How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work

by Megan Hustad

  Hey xxxxx, xxx just called and said he never got the book. I wasn’t going to say anything last week because I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt (and you’ve been so diligent in the past). But xx, xxxx, and xxxxxx—all people who are crucial to this book really getting off the ground—also haven’t received theirs. Now xxxxxx is off to Buenos Aires for a couple weeks, so turns out he won’t be needing it after all. In the future, please tell me if you plan on not using my entire list, despite assuring me otherwise beforehand, so I can anticipate these embarrassments and prepare for them. It is just ridiculous and profoundly insulting that I have to micromanage this process. Also, I’m still owed $47 for the cab to O’Hare. Thanks.

  PS. Saw xxxxxxxxx at lunch. He said he liked the book. That was nice.

  It doesn’t take mastery of nuance to appreciate that there are a lot of what Suzette Haden Elgin, in The Gentie Art of Verbal Self-Defense} would call “relevant presuppositions” in this e-mail. The e-mailed grievance often contains layer upon layer of trouble and innuendo. Whatever the length, the formula for angry e-mail writers is: Mention the precipitating problem (you did this), then a second (you also did this), then highlight a factor that compounds the difficulty (while you were supposed to be bearing that in mind), another factor (that too), and stress the efforts made to compensate for the problem you created (meanwhile, I’m doing all this), and how your failure to foresee what might result from your blunder just makes it all the more upsetting (now I wonder if you’re as competent as I thought you were is always the implication).

  It’s clear from this how every mistake holds the potential for a more prolonged disagreement. Covey is quite astute on how discord inspires palpable unease—and how in large swaths of the population, agreeing to disagree is practically unheard of. “When other people disagree with us, we immediately think something is wrong with them,” he writes in The 7 Habitsr. And proactivity, he knew, wasn’t a big or bracing enough concept to deter people from launching into lengthy explanations or rebuttals. Or so one might assume from the fact that Covey brings in two separate schemas—one involving “Emotional Bank Accounts” and another involving “a goose that lays golden eggs”—to try to convince people that taking it on the chin sometimes may be the best thing for them.

  I’ll repeat that. Covey uses Emotional Bank Accounts and a goose that lays golden eggs to suggest that sometimes you should just accept blame for a mistake. This next part needs to be read slowly. Confrontations, according to Covey, start when someone is expecting to get something—could be $47, could be affection, validation, that report, whatever—and doesn’t get it. This constitutes a withdrawal from the Emotional Bank Account at the center of the relationship. If it’s you who didn’t deliver, it is you who made the withdrawal. Now, if the relationship is strong, and built on a healthy amount of trust and goodwill, it won’t be damaged by the occasional small withdrawal. (You arrive late, but nineteen times out of twenty you’re on time, so it’s quickly forgiven.) But over time, making withdrawals from the Emotional Bank Account without making an equivalent amount of deposits threatens the integrity of the relationship. A mistake might constitute a withdrawal, but an earnest apology upon making that withdrawal was a deposit.

  The golden eggs illustrate a concept Covey called the P/PC balance. The golden eggs are what you enjoy, the effect you desire, the end result—P, for production. The goose that lays these eggs is PC, for production capability. You might not relish spending time on this goose, but if you didn’t feed it, tend to it, stroke it, then its ability to lay golden eggs would be seriously compromised. In time it might stop producing golden eggs altogether. So one shouldn’t, Covey suggested, get so distracted by the sheen on those eggs that one neglects the goose. If you understood the eggs to be “the effectiveness, the wonderful synergy, the results created by open communication and positive interaction,” and the goose to be the relationship at the heart of that wonderful synergy, then your decision about how to handle any given conflict becomes clearer. You have to tend to the relationship first. Here’s the point, at last: Having to be right and correct and good all the time makes feeding the relationship much, much more difficult.

  In other words, sometimes the boss just wants an apology and that’s it. When I read this, I thought I’d seen this advice somewhere before, so I was curious if Covey’s approach was really as fresh as he claimed it was. And there it is, in Mark McCormack’s 1984 What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business Schooly page 80, not on mistakes per se but specifically on going mano a mano with the boss: “If you win the battle you’re probably going to lose the war. And the more right you are, the more damage it will probably do in the long run.” But even that didn’t smell new to me, and I dimly recalled J. P. Morgan saying something similar. He didn’t. What he said was, “A man always has two reasons for the things he does—a good one, and the real one.” Dale Carnegie, on the subject of arguments, paraphrased Morgan’s line this way: “A person usually has two reasons for doing a thing: one that sounds good and a real one.” Whatever the phrasing, it’s a good reminder that there’s a limit on how much you gain by arguing certain interpersonal matters. Even if you start talking up all your good intentions, you’ve got about a fifty-fifty chance of being taken at your word.

  And now’s probably the right time to bring up Jennifer An-iston. In 2005, at an evening of story performances to celebrate the release of a book called The Underminer; the actress Nancy Balbirer regaled the audience with a story involving “Jane,” a former roommate who was never identified as Aniston but who was described as a then-struggling actress, daughter of a soap star, of Greek heritage, graduate of New York’s High School for the Performing Arts, and recipient of a career-making nose job who then went on to star in an ensemble sitcom about twenty-somethings living in the West Village. A number of unflattering snippets about “Jane” were relayed that evening (including her instructing Balbirer to stuff a bra with chicken cutlets), and a New York gossip columnist described the event in his “Low-down” column the next day. Balbirer objected to his coverage —in particular his fingering Aniston as “Jane,” and his suggestion that Balbirer was upset over snubs from Aniston and a rejection from Friends—and wrote a letter to the editor in which she sought to “clarify some inaccuracies.” The article, she claimed, made a series of false allegations. At no point did she mention Jennifer Aniston by name, and “furthermore, the Daily News article misleadingly puts in quotation marks the Lowdown spy’s summary, which completely misquotes my performance piece.” She’d read a story about a former friend, a friend named Jane who hurt and betrayed her, and what happened to her “was sad, not hilarious.” The piece was intended as a profound exploration of the compromises people make as they chase fame, and at no point did she, Balbirer, say that Jane was a pseudonym for anyone else. Nor did she claim that the real person named Jennifer Aniston had at any point had cosmetic surgery.

  Nor is she a gossip. “I am an artist… I use the backdrop of my life experiences to examine larger issues. It’s not about airing anybody’s dirty laundry.” If anyone had any doubts about that, they could consult the “well-known personalities” who were in attendance at the event that night, which, she wanted to mention, was a benefit for a nonprofit organization that taught inner-city schoolchildren to read and write. Oh, and she also had a book coming out.

  If The 7 Habits can help people avoid huffy train wrecks like this, reading it is nothing to be ashamed of. Balbirer didn’t make the case for her Snow White-ness so much as confirm everything the columnist suggested, plus more that wasn’t so flattering—about herself. Lengthy explanations always come dangerously close to sounding shrill, and angling for sympathy has the paradoxical effect of making you unsympathetic.50

  Back at the office, shrillness weakens the argument because it gives the impression that resentment has been bottled up for a while. And unfortunately, resentment, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. “Ever get into a fight at work?” Julie
—one of the most mild-mannered women I know—was once asked during a job interview. No, Julie said, she had good relationships with her coworkers and generally managed not to let misunderstandings escalate. But what if someone attacked her? “Well,” she continued, “I’d try to explain what happened, or what I’d done and when and how”—and here Julie made a wavy hand gesture that made an unintentional little thump on the desk—“and hopefully we could come to an understanding.”

  The interviewer nodded. “Uh-huh. I see. So do you always bang your fist on the table like that when you’re mad?”

  There’s also the possibility that your explanation will give the wrong message entirely. As Jayson Blair, a New York Times reporter caught plagiarizing, explained in an interview with

  London’s the Observer; his initial impulse when the wrath came down was to compare himself with Stephen Glass, a similarly precocious reporter for the New Republic who was similarly disgraced not long before. “Were our stories treated differently? Sure,” remarked Blair. “He got this whiz-kid ride, and I was just dumb and black. The problem with pursuing that argument is that the inevitable conclusion you end up with is: ‘Hey, I’m an evil genius too!’ And that’s not the point you’re trying to make.”

  Or, as Paul the freelancer realized after his careful defense only increased his boss’s ire, he must have “sounded like Mr. Rogers. Like, ‘Come now, boss, you don’t understand the situation. Let me explain to you.’ And that… evidently comes across as a little condescending.” Covey also asserted that the time spent concocting exhaustive defenses might be better used trying to figure out the full panoply of reasons for someone’s anger. Habit Five: “Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood.” Most people, he said, most ineffective people, be they bosses or employees, went through their days not really listening. That is, they listened only so far as they needed to come up with a response; when they weren’t doing the talking, they were usually just waiting for the other person to finish, so they could start up again. This pseudolistening, Covey claimed, happened at one of four levels: people may actually be ignoring you, they may be pretending to take in what you’re saying but not really bothering to let anything sink in, they could be listening selectively, or they may truly be attentive to what you’re saying but not really hearing you hearing you. If you really sought to understand instead of going through these fruitless motions, there was less chance of conversations devolving into political quagmires.

  And at this point it might be useful to mention the situations in which it is always and absolutely counterproductive to try to emerge blameless. Whenever you work in an office that prizes group harmony, is one. (You’ll know this about your workplace if you’ve been paying close attention. Occasionally you encounter a person who will say, out loud, “I’m a company man” or “I’m a company woman,” but it’s rare. Usually you discover this premium on loyalty indirectly.) You will lose these battles even if you win on points because company men and women don’t like it when a lone ranger causes such a ruckus. Grappling directly with the boss is one thing, but a boss that’s uncomfortable with confrontation will get fidgety over any office battle—not just the ones that directly involve him or her.51

  Whenever it’s clear that preservation of the hierarchy demands that someone get hurt, is another. In some work cultures, any involvement in conflict will land some kind of punishment, regardless of who and what started it. “You could get sucker-punched while saying a rosary and still receive the same punishment as your attacker,” remembered Rivethead author Ben Hamper of life at a GM Truck and Bus plant. In the stiffer white-collar world, the cc on a confrontational e-mail is usually a strong signal that someone is seeking blood. Cc’s are a passive-aggressive person’s Christmas miracle, as they can be used (a) to summon backup; (b) to place the menacing suggestion in the recipient’s mind that more than one minder is awaiting a response; or (c) to suggest that more than one person is culpable, and as to who takes full responsibility, that doesn’t so much matter. If you ever find yourself in any of these situations, you might want to take one for the team, and volunteer to clean up any mess. A willingness to solve a problem you didn’t make is a largely riskfree way to generate goodwill, not least because it saves someone the trouble of assigning blame. Barring sadism on the boss’s part, meting out blame and subsequent punishment is a moot point once someone’s taken responsibility. Admitting, acknowledging instantly, absorbing the blame—there’s a touch of emotional glamour to it as well. “People with little internal security can’t do it,” said Covey of genuine apologies. “It makes them too vulnerable.”

  But ultimately, you shouldn’t underestimate how much people like it when someone gets nailed. It’s exciting. If taking the heat doesn’t immediately seem like it could help relations with the boss—or if that relationship is something you’re willing to sacrifice—it might be smart to fall on your sword just to show your coworkers a good time. Tom, our branding consultant, described a woman he once worked with who, every few weeks, could be heard tearfully explaining to the department head that she worried she wasn’t doing her job as well as she could. It brought him a little blush of joy in the middle of a drab day.

  This is schadenfreude, and it’s another big lacuna in the American success canon. There’s no English word for this phenomenon, which can loosely be defined as the small pleasure we take in someone’s pain, bad luck, or costly blunder. Schadenfreude is laughing when someone trips, and feeling strangely elated when an acquaintance is dumped, laid off, or forced to take it on the chin. Covey didn’t use the word himself. But The 7 Habits comes very close to a sensible explanation for what drives it:

  The Scarcity Mentality is the zero-sum paradigm of life. People with a scarcity mentality have a very difficult time sharing recognition and credit, power or profit—even with those who help in the production. They also have a very hard time being genuinely happy for the successes of other people—even, and sometimes especially, members of their own family or close friends and associates. It’s almost as if something is being taken from them when someone else receives special recognition or windfall gain or has remarkable success or achievement… Often, people with a Scarcity Mentality harbor secret hopes that others might suffer misfortune—not terrible misfortune, but acceptable misfortune that would keep them “in their place” [emphasis mine]. They’re always comparing, always competing.

  The Scarcity Mentality idea, by the way, is pure Orison Swett Marden. But it’s interesting to think that being the Golden Boy can constitute a withdrawal from someone else’s Emotional Bank Account, and that you might actually be doing people a small favor by failing from time to time. If only because it provides them temporary relief from their nagging insecurities.

  Covey, of course, would never suggest you exploit anyone’s nagging insecurities in this or any other way. Sometimes not defending yourself just boils down to acknowledging that trouble will find you, simply because you take up space on this earth. “You know, that first big mistake, that major blowup… I think it’s something you have to go through,” said Daniel, an executive assistant who has weathered his fair share of storms. “Your time will come. It’s almost better just to get it over with.” If you’re still waiting for that day, or even if that inaugural smackdown has come and gone, the following are some good habits—not Covey’s, but inspired by them—to fall into:

  Don’t start talking particulars if you think the premise is flawed. Arguing the details of an accusation is an implicit endorsement of the broader indictment. How do you win an argument that you believe is flawed at its foundation?

  Do ditch rhetorical questions. Many people begin their exhaustive defenses with sentences like “What would you have done if you were in my position?” Usually people only phrase a question this way when they’ve already determined what the correct answer is and also doubt your ability to come up with it. “What would you have done if you were in my position?” doesn’t sound like one but is, essentially, a rhetoric
al question if it’s followed by a lengthy justification for the course of action you took. So too a rushed “What should I have done?” They both sound argumentative, and ultimately defensive.

  While you’re at it, you might also excise words like furthermore and moreover from your vocabulary. They belong on college papers but they only set you up nicely for blowback in any kind of office setting.

  Don’t say I’m sorry you’re upset.“ People say this when they’re too lazy or insecure to apologize—or don’t actually want to accept responsibility but feel they should make some motion in that direction. A popular variation of “I’m sorry you’re upset” is to couch the apology in a passive construction, as if no human hands could possibly be implicated in the mishap, and it usually sounds something like this: “I’m sorry it didn’t get done,” or, more popular still, “I’m sorry this happened,” or “I’m sorry if anyone was offended by my…” The smarter or angrier the audience, the less chance these nonapology apologies will be effective.

  You might also want to be careful about saying, “Oh, I

  could never_,” whenever a vice or tacky habit comes up in conversation. According to Lord Chesterfield, it was the exclusive domain of the pretentious and self-righteous. From my experience, it also invites people to think that perhaps you often

  _, but feel suitably guilty about it. I once had a literary agent in my office for a meeting. She had requested the meeting, and I was thrilled to have her there because it felt like professional recognition. Five minutes into our conversation, her cell phone rings and she answers. She proceeds to talk on her cell phone for quite a while, sitting directly across from me at my desk (it was a small office), occasionally glancing up to smile while I pretended to check my e-mail. When she finally hung up, she said she was oh so sorry, that as a rule she never does that. But it was an important call, you see, as one of her authors had a new hardcover coming out in two weeks and this author was leaving for Bangkok tomorrow and, would you believe, the jacket art just arrived with the author’s name set bigger than the title of the book itself? Funny, wasn’t it, how hugely popular this author had become? Anyhow, it was important they discuss all this before Bangkok, but she hoped I didn’t mind her taking that call because she, as a rule, never does that.