Works Well with Others: An Outsider's Guide to Shaking Hands, Shutting Up, Handling Jerks, and Other Crucial Skills in Business That No One Ever Teaches You - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ross McCammon is an editor at GQ magazine and the business etiquette columnist at Entrepreneur magazine. He was a senior editor at Esquire magazine from 2005 to 2016, where he was responsible for the magazine’s coverage of pop culture, drinking, cars, and etiquette. He has written for Elle, Cosmopolitan, Wired, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Texas Monthly, and Parents. His humor has been collected in Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: The Best of McSweeney’s Humor Category, edited by Dave Eggers. He lives in New York, with his wife and children.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction

I’m going to make a few assumptions about you. If I’m wrong, I hope you’ll read the rest of this book anyway. Also: I’m sorry for misreading you. If I’m right, well, I’m clearly some sort of wizard.

You look great, by the way.

Anyway, this is who I think you are. You’re smart. You’re talented. You’re ambitious. But you’re not “well-leveraged.” You don’t think you have an “edge” on the competition. You don’t have “hookups” that you can exploit. You don’t have a “stellar pedigree,” as if you are some sort of racehorse. You are not the spawn of a CEO and you can’t call upon the powers of nepotism when things aren’t “looking up.” You don’t “know” a lot of “people.”

You’re an outsider.

And your outsider status has made you a little uncomfortable. You’re not “sure of yourself” in a job interview. You don’t know how to “make a presentation” or “give a speech.” You’re not sure what to order when you’re at an “important lunch.”

You’re finding my use of quotation marks “kind of stupid.”

It’s important for you to know that all of those things describe me too. I’m pretty smart, kind of talented, and moderately ambitious, but when I unexpectedly (and, from my perspective, miraculously) got a call from Esquire magazine in 2005 to interview for an editor position, I felt crucially ill equipped for the job. I worked at Southwest Airlines’ in-flight magazine (the Esquire of airplane magazines), had a degree from the University of North Texas (the Harvard of the northeastern Texas / southern Oklahoma region), and knew sort-of-important people, but they were all in Dallas (the New York City of . . . eh, never mind).

I thought that my circumstances would determine my eventual failure in New York. Because I wasn’t the right type. And I didn’t deserve it. I was an impostor, and I was going to be found out about a month in. (Rule: Nothing can be found out about a person less than a month into a job. Nothing. Because you’re not seeing the real person. You’re seeing an agent for that person whose job it is to confusedly stare at the fancy electronic restroom faucets until someone comes along who knows how they work.)

The term “impostor phenomenon” was coined in 1978 by Georgia State University psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes. Initially linked mainly to high-achieving women (but later seen as often—if not more so—in men), it can be broken down into three types of feelings: that you aren’t as successful as other people think; that your accomplishments can be chalked up to luck; and that even if you’ve attained success, it isn’t all that impressive.

Since that initial research, psychologists have studied and debated the possible causes of “impostorism.” Is it a trait or is it a state of mind? Is it a “situational condition” or is it deeply rooted in how we were parented? Is it merely a reflection of an anxious personality? Or depression? Are people who describe themselves as frauds actually more confident than they let on, as some researchers have suggested? Is it a “self-presentational strategy”—something that people do, consciously or not, to seem extra humble or to lower others’ expectations of them?

This book isn’t so concerned with why people feel like impostors but that people do.

And a lot of people do.

People like Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor: “My first month as a judge I was terrified. . . . I still couldn’t believe this had worked out as dreamed, and I felt myself almost an impostor meeting my fate so brazenly.”

And Kate Winslet: “Sometimes I wake up in the morning before going off to a shoot, and I think, I can’t do this. I’m a fraud.”

And Chuck Lorre, creator/writer/producer of The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men: “When you go and watch a rehearsal of something you’ve written and it stinks, the natural feeling is ‘I stink. I’m a fraud. I need to go and hide.’”

And Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of Reddit: “I have no idea what I’m doing, and that’s awesome.”

And Tina Fey: “You just try to ride the egomania when it comes and enjoy it, and then slide through the idea of fraud.”

And Meryl Streep: “You think, ‘Why would anyone want to see me again in a movie? And I don’t know how to act anyway, so why am I doing this?’”

When I got to New York, I felt unlike all of my peers. I didn’t dress the part. I didn’t know anyone important. I didn’t know how to have a business lunch. I didn’t even really know how to order a drink in a bar. (At this point, you may be questioning my ability to clean and feed myself. Bear with me.) I didn’t know how to work at a big magazine and I didn’t know how to live in a city like New York.

But a few months after working in New York, a truth came into focus: Everyone around me was an impostor, too. We all have insecurities. And I think successful people are successful because of them. Not in spite of them. There’s great energy in the spot on the Venn diagram where awkwardness and ambition overlap. There’s a great energy in weirdness.

Hugely important rule: Everyone is weird and nervous. No matter how famous or important, everyone is just really weird and really nervous. Especially the people who don’t seem weird or nervous.

I came to see that the difference between those who are successful and those who aren’t isn’t just talent or behavior. The people I came to respect the most weren’t any better minds or workers than I was (though they were talented and hardworking, believe me). They were just better at seeming better. They acted like they belonged. They seemed to claim success by performing its mechanics with confidence.

And as I met more and more interesting people (from people in my industry to famous actors and musicians as a part of my job), I began to realize that most of the so-called rules of success don’t work. You don’t have to “sell” yourself. You don’t have to “network.” And you don’t have to dress the “right” way (although that has its advantages). But you do have to understand why people do those things. And you have to comport yourself with integrity, even when you have no idea what’s going on—in the meeting room, at a business lunch, or at the bar after work.

I also learned that the problem is not being ignorant of certain customs or devoid of certain skills. The problem is letting your inadequacies get to you.

This is a book about success, but my angle on success is a sideways one. I am not going to spell out any sort of “system” or “philosophy.” This is a self-help book for people who don’t like self-help books. It’s less concerned with how to “get” a job than how to interview for one. It’s less concerned with how to overcome a fear of public speaking than how to approach a podium. To borrow a now-overused construct from the military, this book is less concerned about strategy than it is about tactics. It’s not about the “what.” It’s about the “how” and the “who.”

This book is about the seemingly small things, which are...