  

Part of building equity and trust is learning how to operate in a new environment.  It is critical to learn where the bodies are buried, know who can be counted on (both above and below), to know the do’s and don’ts of the new company and to understand how decisions are made and work gets done.  

Without this knowledge, it is easy to fail.

When people fail in a new job, despite success in the previous job (or jobs), it is because they haven't properly studied and learned the new culture.  It is actually easy to fail, even when a new job is similar to a previous position. It doesn’t matter whether one is the chairman, president, CEO or just a lower level employee, when starting work they lack personal equity.  Everything they do is subject to second guessing and there is no benefit of the doubt. Success is built one day at a time.  It is essential to learn how to operate effectively in a new environment before taking significant action.  

What worked before many not work the same way now.

I have seen people go from one company where they were successful and move to another similar company and fail miserably.  I can think of a president of a highly successful creative ad agency who went to another creative agency as president and made a spectacular belly flop.  Why?  Because he didn’t take into consideration the culture of the new place and he didn’t take the time to define the problems and learn how to solve them within the context of his new environment. He tried to operate as he did before.  Unfortunately, the people below him did not know or trust him and they responded to him poorly because his style was so different than his predecessor.

There is a book I would like to recommend to everyone who is changing jobs.  It is by Michael D.  Watkins, “The First 90 Days” and it should be mandatory reading for every mid-to senior level executive who changes jobs.  While the book is somewhat professorial and academic, Mr.  Watkins’ entire book deals with understanding new cultures and how to function effectively within them. It gives wonderful insights into how to succeed.  It is great reading no matter if you are a boss or not.

There have been spectacular failures of new CEO’s, like the recent debacle at J.C. Penny with Ron Johnson. Mr. Johnson’s failure was in misreading the marketplace and the customer; his people followed him but his strategy was off. While this colossal misjudgment caused him to fail, this kind of failure is actually rare. 

More common is the person who starts a new job and tries to do exactly what he or she did in a prior company (they may even have been hired for that exact purpose) and finding that the culture of the new environment is resistant or even hostile. This happened to the agency president mentioned above. Without understanding the nuances of the environment, it may be difficult to accomplish anything (Most of Mr. Watkins book covers this.).  Many an ad agency has hired a guru to save an account, only to find out that the person was an abject failure.  And often that lack of success was not that their ideas were wrong or bad, but rather that they failed to take into account the nature of their new environment and they couldn’t get their ideas accepted and acted upon, either internally and/or with their clients.  I won’t name names, but everyone knows people who have been through this.

One of the smartest agency presidents I know (he ran two agencies), always started his new job by spending his first days at his clients - he talked to everyone who dealt with his agency - until he understood their point of view of his company and its people.  He then went back to his agency and spent an extraordinary amount of time with each of his key people just talking about the agency and the business. His first six or eight weeks were spent building trust and equity.  Consequently, he was always successful.

Personal equity requires cultivation and understanding so that when decisions are made, people will follow the leader.  Leadership requires vision as well as understanding; and essential to that is a willing constituency. 

What Is Proper Email Etiquette?

Has anyone written a standard for emails? I honestly don’t know what is right these days. I looked on line and found a number of decent rules for content: http://bit.ly/1l7GyIQ. (I particularly like the first one, from Microsoft), but none of these links answers the issues I am raising.

For instance, does one have to write, “Dear So and So”?  Does one have to sign it, “Best” or “Sincerely”?  I know that when I email my family I don’t do any of these things.  I always do it on a first email to anyone, but after that, I wonder if it is really necessary.

My emails tend to be brief and often without salutations or closings, especially to people I am in constant contact with for an on-going subject.  I know that years ago, I was chairman of a not-for-profit and emailed a board member who was offended that I didn’t include a salutation and just signed it, “Paul”.  She lectured me through email that I was rude and needed to say, “Dear Sue” and “Best regards”.  She also suggested that I should ask how she is. Is this really necessary?

To me, emails are an abbreviated way of addressing people and issues.  An email is not a formal letter, especially if it is an on-going conversation. If an email is used to send a résumé or to make a proposal, then by all means it is a formal document and should follow the rules of good letters. 

An email should not replace a conversation where it is easy to ask about someone’s weekend (I find when I do this in an email, it is often not responded to).  If you want to chit-chat, the phone is a better medium.

These days, with all the old rules relaxed or eliminated – men wearing baseball hats in restaurants, women wearing flip-flops to the White House, people not giving up their seats for pregnant women, people wearing jeans to interviews – it is hard to know what is right or appropriate.

I would really love to hear opinions of my readers.

Adventures In Recruiting: Crazies And Eccentrics I Have Known

When I started recruiting, it never occurred to me that I was actually dealing with the general public.  But with so many people I have met, that is the truth.  On a bell shaped curve, some fall into the upper 2%, but some fall on the left side of the curve in the bottom 2%.

I thought it would be fun to briefly recount some of the “crazies” and eccentrics I have met.  Suffice to say that I don’t work with any of them.

• There was the woman who refused to come to my office for an interview, despite me being well known.  She told me, “I don’t go to men’s offices.”

•  There was the guy who wouldn’t give me his address.  It turns out he was saving money by not paying rent during the summer. He was literally living under a park bench on Long Island.

•  There was the woman who unbuttoned her blouse in order to try to convince me to send her out on interviews.

• There was a man who refused to tell me where he currently worked or what he worked on, “For reasons of security”.

•  There have been several “new business” people who claimed to be able to move an account with them. But when I contacted the ad or marketing manager of the business, they either didn’t know this person or hadn’t been in contact with them or had no intention of changing agencies.

• There was an account guy who did primal screams in the middle of the day and saw nothing wrong with it. He told me he could not share and office and could not work at an open plan office.  Not surprisingly, he was out of work.

• There was a guy who sent a résumé under a false name; he even had an email account. When I met him he told me his real name, but did not want me to identify him to my clients until after he received an offer.

• There was a woman who heard about a job at a company and asked me to change her name on her résumé.  It seems she had worked there before and didn’t want them to know it.

• In the days of snail mail there was a guy who used a false address on his résumé, “So he didn’t get junk mail.”  He never told me. When his offer letter was returned marked “address unknown” his offer was withdrawn.  He told me he did not expect a letter, just an email.

• There was a group account director, a notorious screamer, who has been let go many times. He screamed at me for not sending him out.  He then sent me an insulting email rant, which ended with, “If you don’t send me out, I will never use you to recruit for me”.  He never had before.

• I was about to hire a recruiter.  I called her on a Saturday morning to make her an offer.  She cursed at me (literally) and screamed that I had no business calling her on a weekend and that I was stealing her personal time.  I did not make the offer.

• I got a call from a client. He had just fired a person I had placed a year prior for making a huge mistake in scheduling; it cost the agency a lot of money.  She told him it was my fault because she did not like being there.  The client and I both had a good laugh.