The notion of management sagacity has come up twice in the last 48 hours, maybe because sanctimony is in season, it being the traditional graduation month and all.
Fortune via money.cnn.com has a particularly irritating little quiz to test one’s corporate mettle, “Will you succeed in your new job?”
Here’s the first question – gee, wonder which is the “right” answer:
Five minutes from now, you will step on to an elevator whose only other passenger is your company’s CEO, whom you haven’t met before. You are most likely to:
– Be completely tongue-tied and say nothing.
– Introduce yourself and give a 30-second summary of the work you’re doing and why you’re excited about it.
– Chat about the weather.
A new hire would do well to remember that scene from “Braveheart” in which Patrick McGoohan’s Edward I asks “Who is this person that speaks to me as though I needed his advice?” and subsequently dispatches Prince Edward’s “High Counsellor” Philip through a window to his death.
I submit this as evidence that the complexities of human relationships cannot be encapsulated in cunning little toadyisms.
The scene from “Braveheart” is instructive: just before his untimely hurl from the ramparts, Philip witnessed the delivery of bad news to the man he was trying so single-mindedly to impress. The King learned in a most distressing way that his nephew had been assassinated: a basket was delivered to Edward containing his nephew’s head.
Even in settings where baskets generally contain modest tribute, initiating a conversation with a CEO is still risky, timing being everything: one simply cannot know what was delivered to the woman or man just before one encounters them on that elevator. The business climate being what it is, one can almost be certain that it was not good news.
I saw another well-meaning list a couple of days ago, including “Conflict is OK”. I happen to think this is true, but I’ll be darned if I can recall a single company in which people really believed this.
Recently, my nephew, who is in his mid-twenties, got married, and the wedding guests included a passle of similarly good-looking, well-educated young people already on the road to corporate success.
They looked a lot like the staff at one of my clients: recent college grads who impress each other with their muscle tone and heretofore unchallenged self-confidence.
Being around so many young people recently, I conclude thusly: the appropriateness of trying to impress the boss and coworkers with one’s seriousness of purpose is best reserved to them, the young, from whom impetuosity and self-aggrandisement is expected. In an older person, it’s interpreted as not knowing one’s place.
I would suppose that the editors of Fortune make the assumption that certain facts about making a good workplace impression are common knowledge, so they left these things out.
Such as, unless you’re the CEO, wearing glasses is bad. It gives the misimpression that you think you are smarter than everyone else and don’t think about looking your best: somewhere, it is written, peons look bad with protective eyewear.
Personally, I’ve never found a style that worked for me. Being nice makes you a doormat. Expressing opinions makes you disloyal. Working hard and doing a good job opens you to the criticism that you didn’t get things done fast enough. Being tough-minded makes you a drama queen.
I think it comes down to this: if you’re a white man with an ethnically acceptable last name, you’re okay, and if you’re a woman, you have to have been born rich and/or ectomorphic, i.e., you don’t need a job.
In other words, being successful in business and in life is pretty much out of one’s control.