A ‘Shake and A Smile — How To Get Noticed At Work
Strategies for how to be successful at work are a dime a dozen. Work hard, put in the time, educate yourself and always learn, learn, learn. This is good advice, but it is merely the cost of admission.
What I’ve found to be more important than my skill-set and aptitude, is how I do my job.
Now, this wouldn’t be credible at all, if this article was how to rise to the top of your organization. I can’t speak to that, because I don’t have any experience doing that.
What I can speak to however, is how to generate a positive buzz about your name at all levels of an organization. I don’t know what this leads to, but having a positive association to my name is preferable to a negative one. I’m sure you would agree.
In my job, I see many different people going about their business in many different ways, but most have a common denominator. Most of them sit in front of their computer all day, and stare at the screen.
This is no way to live.
Even worse, it’s not like these people don’t have interactions with people. Almost all of them have a job where interacting with people is of critical importance. In my experience, interacting with people is of critical importance in most jobs.
If you want to get noticed at work, you need to get up off your ass and start talking to people. In person.
When you send an email to someone you get 7% of your message across. On the phone it’s 45%, but when you talk to someone face-to-face, you get 100% of your message across. This is illustrated nicely in this chart based on the Mehrabian communication model:
When you increase the efficiency of your communication, you also increase your efficiency at work, because people are more likely to comply with your requests and find you agreeable, when you talk to them in person. On top of that, research shows that the most connected people are the most successful. Read this book, to see for yourself.
So seeing people in person and talking to them is way more important than you might think. Not only for the sake of your personal pleasure and professional satisfaction — after all, we humans are social animals — but also because you will make a good impression.
In order to illustrate this, let me give you an example. Where I work there are a few important people. People who earn a lot of money and have a lot of power over me, my boss and in general. So being in their good graces is important. How to get noticed in a positive way, without being viewed as a suck-up?
I engineered a situation where it was natural for me to go and talk to the VIP.
I had a document to be signed. It could have been signed by many people, and I could have sent it with internal mail. This might even have made more sense, but I wanted to talk to the guy.
So I took the mail to him personally. When I saw him, I smiled, extended my arm and we shook hands. We then started chatting, and he told me a story of his former boss and all in all we had a brief and pleasurable exchange.
This interaction is insanely powerful because it creates a connection between you. Not only that, but it gives you something to build on in the future.
That’s never going to happen over an email.
The biggest life hack I’ve ever experienced personally is to always do something in person when the situation allows. It might be easier in the short run to send an email, but all outcomes improve when I interact with someone in person.
The best way to get noticed at work?
Get up off your ass and go talk to people.
