Death by water cooler

Can a water cooler kill your career?  Possibly.  The office water cooler, hallways, and coffee machine are places where either your advocates congregate or where detractors launch career-sinking torpedoes.  These are the places where your colleagues in the office (superiors, peers, and subordinates) talk about you behind your back.

Just like a submarine which is invisible until it attacks, you may never know about a water cooler conversation where a detractor undermined your standing in the workplace.  Similarly, you might never know how close you came to a career disaster except for an advocate who stood up for you behind your back in a hallway conference.

A relative recently was smugly bragging about how secure his job was.  Three weeks later he was fired.  Three union programmers at a customer service seminar I conducted were smug in their confidence about their job security.  They didn't care about improving their customer service skills, because they were union workers who couldn't be fired.  Later, their jobs were eliminated, leaving them out of work.  A chief engineer with whom I worked was highly competent, but his demeanor left him unrespected by his colleagues.  In spite of his high level of competence, he was fired because he didn't have the support of his co-workers.

As IT pros, our customer base includes not only external and internal users, but also our colleagues.  Our colleagues are just as deserving of outstanding customer service as our end-users.  Frankly, from a human-to-human perspective, decent people are helpful to each other and treat each other with respect and dignity.  Even if you don't care about being a decent person, there are practical career benefits to losing the smug attitude, helping your co-workers, and treating everyone with respect.  The benefits come in hall conferences and water cooler conversations where your supporters and detractors talk about you.

Smart executives are in tune with their employees, they listen to what's being said in casual conversations, and they are concerned with how well their teams function.  This doesn't mean that technical competence isn't important.  Your technical competence is what gets you in the door and allows you to do your job.  It's your ability, however, to garner the support of your colleagues behind your back that can save your job when it's time for budget cuts.  Most executives have been in meetings where the group was deciding which workers to lay off and which workers to keep.  Often, such decisions are made based on how easy it is to work with one individual compared to another or how well an individual gets along with others in the work place. 

Here are five ways to build advocates behind your back:

1. Keep current with the technology.  Are you current in your technical knowledge and do you confirm it with diplomas, certifications, and training certificates?
2. Be respectful of everyone.  Do you treat everyone with respect, regardless of how you feel about them?  (It's not necessary to respect someone in order to treat him/her with respect and dignity.)
3. Lighten up.  Do you maintain a sense of humor (light humor, not sarcastic, cynical, or biting) at all times?
4. Be appropriately serious.  Do you take your job seriously, but not yourself?
5. Look and act like a pro.  Do you present yourself professionally in the workplace?  This doesn't necessarily mean wearing a coat and tie.  It means that you dress appropriately for your workplace (you would dress one way at Facebook and a different way at Vanguard Funds).  It's also not just about how you dress, but also about how you write (check everything you write twice for clarity, spelling, grammar, and punctuation), how you give PowerPoint presentations (make them attractive and interesting and follow Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint),  and interact with your co-workers.

In today's world, nothing can guarantee your job.  There are lots of technically competent people who are out of work.  It's pretty easy, however, to get your co-workers to be your advocates instead of detractors.  A detractor lobs grenades on your career.  Your advocates will cover your back in hall conferences, around the coffee machine, and at the water cooler.

Don R. Crawley is President/Chief Technologist at soundtraining.net, the Seattle IT training firm. A geek and nerdy kind of guy since sometime back in the 60s, today he pontificates at Computerworld, writes books for IT people, and speaks on command.

His full profile and disclosure are here. You can reach him at ftte@soundtraining.net.