Do you want your boss to see the value you bring to work? How can you break the rules in a good way?
Once you’ve started your career, it’s time to start building power within your organization. To do this, Jeffrey Pfeffer says you need to find a way to stand out from your competition, which requires you to be unafraid to do two things: Ask for help from your superiors, and break the rules.
Continue reading to learn how to stand out at work.
Requirement #1: Asking for Help
The more you interact with powerful people like your boss and company executives, the more you’ll stand out at work. One very easy way to interact with such people is to ask them for help and advice.
Pfeffer adds that many people don’t like to ask for help for several reasons, all of which are wrong more often than not. Let’s review two of the most common reasons:
1) People want to be independent, or to be seen as independent. Admitting that you need help can be a blow to your ego, but trying to protect your pride often does more harm than good—for instance, doing your job badly will be much more embarrassing than simply asking someone to check your work. You might also be worried that others will start thinking you can’t handle situations on your own. However, asking your superiors questions will often have the opposite effect: They’ll see you as humble and eager to learn, which will improve their opinion of you rather than worsening it.
(Shortform note: In A More Beautiful Question, journalist Warren Berger offers another possible explanation for why people are afraid to ask for help or advice: because school counterproductively trains us not to ask questions. He explains that students are expected to sit quietly and memorize whatever information their teachers provide, and are then tested on how well they can recall that information. This rote learning approach stifles curiosity and creativity, creating adults who don’t even realize that they have the option of asking questions like “Would this approach work?” or “Could you check this over for me?”)
2) People are afraid of rejection. You might hesitate to ask for help because you’re afraid of being told “no.” Rejection can hurt your self-esteem, so many people try to avoid it. This is especially common when asking for help from very powerful people, like a company CEO—you might think they’re much too busy to help you or that you’re simply beneath their notice, but Pfeffer urges you to ask anyway. Even if they really are unwilling or unable to help, the mere act of asking suggests that you look up to the other person. That will give them a small ego boost and create a positive association with you in their mind. Therefore, even if you don’t get the immediate guidance you’re hoping for, taking that chance can pay off in the long run.
(Shortform note: In Transcend, cognitive scientist Scott Barry Kaufman says that our fear of rejection is an evolutionary holdover; for our ancient ancestors, being rejected by their community would most likely be a death sentence. However, that’s no longer the case—while it can be unpleasant and upsetting, rejection isn’t actually dangerous to us anymore. Therefore, one way to overcome your fear of rejection is to remember why you fear it in the first place, and realize that your fear isn’t an accurate reflection of your present-day situation.)
Requirement #2: Breaking the Rules
Pfeffer says that on top of asking for help, you have to be willing to stand out in other ways, and this often means breaking rules or social norms to do so. After all, you can’t expect to stand out by doing the same things everyone else does.
He explains that rules tend to benefit the people who make them at everyone else’s expense—and, by definition, the people who are already in power are the ones who make the rules. Therefore, it stands to reason that to gain power of your own you’ll have to bend or break those rules. For instance, breaking rules to stand out might mean personally asking the CEO of your company for a favor, or it could mean performing duties outside of your job description.
| A Word of Warning: Make Sure to Break the Right Rules Bending rules can be a good way to draw attention to yourself, but depending on which rules you break and how badly you break them, this strategy can easily backfire. In Humanocracy, business consultants Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini point out that compliance (which is to say, obeying the rules) is the most basic need of any organization. If employees feel free to break rules and ignore procedures whenever they want, the company won’t be able to function. Therefore, you have to strike a careful balance between compliance and rule-breaking to ensure that your actions get you praised, instead of getting you reprimanded or worse. For instance, Pfeffer suggests taking on additional tasks outside of your job description. This can be a good way to get attention—unless there’s a good reason why you weren’t assigned those tasks, such as needing special training to perform them. In that case, your efforts to contribute more will only cause problems for your superiors, who are likely to reprimand you instead of praising you as a result. |
