Fire Your Boss (21 page)

Besides the lifestyle benefit of being closer to work, there’s also a financial benefit. How can you calculate the financial value of less time spent commuting? Well, one way is to take your weekly salary and divide that by the total of the hours you spend traveling to and from work and the hours you actually spend at work. Say you spend two hours a day commuting and you work eight hours a day. That’s a total of ten hours a day and fifty hours a week. Let’s also say, for simplicity’s sake, you gross $1,000 a week. That means, commuting included, you’re earning $20 per hour. Say you are offered a job that pays the same $1,000 a week, but that is thirty minutes closer to your home. That’s one hour a day and five hours a week you save in travel. Instead of dividing the $1,000 by fifty hours, divide it by forty-five hours. Your hourly earnings, calculated in this manner, would increase to $22.22 per hour. That’s the equivalent of an extra $111 a week, and $5,772 a year. Add the potential lifestyle advantages to the additional equivalent of $5,772 a year, and the nearer job is the better choice.

Paid time off.
The third important factor to consider when weighing jobs today is how much paid time off you get at each job. The more paid time off you get, the more time you have to spend on your personal life, doing the things that are more likely to give you psychological, emotional, and spiritual fulfillment, without paying a financial price for that fulfillment. In effect, you get to have your cake and eat it too; you get to spend time on your personal life while being paid by your employer. While two weeks’ paid vacation has become the standard in the American workplace, there are many organizations that offer more days, based on years of service, and that also allow you to accumulate unused paid sick and personal days. I’d suggest that if you can’t trade any of the unimportant factors for money, you try to trade them for additional paid time off. I’d rather see you get another week’s vacation than a better title and a company car.

Unpaid time off.
While it’s not as valuable as paid time off, unpaid time off is also an important factor to weigh when comparing jobs. Temporary leaves to handle family matters can be invaluable in a crisis. The psychological comfort you receive from knowing your job will be waiting for you when you return from welcoming a newborn into your home, easing an aging parent into a new living situation, or attending to a death in the family is incalculable. Sabbaticals, while offered by only a handful of employers, are incredible opportunities to spend an extended period of time doing something that brings fulfillment. Being able to spend six months traveling through Europe or helping Habitat for Humanity build low-income housing in West Virginia, and being able to come back to your job after such an experience, is a rare opportunity and it should be treasured.

Opportunity for learning.
A much more common opportunity, which I don’t think is treasured enough, is the chance to expand your skills and knowledge on the job. An opportunity for learning is an opportunity to increase your future job-fishing prospects. Whether it’s studying and absorbing the dynamics of a new industry, or picking up a new technical skill, learning opportunities will turn you into a more desirable employee in the future. This is one of the few things your current employer will ever do to help you land your next job. This can sometimes be such an important factor that I’ve actually encouraged a handful of clients over the years to take a lesser-paying job just for the chance to pick up a new skill. The idea is that by taking one step back financially they will set themselves up to take a larger step ahead with their next job by adding a skill to their repertoire that exponentially increases their value. An example that comes quickly to mind is Rachel Mizrahi, a client who worked as managing editor of a women’s magazine. She took a job with a start - up that was founding a woman-oriented health Web site in the early 1990s even though it meant a small cut in her pay. After only a year working at the Web site she was offered a job heading up the publications department of a medical school, based at least in part on her having both magazine and Web site experience. That job paid $20,000 more than she was previously earning, an income jump she wouldn’t have achieved as quickly without having first taken that step back in exchange for an opportunity to learn.

Turn back to the chart you created comparing your competing job offers. Get yourself a Hi-Liter or a red pen. Highlight the lines in the chart that represent the factors which are truly important to you. In addition to the five I believe are important to everyone — income, proximity, paid time off, unpaid time off, and opportunity for learning — include any of the five neutral factors — disability insurance, health insurance, life insurance, retirement plan, tuition reimbursement — that are important in this instance.

Now compare the two offers, focusing on only these factors. Is one offer clearly better than the other? I’ll bet that by prioritizing in this fashion you’re able to take a debatable choice and make it clearer. However, if you’re still unable to clearly chose one over the other, my advice would be to choose the one that pays a higher income. Never forget that when it comes to work, it’s the money that matters most.

Debbie went back to her chart and highlighted the five important factors. On the income line, the satellite job had the advantage. On the proximity line, the radio job came out on top. While the radio job also had the advantage of offering more unpaid time off, the satellite job provided more paid time off. The satellite job also offered opportunities for learning. Since neither job offered disability or life insurance, or tuition reimbursement, those factors weren’t important. Debbie already had health insurance coverage through her husband, so that wasn’t an important factor either. However, the satellite radio job had a retirement plan that included an employer financial contribution, effectively adding to her income and making it an important factor to consider. Weighing the factors that really are important today, Debbie surprised herself (and her husband) by opting for the satellite radio job…the offer she had almost reflexively turned down. I gave her a round of applause, both in congratulations and as a small substitute for the public fanfare she’d be missing. But then I told her she still had more work to do: she had to figure out when she’d be leaving the job she’d just started.

AGGIE WICKFIELD HAD
never felt so empowered when leaving a job. After eighteen months as administrative assistant to the comptroller of an outdoor-clothing manufacturing firm, Aggie was leaving, of her own volition, to take a job as personal assistant to the president of a labor union. Every other time she had left a job it had been because she either hated the job or was laid off. But she didn’t hate her job with the clothing manufacturer. In fact, she liked it. It paid well and provided her with the chance to learn some new skills. And far from laying her off, her boss was sad to see her go, fearful of not being able to replace her. Aggie was leaving because she had found something even better; a job that provided more of the benefits of her current job, as well as some things it lacked. The job with the labor union paid better, provided chances to learn even more new skills, gave more paid holidays, and was located closer to her home. For the first time in her working life Aggie felt as if she were moving toward something, rather than away from something. She realized she was moving toward being happier.

You can choose the time you leave a job, rather than waiting for the ax to fall.

You can repeatedly move from good jobs to better jobs, instead of moving from one bad job to another.

You can guarantee you get more of what you want from work simply by choosing to shift jobs in order to improve your situation.

You can turn your work life from a reactive process in which you feel pushed around by chance and uncaring bosses, to a proactive course in which you are in charge, moving when and where you want.

To achieve this you need to adopt the seventh and final element in my work philosophy, one I call “Hello, I must be going.” What this means is that, having gone job fishing and landed a number of job offers, and having chosen the best one, you enter that job with the clear sense of why and how you’ll leave it. You accept that every job is temporary, and plan accordingly.

In professional sports leagues, only one team wins a championship. That means every other team in the league ends up a loser, regardless of how entertaining its games were, or how much its record improved over previous years. Because of this, coaches or managers are constantly being fired. After all, unless they win the championship they’ve failed at their job. The adage is that a coach or manager is hired to be fired.

What’s true of professional sports is true of all work today. We are all hired to be fired. A company brings in a group of people to, let’s say, create an e-commerce operation for the company. If it generates immediate profits or boosts the stock price, they keep their jobs and keep the operation going. If after, perhaps, two years, the e-commerce operation isn’t working, or hasn’t helped push up the stock price, the whole project is shelved and everyone is fired. This goes not just for new ventures, but for long-standing elements of an organization. Outsource the bookkeeping department. Replace the sales staff with independent reps. Computerize customer service and fire the whole team.

People used to be viewed as assets of a business, a part of the long-term wealth and value of the organization. Today, people are seen as expenses, to be added or cut depending on what’s needed to impact the short-term revenues, or worse, stock price, of the company.

You can blame this on the acceleration of the business cycle, the globalization of commerce, or advances in information technology. You can blame it on the current presidential administration, Congress, or Wall Street. You can even blame the tides or the signs of the zodiac. On the practical level, where and who we work for a living all exist, it doesn’t matter who’s to blame. What matters is the facts on the ground…and how you react to them. This what I tried to explain to Bill Kaplan when he first came to see me.

As I noted back in chapter 1, Bill is a recent college graduate who led a pretty unsettled and nomadic life up until graduation. The son of a longtime client of mine, Bill is a charming and very creative young man. At times it seemed his creativity was more of a curse than a blessing, since he could never quite figure out how to harness it.

After high school he went to a small private college in upstate New York with the intent of being a fine-arts major. But while there he was bitten by the acting bug. Convinced that was where his future lay, he transferred from the arts school to a state university, where he became a theater arts major. After a year studying theater he decided the only way to really become an actor was to act, and so, despite his parents’ pleas, he dropped out of college, moved to New York City, took jobs waiting on tables, and tried to line up acting work. After two years of struggle he went back to school at a city college, this time to pursue his love of writing and reading. He became an English major and finally graduated.

Having become fascinated by the bookstore business, Bill was thrilled to line up a job as an assistant manager at one of the large chain bookstores. He came to see me for a life-planning session, at the suggestion of his parents. After hearing him wax enthusiastic about his new job I explained that everyone, including him, had actually been hired to be fired, and suggested he start laying the groundwork to leave.

I don’t think anyone who’s been in the job market for the past few years, or who has read the newspapers or watched the news recently, can disagree that today we’re all hired to be fired. No one’s job is secure for the long term, whether you’re the last hired or a lifelong employee, a star performer or a slacker, making minimum wage or six figures. As a result, I think it’s essential that you leave before you’re pushed out.

As I’ve touched on earlier in this book, if you wait until you’re terminated to look for work, you’ll find yourself a seller in a buyer’s market. If your employer is cutting staff, you’ll be competing with your former coworkers for any job openings elsewhere. If your old company is cutting back, odds are that other firms in the same industry are doing the same, making the number of job seekers out there even larger and the number of potential employers lower. And if multiple companies in your industry are cutting back, that could have a ripple effect on support industries and businesses, adding to the number of unemployed and subtracting from the number of possible openings. In addition, an industry-wide cutback could be indicative of a larger economic trend, meaning many other industries are ailing too. That means still more job seekers and still fewer potential employers.