A manager weighs in on an overlooked aspect of career success

 

Laura Weiderhaft

 

RECENTLY, A SITE called Intelligent.com published results of a survey reporting that 81% of participating managers say that new college grads need training on how to act in the workplace. I assume that refers to all employees entering the workforce for the first time, such as non-grads serving as apprentices—it’s the lack of experience, not the path they followed to get there. The core areas where managers agreed that new hires needed direction were in handling conflict, taking constructive criticism, dressing and communicating professionally, being on time, and understanding cellphone etiquette.

I’m a manager myself now, and these survey results made me think about my own path to a sustainable career. I managed a restaurant in my pre-IT days, and even did some stand-up comedy. There was no playbook I could follow when I transitioned into IT work in enterprise settings. I often find myself wishing I knew then what I know now. And I see a new generation coming into the workforce facing the same things that I did—knowing how to do the job but struggling to adapt to workplace norms.

Of course, the pandemic affected a lot of kids—they had to do a few years of schooling remotely, and you lose some crucial social skills when you’re always working alone. But another underlying factor is the prevalence of protective parenting. So many millennials and now Gen Z were raised with their parents telling them, “You’re the absolute best, you’re just perfect as you are.” They love their kids, and their kids are always the best, no matter what. While that’s nice to hear, you don’t get the kind of constructive criticism you need in order to go out and be a grownup in this world. You don’t quite learn that you’re not the center of the universe.

I think that contributed to the challenge of adapting to the workplace in my first job. Obviously, I knew I wasn’t the absolute center of the universe, but I was still a bit recalcitrant. I thought, I should be able to be my own person and do things my way. And, incidentally, I worked at Walmart, so this was the biggest company you can work at, and there is a normal way that things should go. And I rebuffed it, thinking This isn’t for me. I do think there are different work cultures that don’t suit certain personality types, and startups are certainly more friendly if you prefer to have a creative outlook. I’ve been more successful at startups, but there’s still an extent to which there are things that you must do if you want to be successful in any workplace, whether it’s a startup or Walmart.

I would say there’s etiquette around responding to emails promptly, like within a day or two. There’s etiquette around having your camera on during meetings, and this is hard to grasp for some young employees because if you were in a remote class during the pandemic, it was okay to have your camera off. But in a workplace setting, having your camera on is a sign of engagement.

Even making time-off requests properly is hard for some people. If you’re going to be gone for a week, you need to give three weeks’ notice. You can’t just say, “I’m burned out so I need to be away next week.” You’re part of a team, and you need to give the others a heads up so they can work around your being gone. Mental health days are important and necessary, but it can’t be the only way that you’re taking time off from work.

The more I think about it, the more I think we’re still talking about the pandemic in a way. People who “came of age” during the pandemic might be the ones this is hardest for. They care a lot about work-life balance, and they seem generally more hesitant to commit to or buy in to every part of a company culture. At the same time, companies are trying to focus more on culture and to do things to get their post-Covid workforce more engaged. But if there are certain standards that companies are pushing for and they’re also ordering a mandatory return to the office without giving a reason, some people pull away. It’s like they’re saying, “If that’s an arbitrary rule, maybe all of our rules are arbitrary.”

My company, Flywheel, is a global company. Half my team is in the same office as I am, and half are remote, scattered across the country. So I have both in-office and virtual situations to deal with. I manage engineers and IT folks, and they can sometimes be like, I’m just a tech person. Why do I need to go to that meeting? I should just be able to code all day with the lights off.

So my approach has been, “I’m trying to prepare you to have success in your career, and in the future this is a soft skill that’s going to really help you stand out as an engineer. Communication is a really critical part of our success as a team, and if you only work at night, there’s not a lot of time for you to overlap with people and collaborate, which is an expectation. And the engineering market is competitive, and so there are skills that you should develop that make you more likely to succeed in the future. A lot of those are soft skills.”

There is a balance between being very good technically and also being able to collaborate and understand the business requirements and work with multiple stakeholders. And those are things that I see from both an engineering perspective and with people entering the workforce. The degree of engagement and collaboration that you should really be demonstrating in a work setting is a lot higher than a lot of people expect.

I like the management role. As a manager, I’m able to think about people’s development, think about how I can overlap what’s good for the company with what’s good for people’s career paths. Finding that intersection is probably my favorite component of managing. It’s like, how do we help both? How do we make this mutually beneficial? I think individuals can also take this approach—and developing the following soft skills goes a long way towards helping folks who are new to the workforce adapt and create value both for themselves and their workplaces.

Constructive Criticism

I am pretty direct. I say, “This is going to be important for you to consider as you work, because you’re not just working with me. You have peers. You might have another manager in the future, and this is advice that’s going to help in your career.” But you have to be direct. We’re not being punitive about whatever the problem is, but I want it to be conversational and have the person actually understand the why. Not just, “Hey, you need to do this.” We have to agree and commit to a change going forward.

Being On Time

Part of a core component of the Flywheel culture is that we are flexible. We have a hybrid working policy. We’re not going to ask you where you are at 9 AM if you don’t show up, but there is an expectation that you will be available. We are a client-driven organization, we’re an agency. We work with a lot of major brands and they expect you to be able to respond. They have emergencies at 9 AM. So I would say that if my team’s not available at 9 AM, that’s where it gets hard. Unless there’s some explicitly stated reason, I would certainly expect to get answers to questions within an hour of 9 AM at least.

Meeting Etiquette

I’ll sometimes see people on their phones during meetings, and that’s a time when everyone needs to be engaged. Cameras on. Even if you don’t think the meeting is relevant to you, you might learn something and then have another tool on your tool belt. Or you might make a connection later because you remembered something you heard. The bigger the group, the more people are like, I can look at my phone. And I try to draw a line in the sand about that: “It’s actually not acceptable to work through this meeting.” Why have a meeting if everyone’s working through it? With my team, certainly, I’m like, “If you aren’t planning on participating in a meeting, don’t come.” Because a lot of people think, I can just listen and I don’t have to participate. That’s actually something I see with new folks a lot.

Cellphones On

I see people on their phones, of course. But again, we have a client-driven culture. A lot of our clients have our cellphone numbers and we talk to them that way, because we have good relationships with them. We’re in advertising and we do retail media as well, and almost 60% of transactions come from mobile apps. So in some cases, it’s like you’re not good at your job if you aren’t on your phone. It’s expected now. Even students in classrooms are used to being on their phones. It’s a part of how people work today. I don’t think managers want to micromanage cellphone use if you’re performing your job as expected—unless there is a safety or customer service component to your work where you shouldn’t be distracted.

Communication

My team has quarterly sessions in which we get together, look at the problems ahead of us, look at our roadmap, and agree on communication standards and what’s going to make us successful. Not just what actions are we going to take, but what are our ways of working as a team that are going to unlock this success? A lot of people clam up in meetings, and this may be a result of some level of job insecurity and the fact that health insurance is tied to people’s jobs. So they aren’t really willing to be vulnerable. Or they’ll talk to their manager, but maybe they’re a little guarded with a larger team. But you can’t have a successful team without really, really strong communication. So how do you unblock that reluctance to speak out?

I tell them, “Communicate early and often. Bad news needs to travel fast.” That’s something that I think people don’t learn, and then it gets to a point where something’s escalated and we didn’t take the corrective steps we could’ve taken sooner. I understand that when you’re just starting a job, you want to make a good impression. So the goal is to get people comfortable with the fact that it doesn’t always have to be good news. You have to address challenges. A lot of workplaces are overly positive from a culture perspective. It’s not healthy to be negative all of the time, but you have to create space where we can identify what’s not working and develop corrective actions.

When managers say new hires need etiquette training, what we mean is, we need you to be resourceful. We want you to get involved and find out where our needs and your skills overlap. How might you step in and take on projects? Don’t wait to be told what to do. We need you to come in, pay a lot of attention and identify where you can add value. Get to the point where you know what’s the next thing that needs to be done without having to wait for your manager. Soft skills are such a big component of being able to drive value in the actual execution of your work. Don’t overlook it when you’re starting out.

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Laura Weiderhaft is Director of Product at Flywheel in Fayetteville, AR.