Have you ever witnessed what happens when someone hits “Reply to all” when they clearly didn’t mean to?
It usually starts innocently enough. Someone mistakenly sends an email to hundreds of people when they intended it to only go to one person.
For example, Kathy, in Atlanta, errantly sends something like this to the entire sales force:
What time are we supposed to be on that call Friday?
She’s referring to a scheduled phone call with a local client, and she meant to ask only her coworker Steve.
John in Seattle is confused. He replies to all:
What call? I’m planning on being out of the office Friday.
Sam in New York is also confused:
Do I know you?
And Jane in Tampa accidentally makes things much worse:
I think it’s at 2:30
Unfortunately, Jane has a call scheduled at 2:30 for her regional office by coincidence. Now, many of the people who initially dismissed the emails are starting to wonder if there really is a call.
Tom in New York doubts himself:
Wait, is there really a company-wide call?
Mike in Seattle has had enough:
No, stop hitting reply to all.
Jim in Atlanta just got back from lunch:
Why am I getting all these emails?
Lisa jumps in to explain, thereby adding to the clutter:
I think the first person just accidentally hit reply to all. If there are phone calls, they are local only, so if you aren’t aware of one, don’t worry about it.
Peter in Los Angeles reads IHYJ and thinks this is hilarious. He wants it to continue:
The call Friday isn’t for everyone. If you don’t know about it, you weren’t invited.
Peter’s friend Joe in L.A. plays along:
Only people on target to hit quota were invited to the call.
Ray in Madison takes the bait:
I’m about to close a big deal. Who should I contact to see if I’m supposed to be on the call?
I think this happens about once a year in most large companies. The sporadic frequency, the varying types of emails: it is essentially an email meteor shower.
If you’re lucky enough to witness one, kick back and enjoy, my friend. There are few office phenomena as entertaining to witness in the corporate world.
When it comes to determining how your life will play out, you have only two options. You will either choose based on impulse or you will choose based on intention. It is impossible not to choose.
For example, if I don’t have a budget, I will spend my money where I am naturally inclined to spend it. My impulses will take over. If I have a budget, I will spend my money on that which I have willfully chosen as a good option. Either way, I am determining where the money goes.
When you neglect to give time and attention to planning your finances, your time, or your career, you are giving control of your life over to your impulses, and as you know, your impulses will only get you so far.
Do you know anyone that has served our country in the military?
An email I received yesterday from Anita Bruzzese brought my attention to a worthy cause.
Apparently, finding work after a tour in the military may not be as easy as it is for civilians.
Anita writes:
I recently spent nearly an hour talking to Caulfield, an articulate, passionate and committed guy who gave me a real earful about the pitiful state of affairs regarding employment for our veterans. Despite having served with honor and serving in some of the most dangerous parts of the world, these vets have a tougher time than other job seekers looking for work – those age 20-24 often have an unemployment rate two to three times higher than non-veterans of the same age group.
Our veterans are usually impressive people with a sense of pride and integrity that immediately distinguishes them from the candidate pool. Beyond that though, these are often highly trained individuals in the areas of leadership and problem-solving in addition to the abilities and interests they bring to the work world.
This organization is a strong effort to help match these noteworthy prospects to the corporate world’s needs by compensating for the unique challenges created by being otherwise occupied during the typical first years of a civilian career.
Hire a Hero focuses on helping vets connect with people locally who can help them get jobs. By allowing vets to post requests for help, and information about themselves, the site helps connect vets with hundreds of companies willing to employ those who have served. At the same time, the social networking aspect helps vets support each other during the difficult period of returning to civilian life and trying to find a job.
Take a moment to visit Hire a Hero. Have a great weekend!
Have you ever stopped to consider why some bosses seem to be in love with micromanaging their employees?
If so, then here’s your answer: They are incapable of managing in any other way.
In many cases, a promotion to a management or supervisory role is a way to reward a good employee. It doesn’t really matter if that individual possesses the skill set required to manage–they deserve to move up. Of course, being good at a job doesn’t mean you’ll be good at a tangentially related task.
You’ve been a great truck driver. How’d you like to fly an F-18 for us?
Should Accountants Be Farmers?
We have a tendency to assume that any intelligent person can make a transition to working in a related field without difficulty. Comedian Mitch Hedberg best described the problem with this assumption:
“As a comedian I always get in these situations where I’m auditioning for movies or sitcoms.
As a comedian, they want you do other things besides comedy. ‘OK, you’re a comedian, can you write? Write us a script. Act. Act in this sitcom.’ They want you do sh*t that’s related to comedy, but it’s not comedy, it’s not fair.
It’s as though I was a cook, I worked my ass off to become a really good cook, and they say ‘OK, you’re a good cook. But can you farm?’”
So when you take a great accountant and make him a lousy manager, what’s he going to do to avoid looking like an idiot? He’s going to try to use his strengths to compensate for his weakness. He’s going to try to do a little bit of accounting all over the department (by looking over your shoulder) and hope that the overall level of work will be elevated.
If production is up, he’ll be viewed as an effective manager. Who cares if he had to accomplish it by putting his hands into everyone else’s work?
Many people equate courage with a set jaw and a steady gaze–being able to suppress a moment of fear and press forward in the face of a threat. When it comes to our careers, however, courage is a steady commitment to maintain perspective and refuse to compromise your principles and goals.
Mike Gundy is a football coach at Oklahoma State University. One of his players, a quarterback that has struggled so far this year, was essentially attacked in this article written by a local columnist.
Gundy, who has himself taken heat for the team’s poor play so far this year, was unashamed in coming to the defense of his player. Keep in mind, picking a fight with the media when your job largely rests on the favor of public opinion takes courage. Doing it with guns blazing, whether you agree with it or not, demonstrates absolute conviction.
If you haven’t seen this yet, you’ll probably find it entertaining in how uncomfortable the level of confrontation is. Beyond that, though, think about what it means to the young man he is defending and what it says about the coach willing to put himself out there so completely for one of his kids.
I’m not encouraging you to yell and scream at your boss. However, when faced with a decision between being safe and taking a risk for something worthwhile, he sets a pretty good example for us.
Rennie Sloan, a contributor for Motto Magazine’s blog, published a post about I Hate Your Job yesterday. In it, she writes:
A friend of mine’s 23-year-old son started a web site called www.ihateyourjob.com - his motto is that he hates your job until you love it. The site is geared to help people tolerate, if not love, their jobs, and he pokes fun at the droll tedium of 9-5’ers while providing inspiration and resources to find a new job with a better quality of life.
He seemed a bit young to me to truly grasp this concept – don’t you have to be out there for a while before you understand the ways in which the last comment tossed out by an insufferable colleague during a meeting can fuel Google searches of how to earn a living selling sunscreen in a Tahitian hut?”
It’s a good question–one that I’d like to answer here.
The question is, to paraphrase, “Can such a young person appreciate the value of escaping the rat race without having spent many years inside of it?”
Me. I did.
Yes and no. I can be thankful for my good health without ever having had cancer, but a cancer survivor appreciates the day when they are cancer free more than I ever could. I can be thankful for a warm meal and a place to sleep, but not in the way someone who once was homeless can.
Of course, I’m not going to try to contract cancer or lose my home in order to better appreciate my good circumstances. In the same way, I don’t believe I’ll be missing out by avoiding an extended stay in a job that makes me miserable.
I worked at a job that was a poor fit for me for two years, and that was enough for me to realize that continuing in that direction would be a mistake. I just have to touch the hot stove, I don’t need to lean on it…
The Elephant in the Room
Since I started this blog, I’ve intentionally withheld my age for fear of a perceived lack of authority. A discussion with Rennie (the author of the Motto piece) last month has helped me to move past that now. So, for the record, yes–I’m 23 years old, and yes, what I have to say is relevant beyond novelty. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to learning more and helping others well into my mid-twenties ; )
By the way whatsyourmotto.com is truly a great site for work-life balance issues and the magazine is solid as well. Check it out!
What caused you to choose your first job out of school?
Highest salary?
Fit college major?
Only decent offer?
Passion and interest?
Rushed to find a job?
General prestige?
Overall career plan?
What caused you to choose your second job?
Continuation on experience of first job?
Reaction away from first job?
If we go back and trace the path that placed us in our present job situation, we’ll probably find a series of decisions and influences that were at least partially arbitrary that got us where we are today.
In order to make a change for the better, you might simply have to break that pattern. Sit down and do something intentional for yourself and your career. Don’t let the choices you made when you were 16 continue to dictate your future ones.
Tell me you have something exciting or uncomfortable/difficult that we need to discuss. Tell me that we’ll talk about it several hours from now.
Allow me to stew for several hours. At that point, forget about the meeting and fail to call me into your office. When I remind you, apologize and say we need to bump it back another couple of hours.
When we do actually meet, tell me something underwhelming or banal that you could have just sent me a quick email about.
Thanks to Scott Adams and Dilbert for reminding me of this phenomenon–it’s one of the things I love to hate in the work world.
Sometimes, we get so caught up with work that we become transformed by it. Particularly when it comes to networking, we might get so focused on “What’s in it for me?” that we only notice the people that can do something for us and ignore everyone else.
This bit of humor from The Onion satirizes that tendency quite nicely:
NEW YORK—The funeral for Bank of America CEO David Kessler, intended as a solemn remembrance of the 73-year-old’s life, quickly developed into a networking dream for executives who attended the service at Beth Israel Synagogue Tuesday.
I’d paste it all here but for copyright reasons, it’s very short. Read the rest at CEO’s Funeral A Networking Dream and ask yourself if you’ve been guilty of a few soulless moments thanks to networking strategy.
I never send forwards, do memes, tag people, poke people, etc., but this is important and could be interesting if it goes well.
If you don’t already have one, take some time to write a personal mission statement whether you participate overall or not. I’m not talking about a one or two sentence blurb like a corporate mission statement but a meaningful declaration of what you hope to be about in life. Stephen Covey’s mission statement builder might help you, or you can just write it free form.
Avoid putting in fluff and buzzwords unless you’re a corporation–try to create a document that really focuses on actions that you can perform each day and that are meaningful to you.
Got a good first draft? Great. Now copy the text of this post and replace my statement with yours and the blogs I’ve tagged with the blogs you’d like to tag. Include this text and this link to the post at http://www.ihateyourjob.com/an-explosion-of-purpose-and-fulfillment/ and it’ll post a link to your blog in my comments section so we can keep track of who’s done it and read the results.
Those without blogs should participate in the comments section below.
6 Reasons to Participate
It is relevant to your subject matter. Regardless of what you write about, your blog is an extension of you, and your readers care about where you intersect with your subject matter. Rather than a meme about your favorite movie, this is a rare chance for your readers to get to know you while you can still stay on topic!
Allow readers and fellow bloggers to see why you care about your subject as part of your life’s big picture.
Articulating your personal mission is personally rewarding and incredibly beneficial.
Your readers will greatly appreciate you helping them to get started on their statements if they’ve never done it before (most haven’t).
It is a worthy cause. Few things in the blogosphere can match the impact of helping even one person bring greater focus to their lives, let alone thousands.
Get to know the people you decide to tag
My Mission Statement
(In no particular order…) Keep quiet my strengths and others’ flaws. Allow grace in me to be plain. Promise specifically to do what I ought to do; never break a promise. Smile. Wait observantly without complaining. Avoid distress by enjoying pauses and delay. [Click to Continue Reading →]
