On The Plant Floor Blog

Guest Post by Diana Antholis

When you’re in college, you can’t wait to get to work.  You dream of your own desk, paychecks, and social status amongst your peers.  But then you get to work and realize that you have a tiny cubicle, less-than-expected dollar amounts in your paychecks, and no one cares about your job or company.

Ah, so is life.  The grass is always greener.

In college, no one really prepares you for the next stage of life.  Sure, you majored in a particular area you thought you would enjoy, read all the theories about that subject, and wrote papers about it.  You assume the real world must be similar.

Eh, no.

So, what can you do to make the experience of entering adulthood or the “real world” a little less daunting?

Actually Work

This means get a job or internship that allows you to be in an office for a full work day.  This helps by:
Gaining Experience (for life and for your resume)
Seeing how things are done outside of school
Learning office dynamics and politics between co-workers
Developing the soft skills you need to succeed (communication, negotiation, collaboration, organization)

By being in an office for a full day, you can watch how people operate and get used to how to schedule your time throughout an 8 or 9 hour day (if you’re lucky).  You learn how to prioritize work and how to actually accomplish work when there are five meetings during the day.  Going to work isn’t as simple as being given a task, doing that task, and leaving.  There are often plenty of interruptions that leave you at your desk at 5pm realizing you haven’t accomplished anything all day.

Be Open-Minded

Just because you studied something in school doesn’t mean that there is an exact job description matching that major.  Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn’t.  Be open to the idea of different jobs and different companies.  Get creative with your job search.

For example, if you are a marketing major, you have many different options.   You can do in-house marketing for a big company, be part of a creative agency, do all of the marketing for a small business or start-up, or choose different facets of marketing like advertising, social media, public relations, sales, etc.  The options are endless.  Don’t think that you only can go in one direction.

Know What You’re Worth

Do you know what the salary is for the job you are applying to?  What is the industry standard?  What is the company standard?  Do you negotiate your salary when they offer you the job?

No one in college really talks to you about this.  If your professors work, ask them how to navigate the negotiation of your salary.  If you are freelance, ask what your hourly or daily rate should be.

After being salaried for several years, I was asked what my freelance hourly rate was when being offered a job and I had no idea.  I had to ask a former boss of mine what I should be charging.

Learn about Management and Leadership skills

At your first job out of college, you will quickly realize that people have very different management styles.  Some you will like, some you won’t.  Some will make you more productive, some won’t.

It helps to know how to deal with managers.  It can be extremely frustrating when no one listens to or cares about what you have to say.  Or when you get stuck doing busy work because your manager doesn’t want to do it.  Take the time to read some of the fundamentals of what a good manager does and what a good leader should be.  You will be in that position one day and you will learn what you respond to when you start interacting with your own management team.

Commit to Work/Life Balance

Some jobs have very clear-cut 8 hour days.  Some do not.  You may find yourself in a position where you are working 12 hours a day with only time to eat and sleep when you get home.  That’s no way to live.

Before you enter the work world, find out what kind of hours are expected of employees in the industry you are pursuing.  It is important to work somewhere that is compatible with your ideals and beliefs of your work schedule.

In summary, be prepared for the real world by actually working; being open-minded; knowing what you’re worth; learning about managing;  and committing to a balanced life.  It will make a huge difference in your attitude and give you the confidence to make the work world better.

Diana Antholis is the Founder of Enter: Adulthood, an online guide for young adults that shares advice and tips on career, relationship, and life choices to transition into the “real world.”  Diana helps 20somethings transition to a new career based on their wants and goals to ultimately make them happy and healthy individuals.  She is the author to the Conquer Your Career e-Guide, a four part series on starting, changing, or boosting your career with 100 actionable strategies to start immediately.  Connect with Diana on Twitter @DianaAntholis and Facebook.

Don’t Promote Failure

“You cannot manage men into battle. You manage things; you lead people.”                          Grace Hopper (retired Admiral, U.S. Navy)

If you Google “leadership” you will get about 139,000,000 hits. That’s one hundred thirty-nine million!  It’s pretty obvious that a lot of people have ideas about leadership.

If the sweetest sound a person can hear is his own name, then surely the most gratifying thing for a follower to know is that his leader understands who he is. A true leader adds value to people by training them, challenging them to achieve, and honestly evaluating their roles in the company. Knowing their stories and finding out who they are will help you to add value. Don’t expect that you will learn your people’s stories by interviewing them! Walking up to someone on the floor, whipping out your notebook, and saying, “OK, Bill, I want to know all about you, so shoot!” will only ensure that you are labeled as a nut before the end of the shift. Getting to know people in a workplace isn’t all that much different from getting to know them anywhere else. It takes time, effort and patience. Not everyone will open up at the same time and to the same degree (there is that pesky individuality thing again), but even the most hardened member of your team will tell his story eventually. In order to learn their stories, remember that you must be open to being teachable or all this effort will go to waste.

Evaluating people’s skills and temperament and determining their role in the organization will occupy much of your time as a manager. Your company expects you to perform an annual evaluation of your people which will become a part of their permanent record. Imagine the difficulty (if you haven’t already gone through it) in being accurate without knowing who they are! You do a disservice to your boss, you, and most importantly your people if you complete evaluations with incomplete knowledge. Consider being passed over for a promotion by your faceless boss because he assumed you were happy exactly where you were! This is just the sort of thing you risk doing to your people if you remain unknown to them and they to you. 

The converse is true as well. Warm, fuzzy feelings are a great thing at the annual office Christmas party, but there are those unfortunate times that you need to lead somebody out the door – a termination. Knowing their story will be important here as well just in case they can be saved.  

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

You know that you manage things and lead people, and you know their stories which have aided you to make proper evaluations. Promotions can be very good events, but they can turn bad and ugly quickly if you make a poor choice. Certainly, skills and performance will play a large choice in your decision to promote. You won’t likely promote someone who is a perennially mediocre performer, but you might promote a trusted employee who has succeeded at everything he was assigned. If you don’t know your people, you might promote that trusted employee right into a position for which he is wholly unsuited. Maybe he can’t handle making quick decisions and spends all his time wrapped up in his underwear. Maybe he runs away from the inevitable confrontations that occur in stressful situations. Maybe he is having trouble balancing his work life and personal life in his new, more demanding roll. So he’s failed….and so have you. Although there is no guarantee that any promotion will be good, you owe it to both your candidate and yourself to know if his story will likely lead him to success or disaster. These can be hard decisions, especially if a candidate has done well for you and wants to advance. But should you make a bad decision, he will suffer far more from the promotion than he will from the disappointment of being denied the opportunity. The experienced manager understands this and will often use his instinct in these situations. This instinct, or gut feeling, if you will, is probably the result of learning from their own failure. Odds are he promoted someone who failed miserably and it still haunts him. Maybe he even lost a friend over it. We will caution that gut instinct needs to be reinforced with objectivity or that feeling rumbling in your gut may just be a fart.  

In those 139,000,000 Google hits, there are plenty that list leadership characteristics.  Some will list 5, some will list 7, and others will list many more. There are only two, in our humble opinion, that are required for effective leaders. They are trust and integrity. Both your followers and leaders must believe they can trust you to have the integrity to do the right thing, no matter how hard it may be. If you don’t have those two qualities then even Ronald Reagan’s charisma won’t be enough.

“As a leader…your principal job is to create an operating environment where others can do great things.”  -Richard Teerlink 

This will require building that trust and integrity within the enterprise. It starts at the factory with the plant manager. Create mutual respect among team members that commands the management team to operate in a manner that embraces honesty. Honesty builds trust, trust builds integrity, and integrity builds character. These are qualities that no one can give or take away from you. Your choices are your own. This will require that you offer your very best. Here is a quick reference guide to major differences in being leaders and managers.  Remember that you are both and the trick is in the timing.

“I do the very best I know how – the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.” - Abraham Lincoln