Let’s break it down:

Show Up: Go to work every day. Day in and day out. Week after week. Month after month. No last minute call offs. No excuses on why today just isn’t a good day to report for work.  Even when you would rather not, show up.

On Time: Show up every day when you are supposed to show up. Not 15 minutes later, not five minutes later. Get to work at the scheduled time, all the time, so you do not negatively impact the flow of business. Do what you must to order your life and activities so that they do not interfere with getting to work on time.

Every Day: Showing up on time most days, or 4 out of 5 or even 9 out of 10 days is not good enough. Consistency (read every day) is the key here, occasionally will not do. This is not horseshoes or hand grenades. Close don’t count. Most don’t count. Every day counts.

Ready for Work: Personal business handled. Rested and ready to meet the tasks for the day. Mind focused on the task at hand not on your love life, your recreations, or your troubles. We all have them and we must learn to put them aside at work. Engage your mind and focus on your job.

Get Along with Others: Show some emotional maturity and use emotional intelligence to handle the annoyances you will encounter. Be cooperative and flexible with the people (and customers) you must deal with not quick to take offense at thoughtless actions and comments. Put aside self centeredness and think in terms of what is good for your team members or employer and not just for you. Believe it or not it is not all about you.

These few basic requirements, along with some basic ability to perform the tasks of the job, are really all it takes to be successful in the workplace.

Employers state that they are willing to invest in people who meet this idea of “dependable”. They will train you for other positions, provide opportunities for advancement, and tend to keep you around if you meet their idea of dependable.

If you are entering the job market from school or trying to re-enter it after a period of unemployment you need to project dependability. You need to sell the hiring manger on your ability to meet these few simple criteria. Hiring managers are looking for it; they want to find it in you. Use your answers in the interview so that they see you as that dependable one they are looking for.

The hard part will be to maintain, with consistancy, being dependable over time. You may talk a good game in the interview about being dependable but then you must be able to deliver on that over time.

Your Network Piggy Bank

When you were a child did you have a “piggy bank”? My guess is that you did or at least some type of bank in which you tried to save some of the money that you parent, grandparents, or tooth fairy gave you.  But why did you save the money? Well, beside answering “My parents made me” you may have decided to save up in order to buy something that was going to cost more money than you had in you hot little hands.

As you dropped the coins into the slot you hear them “clink” against each other and the side of the bank and you dreamed of the special thing you were going to buy … when you had save enough. Week after week, month after month you squirreled away your nickel, dimes and quarters all the while thinking of that object you wanted.

But time passed, you grew impatient, and at some point you lost sight of goal of your saving. You may have stopped saving. The thing you were saving for seemed too distant. It was taking too long. Perhaps some other thing caught your eye and became the focus of you attention, something that you could get NOW with the money you all ready had.

You may have taken the plug out of the bottom and took a little of the cash, you may have turned it upside down and slid a butter knife into the slot while shaking the bank to get some coins to drop out. After all, you thought, “I’ll only take a little of the money” and you wanted what you wanted NOW! 

BUT …taking the money put you behind in your savings goal and now the thing you wanted was even farther away. It would take even more time to get it. You’d have to save more money. You’d have to wait longer to get what you wanted. So, in frustration, you gave up on the idea of saving up for something and just took money from the bank and spent it on anything and everything you wanted.

If you can’t identify with this story because you were the type of kid that was determined and not deterred in saving for the special item, good for you! But keep reading any way. If you were the kid that regularly hit up the piggy bank to go to the movies, or buy some candy, or ice cream, keep reading.

Networking is a lot like saving in a piggy bank. Each time you make a contact, and then maintain the contact, and then nurture that contact by building a relationship with that person and then seek opportunities to be of service to that person, “clink”, you have dropped a coin into your “networking piggy bank”. “Clink”, another network relationship established and you’ve grown wealthier in your network of relationships and you are saving for the future.

Most people are poor “savers” when it comes to networking. Some may underestimate the value of networking because they believe that their education or experience should be enough to get them the job. Others don’t understand how to network or they are not comfortable with it so they end up doing it poorly. Some individuals make the mistake that of thinking that networking is meeting as many people as possible, passing out and collecting business cards as possible and hoping for the best.  Or if they do understand networking, they ask for a return on an “investment” they haven’t made yet by asking for a favor too soon in a relationship or they may try and make withdrawals too often for amount they don’t have on deposit. Then run the risk of ruining the relationship if the other person feels used.

A network, especially your network has to be tended.  You must make regular deposits to it. You have to nurture and grow the relationships in your network. Your goal in networking should be to serve, not to be served and when you have served you have “saved”. You goal with your “networking piggy bank” should be to gather up people, build relationships, and to seek to be of help to people.  For each time you do, your “networking piggy bank” and your resources grow.

If you have followed the analogy this far you will see that there are two benefits of a “network savings bank”. First, you need to seek to be of service to others. It moves you beyond yourself and helps you to grow as an individual. Seeking to serve, rather than be served broadens your perspective on life and individuals. You may begin to understand that helping others brings a certain amount of fulfillment to you.  The second reason for making deposits in your “networking piggy bank” is so that you will have what you need when you have to open the bank and use the resources you have saved … when you need others to be of service to you. We all need a little help at one time or another. This is especially true in times of seeking employment and job search since a high percentage of positions are filled through networking … it is all about who you know.

What to learn more about the ins and outs of networking? Contact Emmett at emmett@baxendell.com

 As a child you may have been sent to your room or made to “sit in the corner” to think about what you did to get you is such a sad position, so usually you were in trouble. While in your room, feeling isolated from all human contact and alone with your thoughts you were supposed to think about what you did, feel sorry for your actions and their consequences, apologize for what you did, make amends for what you did if possible, and promise never to do it again. Or at least that’s what you parents wanted you to do. 

As much as we hated being sent to our rooms it was our earliest training on learning the importance of reflection about ourselves and our actions. These early efforts by the authority figures in our lives to get us to reflect actually laid the foundation and served to teach us the value of pausing to consider, ponder, question, think and reflect all in a critical way about our issues, problems, success, failures, and plans … our lives.

Unfortunately, since this learning was not taking place under pleasant circumstances. So if we participated in the process at all we did it grudgingly, but usually we feigned the response that was expected of us to get out of the circumstances we found ourselves in. This was also an early form of enlightened self interest … so that we could get back to our agenda, whatever we were doing before we were interrupted by this unreasonable demand to “think about what you have done”. Those demands placed upon us may be part of the reason so few people take the time to reflect and think about their lives, actions, and careers as adults. We don’t do it because it’s not easy, not fun, and we don’t see the benefit in doing it.

How does this relate to career development? In any part of life, but especially in career development efforts, critical reflection is an essential part of your development plan. After you draw up your plan and have begun the implementation and have worked the plan for a while you need to pause and take some time to reflect on what you are doing. You need to set aside time periodically and examine your plan, your progress in implementing it, and your overall effectiveness in making it work.

The reason for this critical reflection is not only to check on your progress, to see how far you’ve got, but to also to tweak the plan and make any adjustments needed to enhance your development plan. You need to ask yourself questions like “What’s working?”, “What’s not working?”, “What do I need to do more of?”, “What do I need to do less of?”, “Do I have the resources I need to execute my plan?”, “Who do I need to network with to help further my goal?” “What are the implications if I take this action as opposed to that action?”. By asking these and other critically reflective questions you can sharpen your plan and continue to update your execution strategy. By exercising the disciple of critical reflection you can make your plans better and improve your chances for success.

In order to do this type of deep thinking and to be able to critically reflect upon your current state you need to get way from distractions of the day to day and concentrate, to focus on the task. A friend of mine refers to this as “going to the mountain top”. This simply means that you take the time to get away from the noise and distractions of your daily life so that you can concentrate on the task at hand. This may mean that you need to remove yourself physically from other people and distractions for an extended period of time so that you can be alone with your thoughts and think. If actually removing yourself for periods of time is not possible, it may mean that you purposely set aside time on a daily basis to reflect upon and examine your plans and progress, on what you have done and what you need to do. However you do it is not important. That you do it is imperative!

There is a certain discipline that is needed for this. As a child your parents brought pressure to bear in an attempt to force/ coerce/ make you think about what you had done. Now, as an adult, no one has the authority to pressure you or demand that you reflect on what you have done and how you do it. You have to demand it of yourself. And you do it because you realize it is in your own best interest to do so.

There is no doubt that we live in an age where we expect everything instantly, on demand, and now, and usually get it that way. If a page on our computer loads too slow we get inpatient, if we can’t get some purchase from some distant place to our door in a few days or overnight we get annoyed at the thought of having to wait. Phone conversations, too much bother just text and use abbreviations to save space… and do it quickly. The quicker, the faster, the shorter amount of time it takes us to get what we want … the better. In many instances there is nothing wrong with wanting things now, except that it begins to set up those same expectations in other parts of our lives. I can become really problematical when we carry this demand for urgency in to the area of career development and advancement.

Much has been written about the impatience of Gen X and Gen Y in the workplace. This article is not about the impatience of a particular generation, members of Gen X and Gen Y certainly do not have a monopoly on wanting quick advancement or instant gratification. Rather, this article is about the impatience you may feel when it comes to your career development and your advancement in the workplace.

In my coaching practice I often come into contact with those who are impatient about the progress they are making in their careers. These individuals feel that opportunities to advance just do not come quickly enough, promotions do not happen fast enough, and the job offers for particular positions are few and far between. Living in an on demand society with instant gratification the norm, and having an overinflated view of their own skills and abilities leads them to frustration.

What you must understand is career development and advancement in the workplace is not subject to our “on demand expectations” or the “instant gratification” that we are used to.  Neither should career development be treated as an “impulse buy”, done on the spur of the moment because we think it the right thing to do in order to get what we want, like the stuff kept by the cash register to take advantage of our impulses to see it- want it- buy it- have it … in a matter of seconds.

Career development or advancement takes thought and planning to achieve and time to accomplish. There are no “quick fixes” or “hurry ups”. Careers cannot be made in a microwave.  Development for advancement, which is really preparation for advancement, can’t begin when you see the position you want advertised. You cannot treat it as an afterthought and expect it to be there when you want it. Development, to be effective cannot be treated as an impulse buy. It needs to begin long before that.

How long? Hard to say and no one can really answer that. As long as it takes to gain the skills, knowledge, and experience you need to become a good candidate for the job or the promotion you want. I can’t tell you how long your development will take but I can tell you when it begins. It begins NOW.

Quick results come only to the prepared. Individuals who have the fore thought to grow and develop, to pursue learning and grow their skills will be the ones who see the quickest results. Career Development and the advancement … and rewards that follows come around most quickly to you if you have prepared, pursued, and practiced for them. Need help with creating your career plan and developing a plan for advancement?
Contact: Emmett@nextmovecoaching.com

The truth about the gnosis of success is this … there is no gnosis of success. What individuals need to be successful, to give them the edge, to help them obtain the goal they seek is not a secret. It can be readily learned if they are willing to apply themselves and look for it. It is everywhere. There is a plethora of books, articles, blogs, coaches, and mentors that can all tell you what you need to know in order to be successful at work or in life. The information is out there, it is readily available. The gnosis of success is not hidden, it is not a secret, the knowledge of what it takes to be successful is available to all who seek it and are willing to apply it.

So the first step is to actively seek out that knowledge. You’ll need to read; you’ll need to talk with others about their experiences; you’ll need to attend presentations, lectures and classes. Then you will need to pause and reflect on what you have been exposed to. You will need to look for the learning and how it applies to your particular situation. All that takes time, it takes effort. It does not happen overnight. Part of the secret of success is Preparation.

The second step to success in any endeavor is to Plan. Failure to thoughtfully plot your next steps is a sure way not to succeed. Your planning should begin with the end in mind. Envision what your success will finally look like. Then ask yourself what steps you must take to achieve that success. Be very specific in thinking about and then listing those steps in writing.  Plan not only the steps that need taken but also identify and plan to obtain the resources you will need to successfully implement your plan.

The third and most important step in your success is Execution, the doing. The truth of the matter, and the reason that many people are not successful in obtaining their goals or making their next move, is that they just do not execute. They are not willing to put, as the old saying goes, “their noses to the grind stone and their shoulders to the wheel.” It is not the knowledge, the technique, the phrase, or even the execution of a single particular task that leads individuals to success; it is just plain old fashion hard work that leads to success. Hard work, combined with excellence in the execution of your plan is what will give you the edge you seek. You see, hard work is needed but it must be quality effort that is put forth, that is what makes people successful in accomplishing their goals or obtaining what they set out for.

Everyone is looking for an edge, the inside track, that little extra knowledge or technique that will put them over the top. The truth is the “gnosis of success” is hard work. Your success will only come about when the desire you have is combined with a plan for action and then carried out with an excellence in its execution.

Career Coach: Compass or GPS?

One symbol widely adopted in the coaching community is the compass. It is a fitting representation of the role the coach plays in the development of the client.

The compass is a wonderful tool to use in gaining a sense of what direction to move in and when used properly is very reliable under most circumstances. The same is true of the coach. Through listening, questioning, and sometimes suggesting new ways of looking at things the coach can assist the client to gain or regain a sense of direction for their lives and careers.

The compass in the hands that know how to use it can help you determine bearings and headings. It can point you in the direction you want to go. When you’re lost it is a valuable tool to get you pointed in the right direction and keeps you on course. Again, the same is true of the coach. Once a direction is determined by the client the coach can assist the client in further refining the direction and steps needed to get moving, keep moving, and finally arrive at their desired destination.

A GPS on the other hand is the device of preference these days for the traveler.  Plug in the information, the city, the street, the number and viola! Instant directions! Exact directions! Complete with the visual of a map, voice narration, and instructions on where and when to turn. Hard to get off course with one of these babies but if you do you’ll hear the device say “recalculating route” and soon your put right with visual and audio cues all adjusted to your route. Nice! And when, at long last I come to my destination it tells me I have arrived!

The comparison is stark. The compass, a centuries old mechanical device that was one time considered magical or a 21st century electronic gadget that makes use of satellites, triangulation, and other technology most of us don’t really understand. I know when given the choice I want to take the GPS on the road trips I take. The GPS is exact, precise, calculatingly keeping me on the straight and narrow even if the little voice seems unforgiving at times. The GPS adjusts to my errors in navigation and puts me back on course every time in ways designed to get me to my destination as quickly and directly as possible. It is user friendly and fairly idiot proof.

Sometimes our clients want a GPS for their career development tool. Clients who do not understand the coaching process or the idea of career development come to the coach seeking GPS like services. They desire exact direction, precise step by step instructions on what they should do and how they should go about doing it. As a coach it is sometimes tempting to provide them the direction they seek but that would be of no services to them. The coach must resist the temptation to be directive and instead help the client to discover for themselves what direction and course they should set for themselves.

For career coaching I’ll take the compass every time.
The compass is not as exacting, not as precise.  With the compass there are no precise directions on where to turn and when to turn just the steady pointing of a needle that indicates the direction of magnetic North. Certainly not the accuracy of a GPS but accurate enough to keep you on course once you have an idea of the direction in which you want to go. The route the compass gives is more general. It will allow you to suddenly veer off course if you wish to do so or to slowly drift off course if you choose not to refer to it on your journey, all without correcting you. But still it always maintains the accuracy of the direction you had set for your original course.  The compass is not prescriptive like the GPS; it does not say “do this, then do that, now do this” and tell you that you have arrived at your destination. The function of the career coach is to be more like a compass than a GPS.
Coaching, when at its best, is or at least should be more like the compass than the GPS. Your coach should work to help you discover the general direction of your destination but you need to determine where that destination lay and how best to get there. Certainly it is the function of the coach to help you discover the destination you desire but the choice of destinations is yours. No coach or assessment tool can be the final arbiter of the direction in which you should move in your career. There should not be the prescriptive “do this and then do that” coming from the coach on which you peg the hopes of your career. The coach is there to point the way, keep you on course, help you develop a plan and a direction, and provide a measure of accountability not to give you turn by turn instructions on your career. Why? Two reasons really.

First, you are an individual, immensely complicated, and unique. Like every other individual you should not be prescribed to a career direction, you should be assisted to discover it. There is no such thing as “one size fits all” in career development. There can be no prescriptive method that works for every person, every time, which will deliver them to their career destination.

Second, and more importantly, it is your responsibility to figure it out. It is your life, your career, your happiness and fulfillment at stake. By putting forth the effort to determine your destination, to plan the route, to make the journey, to make the adjustments along the way and then to finally decide if and when you have arrived at the destination you planned you take control of your career and your life. Chances are you’ll be more satisfied with the outcome.

Many times clients, acting out of frustration, will say “Just tell me what I need to do to …. get the promotion … get the job I want … get ahead on the job …” They want GPS like direction for their careers or lives. They want turn by turn instructions on how to get them to their destination. They want “to arrive” in the shortest time possible, over the shortest distance possible, with as little planning as possible. And while, as a coach, it is tempting just to tell them what they need to know to relieve their anguish that is not the role or function of the coach.

The coach, like the compass, is a tool for you to use in your career development. The coach can point you in the right direction and keep you on course if you choose to use him/her for the purpose they were intended and in the way they were designed to be used. The journey however is up to you. It falls to you to determine, to plan, to conduct, and to finally it bring to fruition. And when you have “arrived” at your destination the coach will be there waiting and pointing to the possibilities that await you beyond the place where you have “arrived”.

Gambling with Your Career

Gambling can be a fun and exciting proposition if you have an adventurous spirit and a tolerance for risking your assets. There are those brave souls that venture into the casinos, gaming halls, and private games that find the risk taking involved thrilling. They don’t mind the fact that the odds in every game favor the house and not them. These armature gamblers don’t mind the “sucker bet”. They fearlessly go against the odds in the hope that “lady luck” will smile on them. They get an adrenaline rush; their pulse quickens, the excitement builds for them from the thought of going against the odds, making a long shot and beating the house.

But the professional gambler does not trust in “luck”.  When playing against the house the professional knows that the odds are against them. To play and play well in this arena the professional prepares. here is no “chance”. There is only skill. The professional plays the odds. They calculate the odds of their game of choice. They bet with intentionality. They watch each move carefully.

When playing against other gamblers the professional players track the cards played and look for “tells” from other players that might give them an edge in the game or insight into how others play it. They take all this information, formulate a plan, and play the game accordingly.

Your career development is a lot like gambling if you are not intentionally, actively, calculating your best moves and managing your career.

What can you do to eliminate the “gamble” and increase your odds of winning? Here are five things to get you started.
•  Assess where you are now and where you want to be in your career
       o Reflect on what you have to offer an employer
       o Assess yourself and your potential
       o Develop a plan to get you where you want to be
•  Keep your skills and your resume updated so you are ready when the opportunity comes
       o Plan for your professional development
       o Seek out learning opportunities and training
       o Become a Life Long Learner & look for the learning in every experience
•  Network, Network, Network
       o Re-establish contact with past friends, co-workers, clients, etc
       o Nourish your network
       o Strengthen your network by investing in it
•  Promote your product; promote yourself
       o Establish your Brand
       o Protect your Brand Reputation
       o Develop your “elevator speech”
       o Practice interviewing skills
• Work with a Professional
       o Establish a relationship with a Career Coach
       o Resume Writers
       o J ob Center Staff
       o Find a Mentor

Don’t gamble with your career like an amateur.  Where your career is concerned don’t leave things to “luck” or “chance”. Instead, be a professional. Understand what you’re up against; calculate the odds against you, look for opportunities to take the advantage, manage your career like a professional.
Contact us for assistance in turning from “career amateur” to “career pro”.

These clients usually have a story of at least one time (usually several) where they were passed over for a promotion or lost a job opportunity to individuals they “knew” were (or perceived by them) as less skilled or less technically excellent than themselves. What they failed to realize was that “the race is not always to the swift … er… skilled”. These individuals have failed to understand what employers’ are looking for when they hire and promote individuals.

Equally surprising to individuals who sacrificed and strove to gain a degree in their adult years is the idea that the degree they worked so hard to get may not make them the attractive candidate they see themselves to be. Listen, all education is worthwhile. The pursuit of a degree is generally a good thing and I believe that all adults should be life long learners”. While I would not discourage anyone from pursuing a degree the bachelors, masters, or doctorate may not open the doors you think it will and may not be the deciding factor for the potential employer. There are other things, more important things that potential employers will be looking for.

There was I time in my management career when I did a lot of interviewing and hiring for staff positions. Whenever conducting interviews I always looked for skilled people but there were other attributes I wanted in the people I hired. At times, I intentionally hired people with fewer skills than those who had an abundance of skills in the technical aspects of the job. Why hire the less skilled? Simply put, sometimes they were the best candidates for the position.

 What was my reasoning for this? Simple really, as your manager I can always invest in your knowledge and skills. You can be sent to classes, provided with training, attend seminars and workshops to increase your knowledge base or get you up to speed on things. But your teachability, manageability, and attitude already came with you as a function of your personality and emotional maturity. I can’t send someone to class for that. It would take too long, if it could ever even happen, to try and get you where I need you to be in these critical areas and the potential harm that could come to my team in the meantime was not worth the risk. The philosophy was simple, “Hire attitude, train skills”.

The experienced hiring manager, when looking for someone to add to their team, is looking for more than skills.  They are looking for the best possible match for their team or department. Yes, that is a very subjective judgment that must be made but it is a critical one. Hiring managers, the wise ones any way, are looking for the well rounded individuals not the one sided individuals. Yes, they are looking for skills and education, but also for individuals with at least three other traits. They are looking for someone who is teachable, manageable, and with a great positive attitude.

To be teachable means that you are accepting of and are willing to learn new ways and methods of doing things. You realize that despite you great knowledge and skills you still have things to learn. You must be open to laying aside your ways and methods in favor of others. You must be willing to try and explore new things and not think or express a superiority of you skills until you have proven them. You must be willing to change.

To be manageable means that you can accept direction, will follow instruction willingly and often without questioning the reasons or authority of your manager. It also means that you “keep your nose clean” and don’t participate in the “office dramas” that can be divisive to your workgroup or team.  To convincingly portray this skill is no small feat for individuals who believe that their skills and knowledge are superior to their team members and/or their managers. If you are one of those individuals that feel they have something to say on most every issue and also feel some inner compulsion to have to share it, then your manageability is in doubt. I’m not suggesting that you become some kind of  “yes man” of withhold your input but knowing when to do and how to do it is what gets you considered manageable.

Attitude is more ethereal and harder to describe but everyone knows a good attitude from a bad attitude when they see it. To possess a positive attitude is to project a “can do” mind set in both your words and your deeds. This is what all good managers want to add to their team. That positive attitude can be infectious when supported and rewarded and managers will reward it. Managers don’t like, don’t need and don’t want negativity on their team and will avoid hiring individuals they perceive as potentially risks because of their attitudes. Just as a positive attitude can be infectious, it is doubly true that an individual with a “bad attitude” can bring a team down and potentially destroy it. Good managers know that and hire accordingly. A smiling, easygoing, up-beat persona helps to project a positive attitude and gets the managers attention.

Technical skills, yeah, you need them. You need “mad skills” and you need them in abundance but equally important if not more important are those other things that make you a good hire, teachability, managability, and a great attitude. Many times they will make the difference between getting a job offer and being passed by. Time for self examination,  how teachable and manageable are you … really? Oh yeah, and what about that attitude?

The responses of my clients at that point are varied but all are telling. They run the gamut from looks of sudden illumination, to wry smiles, to incredulous stares.  And then I assure them that indeed their number one priority and their number one job is to make the boss look good. Then I explain.
• You can make the boss look in good in any one of a thousand ways. You do it by doing your job to the best of your ability…every day.
• You do it by coming into work every day, on time, and ready to work.
• You do it by delivering the goods, whatever those goods are (reports, projects, widgets, etc) complete and on time.
• You do it by getting along with all your coworkers (yes, even those you don’t like or maybe even can’t stand) and proving yourself a “team player”.
• You do it by being easy to manage, eager to take on work and always having the bosses back.
There is no magic to it, it’s called being a responsible employee but more and more I see this being lost in the workforce.

Why is making the boss look good an employee’s number one responsibility? Here’s why. When the boss looks good, he/she is a happier boss and a happier boss is a boss who is easier to work with and easier to work for.
Make your boss look good and they will value not only what you do, they will value you as an individual. A boss who values you will be more likely to help promote your interests in an effort to keep you happy and productive and themselves looking good. You may get that extra consideration when it comes time for a promotion or a raise. Or it can work itself out in plum assignments, getting off a few hours early now and then, added flexibility to your schedule, or you may just get to keep your job.

When your boss is made to look successful and you make his/her job easier you become a “valued employee” and stand a greater chance of gaining the success you want and being successful too. It is a symbiotic relationship and everybody wins.

Manager as Gatekeeper

Picture this. You are on your career journey through the workplace. You wander wearily along that road in a strange land. It’s a bleak land of twilight with only occasional rays of sunshine breaking through the clouds that beset your journey. It is a land inhabited by strange and sometime fearsome creatures that plague your journey and seek to impede your progress. But you press on with your travels along that road strangely compelled by the annoying gnawing in your gut and that buzzing about your head from those blood sucking insects trying to drain you of your vital juices. The going is rough and you are making slow but sure progress when you come across a huge iron gate that blocks the path. On the other side of the gate is the land of your new career. A land of plenty where the grass appears greener, the sky bluer, the air sweeter, and the inhabitants a wait to greet you welcome you to your new home. At that gate is the gatekeeper. There is something about the keeper that seems familiar but you can’t quite place it. As you draw closer the image of the keeper becomes clearer, you focus harder on their personage and to your surprise looks remarkably like your manager. A sudden rush of realization washes over you and you are certain that the keeper is your manager.

There the gatekeeper stands before you, with the keys to the gate in their hand, the power to grant you entrance in to the land beyond the gate. Will the gatekeeper open the gate for you ushering you through the gate to that new land of opportunity? You present your qualifications, you argue for your skills and past service, you make the case for entry skillfully but it seems to have little effect on the gatekeeper. Will the keeper be moved to open the gate or will the keeper stand fast ignoring your pleas for entrance … Your past “merits” mean little at this point. The decision now entirely depends on your past treatment of the gatekeeper.

OK. Maybe my little tale is a bit melodramatic, but the truth of the matter is your manager is the gatekeeper to you career. Read on.

As an employee who desires to advance your career the one thing that you must understand is that your manager, for good or for ill, is the gatekeeper to your career within your organization. For those with a poor relationship with their manager it is a sad fact of life. For those others, with good relationships with their managers it is encouraging news. For those of you that have not thought much about it, now is the time to start tending to the relationship and cultivating it into something positive.

Your manager can be of a good deal of use to you career plans. If you manage your relationship well, if you tend that relationship, if you foster and nurture it your efforts will be rewarded when the time comes. Whether you believe it or not, you in truth, need that relationship to be a good one in order to advance in any meaningful measure even if your boss is a jerk. Especially when your boss is a jerk.

Consider this; your manager can speak good or ill of you (and does) in conversations with his/her peers and superiors inside your organization. He/She can either help build your reputation or help destroy it in the course of a simple conversation. If you are planning a career within your organization, these will be the very people you will be interviewing with in the attempt to advance your career.

You must realize that managers talk with each other about their employees and so your reputation may proceed you even before you try for that other job. When you try to move to another position within the company the manager that you are interviewing with or has authority to hire you will, before the job offer is made, call your current manager to find out about you. Your reputation, your work habits, your interpersonal skills will all be up for discussion. And understand this; managers will also tend to tell each other the truth about an employee when asked because there is no advantage for them not to. Even if you are a “bad” employee managers will not tend to pass their problem people off to others because there is a price they will pay later in that relationship if they do.

So you say, “This doesn’t apply to me; I’m looking for opportunities outside my current company where my manager can’t undercut me”. Sorry, same rules apply. You never really know who your manager knows, what professional contacts he/she might have, who they see socially. And let me warn you, even though your company’s HR department has an official policy of “name, rank, employment dates and salary” only, more often than not managers across the industry will talk and will “warn off” a fellow manager from a hiring a bad employee. There are many ways to do it both overtly and covertly.

So what does all this mean? Some of my clients react negatively to this concept of “manager as gatekeeper”. They are quick to say “I’m not a suck up” or “I don’t kiss ass” or “I don’t play that …I keep it real.” I tell them this. “You may not like it, you may not want to acknowledge it but that is how the workforce operates”. Fail to recognize that your manager is the gatekeeper to your career or fail to manage that relationship in a positive way and you will have a more difficult time trying to improve your lot in the workplace.”