Wood's Laws of the Job Search

This was written for MBA students who came to me with questions about career choices. It has since been reproduced around the world in a variety of books, magazines and journals. This is the original version.

• You can't decide what you want from a job until you're clear on what you want from life.
• Some people have been too busy "succeeding" to figure out what success means to them. Don't look for a job until you've thought it through.
• First figure out what you want in life. Then go look for it.
• It's easy to fool yourself as to what you really want from life.
• There are a lot of people around you who will tell you what you should want from life: parents, teachers, friends. You don't have to accept their answers. Don't get stampeded.
• Ban the word "should" from your job search.
• We all want to impress people. The tough part is figuring out precisely who we want to impress and why.
• You can't impress everyone simultaneously. Different people are impressed by different things: money, status, intellect, character, contribution to society and so on, forever. What do you want to be admired for? By whom?
• We all want respect and prestige. But in whose eyes? It ain't necessarily those of other students (because six months from now you won't see most of them ever again).
• The key to what you really want lies in something that you don't like to admit. "I don't like to admit it but I need to be the centre of attention." OK; find a job that will let you show off. "I don't like to admit it but I really want to be rich." Fine; go out and get rich. "I don't like to admit it but I'm a snob." That's all right; go work with "upper class" people.
• Play to your "evil secrets"; don't suppress them.
• You are a lot less flexible than you think.
• Some people are big-city types: others are happier in small towns. Which are you? It's more important than you think.
• Changing jobs is easier than changing family, and a lot less painful.
• Your happiness will be determined much more by what job you've got than by what company you're working for or what industry you're in. Most people choose an industry, then choose a company, then choose a job. It's the wrong order.
• You can't figure out what you want in life by going to interviews.
• The more interviews you attend, the more confusion you'll feel.
• The more confusion you feel, the worse the decision you'll make.
• The goal is to get the right job offer, not the most job offers.
• There is nothing as pathetic as someone getting depressed about being turned down by a company they didn't want to go work for anyway.
• Don't sell: buy! You can either buy yourself a job or be bought by one.
• If your new job doesn't work out, the divorce will be a lot more painful for you than for your employer. So you should be a lot pickier than they are in deciding whether to "get married." Don't sell: buy!
• Nothing impresses an interviewer more than someone who knows what they want and why. Don't sell: buy!
• What do you really need to know about the job you'll be doing to be sure you'll be happy? Don't be afraid to ask. Check it out to be sure. Don't sell: buy!
• You'll be happier if you like and respect the people you'll be working with: bosses, peers, subordinates, customers. Do you know who you like and respect? Is it these people? Don't sell: buy!
• People don't care about how much you know until they know how much you care. Enthusiasm and the hard work it inspires counts for more than an extra piece of ability.
• Don't worry about whether you'll be good at it: If it turns you on, you'll be good enough. If it doesn't, you won't.
• Your "strengths" are irrelevant; what you like is critical.
• Don't plan too far ahead. In five to ten years, you'll be a different person who will want different things from life.
• Do it because it will make you happy now, not because it will (if it works out) make you happy tomorrow.
• Don't serve any pure apprenticeship, something that you'll hate and will do only because it will lead somewhere. If you hate it, you'll never get through it.
• All job choices are risky, so think about how you'll feel if it doesn't work out. If you'll able to say, "I'm glad I tried it anyway," then consider the job. If you can't imagine saying that, don't bother pursuing it any further.
• Remember, the point of life is to be happy.
• All other goals (money, fame, status, achievement, responsibility) are merely ways of making you happy and are worthless in themselves."

The Role of the Manager

by Editors of DBM 2002

from Dutch Business Magazine, 2002

Could you briefly introduce yourself to our readers?

RW: I have been a consultant to professional firms around the world for 6 years. Before that, I was a student at QUT and USQ. All of my articles on professional businesses have been translated into Dutch. In a recent book by Tom Brown I was identified as one of the top 40 business thinkers in Australia.

Your basic assumption in Practice What You Preach is that certain elements have a direct influence on the profits of companies, because top companies have a better score on certain questions. How do you know that these factors influence their profits? Could other factors be influencing the company's results? When questioning these firms, might you find that they also score differently on other topics on your list?

RW: I did not assume anything. I studied 139 businesses in 15 countries, then used traditional statistical approaches to test exactly this question. The odds that the relationships I found are coincidental (i.e., actually driven by something else) are less than one in a thousand. If I only had 13 businesses, chance and coincidence might be factors, but with 139 data points it is very unlikely.

I'm interested in how you measure managers. Which criteria are most appropriate to use when measuring the effectiveness of a manager (not particularly top management but just individual managers)?

RW: The job of a manager is to make other people in his or her group successful -- sometimes in spite of themselves! The manger's job is to be a creator of energy, excitement and enthusiasm so that people in the group accomplish more than they would without the manager.

There are two ways to judge a manager's effectiveness. First, you can look at the group's performance: profits, growth, client satisfaction and people development. Second, you can and should ask the people within the group to evaluate whether the manager is adding any value. Here is a questionnaire from my latest article that can be used to evaluate the manager:

The manager

• Causes me to stretch for performance goals
• Is concerned about long-term issues, not just short-term profits
• Provides constructive feedback that helps me improve my performance
• Is a source of creative ideas about our business
• Helps me to grow and develop
• Conducts team meetings in a manner that breeds involvement
• Makes me feel that I am a member of a well-functioning team
• Emphasises co-operation as opposed to competitiveness between work groups
• Is prompt in dealing with under-performance and under-performers
• Helps me understand how my tasks fit into the overall objectives for the firm
• Keeps me informed about the things I need to know to perform my role properly
• Actively encourages me to volunteer new ideas and make suggestions for the improvement of the practice
• Encourages me to initiate tasks or projects I think are important
• Is good at keeping down the level of "politics and politicking"
• Is more often encouraging than critical
• Is accessible when I want to talk
• Is fair
• Is consultative in his or her decision making
• Acts more like a coach than a boss
• Is publicly generous with credit
• Is effective in communicating

Which methods are commonly used to measure the results of managers?

RW: Unfortunately, most managers are judged too narrowly. They are judged on group results, but only financial group results; there is a need for a more balanced scorecard. In addition, it is rare that the views of those being managed are used formally to assess the manger. They are sometimes collected in so-called 360-degree feedback systems, but that data is used for information only and is not a formal part of the manager's performance appraisal.

I've interviewed GE Plastics' European HR manager. He told me how managers and in fact all employees are constantly being judged by the company. At the beginning of the year the criteria by which an employee will be assessed is outlined. Each employee is assessed on various occasions throughout the year and also at the end of the year. Criteria used include 1) results and 2) values. The main value of the company is integrity.

Everyone is being judged at these two levels and gets to hear if he or she is top A), middle B) or low C) level. Employees scoring low in both areas must work on improvement. In that way, all employees are required to constantly improve and develop themselves. This is of course a very brief outline of how they work, but no doubt you know a lot more about GE. Could you give a reaction on this method of judging management? Do you think it is effective? Is it an example to other companies, or does it not leave enough space for people to be different?

RW: The GE system is a major step in the right direction and should be copied by many businesses. The data in my article confirms that the most effective managers (i.e., those able to get their people to perform at the highest level) were notable because of their character, not their skills. The employees I interviewed repeatedly told me that they worked at their best because their managers were people of high integrity, had clear and uncompromising standards, and were completely trustworthy. This was a surprise to me, because they don't teach you anything about these things in your business education. The conclusion is the same as that reached by Jim Collins in his (data-driven) books Built to Last and Good to Great -- that the best managers have a clear ideology and combine a pursuit of profits with a purpose beyond profits. He reports the same thing I found: The most successful managers are not ego-driven, but are ambitious for their group. Their people trust them to do the right thing for the group as a whole.

The reason this is so important is that you can improve your group in the short term by being none of these things, but instead just by being a hard task-master: very demanding, worrying only about the short term. But the evidence is now accumulating that this will bring only a short-term benefit. To succeed in the long term, you must be seen to be both demanding and supportive.

Judging from your article, managers have a big influence on a company's results. Could you explain that briefly to our readers?

RW: My article demonstrates (with data) that there is a clear path to profits that must be followed. To make the most money, you must deliver superior value to the market-place, and to deliver superior value, you must have an excited, energised, enthused, driven, committed, ambitious, passionate workforce. To achieve this, you must have individual managers with emotional intelligence and interpersonal and social skills who know when and how to exhort, critique, inspire, challenge, compliment, nag and, above all, manage emotions. Exciting people is not a logical, intellectual or rational skill, but rather an emotional skill in which few of us were ever trained. (That's why my next article is a how-to-do-it manual for managers.)

What role do you see for HR managers in improving the assessment and development of managers?

RW: HR can help a lot in the selection process for managers. Unfortunately, it's still true that we choose managers based on all the wrong criteria. We choose them because they are technically smart, or financially astute, or can sell, or any of a number of irrelevant things. The only REAL question is whether people respond to you by raising their performance. Are you a net creator of excitement or a net destroyer of it? Do people trust you (and hence accept your guidance)? Do people believe you are a man or woman of principle or a "do anything to make a euro" type?

At the moment we have poor promotion screening systems to choose good managers. HR could help develop them.

HR could also help develop some training for managers, who are mostly untrained. We train people in business, but that's not the same as training them in how to manage. We need better programs in the basic skills of winning influence and dealing with human beings.