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Trust equals consistency over time – Jeff Weiner, CEO LinkedIn
A friend and I were talking about different types of jobs.
Not jobs exactly, but roles – and why different people end up in different roles and often very different situations.
Take a young person at the start of a career, for example.
They might start a low paid job, perhaps one that’s based on shifts.
They might get something that fits with their skills and willingness to learn – but comes with an entry level salary.
Talent, as Felix Dennis wrote, can be underpaid for a while provided the work is challenging enough.
Dennis quotes Degas as saying “Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty.”
So, how do they move up in the world?
Change jobs, goes the advice.
Move on every 18 months and find a new, better paid role.
That’s the way to get experience in a sector or industry.
It seem that the best way to earn more money, if that’s what you want, is to jump ship often – and quickly you’ll earn more than the ones left behind.
The same logic applies perhaps the idea of skipping university and heading straight into work.
Why spend time studying when you could spend time working and making money?
After ten years or so, something different happens.
Some of the people who’ve stayed at a place for a while have worked their way up a ladder.
They’re insiders.
The ones who have moved from place to place are visitors.
And the nature of such relationships don’t seem to vary that much.
When you get a new colleague it takes some time to get to know them.
It’s easy when it’s transactional and they just need to do what they’re told.
But, given a choice between someone who you’ve worked with for ten years and someone you’ve worked with for six months – who do you know better?
Which one would you trust?
Well, it probably depends on how they have acted over that time.
Some people are dependable workers, turning out the same thing time after time on time.
Some are creative mavericks, who come up with different things all the time, but who deliver on time.
And then there are the ones that don’t.
The fact is that it doesn’t matter if you’re an insider or a visitor.
What matters is what you do.
People who stay in one place are trusted not because they stayed but because they did consistent work over that time.
The ones who didn’t are the ones you’re trying to move on – but they can’t find a role anywhere else.
If you’ve moved around your track record will get you an interview.
But after that you’ve got to show what you can do to build trust.
The ideal, really, is to start work at a place you’d be happy to spend the next twenty years because the work is interesting and challenging.
Over time, you’ll probably get paid what you’re worth.
Maybe a little less.
But at least you’ll be learning every day.
And you’ll probably have the trust of people around you.
There are few things that suck more than having to go to a well-paid job that you hate.
And this is the hard thing to tell young people – and you probably wouldn’t have listened when you were that age as well.
Choose your first job carefully.
If you think that’s not very good advice you should listen to what Bertrand Russell suggested you should try and do.
Choose your parents wisely.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
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