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The Office Jungle
Judi James
A sharp, upbeat and essential handbook for anyone picking their way through the minefield of modern office life.
The Office Jungle is a punchy and practical look at the pressures and pitfalls of today’s working environment. Thought-provoking and insightful, this books contains a wealth of information and vital tips aimed at easing the path to success. Drawing on fifteen years’ research and feedback, while training all levels of staff, Judi James considers:
• Strengths, limitations and incentives: uncover your views on office philosophies and discover your skills and values.
• Problem solving: invaluable tips on every subject from how to navigate your way through office politics to getting listened to when you speak.
• What to do if…: the corporate agony aunt section addresses questions and dilemmas such as what to do if you want a promotion and what to do if you hate your boss.
Aimed at everyone – men and women, first-time job hunters and long-term directors alike – this guide offers an unsurpassed insight into office life and etiquette. Through examining gestures, expressions, clothes and corporate style, Judi James also offers a unique chance to reassess your own self-marketing strategy.
The Office Jungle
The Survivor’s Guide to the Nylon Shagpile of Corporate Life
JUDI JAMES
Contents
Cover (#u8b137fad-46f7-5de2-a35f-0a17e14673b8)
Title Page (#u242509c8-4ce4-51aa-94a7-e9d0c619fe89)
Introduction (#u44dad216-0720-5a9f-bb51-c3006a95737b)
PART I – STRENGTHS, LIMITATIONS AND AMBITION (#u8442b170-150c-5baf-be35-0295027dd6e7)
1 Starting With You (#u4a257ba5-cd06-5eee-9f2b-ed2747f8b0f4)
2 Do You Hate Your Job? (#ude75c401-55c2-5a62-a937-518d26361948)
3 Are You Being Stereotyped? (#u2947b6f6-b895-5819-bfeb-6a0a4d76d9fe)
4 Targets and Objectives (#u7a3258f9-b136-5714-a3d0-0b786edd3025)
5 Over the Barricades (#u9200d996-773f-5693-aae4-ba3ea51d8ae7)
6 The Skills of Fuzzy Logic (#u32a780a6-7c59-5579-98c1-74714f3d604c)
7 My Company Does … What, Exactly? (#ua1b1abf7-7e9b-505a-9459-bd6e1b4e1190)
8 Handling Stress (#u2483e67b-058f-5931-8add-da31f18f86ff)
9 Office Rage (#litres_trial_promo)
PART II – HOW TO … (#litres_trial_promo)
10 How to Communicate and Be Heard (#litres_trial_promo)
11 How to Deal With Difficult People (#litres_trial_promo)
12 How to Manage Your Time 107 (#litres_trial_promo)
13 How to Manage Perfect Toilet/Lift Etiquette (#litres_trial_promo)
14 How to Handle Sex in the Office (#litres_trial_promo)
15 How to Handle Office Politics (#litres_trial_promo)
16 How to Deal With Bullying and Power-Posturing (#litres_trial_promo)
17 How to Market Yourself in the Office (#litres_trial_promo)
18 How to Look As Though You’re Working Hard When You’re Not (#litres_trial_promo)
19 How to Lie Effectively (#litres_trial_promo)
20 How to Meet and Greet Company Clients and Visitors (#litres_trial_promo)
21 How to Juggle a Career and a Home Life (#litres_trial_promo)
22 How to Survive the Corporate Lunch (#litres_trial_promo)
23 How to Survive the Corporate Training Course (#litres_trial_promo)
24 How to Survive the Office Party (#litres_trial_promo)
PART III – WHAT TO DO IF … (#litres_trial_promo)
25 What to Do If You Want to Kill Your Boss (#litres_trial_promo)
26 What to Do If Your Boss Hates You (#litres_trial_promo)
27 What to Do If You Want a Promotion (#litres_trial_promo)
28 What to Do If You Want a Rise (#litres_trial_promo)
29 What to Do If You Are Going to an Interview (#litres_trial_promo)
30 So Where Do I Go From Here? (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction (#ulink_a0b5216d-ab7e-5b64-90e3-0c346364e26e)
Survival in the workplace requires an altogether disparate array of talents from those required to be merely competent at your job. To subsist, and even flourish, in the business environment you must be Confident, possess Interpersonal, Communication and Presentation skills and be proficient in Self-marketing and Assertion, as well as having a hefty dollop of Grade ‘A’ Animal Cunning in your genetic make-up.
It’s these Seven Great Secret Skills – the lifeblood of resourceful corporate existence – that this book aims to teach you.
Trapped in the Shagpile
Of course you are an idealist at heart. You want the best for yourself and you want the most out of your career. Eyes afire with ambitions and objectives, you have your sights set firmly on the window of opportunities – while your feet lie trapped in the grubby, nylon shagpile of political intrigue and emotional in-fighting that still carpets most modern workplaces.
Marketing Strategies
Your talent and career potential are not worth the paper they’re written on if no one at work is aware of them. To sell your capabilities you must first sell yourself, no matter what your qualifications and existing job-level. To market yourself effectively, however, you may decide a little Product-Tinkering is warranted first.
Being Realistic
You’re going to study your aims and objectives. You’re going to be positive about achievements and action plans, but you’re not going down the happy-clappy path to self-enlightenment. You’re not going to finish this book feeling that you’ve tapped in to unlimited inner super-powers that you were previously unaware of.
What you are going to be, then, is realistic: realistic about your objectives and realistic about the amount of time and work you intend to put in to achieve them. You know you could be Master of the Universe if you could only acquire the necessary level of focus. But maybe you want a life as well as a job. This book is not about creating resolutions that deep down you know you’ll never have the energy or application to accomplish.
Role Ambiguity
As an increasing number of companies pare down their staff to the point of corporate anorexia and beyond, in an attempt to stay solvent, so the defining lines of role and task fade into fuzzy ambiguity.
There is a similar cosy comfort to be found in role-clarity as there is in easing on the same old pair of slippers each night. You know what to expect of them and they – pretty much – know what to expect of you.
Some firms trade on a hierarchical pecking-order, using terms like ‘Fee-earners’, ‘Non-fee-earners’ or ‘Support Staff’ to keep everyone tucked in their place. Current trends, though, are moving towards redefinition – which aims at role flexibility and open-mindedness.
This ambiguity can lead to an increased workload – but, remember, it also means a sudden renegotiation of exactly what’s up for grabs, and for whom. It often signifies a shattering of traditional barriers, leaving the door open for you to reach your full potential in your career.
Curry Sauce
Then there are the people you have to work with. Office work without people is like chicken without the tikka sauce. Your colleagues add spice and flavour to the day’s tasks – but, unfortunately, they can also give you indigestion.
Playground Politics
It’s a fact of corporate life that most of us are still the same squabbling, jealous, terrified, demanding, territorial little brats we were at school. It’s just that some of us have learnt to mask or curb our rawer emotions in an attempt to appear user-friendly and businesslike. That doesn’t mean to say we still don’t feel the same when something goes wrong, or even react the same when we feel we’re being cornered.
At work we become driven by a heady mix of hierarchical needs that include money, status, power and territory. If you doubt the territorial theory try asking a colleague to move their desk a mere inch to accommodate some equipment of your own – and then sit back to watch the fur fly.
Jekyll and Hyde
Everybody changes when they set foot inside their business premises – and not always for the better, either. But then this is part of the fun of your job.
Round up any random assortment of suits – throw in a few misfits, oddballs, psycho- and sociopaths – call them a team and given them a task to do that they don’t really understand, explained to them by people who don’t really know what they’re talking about, push them into an overcrowded environment to breathe recycled, regurgitated, thematically modulated air, stir in a little paranoia courtesy of rumoured redundancies and take-over bids and – bingo! You’re looking at all the wonderful, breathtaking drama, intrigue and crises that constitute modern corporate life.
PART I STRENGTHS, LIMITATIONS AND AMBITION (#ulink_00e3b0fa-30cd-5aa3-a226-f42e70357cb2)
1 Starting With You (#ulink_43cde64e-6a34-5f92-bff3-daafe4764b06)
Before you begin studying career-related problems and hurdles, it’s vital you have a good understanding of yourself. You are the product we’re marketing. Without a solid idea of your own core values, objectives and ambitions it’s impossible to compile an effective action plan.
As the volume of your work increases, so the amount of time available for self-study diminishes. As soon as you wake up on a working day the pressures and deadlines you face are mainly business-driven. Your personal and professional self-perception may be affected by the same external influences.
If you are good at your job you will see yourself as a successful person. If your work receives criticism your confidence may droop. Your business targets might possibly be set by someone other than yourself. Sometimes your expectations of ambition, pleasure and even happiness will all be externally influenced.
From the day you were born you listened to other people telling you what you are like and what you can or can’t do. Small babies will react to the tone of a parent’s voice even when they don’t understand the words. Other animals will be the same. Tell your cat it’s stupid – but in a warm friendly voice – and it will purr happily. Shout the same thing and it will run off, scared.
Once you began to understand the words themselves you heard a constant stream of approval or disapproval of your actions from both your parents and family. Then your teachers muscled in on the act – and finally your boss and work colleagues.
It is now essential to your success in the workplace that you allow time to take stock of yourself now and again – reassess yourself and recharge the inner batteries. You need to find out your own likes and dislikes, your own standards of ambition and your own requirements for happiness and contentment. This assessment is vital in order to build your self-esteem.
Without self-esteem it is difficult to like and get on with yourself – let alone other people.
How the Hell Did I Get Here?
A good question – and one you probably ask yourself on a regular basis as you swing dolefully backward and forward on your flexi-recliner chair, gaping bug-eyed at the trance-inducing configurations on your screen-saver.
How did you get involved in your current business? Was it ever a childhood ambition? Surely only the most snivelling little baggy-socked nerd would have listed things like ‘Line Manager’, ‘PA’, or ‘Account Manager’ as his or her primary choice during career sessions? Didn’t you once want a proper job, as a train driver or traffic warden?
The point you missed as you stepped trembling on to the first rung of your career ladder was this: virtually whatever your choice of scintillating and dazzling job, the odds were a pound to a penny that at some stage you’d end up with your knees pressed beneath a paper-strewn work-station with your aching fingers clicking away a happy tattoo on a poor little mouse.
The Work Windfall
Did you choose your job then, or did you just fall into it by mistake? Do you see it as a stepping-stone to greater things, or a barrier to your career progression?
EXERCISE:
Let’s start by being honest – why exactly are you in your present job? Underline the statement or statements that get nearest to the truth, or fill in your own statement if none of the options is suitable (remember, this is not a quiz but a personal evaluation exercise):
1 I am here because I feel totally fulfilled.
2 I have worked my way up through my profession and this is the last step before retirement.
3 This is my own company and I enjoy the challenge.
4 I enjoy my present position, but have my eye on promotion within the company.
5 I am using this job as a stepping-stone to something better in another company.
6 I plan to hold down this job until I can branch out into a totally different career.
7 I am here because I have no choice – I need the money and see little alternative.
8 I took a job with this company as a stopgap but somehow seem to have been here for years.
