If you are under 32 you should read this. It will help your career.
Be Prepared: Earlier this week one of my junior consultants booked an 8 AM meeting with me. That’s your first mistake (more on that later). There was no agenda in the meeting invite, no notes, nothing. I am big on meeting hygiene so when I see such sloppiness I get frustrated. Two days later I get on the phone at 8 AM, my toddler yelling in the background, dog barking, I haven’t had a chance to shower yet….. an ugly scene. I greeted her with a gruff hello and then an intense stare into the computer camera.
“Wait, wait….. I know I booked this meeting, but I can’t remember why. Hold on a second.”
Well done. Great job! It’s only 8 AM and I am already boiling with rage. I want to absolutely unleash on you, but I worry about an HR violation cause if I start spewing my venom you’ll be covered in tears within 45 seconds. I have weekly meetings with my CEO. The best thing that can happen to me is if he cancels because that saves me 2 hours of preparation. I send him detailed notes and discussion items prior to the meeting. Often late at night cause I am busy. Granted, I am certainly not the CEO, but I am still several levels above you. Don’t waste my time, don’t fucking DISRESPECT me like this. If the executive VP wants to grab me for 30 minutes without an agenda, she gets to do that. That privilege doesn’t cut both ways. Also, she may not have an agenda, but she sure as hell knows what she wants to say.
Chat GPT Is better than you: It brings me no joy to say this but it’s true. If you are under 26 years old (I don’t care what degree you “earned” – I say that cause all these universities are pass/fail now and don’t teach shit - from what school) you don’t know anything about anything. I too was worthless at that age. What has changed though is that today, I, your boss, can spend 45-60 minutes going back and forth with Chat GPT and get a better deliverable than I can from you in 2 weeks. It is easier for me to take my idea and past documents and other resources to ChatGPT and get a deliverable that I can then take to the finish line myself than it is for me to spend 3 hours explaining the assignment, answering your questions for the next week, and then get a dogshit rough draft that is essentially a do-over. Furthermore, because yall grew up in the era of text messages, DMs and emoticons, none of you can write worth a damn anyway so you TOO are going to ChatGPT to try and complete the assignment. It’s painfully obvious and irritating because then when I ask you about the document you wrote for me you have zero fucking clue what you even wrote. Shot in the dark here…. Perhaps it’s cause you didn’t actually write it. Truth is I pity you. And I don’t mean that in a condescending way. I truly do. The number of entry level office (“knowledge worker” – what a farce) jobs in the coming years will dwindle dramatically. I would counsel any 18-year-old today to forego college and go straight to trade school. Start working with your hands. I will never trust a robot to groom my dog and I sure as hell am not about to express her anal glands myself. Another example: If a robot rolls into my house with a plunger and tells me it is here to fix my backed up drain, I will beat it to death with a bat. My point being that blue collar jobs are the way to go. Keep in mind that some of these people make bank and don’t answer emails at 10 PM on a Thursday.
Know your audience: For the sake of your interactions / relationship with me but also everyone in your professional life. I am a middle-aged, middle manager with a young family and a special needs dog. Everyone demands shit from me all day. All day! Toddler, dog, pregnant wife, upper management, C-level, you fucking little wieners booking unnecessary meetings with me…… I am supposed to manage 8 accounts yet sell new business. I work 830-5, parent, then work 8 PM -1030 PM, clean, pass out. I deal with shit all day, figuratively and literally. Thus, you know what I want: Time. Take your task, do a good job, and finish it without bothering me. The best employee is the one I can trust to handle an assignment that I don’t want to deal with. Especially the administrative shit. Don’t you dare assign me tasks on the company project management software. I don’t use that shit. I am too busy and candidly too important. I don’t do status reports; YOU do status reports. You want to get promoted? Cancel our weekly 1-1 meeting, communicate directly with the client, send quality work to the client that I don’t need to proofread, and don’t ever assign me any admin “tasks”. Also, the 2-3 times a year I see you in person at a company event or tradeshow – let me buy you a few drinks and don’t talk about work. I’m much more interested in the fact that you are an Islanders fan or spent last summer in Lyon than I am in any of these accounts we manage.
Pick up the phone: This is an easy one. I am stunned by the number of young people who simply won’t use the phone and have a conversation. They prefer instead to send me 57 Slack / MS Teams messages even though I outright tell them to call me. If the phone makes contact with your face, will you break out in acne? Do you have a crippling speech impediment? I am not your teenage girlfriend; we’re not going to be texting each other back and forth for the next 45 minutes. Pick up the motherfucking phone like an adult and lets quickly resolve whatever the issue is.
So what can you expect in return? I truly do want to develop you, teach you, and I will also NEVER bullshit you. Nobody will of course tell me to my face, but I suspect that the younger folks I manage view me as a crazy uncle type that says weird shit. My colleague the other day affectionately reminded me that I had at one point referred to us consultants as “glorified ass wipers.” Yikes. I don’t remember that, but it sounds like something I would say. I’m also not immune to the occasional rant preceded of course by “between you and me…….”. But I have too much respect for those I manage to gaslight them about how awesome our clients are and how every project we do will be riveting.
More importantly though, I sincerely want to help you grow professionally, give you interesting work, give you opportunities to learn, try to give you work life balance, give you credit when things go well and take the blame myself when things go poorly. I routinely sit down with my direct reports to talk about how I can help them grow, get more interesting work, get them more exposure, etc.
I also don’t want to be a bottleneck. I don’t need to review everything, and I am honest when I am not more knowledgeable on a topic than you are. Just because I have a higher title doesn’t mean I need to pretend like I am a SME on everything and that I need to weigh in.
I am not that old, but I have been in the labor force since 1999 and am fucking exhausted. I feel old as hell and that in many ways I have ran my race. Thus, I truly want to give you an opportunity and the means to blossom. Any of these kids could get me in trouble by reporting me for my shitty jokes and angry rants, but I’d like to think that they see some of the positives above and thus choose to giggle along and extract whatever nuggets of wisdom they can from me. From what I hear there are worse alternatives. Managers who are insecure and thus insert themselves needlessly through superfluous meetings and nitpicks. Drama and cattiness. People who hoard power and feel like a talented subordinate is not an asset but a threat. Fuck these people.
And fuck ChatGPT and AI. I thought this shit was supposed to make the world better? So far all it has done is make it harder for people to get a job. For those of us who do have jobs at the moment, we are expected to take on more and more and more. I WANT to be made redundant and put on that universal basic income. Then I can spend more time with my family, get a part time job that I enjoy and maybe actually contributes to society, and write more Jamoke!
So simple
So exclusive
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