How to Survive at Work

Five moves from the research on workplace power. None of them is “work harder.”

Why “survival” at work is not a figure of speech

Michael Marmot spent years studying British civil servants. He found that the lower someone’s rank, the higher their risk of dying from heart disease. Smoking, blood pressure, weight and exercise explained about a quarter of the gap. The rest came down to something simpler: how much control people had over their own work.

Jeffrey Pfeffer opens his book Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t with that study, and it is the right place to start.

Most of us run on the same quiet assumption. Do good work, and someone will notice. The research is not kind to that plan. Here are five better ones.

1. Good work is a ticket, not a shield

One study looked at performance reviews for 354 office workers. The strongest pattern was not how well people did the job. It was whether their manager had wanted to hire them in the first place. People the boss had pushed for scored high. People hired over the boss’s objection scored low. The gap held even after actual performance was taken into account.

Other findings point the same way. At one Dutch manufacturer, staff rated “very good” were only about 12% more likely to be promoted than staff rated “good.” A whole rating band, worth almost nothing.

So good work gets you in the door. Something else keeps you in the building. When a company reorganises, the question in the room is rarely who performed well. It is whose absence would hurt someone important.

Do this: Write down who really decides your rating, your projects and your headcount. If you cannot name all three people, that is your first gap.

2. Find out what you are graded on, then use their words

Your work has many sides, and whoever picks the side picks the verdict.

Pfeffer’s example is the magazine editor Tina Brown. She multiplied circulation at Vanity Fair, lifted sales at The New Yorker and collected awards. She also reportedly never turned a profit. Was that a good run? It depends entirely on which number you read out loud. Someone always picks the number.

So stop guessing what your manager cares about. Ask, and ask again every few months. Then do the thing they named, and describe it back using their vocabulary. If your director talks about cost per case, your automation project is a cost-per-case story, not an hours-saved story. Same work, different exam.

One warning. Being brilliant at one job can lock you into it. Pfeffer describes a manager so good at delivering IT projects that his boss refused to let him move, and a plant turnaround specialist who collected bonuses for a decade and no promotions. You become the kind of colleague people only notice once you are gone.

Do this: Send a short monthly update with your manager’s two stated priorities as the headings.

3. Look at where you sit, not just what you do

The unit you are in shapes your future more than the work you do inside it. People who start their careers in strong departments move up faster, and tend to stay in strong departments.

You can read this without asking anyone. A student group once collected years of floor plans from Pacific Gas and Electric’s headquarters. Engineering moved down the building floor by floor, then out to a satellite office miles away, while the lawyers and finance people moved up. Nobody sent an announcement. The seating chart said it.

Pay says it too, and it says different things in different countries. In one older international comparison, the best-paid senior function was R&D in Germany and finance in the United States. The map is not the same in Istanbul, Paris and New York.

This matters because cuts are rarely spread evenly. They follow the map. Knowing which side of it you are on can give you a year of warning.

Do this: Answer four questions. What does my function pay compared with others at my level? Where do we physically sit? Who from my function sits on the budget committee? Which team grew in the last reorganisation?

4. Build the network that does not report to you

A classic study of how people find jobs found that loose contacts beat close ones. Your close colleagues know what you already know. People you barely know carry information that has not reached you yet, and most of them will help, because small favours are easy to say yes to.

Where you sit in the network matters as much as its size. Pfeffer describes an engineer at a Japanese utility who was the only nuclear specialist in the building with a business degree. Two divisions that barely spoke to each other both had to go through him. Senior managers started asking his opinion on things far above his grade.

There is a catch. Research by Ronald Burt found that standing one step away from that person gets you almost nothing. You either hold the position or you do not.

This takes planning more than time. One investor Pfeffer writes about sends a holiday letter every year, printed and mailed about 700 times.

Here is the survival version. In a bad quarter, two people usually decide what happens to you: someone inside who speaks up for you in a meeting you are not in, and someone outside who picks up your call in week one. You build both before you need them.

Do this: Name one of each. Message them this month, with nothing to ask for.

5. Stay calm in the room, write things down after

You do not choose when conflict shows up. You choose how you behave and what exists in writing afterwards.

In the room, slow down. When actors train people to speak with authority, the ones who do best pause for longer than feels comfortable before starting. And watch your register. Research suggests people who show controlled anger read as competent, while people who apologise read as junior. The findings on gender here are genuinely mixed, so do not take it as advice to raise your voice. Take it as a floor: do not apologise your way through a disagreement you have not lost.

Give the other side a way out. Corner someone and they fight, because they have nothing left to protect. A university once defused a campaign over pay equity by giving the campaigners a committee, a small budget and real standing. The temperature dropped.

Watch actions, not promises. In the 1998 BankAmerica merger, one CEO accepted warm assurances about shared power while the board split against him and the headquarters moved to the other side of the country. He was gone in under three weeks.

Then write things down. The useful question during a hard period is not is this illegal, which is the wrong question at the worst moment. It is should this be in writing. A short, dated, factual note written the same day beats a memory reconstructed six months later.

Do this: One line, same day, with a date on it. Nothing dramatic.

What changes from country to country

What a written record does for you changes by jurisdiction. In Germany and France, dismissals usually follow a set procedure, so the paperwork is part of the process. In the United Kingdom, how a process was run carries weight. In Turkey, severance is calculated from dates and pay figures you should be able to show. In the United States, where most employment is at-will, your notes tend to do more inside the company and in a negotiation.

The habit is the same habit everywhere. Only the paperwork changes at the border.

The part nobody likes to hear

None of this asks you to become someone you do not like. Four of these five moves are simply about being seen clearly by the people who decide things. The fifth is about being ready.

Pfeffer makes one point worth sitting with. Many people decide not to play at all, and he reads that as self-protection. If you never competed, losing is not a judgement on you. It is a real choice, and it has a real cost. That cost usually shows up later, as a job you cannot leave and decisions you do not get to make.

Which brings us back to those civil servants. The thing that tracked their health was not salary or title. It was control. Everything above is the work of keeping some.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Jeffrey Pfeffer, Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t (HarperBusiness, 2010) — the source for the studies and cases summarised above.
• Michael Marmot’s Whitehall studies on job control, rank and cardiovascular mortality among British civil servants.
• Mark Granovetter on weak ties in job finding; Ronald Burt on structural holes; Larissa Tiedens on emotional display and perceived status; Jack Brehm on psychological reactance.

General information, not legal advice. Employment law and dismissal procedure differ by country and by individual situation.

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