Winning - Jack Welch [90]
But any job you take should feel somewhat challenging going in. It should make you think, “I can do most of the work, but there are certainly skills and knowledge this job requires that I don’t have yet. I’m going to learn something here.”*
In other words, any new job should feel like a stretch, not a layup.
Why? Because stretching, growing, learning—all these activities keep you engaged and energized. They have the effect of making work more interesting, and they keep your head in the game.
Yes, a stretch job increases the possibility of you screwing up. That’s why you should also make sure you join a company where learning is truly a value, growth for every employee is a real objective, mistakes aren’t always fatal, and there are lots of people around whom you can reach out to for coaching and mentoring.
Incidentally, stretching doesn’t—and shouldn’t—just happen at the beginning of a person’s career.
Take the case of Robert Bagby, who runs the brokerage firm A.G. Edwards. Bob says that he has twice taken on real stretch jobs—twenty-six years apart. The first time was when he began as a broker for another firm in Kansas City. The second time was in 2001, when he was named chairman and CEO of A.G. Edwards.
“At first, being a broker—my God, I had no idea what I was doing or why I had taken the job,” Bob said recently. “The phone was like a dangerous weapon. I was afraid to touch it.” Within a few months, though, Bob had learned enough new skills to start to excel. He came to love the brokerage business, and soon enough, his territory expanded and promotions started rolling in.
He didn’t feel out of his element again until the A.G. Edwards board picked him for the top position.
“It was that same feeling again,” Bob says. “There’s no pretraining to be a CEO. All your past history, and all your past successes, they don’t really matter anymore. You have to earn your respect all over again.”
Bob’s promotion to CEO couldn’t have come at a more challenging time. The Internet bubble had burst, and the market was collapsing after 9/11. Bob had to oversee the firm’s first workforce reduction and redirect its culture.
“I’d say it took a year for me to get on solid footing again,” he said. “Things are really back to normal—it’s fun now.”
Bob’s story, like so many others, illustrates that you shouldn’t be afraid of a job that feels too big at the outset. If you’re any good—which is why you were hired or promoted in the first place—you’ll grow into it, and be better for the experience.
OPTIONS
If the opportunity signal is about finding a job that allows you to grow and stretch while you are there, the options signal is about finding a job that helps you if you leave.
Working for some companies is like winning an Olympic medal. For the rest of your career, you are associated with great performance and success. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company is like that. Because it is known to hire the world’s top MBAs for their intelligence and intensity, and because of its reputation for intensive training, its alumni always get attention in the job market. By the same token, when I was in my early days of hiring in Plastics, we were always trying to hire people away from DuPont, and we considered it a real coup when we did. It may not have been true, but we had it in our heads that if you got a DuPont engineer, you were getting the most cutting-edge knowledge of processes and techniques.
Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and Johnson & Johnson also have enormous “employee brands,” which is to say, their people get a real credential just by working there for a few years. Even putting my biases aside, GE is also in this category. Today, five of its former employees are CEOs in the Dow Jones 30. Many more are currently CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and thousands more are executives at companies around the world.*
Obviously, you cannot let the employee brand phenomenon totally drive your job decisions. You could end up at a highly respected company only to discover your boss is terrible or your