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Skills For Success

July/August 2001

Six Rules of Continued Employment

Anne Camille Maher
Executive Director, Cozint, Inc.
Andover, Massachusetts
HBA Co-Chair for Career Development

I’m not sure if these rules are just an insurance policy against the worst kind of day at the office. You know: the kind of bad day when a pink slip flutters out of the sky and lands on your desk. These rules are certainly the organic result of learning to follow something I heard in the early 1980’s. That dictum is captured in Dr. Marsha Sinetar’s 1987 book: Do What You Love; The Money Will Follow. Her advice and these six “rules” comprise roughly 90% of my own career management strategy…so far. What I know without doubt is that they work for me. I dearly hope they will be useful to you.

Rule 1. Do your job with excellence.
Never give your boss a reason to think of you when it’s time to reduce head count. Get your job done and do it better than it has ever been done before.

I like to strive for “ordinary excellence.” I don’t always succeed at doing my job with excellence, but if my conscious intent is to be excellent in the humble day-to-day tedium of my job as well as in the big, visible projects, then I am regularly strengthening the foundations of my skill set. World-class sprinters still attend to the basics of good nutrition, the best gear, warm-ups and stretching exercises. They cannot regularly leap out on the track and run the 100-meters in “personal best” time if they are always poorly fed and wearing worn-out running shoes. Today, for you and me in the healthcare industry, this basic maintenance translates to honing one’s skills in some simple, but important tasks. These humble tasks range from the occasional close reading of clinical trial or market research results in order to understand the “devil in the details” of treating a disorder, to practicing the good manners of writing simple thank you notes. Senior management will trust you with the bigger deals if they know you will effectively handle the small ones.

Trust me on this; you never know when something that’s ordinary today will mature into a serious opportunity in a few years.

This first rule refers to your job for some organization that, frankly, pays for your ordinary excellence. And, it refers to your responsibility to yourself and to your loved ones to build financial stability (read: employability) with daily discipline and regular best efforts. Listen. Speak up. Focus. Network. Study. Test. Dialogue. Pray. Do what you need to do in order to be excellent at your current job, even if you know that this job is a stone you’re bound to step off one day, with or without the push of a pink slip.

Rule 2. Just Say “Yes” to professional development.
This rule is also known as “Sharpen the saw.” Stephen Covey, who wrote The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, develops this idea wonderfully. The essence of this rule is to keep learning. For example, enroll in a short course related to your job or listen to skill-honing tapes in your car. At the very least, stay current by perusing the professional journals pertaining to your function and your therapy area. Organize a “journal club” in your department to learn together about therapy areas, drug classes, or physician specialties. Participate in professional development of all appropriate forms. Take initiative and creatively apply your lessons by solving a problem that your boss cares about.

How do you know if you’re undertaking enough professional development? Do just a little bit more than your boss thinks you have time for. That’s how you know.

Rule 3. Never throw away a name and address; build your network.
Take a couple of minutes when you meet new people to get to know them and collect their contact details. Trap those details in your personal database. Back-up your database regularly so that if it crashes, you don’t lose it. Never be without your business cards and offer them when you are introduced. If your employer won’t pay for them, have your own “home address” cards printed and use them. Learn and exercise the social graces of proper introductions, follow-up phone calls, and public speaking. Good manners will help you to overcome any shyness you might have and will round out any chips on your shoulder.

Make and send “FYI” copies of articles to people who could use the information. Send these with a note and sign them with your name as the source. Don’t frustrate people for whom you do favors by neglecting to let them know who to thank. I had a little stamp made that says “Information copy from A.C. Maher.” That makes it easy to relay a printed clipping. I know I’ve annoyed people occasionally with “TMI” (Too Much Information!), but I’d rather give colleagues a chance to toss information they already have than miss the chance to help them in a small, easy way. If they never comment or say “Thanks,” then I know that I can save us both the trouble in future.

Following this rule should certainly include volunteering and getting active in at least one professional organization. Merely joining and paying the dues doesn’t cut it nearly as well as attending the meetings and rolling up your sleeves as a volunteer. You’ll get access to people you’d never meet “on the job,” and you’ll have a chance to develop new skills. In addition, participating in town politics or community volunteer organizations will develop your personal interests and prove quite fulfilling. You will be amazed at how pleased and grateful these groups are to have your sharp mind focused on theirimportant non-profit endeavors.

This form of career development might need to take a back seat for a while if you’re currently involved in the biggest, most important “volunteer activity” there is—raising children. But don’t forget to come back to this practice when the kids go off to college. Mentoring young folks does wonders to treat “empty nest syndrome.”

Rule 4. Always have a current resume; be able to discuss your accomplishments.
Never let your resume get even six months out of date. And, always have an “elevator spiel” about what you do better than most people, including a recent example or two of your projects. Think each one through to include a statement of how it made money or otherwise furthered your company’s current year, highlevel objectives.

Keep track of your accomplishments and be ready to rattle them off casually when the big boss asks you what you’ve been working on. A number of the men and women on executive row who we interviewed for the HBA P.O.W.E.R. Study (*To obtain a copy of this study, contact the HBA office at phone: (973)575-0606 or email: info@hbanet.org) a few years ago noted that women tend to neglect the practice of “heralding their accomplishments.” Scratch the surface of almost any conversation at an HBA meeting and you’ll hear women agreeing that we need to get better at doing this. To see “heralding accomplishments” as unseemly or as acting like a “clanging cymbal” is to miss the point that you are simply the person most likely to know all your accomplishments, and thus, you are your own most informed proponent.

Rule 5. Be aware of your opportunities...both inside and outside of the company you’re currently with.
Work your network and read the industry papers, including the ‘Help Wanted’ sections from time to time. This way you stay aware of what’s “out there,” how it’s being described now, and how your qualifications match what the market wants. It used to be the case that once you went to the “service side” (advertising, market research, CRO’s), you could not expect to ever be welcomed back on the pharmaceutical manufacturer side. That advice is at least five years out of date. Skills are skills and if you’ve spent some time on the service side, you have had a better view of the competitors and of more therapy areas than you can have in practice from inside Big Pharma.

Rule 6. Never, ever be rude to a headhunter.
Always help recruiters find good candidates when they call you (see rules # 3 & 5). Know the differences between contingency-based and retained search consultants. Get to know the ones who specialize in our industry and across industries in your skill set. More importantly, let them get to know you without the immediate pressure of you needing a job. They will remember you and help you should you need them later. I have received much more kindness from this sector in my moments of need than I ever felt I deserved. (I accept the kindnesses anyway!)

That’s my story of good career habits...and I’m stickin’ to it. I’m sure you’ll find that these rules overlap and interact with each other in positive synergy. You can’t work all of them all the time, but you can attend to each of them in balance. I’d be grateful to hear from you with any comments, enhancements, arguments and other improvements. These rules are certainly subject to further development with your help. And, hey, it’s my volunteer job to facilitate your career advancement. You can reach me at maherac@msn.com.