What You Must Know Before Pursuing a White-Collar Job

As I stated in the first blog, there is nothing wrong with a blue-collar job and many of them offer pay, benefits and other advantages that exceed certain white-collar. But, the clientele I work with as a coach is usually looking to open the door to white-collar careers. But what does a typical white-collar career offer that you won’t find at most blue-collar positions?

According to Indeed.com, here are many of the reasons you would want to consider a full-time, white-collar job:

• They offer more opportunity for upward growth, such as becoming and executive or manager.

• Generally, they involve higher salaries with greater chances for increases with advancements in your position.

• Mentally they are more engaging, such as participating in activities in the field to accomplish essential tasks like meeting clients and traveling to events like conferences.

• They will help you to maintain specialized skills and allow for updating them over time, especially in area of technology and healthcare.

• Most white-collar positions demand a certain level of real-world knowledge, including current events, regulations and trends of the industry.

While it may seem like a no-brainer to choose a white-collar career over a blue-collar one, they are far harder to find. There are far fewer CEOs, doctors, lawyers, account managers and college professors in this world than there are retail employees, waiters/waitresses and construction workers.

The drawback to a white-collar job is that you either have to start at the very bottom of a company’s food chain, or you have to spend many years preparing for the job itself. For instance, when it comes to sales executives, nobody starts at the top. You’ll be the bottom-of-the-barrel just about everywhere you start. Or, in the case of a doctor or lawyer there are many, many years of schooling, both general and specialized, that are necessary before you can even consider the job.

Here, also from Indeed.com, are some of the things to ask yourself when deciding if it’s worth putting in the time to go for a white-collar job:

What are the education or training requirements?

While most blue-collar jobs simply need a high school diploma, there is no template for white collar jobs. Researching the education or training you’ll need is the most important first step.

Should you gain experience first?

There are jobs like administrative assistant, freelance writer or data entry associate that will give you experience in a white-collar environment before you leap in with both feet and commit to a career. This is a good way to determine if you’re cut out for white-collar life without leaping before you look.

Do you have a strong resume?

What is it that is going to make you stand out, even if you have the experience and education that would go with the career you’re pursuing? Consider a professional resume writing service to make yours one that gets into the good pile.

How do you perform in interviews?

While a great resume will get you through the door, it’s just part of the equation. What will the interviewers remember about you 5 minutes after you walk out the door? What will they remember when it comes down to making a decision?

The perks of a white-collar job are certainly there, but before you make the commitment, make sure you’re not dedicating a lot of time, energy and potentially money going down a road that you won’t be best-served traveling.

Managers: Consider Workplace Fit as Much as Experience in New Hires

There’s a bit of a job mirage taking place in the world right now and for those people who are looking to either move up in their professional white-collar career, transition into a different white-collar career, or leave the blue-collar world behind and enter the white-collar world, things aren’t as easy as everybody would have you believe.

For the next few weeks, we’re going to take a look at what it takes to land jobs in this very unique time in our world in the private white-collar sector. I don’t want anybody reading these blogs to think that there is anything wrong with a blue-collar job in this world. There isn’t. Heck, there are blue-collar jobs out there that have far more responsibility and pay far more than many white-collar jobs. It’s just that in my professional coaching practice, probably 99% of the clients I help are looking to improve their situation in the white-collar world.

This week, though, I’d like to talk directly to the hiring managers of the world. You know as well as I do that we’re in a place unlike we’ve ever seen in this economic world. There will be hundreds of books written over the years that examine how the pandemic, the political situation (both domestically and internationally) and worldwide inflation played into one another and I’m not going to give my theories here. Suffice to say, we’re currently in a situation where the rules are being re-written.

I was perusing LinkedIn the other day. In between cat videos and inspirational memes, somebody wrote something to the effect of “Hiring managers, when you’re looking at a resume, remember that there’s someone desperate for a job and their family’s livelihood may just depend on it.”

I think this is huge. It’s easy to just boil down somebody to a set of facts on a resume, but let’s be real, you can find someone who looks like the perfect hire based on their resume and they are a giant bust. What must a hiring manager look for beyond just a resume?

Forbes online had a great article about this very subject in 2021 and they boiled it down to five traits:

• Passion

• Workplace Fit

• Preparation

• Resourcefulness

• Willingness to Learn

We’re going to talk about all of these in the next few weeks but I’d really like to call the hiring managers’ attentions to Workplace Fit and Willingness to Learn. In my experience leading dozens of people as a Naval Officer, these two traits are head-and-shoulders above the others when it comes to determining if a person is going to excel or fail in a new white-collar position.

Workplace Fit is so key and when you see those companies that routinely make the lists of the “Best Places to Work” you’ll always see employees talk about culture. A workplace is like a jigsaw puzzle and you need the pieces to fit together for the whole thing to work. If a piece is missing, or a piece doesn’t fit, it’s obvious. Workplace Fit is not always going to be determined by where someone got their degree or how many years they’ve got for experience. Sometimes workplace productivity simply comes down to if the person likes the person at the desk next to them.

Willingness to Learn, to me, is the most important trait any employee can have. This is exemplified by what an editor of a magazine once told me: “I’d rather have a homeless person tell me that they want to work for me and that they are ready to learn than have a Harvard graduate walk in and tell me they already know how things are done. You may know how you do things, but you don’t know how we do things.” I think that’s brilliant. Someone humble enough to learn your way deserves additional consideration in hiring.

I can’t make your hiring decisions for you, but when it comes to giving someone a chance, the resumé says just so much. Give people a real chance. You probably won’t regret it.

Does emotional intelligence make a good leader?

In the first three parts of this series, we looked at leaders who dropped the ball. I believe there is one thing they were all missing, whether they were criminals or just bad bosses: Emotional intelligence.

Sounds like something we should all strive for, right? It’s an oft-used buzz phrase around companies for the last decade or so, but psychologists have been talking about it since the 1990s. Also sometimes called emotional quotient (EQ), do you know what emotional intelligence really means? And is it just psychobabble, a valuable tool to use in the workplace, or perhaps something slightly more sinister?

Psychologists John Mayer and Peter Salvoney, who are two top researchers on the subject according to VeryWellMind.com, define emotional intelligence as “the ability to recognize and understand emotions in oneself and others. The ability involves using the emotional understanding to make decisions solve problems and communicate with others.”

At its core, it’s about understanding the link between mood and how people behave and make decisions. It seems like it could be a very valuable tool in leadership, doesn’t it?

The Case for Emotional Intelligence

In Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, he suggests that emotional intelligence may be a better indicator at predicting success than actual intelligence. He said that people who are successful and leaders in their professions aren’t just smart, but they have a strong amount of emotional intelligence.

Aside from theories, what are the actual benefits of holding a high level of emotional intelligence? According to a study by the University of Southern California, these five areas were highlighted:

• It helps leaders motivate and inspire good work by understanding others’ motivations.

• It brings more individuals to the table and helps avoid the many pitfalls of groupthink.

• It empowers the leader to recognize and act on opportunities others may be unaware of.

• It assists in the recognition and resolution of conflict in a fair and even-handed way.

• It can produce higher morale and assist others in tapping their professional potential.

The key to developing your emotional intelligence is to sharpen your empathy skills according to Jennifer Bridges, a performance coach and project management professional who speaks on the subject to corporations. She told ProjectManager.com the way to do that is three-pronged:

• Be aware of others’ emotions. The first step to empathy is identifying emotional states in others.

• Detect when someone is shut down and upset. Even just asking if they are is a start to opening their feelings and yours.

• Leverage information when resolving team conflict.

 The Case Against Emotional Intelligence

Jordan Peterson, a University of Toronto psychologist, is in the camp that emotional intelligence is just old school theory presented in a new way to sell books. He believes it’s really just an extension of the trait of agreeableness.

There is also the fact there is no universally acceptable test to measure emotional intelligence, according to Steve Toback, author of Real Leaders Don’t Follow.

“The more delusional, narcissistic and sociopathic you are, the easier it is for you to game the tests and the more likely you are to come out sounding like you’re as self-aware and empathetic as a Zen master or a Buddhist monk,” Toback told Entrepreneur.com

I find the more interesting argument that emotional intelligence may be a bad thing to come from those who see it as a tool of manipulation.

Historian Roger Moorhouse described a leader of the 20th Century in a 2016 article in The Atlantic as one who spent years studying the emotional effects of his body language, practicing hand gestures and analyzing images and film of his body movements. This man became “an absolutely spellbinding public speaker because it was something he worked very hard on.”

Clarence Johnson, who wrote speeches for a 20th Century leader was interviewed in the same article. He talked about choosing language that would stir the hearts of the speaker’s audience because the speaker had the ability to recognize, understand and manage emotions both of himself and the audience. He delivered “a perfectly balanced outcry of reason and emotion, of anger and hope.”

Moorhouse was talking about Adolf Hitler. Johnson was talking about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Research by a University of Cambridge Professor, Jochen Menges, shows that when a leader gives an inspiring speech filled with emotion, the audience was less likely to scrutinize the message and remember less of the content. Ironically, the audience feel so moved by the speech, they believe they recall more of it. Menges called this the “awestruck effect.”

So, which school of thought is correct? I think they both make valid points, but ultimately it comes down to having as many tools in your toolbox as a leader. There are times when leading a group and getting them onboard with plans involves figuring out what motivates them. With some people, that can veer into unethical territory quickly.

Unlike masses of people swayed by dynamic public speakers, I believe that if leaders abuse their emotional intelligence ability, workers will be able to see through it before too long.

It’s absolutely crucial to understand how emotions can affect a workplace, but it’s important to not play on those emotions and manipulate people for your own, or the company’s gain.

Why Amazon Beat the Rest of the World

Today I wanted to look at vision in leadership and talk about businesses who had the kind of leadership that led them to become a household name, and some who flopped out of the starting gate, and a couple others whose leadership eventually failed them.

In early 2018, Amazon leapfrogged Microsoft to become the third most valuable company in the world. It only took a month for them to pass Alphabet (Google) to take the No. 2 spot, behind Apple. Today they sit at No. 1. All we have to do to figure out how is to look at leadership.

I’m guessing you remember 20-to-25 years ago when the dot-com boom was hitting the world. There was a little company called Amazon.com that was offering books. It didn’t seem any more special than Pets.com for animal supplies or eToys.com for playthings.

Pets.com didn’t put pet stores out of business and eToys.com certainly didn’t cause the removal of toys from department stores. Those two companies failed quickly. So why are the remaining pet stores and toy stores becoming the endangered species that bookstores already are? You got it, Amazon.com (although we dropped the .com years ago).

Amazon focused on one thing, selling new books at a discount. Then it invented the Kindle. This was reinventing the reading experience. You no longer needed a book. You just needed a small electronic tablet – available only through Amazon! Do you think your local bookstore saw that coming?

So, what made Amazon succeed where the other dot-coms failed? I believe it has to do with the formula they chose to grow their business.

Once they firmly had the hardcopy book market, they not only began branching out into the e-book world, they poured a ton of resources into expanding their digital capabilities when it came to the online shopping experience. In the early 21stCentury, sure you could buy things online, but few retailers had user-friendly interfaces. Amazon changed that and created a new kind of shopping experience complete with rewards systems like Amazon Prime for loyal customers.

Along the way, they attracted reseller after reseller, branched into 101 areas, employed more than a half-million and reinvented the shopping experience.

Their leadership (Jeff Bezos) had a slow and steady vision. He didn’t need to be the biggest bookstore overnight. He didn’t need to be the biggest online retailer in the world in the 1990s or 2000s or 2010s. He paced things the right way, adapting new technology as it became available.

How many companies have gone broke because of Amazon? Probably thousands if you include Mom and Pop-level establishments. How many saw it coming? Probably less than a handful. Far too few leaders who get comfortable continue with evolving visions. They reach a plateau, feel good, and think they’re going to stay there forever.

The Mom-and-Pop video stores never saw Blockbuster coming. We can say Blockbuster never saw Netflix coming – except Netflix tried to sell their mail-in business to Blockbuster in the early years. Blockbuster saw no future in the mail-in DVD business, much less the long-term plan of Netflix to stream film directly to people’s homes.

And of course, there’s Kodak. People joke about Kodak missing the digital camera revolution and eventually going belly-up, but many people don’t realize that Kodak actually invented the technology to create the digital camera. They didn’t get left behind. They invented the disruptor and licensed it to the very competitors who put them out of business

I’ve worked with too many people who see business as a game to win or lose. It’s not like that. It’s about resilience, being innovative and being in the best position to adapt. While you can’t control what the Amazons of the world are doing, you can be better prepared for it, and react accordingly if you’ve got a strategy in place to identify potential disruptors. Being a good leader is about having vision.

The Five Traits Found in Good – and VERY BAD – Leadership

I was considering writing about the traits of high-quality leadership for my next series of blogs, but I decided that has been done too much. We all have worked for great leaders who inspire us, get more out of us than we knew was possible and still make us want to return the next day. These are the kind of leaders we not only want to work for, but they’re the kind of leaders we all want to be.

However, we’ve also all worked for those kinds of leaders who have inspired the “quiet quitting” movement. They’re the ones who make us feel like we are somehow less than them because they are “the boss” and that we should be thankful that they allow us to follow them. These are the ones who make us cringe and self-promise to never be this way in a leadership position.

Instead of talking about what makes a leader great, I thought this would be a perfect time to run down a quick list of what makes a leader poor. We can’t have terrific leaders without ones who miss the mark, so here are my Top 5 Poor Leadership qualities:

• Poor Communication – If you can’t get your ideas, goals and plans across to a team, how can you expect them to deliver? More importantly, how can you expect there to be quality communication among team members if you’re not serving as the model? Above all else, a leader has to be able to inspire and direct. Somebody with poor communication skills will never be able to do that.

• Micromanagement – I think this can also be looked at a combination of being a control freak and showing a lack of trust in your team. There’s a reason why you have a team, and there’s a reason why they will follow you – and why they won’t. I believe every person on a team has to have a sense of ownership. In a corporate setting, the custodian or receptionist has to feel as much of the team as senior management. Doing their jobs for them will not allow this.

• Accountability – This is in all aspects of the job. If someone on the team is dropping the ball, they must be held accountable. And if you’re that person, you must be held accountable. A leader who feels that they are above the rules or above the same standards as the team is not going to have the necessary buy-in from team members.

• Lack of Vision – This can be the difference between team members coming into work ready to take things into the future and coming into work ready to put in another eight hours so they can earn a check. A leader with a sense of excitement for the future is going to inspire. A leader who is also there for the paycheck is going to inspire the board of directors to look elsewhere.

• No Follow-Through – It’s bad enough when a co-worker makes a promise that they don’t keep, but a leader doing it can be downright toxic. A leader must set an example and be where they say they will, do what they say they will and always be prepared. How can a leader expect their team to reach a goal if they don’t reach certain benchmarks along the way?

These aren’t the only negative character and management traits in poor leadership, but I think they are the ones that can sink the ship the fastest. Next up, we’re going to take a look at the very different stories of Amazon vs. Netflix, Kodak and a few other companies whose poor vision by leadership sunk them.

Returning to Safe Workplaces Is Desired, But Is Leadership Listening?

Over the last several weeks, and in my returning to blogging for the first time in a year, I’ve talked about how my last year having returned from the military has led me to a kind of leadership role within my family that I have relished, but at the same time, I’ve been watching the world shift how it’s treating employment, both from the management and employment sides of things.

For my money, the Pew Research Institute is the best organization of its kind for apolitical data in the working world. I found some of their data that came out earlier this year about the amount of people still telecommuting to work and why.

There were two statistics from Pew’s February 2022 report, “COVID-19 Pandemic Continues to Reshape Work in America” that struck me:

• For most workers who are opting to return to the workplace, they feel that they are more productive at the workplace rather than at home.

• Fewer than half of the workers surveyed were “very satisfied” with the steps that have been taken in their workplace to keep them safe from COVID-19.

I worked in the military during vaccine season, so I’m not going to politicize this at all. I think it’s important to see the two messages coming from employees here: 1) They want to be at work and 2) They don’t feel safe at work.

For the three years I was stationed in Japan, without my family, there was nothing more that I wanted than to be back home with them. It didn’t matter if we did two Zoom calls a day and I visited five weeks a year, by not being there full-time, I was not the most effective father and husband. I was not the best leader.

Despite the fact I wasn’t there, I made sure that they had everything they needed, be it something as minor as hand sanitizer, or something as major as a week’s worth of groceries at all times. People cannot live, they cannot work, they cannot exist… if they don’t feel safe.

I’m not going to restate the entire “keystone habit” case study of former Alcoa chief Paul O’Neill. He proved safety was more important than anything else and if you’re unfamiliar with this study, I hope that you will look it up. It explains better than I can how an emphasis on safety turned a $3 billion company into a $27 billion firm. Now that’s leadership.

There are some companies requiring workers return because that’s the way leadership wants things. The biggest example is Tesla and while you can debate if Elon Musk should have alerted his employees to return to work through Twitter, in his defense, he was close to buying that company at the time. His demand for his workforce to return was met with very extreme opposite reactions. I don’t know if there’s validity to arguments about Tesla workers telecommuting, but I do know that if you’re an employee, you either follow the leader or you find another leader.

Our world is a place of change like most of us have never seen in our lifetimes, whether it’s gas prices, anger about politics, loan forgiveness, or the many social changes happening. But there’s one thing that’s always going to be true that every leader needs to recognize. You need to lead by example, and you need make sure everyone feels safe, be they your employees or your family members. A leader leads, no matter where they are.

Returning Home to a Different Kind of Leadership Role

I’ve always felt compelled toward leadership, even when I’ve been nothing but a follower. While others may be more charismatic, smarter, or faster with a joke, I’ve always known since being named captain of my football team back in high school in Haiti that I’ve had a natural gift to lead men.

I believe it began watching my father with our family. He was a kind, brilliant man always quick to lend his knowledge and teach, but he also knew when to get serious and demand the best out of those under him. More than anything though, he had a work ethic that would put all of us to shame.

Dad could have ruled with an iron fist. I saw plenty of fathers in Haiti do that, clinging to the belief that men are always in charge and always correct – and always the right person for every job. My dad wasn’t that obtuse. He recognized that the best man for the job was often not a man, it was my mom.

Prior to leaving the military a little over a year ago, I was in positions both in the US and Japan leading an on-base preventive medicine team for the Navy. It’s one thing when you’re just checking for infection and making sure that medicines are stored at proper temperature. It’s another when you get that once-in-100-years pandemic. I was grateful I’d had so many years leading the environmental health teams to lean on when COVID-19 surfaced. It was a challenge unlike any I think we’d seen.

While in the military, I instituted other programs and worked on projects, both professionally and personally, designed to help those around me with their leadership skills. Unfortunately, the thing that holds back most potential future leaders is not their skill set, but it’s just the lack of a mentor and the opportunities to show what they are worth.

I’m still working on some of these projects, and I can’t wait to share more with you, but when I left the military to return home, it was to live with my wife and two young sons for the first time in three years as a full-time husband and father. In the back of my mind, I think I may have been telling myself that things were going to be easy, but those young sons are older than they were when I left – they’re actually two completely different guys. My wife is still the same beautiful woman I fell in love with as a high school kid in Haiti, but she has grown as a human while I’ve been away, too.

The first few months at home, I realized that I couldn’t just assert my dominance as the man of the family now that I was home. The best thing I could do as a leader was to stand back and see how they operated, day-in and day-out. My wife and the boys had a good thing going, but of course there were areas that I saw I could help things. But after three years away, I couldn’t just come in like a ferret in a crystal store. I hung back because good leadership, as shown by my father, isn’t only about exercising your muscle, it’s about learning when not to prove you’re a top dog.

The reality was, I could have forced change in a bunch of things. Maybe I thought the boys were going to bed 30 minutes later than they should, or maybe my wife had switched the brand of shampoo we used before I left. Perhaps the route she drives to go to church is not the one I’d pick and where we now enjoy lunch after church isn’t my favorite spot, but leadership is about picking your spots and know when to let things go.

I still call home every week and still make sure to either get down to visit Dad or have him and Mom fly up to visit every year and he’s still an inspiration. Yes, I’m now the leader of my family, but I still see him as the Leader. And ultimately, I’m just a co-leader because like my father, I’m smart enough to recognize my wife is often the best one for the job.

Quietly Quitting: A Momentary Fad or A New Way to Work?

You’re never too old to learn new things and while I just turned 40 years old, I find myself sometimes scratching my head when I see new vernacular out there. Let’s admit, how many people used the term “gaslighting” more than two years ago and now people use it interchangeably with “lying” (even though it’s not completely accurate.) Over the summer, I’ve heard the term “quiet quitting” many times and while I know that most of the newer employment jargon comes from the pandemic, I wanted to learn more about what this meant. Perhaps it was something that I could advise my clients on and if nothing else, I’d be able to discuss the topic… so I dove into the research.

In a nutshell, quiet quitting is not actually quitting your job at all. It is deciding that you are going to draw a few lines and not put your heart and soul, not to mention your labor, into your employment beyond the minimum of what is expected. Instead of attaching yourself to the long-held belief that you enter at the lowest levels, bust your hump, and work your way up the corporate ladder, we now have a culture where people don’t want to work their way up that ladder. They just want to do the work assigned to them, not get hassled, not stick their necks out, not volunteer for special projects, get paid, and go home.

Obviously, we’re not talking about entrepreneurs, business owners and those who still subscribe to “hustle culture.” We’re talking about people who have decided that burnout isn’t worth the paycheck and that they are fine with potentially being laid off or fired by their employers.

My personal opinion is that these are people who have still not adjusted to life since the pandemic restrictions for work have ended. In some cases, with people in their early 20s, they may not have been part of a working world where people clocked in at 9 a.m. and clocked out at 5 p.m. The government did a lot of creative things to keep money in people’s pockets and employers have done a lot of creative things to keep people working, but for a certain segment of the population, it’s still not enough.

The people who are “quietly quitting” are going to face one of two choices ultimately: They’re either going to have to create their own employment as an entrepreneur or they’re going to eventually get with the program and not put in the minimum level of work possible because they don’t want to lose their job. In my birth country of Haiti, for most people who had jobs, they took pride in them and worked very hard. Then, when I moved to Florida and started work in a hotel, I saw many entry-level employees who had been doing their jobs for years, just to put food in their kids’ or grandkids’ mouths. These people worked hard because THEY HAD TO WORK HARD!

The pandemic created a crazy set of circumstances in both employment and the economy (not to mention every other aspect of life) and I think we’re still seeing the fallout of this. This young generation is among the most creative and entrepreneurial we’ve seen, but not everyone is going to be lucky enough to fall into being an influencer or do well in the cryptocurrency markets. Not all have the skills to run their own business or the desire. Ultimately, I think things will settle down and they’ll remind us of what the working world looked like in 2018, which seems like it was 100 years ago.

My message to those who are embracing this lifestyle: You can quietly quit, but you’re going to suffer the consequences at a volume you can’t control.

One Year Later: Look Who Has Returned

I have always heard that sometimes the best thing you can do to move forward is to take a pause, or even take a step back. I don’t think I fully believed this. It doesn’t make a lot of sense on a mathematical level, but after this last year, I now appreciate the sentiment behind this idea.

First, let me thank all of you who have inquired about my blogging. After many years of creating weekly blogs and writing books – not to mention the often writing-heavy job that I had with the military, I just needed a break. I thought that I would simply finish my tour of duty in Japan, move back to the United States and continue with my professional endeavors with the speed and enthusiasm I had been attacking so many things.

I discovered plans are only as good as the piece of paper they are drawn upon.  Real life presented itself and I embraced it with open arms. Because of a health issue with one of myl sons, my family didn’t join me in Japan. Sure, I visited on leave and technology allowed us into each other’s lives daily, but after three years of not co-habitating with my wife and boys, I found myself wanting to spend time being husband and daddy more than I wanted to be life coach or mentor shortly after returning home.

At first, I felt a little bit guilty. The news was full of stories of people who couldn’t get their act together following the pandemic and were finding it difficult to even work from home, let alone make it into an office. Everywhere I turned there were stories about people reinventing what it meant to work, but I wasn’t in a place where it was time to do that. I wanted to continue getting to bond with my family and, while it took some time, I don’t feel guilty that I stepped away from work for this experience.

I still maintained a light coaching schedule, working with my existing clients and taking on the occasional new client, but when it came to all the advice and knowledge I’d been handing out to people over the last many years, I recognized it was time to take some of my own advice and re-prioritize what was going on in my life. When you’re on the other side of the world, there’s just so much you can do when your son skins his knee or when your wife’s car gets a flat tire. Now that I was back home, I was front-and-center. While I’m guessing many people would see the scrapes and unexpected problems as hassles, I saw them as welcome challenges allowing me to integrate the most important people back into my everyday life.

One of my regular clients – who holds a high-level corporate position – said to me the other day, “Arnel, you seem more focused than ever before. Your leadership advice has never been better.” It was a bit of an ironic statement because I think if the man I was five years ago saw the man I have been this last year, they would think that I was slacking off. I, however, agree with my client. I’ve been honing a different kind of leadership this last year and it’s made me a better man.

I’m so pleased to be back with you writing these weekly blogs and I’m going to focus on leadership in these first few weeks. I’ve had a lot of thoughts this last year and I look forward to sharing them with you. If there are any subjects you’d like to me to tackle, please don’t hesitate to let me know and I should also mention I am now taking new clients on again, so if you’re looking for a professional coach with a personal touch, drop me a note.

An Eye-Opening Trip to the Electronics Store

The other day, I walked into one of those big-box department stores that specializes in electronics and computers. I needed an adapter cord to hook an old phone up to my computer to download photos of my sons that were still on there. I had an experience that is like too many encounters happening in the professional world today.

When I walked in, a young guy of around 20, with his hair unwashed and shirt untucked and nametag pinned diagonally to his shirt, greeted me. I wasn’t sure if I should go to the phone department or accessories department to find the cord. The door watcher didn’t know either and urged me to “toss a coin” which department I should visit first.

The phone was old, but not like Blackberry old. I’d guess five or six years. The person behind the counter near the smartphones couldn’t recognize the style of phone and neither could his manager, who also didn’t care. When the worker suggested I go to the phone store, the manager nodded. I asked about their accessories department.

“Oh yeah, that’s probably a better first choice,” said the manager.

After 15 minutes of waiting for somebody to help me because I couldn’t locate the adapter, I was told if I couldn’t find it, they didn’t have it and that wasn’t the kind of thing that they would locate and ship from another store.

What did I think during that half-hour I will never get back?

• The company is OK putting someone unpresentable at the door. If you can’t bother to wash your hair before work, you shouldn’t be greeting customers. And you shouldn’t be at the front if you can’t tell me where things are. You shouldn’t even want to be there.

•  The people who should be able to identify a phone, or at least know how to access the resources to discover the model of the phone, were not to be found on staff. Instead, they have a worker who urges me to shop elsewhere.

• There were no associates looking to help customers. In the 15 minutes I waited for someone to find me – after already being in the store 15 minutes at the phone counter – I could have gone to a similar store in the strip mall across the street and been served.

• A worker told me that if I can’t find it, they don’t have it, almost suggesting I had more knowledge of working there than they did. Do they have any elsewhere? It doesn’t matter because they won’t check, which most other stores do.

I left the store knowing if I can help it, I’m never returning. It’s not that they didn’t have the adapter cord. It’s that they made me feel uncomfortable in multiple ways. No client or customer should ever feel awkward. It comes down to one word:

Professionalism

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to write more about this, but for now, I want you to reflect on the times that you’ve been met with unprofessional service. It’s not just in retail either. Maybe your doctor made an inappropriate joke. Your sanitation work may have just tossed your trash can into your driveway or your child’s teacher wore clothes to teach that were too risqué. 

These are all levels of unprofessionalism you may encounter.

Also, think about your employment history. Are there times you’ve been less than professional? Do you have a bad habit that makes you unprofessional every day?

Professionalism isn’t the service. It isn’t the product. But it is what most people walk away remembering.

If you’ve been considering talking to a career development coach but feel like you may be seen as a black sheep or stick out like a sore thumb, I promise you that you’re losing valuable time. There’s a proper track and a place for you out there. The real question is if you want it enough to talk to somebody like me who knows how to help.

But before you talk to me, prove it to yourself. Check out ArnelDuvet.com and take the career satisfaction quiz. Don’t tell yourself you’re just having yet another bad day. Maybe it’s time to consider making a change. Take this quiz and we’ll calculate your score and let you know if you’re satisfied where you are or if it’s time to follow your destiny.