Last Friday, unemployed women of a certain age lined up outside Reveal clinic in Arlington, VA to receive free injections of Botox to help smooth their fine lines and keep them job interview ready.
At first glance of the article in the Chicago Tribune, I chuckled a bit and envisioned these ladies with resumes in hand forming a queue to be among the first fifty to arrive and receive painful facial injections gratis. I thought it not a very feminist choice for these working women to put so much emphasis on appearance, certainly not the best message to send to their daughters.
But upon reading their quotes and concerns and giving it a little thought, I no longer found it funny but practical and also a bit sad that such aesthetic and cosmetic techniques are not only deemed desirable but requisite to put a mature woman’s best foot forward.
One recipient of the treatment, Colleen Delsack, was quoted as saying, “Age is a handicap.”
Delsack’s home has gone into foreclosure in the 18 months since she lost her job as an account executive with a printing and document-management company.
“There’s so much competition and we’re up against kids coming out of college and not making the salaries that we’ve had,” she said.
Ageism is certainly a very real issue and one that’s only exacerbated by the recession.
I’ve touched on ageism a bit recently in a column on the qualities that employers look for in a digital executive. The skills and qualities I heard pop up again and again from those I interviewed described a member of a younger generation, a technologically savvy and utterly post-modern candidate.
When desired skills sets seem to cater to a younger crowd, it’s no wonder appearance has become an even larger issue for an older set of pavement pounders.
You’re a senior level executive and your job was great, it was challenging, you knew what was expected, and then suddenly you have a new boss. Overnight, everything changes. Priorities are shifted, new procedures are instituted and it seems every day brings new frustrations. You vacillate between anger and depression but mostly you wonder if this situation will ever improve.
As soon as you realize it’s up to you and not your boss to make it better, the faster it will be. That’s the advice of Cynthia Hayes, a New York-based leadership coach.
“The higher up you are in an organization, the harder it is to cope with a transition to a new boss,” explained Hayes. “Senior executives generally accept a new position based on who he or she will be working for. When someone new comes in it feels like the rug has been pulled out from under you.” In contrast, she added, “When a more junior employee decides on a job it’s more about wanting to work for a particular company or in a particular role.”
Hayes explained that losing an old boss and getting a new one can set off a series of emotions. It begins with a sense of loss and grieving, moves to anger and depression but ultimately the goal is to move as quickly as possible to acceptance.
New Boss: Is it the end of life as you know it?
According to Hayes, the first emotion your likely to feel is grief.
“The grief is related to the fact that you’re letting go of something. Even if you didn’t love your job, you knew what your job meant and what the boundaries were. Change to a new boss is an end to the life you knew.”
Get Mad but Get Over It
From grief you go to anger.
“You start with stability and then change is inflicted. You don’t know how to act now that there’s a whole new set of rules.” Hayes acknowledges the importance of being able to vent your anger but suggests that you deal with it as quickly as possible. “Whenever there’s a change we tend to glorify the old. It’s helpful to make a list of all the things you didn’t like about how things were. You’ll probably realize it wasn’t so golden after all.”
“Now think about the positives in the new situation, no matter how minor they may seem,” she says. “In addition, finding the good traits in your new boss can help move you into a positive mindset. Consider that one benefit is having a fresh set of eyes to look at things. There’s personal growth to be gained in developing skills in how to deal with someone new.”
Make It Work
Hayes cautions against taking the attitude that it’s your boss’ responsibility to make things work. It’s important to take responsibility for accepting the change. “Become an active participant in making the change work for you.” If your boss is coming from outside the company, he or she has a myriad of things to digest and may not be as communicative initially as they will be later. “The more you can do to make it easy for your boss, the easier it will be for you.”
But, I Wanted That Job!
If you thought you should have had your old boss’ job, you’re feeling a double sense of loss. In cases where you didn’t get the promotion, you’re probably more likely to get stuck in the anger phase, Hayes says. “It’s even more important to understand the strengths your new boss is contributing if he or she has been chosen over you.” She added, “It’s generally an indication that something is missing in your bag of tricks. This is an opportunity to learn from your new boss about those skills so that you’re better positioned for the next opportunity.”
Last week, Dawn Jordan, a former operations vice president at Bank of America and one of eight unemployed MBA’s that the Wall Street Journal has been following as part of their “Laid off and Looking” series, wrote a piece about the “one size fits all” advice she’s come across time and time again in her job search.
“It seems like 95% of the information, advice and tools I have encountered are totally generic,” Jordan wrote. “They speak to the unemployed population en masse instead of speaking to me.”
Jordan happily announces that she has a few job offers after months of searching (my guess is that her stint as a columnist for the WSJ helped jolt her resume ahead of others), but does not credit any tools or resources for career hunters, saying those currently available are outdated and impersonal.
“It is the lack of personalization and customization in the information available that has been the biggest surprise,” she says. “For an industry so reliant upon building relationships, in my opinion as a job seeker, they are missing an opportunity.”
She quoted some general networking advice found on a career site and then provided the following as her criticism:
“From my perspective, the problem with this is that it only scratches the surface. It’s not bad information. It is just too general and it fails to offer tangible ideas or examples on execution. It’s a one size fits all piece of advice that really doesn’t fit anyone well.
What would I like to see offered as a better answer?
Based on my experience, I’d still give people examples of who should be in their career network as listed in the example above. Then I’d tell them to forget about focusing on a getting a specific job when they talk to people. Instead, I’d tell them to focus on that person and build that relationship. I’d advise them that you can have one thousand contacts in your network but the only meaningful ones will be the ones you’ve taken time to cultivate.
I’d advise them to start building a meaningful network by chatting up the other parents on your kid’s ball team. I’d tell them to talk to people when they walk their dog. I’d also tell them that it is critical to talk about yourself and your interests—not just the type of job you are looking for—when you attend designated networking events. In turn, people should find out the same information from those they meet.”
Jordan ends her piece by saying she came to the aforementioned conclusions on her own, no thanks to any so-called career seeker resources.
While I think some career professionals who put a lot of time and energy into doling out advice on the topic might find Jordan’s conclusions to be disheartening, I think there is a bit of truth in what she has to say. As a blogger trying to find the latest and best in career advice, career news, etc. I do stumble upon many similar articles, blogs, columns, and resources. And when I embarked upon writing a career advice column, I knew right away that I did not want cover topics that have not already been tackled a million and one times.
My conclusion? I decided not to spew out unsolicited advice that falls into that one size fits all category and I decided to answer individual questions. Of course I try to keep the columns and the blog accessible to a larger audience and in answering specific questions that don’t “fit all”, so to speak, I find I reach a larger number than often expected.
So, while I think Jordan’s complaints have some merit to them, I hope to take advantage of what she calls a “missed opportunity” (though I do see a lot of other great blogs and work being done, that perhaps she failed to come across) and become a resource for personalized and customized advice. Just ask!
Visit the Contact page or ask me a question via my Twitter. I will answer all career questions personally or possible in a column or blog post. And if I don’t have the best answer, I’ll find someone who does.
In Swiss essayist Alain de Botton’s new book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, he examines the activity that consumes the majority of our waking lives as adults: our career. To write the book he shadowed and interviewed people of varying professions including an accountant, a rocket scientist, a cookie manufacturer, and an inventor.
The book offers insight on our spiritual relationship with the idea of work and in so doing speaks to the pain and grief associated with job loss, a topic I’ve covered a few times since lay-offs and the Recession hit.
Below is some of the Q&A with de Button conducted by the Wall Street Journal with just a bite sized morsel of de Botton’s wisdom. Seems it could be an interesting read.
A resounding number of people are starting over midcareer and changing jobs. What kind of psychic toll does that take?
The pain is immense. When we lose a job nowadays, we are doing more than forgoing an income; we are being cut off from an identity. We can’t explain any more what we do—and hence who we are.
When college graduates are trying to figure out what careers to pursue, what should they ask themselves?
The process demands such a vast amount of thought that it’s hard to summarize other than by saying: take this moment in your life very, very seriously. I studied the world of career counseling and was amazed by just how casually people continue to fall into jobs. Most of us are still in jobs chosen for us by our unthinking 22-year-old selves. We speak endlessly about waste: waste of energy, of resources, of water. But the most shameful waste is of people’s talents.
Noted graphic designer Paula Scher thinks failure is the way to find success and innovation. An interview in Psychology Today quotes the famed creator of the Citibank umbrella logo as saying she finds her greatest breakthroughs only through stumbling first.
Here are a few good quotes from the article that can be applied to any career and, well, just about anything in life. We’ve heard time and time again to not fear failure, but it’s always nice to hear it from someone who really has turned it into success. Read the full article for more of her wisdom. Below are only a few high points. Also, check out the video beneath as well for her recent TED talk on serious and solemn work and her rise to the top.
“You have a whole philosophy about recovering from failure—how you can learn from failure and how it can actually help you. You’ve spoken about how failures and mistakes in your own work led to your current level of success and allowed you to be creative.
There are two different ways this thing works. I did a TED talk about the difference between serious work and solemn work. I define serious work as being where you make breakthroughs, and solemn work as doing the status quo and the level may be very good but it’s not breakthrough.
There’s another factor—and I’m talking about this as a designer, but I imagine it would work in any form of the arts and to science. When you’re working and you make mistakes, particularly when you’re young, you make discoveries because you do things that are inappropriate and wrongheaded, but within the wrongheadedness you find an unexpected way to go. These things are truly the breakthroughs.
When you’re fulfilling a function—when you’re being obedient, in other words, you’re doing as expected—you can’t learn anything. Because you already know the answer. It’s through mistakes that you actually can grow.
You have to get bad in order to get good. You have to try a lot of things and fail in order to make the next discovery.
The thing about your mistakes is, when everybody praises something, you don’t learn anything. But when you do something terrible, you know what not to do. And that’s fantastic. You also learn what you could do if you manipulated it a different way. You have to try these things. You have to see where the failure takes you. That’s very scary and risky and also hard to do while you’re trying to do something professional. So you have to set aside some personal R&D to make the failure.
What advice do you have for people?
If you find yourself defending yourself and protecting yourself and being outraged about what’s around you, you’re in trouble. That doesn’t mean some things aren’t genuinely outrageous. But you have to ask yourself: Why are you outraged by something? What are you hiding from? What are you defending?
Was there ever a particularly public failure? Any dramatic moments?
People need to understand is the difference between failure and bad luck. Bad luck is something else—sometimes you lose your job, sometimes you’re in the middle of a project and it gets canceled, sometimes you have a client who’s impossible. That’s just bad luck. Failure is when you have the ability to fix it. It’s important to know the difference. It’s like that Al Anon prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” There’s no point in beating yourself up over bad luck, in trying to manipulate something you can’t change. There are people who fall into a downward cycle and blame themselves for things they really have control over.
But for true failure, you should let it beat you up a little bit?
You should pay attention to it, and change the things you can. Ask yourself, why is this not working? Why is my work coming out like this? Why do I do the same thing over and over again?
In keeping with my recent trend of tapping leadership experts to weigh in on management issues for my columns, I’m growing fond of the Corner Office series in the New York Times. This week they featured Dany Levy, founder of DailyCandy.com. For those not familiar with the company, it’s a popular female-centric site and newsletter customized to several different locations and featuring store and restaurant openings, events, deals, and everything you need to be in-the-know in your city.
As I’ve said before, I think it’s important for the still-employed to receive as much guidance as the unemployed during this recession, because while they may have escaped the pink slip, they certainly did not come out unscathed. Managing during trying times and especially after lay-offs is a big challenge and it never hurts to hear what the best of the best have to say about their techniques. In this case, Levy touts the importance of working your way up and understanding being in the bottom of the food chain in order to be good at being on the top. Plus Levy throws in her two cents on what she looks for her in a hire, too. Here are a few highlights:
Q. How are you trying to improve as a manager?
A. Sometimes I don’t slow down enough to walk someone through why I’m making a decision about something.Also, I tend to be a fairly–and this is just me calling it like it is–a fairly anxious person. And I’ve realized that as a boss you can’t be — whatever energy you have is infectious.I’d say in the beginning I was definitely a lot more impulsive and sometimes irrational. And I’ve learned to sort of slow down, take a deep breath.
Q. What prepared you to run your own company?
A. Most of what I learned was from my first job out of college, when I was an intern and then the managing editor’s assistant at New York Magazine. And it was being her assistant that really taught me how the whole machine operates.My career has been this just wonderful series of events that somehow makes perfect sense now. It was not a glamorous job. The Xerox machine broke, it was my problem. I was customer service. I would get people calling and complaining about the magazine, and I would try and talk them down, just knowing that every subscriber had a dollar figure attached to them. So it’s that kind of thinking, understanding the business side of it and understanding the relationship between advertising and editorial, and running up and down and getting people paid.I learned about office politics and how an office works.
When I graduated from college, I really understood that I didn’t know anything.In the real world, college doesn’t really prepare you for that. That’s what worries me a little bit about the present. There’s definitely, in this generation, from what I’ve seen, more a sense of entitlement, a bit of, ‘Why should I go work for ‘the man’ and put in the time when I could have my own blog and do it myself?’ And I totally understand that impulse. But there are some key things to learn from the grunt work.
Q. Can you talk more about that?
A. I think learning to work for people is really important. I think to be a good leader it’s key to know what it’s like to be an employee, and to have had a lot of the different level jobs where you’ve been the scrappy little nobody. I’ve had crazy bosses and I’ve had wonderful bosses, and it’s important to figure out that if you’re working for someone who you don’t gel with, there can be a way to manage that.
Q. What are you looking for when you hire?
A. What I call the figure-it-the-hell-out gene.You know, it’s like Occam’s Razor – the simplest answer is usually the best, and don’t overcomplicate things. It’s that kind of mentality that I look for. Also, I have a sensitive radar for cattiness. I have zero tolerance for that.We’ve got our work to do. This isn’t rocket science. As far as I’m concerned, we should all have each other’s backs, which is what we’ve done.I also like people who have a little bit of an off-sense; they are often more creative and can come up with the unexpected.
Q. Anything else?
A. The ability to prioritize, which I think is more and more important these days, because there’s just so much stimuli out there with everything coming at you on your Blackberry and Twitter and what-have you.The last quality is someone who’s just a good egg. That says a lot — ultimately someone who is going to make the right call, because there are a million decisions to be made every day and it’s just important that they have a strong sense of right and wrong and good and bad.
Fashion model cum clothing designer/reality TV star, Kimora Lee Simmons had a baby last week. How do I know this? Because she was tweeting about her contractions from her hospital bed, complete with a tweet pic! This ranks up there with that twitter tattoo.
I am a big proponent of Twitter and other social networks, most notably for help in personal branding and job hunting techniques, but this cartoon from the New Yorker pretty much sums up the frightening extent of the Twitter take over.
With the recession-induced overflow of job seekers, phone interviews are becoming a bit more intense, says the Wall Street Journal. There are far more candidates who fulfill the basic requirements of a job description than in the past, thus giving interviewers the task of drilling down through the masses by asking the tougher questions one might not expect until an in-person meeting. But not expecting those deeper questions, may eliminate the chance to redeem yourself in person or flash that million dollar smile. Basically, having a great phone presence and being prepared are more important than ever. Here are some tips to gear up and get noticed (some are from a previous column I did on the topic and some are from the wisdom of the WSJ.)
-Allot yourself more time than in the past– some of these tougher phone interviews can go upwards of an hour.
-Don’t multi-task! Give your interviewer your full attention, they’ll notice if your head is in more places than one (and definitely don’t let that second place be a drive-thru!)
-Be brief and stay on topic. The interviewer doesn’t want your life story. Talking too much is one of the biggest mistakes phone interviewees make, but don’t realize it until they’re caught saying, “What was it we were talking about?”
-Make a cheat sheet! Have a list of statistics and key accomplishments you’ll want to mention in front of you. With interviewers digging deeper, you don’t want to hesitate or have to think too much.
-Take notes. It’s harder to show you’re listening intently over the phone. You want to be able to keep on track with what the original question was or go back to something if you think of a better answer or example later in the conversation.
-Do your homework. Have questions prepared and plenty of research on the company. If this might be your only shot, make it count!
-Walk around while you’re talking to keep your energy up or look in a mirror and smile while you talk. You want to sound enthusiastic and looking at your reflection reminds you of how you are being perceived.
-Take some deep breaths before you take the call. You don’t want that shaky nervous voice vibrating across the line.
-Don’t interrupt. It’s rude in person and on the phone.
These rules of thumb are more important than ever when phone interviews are becoming more and more rigorous. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, but if you map out your conversation before it begins you’ll be more in control and that confidence you’ll feel will come across to your interviewer.
Check out the video below featuring WSJ reporter, Sarah Needleman asking for pointers on this topic from CEO of the Clarity Media Group, Bill McGowan.
Last Friday, unemployed women of a certain age lined up outside Reveal clinic in Arlington, VA to receive free injections of Botox to help smooth their fine lines and keep them job interview ready.
Noted graphic designer Paula Scher thinks failure is the way to find success and innovation. An 
