Читать книгу Influence and Impact - George B. Bradt - Страница 11

“Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes you must do what is required.”

—Winston S. Churchill

You know the feeling when you are on a roll at work. You get good reviews, and you are recognized and rewarded by your manager. You look forward to going to work, and feel challenged, stimulated, and “on your front foot.” You are doing things you like and doing them well. You are proud of your work.

What makes this so special? It's a great feeling when people at work are interested in you, and appreciate what you do. That is, in a nutshell, influence. Influence means that other people take the time to listen to you, consider what you have to say, and want to work with you. Having impact is all about having a substantive effect on the organization, by leading without formal authority. Your colleagues know you are adding value to the organization, and to them. Influence and impact are the keys to job engagement and job satisfaction. Whether you are a technician using specialized skills or a business leader driving strategy and inspiring and enabling the organization, having influence and impact turns an average job into a personal growth experience.

Most of us have found ourselves in the converse situation at some point. Work is going “OK,” but you find yourself in your job for longer than you planned. You feel like others are not listening to your ideas or paying attention to your input. Maybe you worked your tail off to help your boss turn things around, only to get a mediocre review and bonus. Or, you finally got the promotion you were looking for, only to see yourself struggling to achieve expectations, and hearing feedback that, “Things are going a little slower than we expected.” You feel that you have lost your edge.

When it's missing, you know it. Human beings are fundamentally social beings. We love interpersonal feedback and connections that establish and reinforce who we are.ⁱ We spend as much time working as we do on anything else in our lives. Most of us want to find value and purpose in what we do. We need to feel we have agency, and we need to feel connected to others.ⁱⁱ

Writers and theorists have different labels for these needs, but they always include notions about independence, connectedness, security, recognition, impact, and having a clear sense of self. When you aren't getting this from your manager or your organization, to the degree you want or need them, you feel the gap and it creates disappointment. And, to paraphrase Yoda from Star Wars, disappointment leads to frustration, frustration leads to anger, anger leads eventually to getting another job. Bill learned a lesson at an early age in how to find value and meaning in doing what your company needs.

At age 15, I took a job as a sales associate in a camera store in downtown Washington, D.C. The store was right on Pennsylvania Avenue, between the White House and the Capital. My objective that summer was to earn enough money to use the discount the owner offered to buy a used Nikon F-1. My dream was to become a professional photographer, and the F-1 was the premier 35mm professional camera. What I did not realize was that very few people who came to the store wanted to talk about fancy cameras or lenses. Most of the people were tourists, walking from one monument to another, and came in either because they needed film, or they could not figure out how to work some basic part of their camera.

After about the 125th person came in and asked me how to rewind the film, or which button to push for zoom, my frustration began to boil over: “If you bothered to read the manual, you would know that the zoom button is right here,” I said, clearly disgusted. The owner saw this and took me aside. “Bill, you came here to sell cameras, but that is not why you are here. You are here to sell film and film developing, because that is what keeps the store running. I need you to talk nice to the customers, answer their questions, no matter how simple, and provide good customer support. If you do that, more people will buy film or get their pictures developed here. That's how we make money. If you treat them poorly, they will go somewhere else. Your job is to get them to come back for those purchases. So, go, be nice, and solve their very simple problems for them.”

At first, I was demoralized. I was going to spend the sweltering D.C. summer being bored. Ironically, I was already frustrated and disappointed because, at age 15, I was not aware of the underlying value of my job. My real job was to make customers feel taken care of. After this lecture from my boss, people's simplistic questions stopped being annoying, because I understood what my boss and the customers needed from me the most, and adapted to that.