Your Contacts

In lots of sales jobs and recruiting jobs, your contact list is part of what your employer expects to receive when you get hired. When you take a new job, clarify everybody’s expectations with respect to your precious contact list. Unless it’s been clearly communicated, your contacts are your own.

If your employer has an employee referral bonus program and you want to participate, go ahead and spread the news about job openings at your workplace, and with luck get paid for it. Otherwise, it’s not ethical for your employer to expect you to peddle its products to your friends, or give up your networking contacts to pad its prospect list.

Your Health

The tragedy of the white-collar working world is that we pretend our bodies don’t exist. Your brain can’t function unless your body gets rest and exercise. It’s not right for your employer to expect you to trash your health for the job. Speak up if you’re not feeling well.

Don’t let a weenie manager browbeat you into coming to work sick and infecting your co-workers, or worsening your own health. If they won’t let you work from home when you’re under the weather or take a sick day, get your resume up to date.

Your Personal Life

Everyone needs to learn the script we call “It’s Impossible” to deal with managers who ask you what you’ve got scheduled at night or on the weekend that would keep you from working extra hours.

What you have planned in your personal life is nobody’s business but yours. Here’s the script:

BOSS: Joe, can you stay late tonight to get those invoices out?

YOU: Not tonight, but I can do them tomorrow.

BOSS: What’s going on tonight?

YOU: Unmovable plans, but don’t worry — I’ll do it tomorrow.

Don’t start explaining that your kid has a hockey match or your wife’s barbershop chorus has a dress rehearsal that you have to attend because you can’t make the concert. The minute you open that vault, you can kiss your personal priorities goodbye.

Learn to say “Wish I could! – but it’s impossible” with a smile on your face.

Unearned Loyalty

Be wary of any employer that tells employees they should be loyal, just because they work there. Loyalty, like respect, is earned. You might be loyal to a boss who’s always had your back, but that’s different than being loyal to a corporation or an institution.

If you get a call from a headhunter about a job that sounds interesting, it’s your right to call back and learn everything you can. You don’t have to stay with a sinking ship and be the person who turns the lights out.

That’s what “stay bonuses” are for.

It’s appropriate and ethically correct to take care of your own and your family’s interests before your employer’s, and that’s what anyone would do unless there is personal loyalty in place – loyalty that’s been earned by past actions.

Run away from people who tell you where they think your loyalties should lie.

Your Soul

Your job might include unpleasant aspects, like bureaucratic processes or boring meetings, but your job shouldn’t require you to pretend to be someone you’re not. If you wake up at night with your heart beating too fast because you can’t stand the person your job requires you to be, get out!

You have one lifetime. You get to make your mark here on our planet, and that means you get to make choices, and you must. You don’t have time or energy to waste with people who don’t get you and value you the way you are right now.

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