#91 - Building bridges, always

A few days ago at work, I met someone who is far up the management chain from me.  I'll call him Ken.  He unexpectedly showed up to a meeting I was running and took a seat in the corner.  As we were dialing in to the conference call number, he greeted me.  He mentioned that when he saw my name come across his desk (when I applied for the job I have) that he called my former VP (who I'll call Jim).  I knew that Jim and Ken were conncted on LinkedIn because I had done some homework, and had half-expected to need an introduction from Jim or another VP at some point during my job hunt. 

Ken said that when he asked Jim about me that Jim had said, "Hire him.  You'll be happy you did." 

Now, Jim had told me as I left the company that he would say some nice things about me.  He encouraged me to ask people to call him.  I didn't do it, because I wasn't sure how much he knew about what I had accomplished, and sometimes he said things that were wrong because he didn't know as much as he thought he did.  I did not want to risk him messing things up for me.  It turned out that quite the opposite had happened.

The importance of this event brought some things home to me.  The first is that putting your best foot forward at all times is a requirement for a successful career.  I was able to make my job transition in 2012 successfully only because I made a very good impression on someone in 1998.  The initial impression I made on that guy let him hire me in 1999.  When I needed a new career path in 2012, that's the guy I called.  In the mean time, I had done very good work for a very long time, and a fair amount of it had crossed Jim's desk.  I did not put him on my list of references, and I did not expect my new company to call him up and ask about me.  But they did.

I think about the opportunities I had at my previous company to disappear - to take on less challenging work, to not challenge the status quo, to stop asking questions.  Sure, I made mistakes.  But I owned up to them, and never made the same mistake twice.  That stuff sticks - and you never know in our connected world who knows whom.  The one time you performed poorly, that one interaction you had with someone: that might be the someone your next employer calls to ask about your performance.

There are no opportunities to slack any more.  It's much like the GMAT's math section.  The GMAT is a test akin to the SAT for students who want to enter a master's program in business.  The math section is self-selecting: the test gives you an easy question.  If you get it right, it gives you a harder one.  When you start to get questions wrong, it goes back to the kind you could solve before.  By the end of the test, it knows what kind of math you can do, and how good you are at it.  A quality employee is going to find getting and keeping a good job pretty easy.  The test is self-selecting where good performance is noted and stays with you.  A poor performer, like the self-selecting math questions on the GMAT that may show that you barely passed high school algebra, will find himself stuck in the same place.  There is no more opportunity to restart a career in management any more, no fresh chances.  Good careers will build consistently.  Poor careers will flatline pretty quickly.

Most of this is to the good.  A poor performer does not belong in, and will not be good at, a position that requires a more competent person.  The converse is true for high performers.  There will be people who get burned by a bad boss or the 1 big mistake she didn't see coming.  But overall, it's a system that is going to be good for companies and the people who run them.

So build your bridges at all times.  My last written communication with Jim was a long, thoughtful note on the company, its strategies, his leadership, and what I felt the company needed from him.  He told me he had read it once and would read it again.  That was 4 hours before I walked out the door for the last time.  Build bridges, even as the heel of your shoe takes the last step onto the other side.  Always.