The economy has been so lousy of late I figured I would just keep my girls at home for the next five years working on my to-do list, which includes cleaning the winter’s dog poops off my lawn, building a stone wall in my backyard and raising the foundation of my home three feet so I can fit a Laguna band saw in the basement. But they are both joining the American work force this summer, so here are my rules for daughters in the workplace:
— Be someone others want to hire. It’s not just advanced degrees and pedigrees, whom you know and being gung-ho. Most of all, you need to be reliable, nice, honest, trainable and pleasant to have around the workplace. Smart people with those attributes are gold, and smart people without them are a sharp stone in a company’s shoe.
— Be able to adapt to change in the workplace and the marketplace. If you go into a job thinking it will be yours forever without change, your career, and your company, are probably doomed. The rate of change in American business has never been faster. Entire industries present when you were born are now gone, victims of breakthroughs that made their business models irrelevant almost overnight. Companies that survive in that environment must be able to turn on a dime, and their employees with them.
— Related, be an adult learner looking constantly for new skills and knowledge to acquire. New computer skills, technical skills, social and management skills, communication skills, artistic skills — whatever. Learn where to find new information, how to do research and how to formulate and present new ideas. This will add value to you as an employee, lead you to new careers and make your life more interesting. If you do all of this and still get laid off someday, you will have a bunch of skills that should make it easier to find a new job.
— Related, master the computer, including commonly used software programs for word processing, data management and communications. The computer is the 21st century equivalent of the hammer — a tool almost no modern business can function without. An employee who cannot use one with comfort is all hammered thumbs, and probably going nowhere.
— Add value to your employer beyond the straight value of your routine work. Be that employee who makes more of your job than anyone else would. Almost anyone can make widgets, answer phones, mix lattes, etc., but not everyone can figure out how to make better widgets and lattes in less time for less cost. Think constantly about how you could make the business that employs you more successful. For example, can you figure out how to save your employer the cost of your job every year? If you work that way, you will increase the chances your company does well, and if it doesn’t do well, you might be the last employee laid off when times are tough and first hired back when times are better.
— Be a “go to” employee, one who can take up slack, do an extra shift, keep your head when others are falling apart, etc. Be that person who, when things are really tough, others will look around and say, “I know we will be OK, because you are here.”
— Contribute a sense of humor to the workplace. Work can be dull, dry and occasionally tense; it begs someone who can make timely contributions of appropriate humor that lifts spirits, gets us through tough moments and helps make work as fun as it can be.
— Do the right thing at work. Be the one who tells the office jerk to pound salt, stops the stupid gossip or the offensive teasing, rejects sexism and racism in the workplace and resists the boss telling employees to do something unsafe or unethical. If that gets you bounced from your job, so be it. You did not want that job anyway.
— Be yourselves. You are smart, funny, warm, wonderful, ethical to a fault, and good people to boot. I would hire you in a heartbeat.
Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region. He also is the interim CEO at Blue Hill Memorial Hospital.