Internal marketing

Dear Bob …

I was particularly interested in the letter from “More than just curious” on Monday March 1, as the situation is one that I have unfortunately seen in too many of the places that I have worked at myself. I wanted to expand on the thoughts because I have seen situations where employees are rewarded and fawned over based on their wonderful ability to pull out a quick fix when a system (such as a mail system — dare I say Exchange) fails for no apparent reason.

Instead of putting the appropriate time and resources in at the beginning of a project, things are thrown together to get something out fast to make themselves look great. The problem is that better planning and gathering of the right resources would have taken more time and then the manager would not have looked so good. What I find more interesting about this is that when the system fails, which it is inevitably going to do, the same persons have to rush in, fix the problem and then they get kudos, and usually an award for saving the day and occasionally monetary “atta-boy”.

To make it more humorous, I find that based on my own level of ethics, I can not put out a system in such a manner, so I look like I am doing things that are taking too long. I find that my systems usually function with little or no failures (ok, yes I do make mistakes too, but I try to make sure that they are minimized based on planning.) To rub salt into the open wounds though, the things that I do that work no one hears about — and why — well because they work, there are no problems and hence no publicity about it.

Now this sounds like complaining, and that is not what I was getting at.  Part of the problem is in fact mine. I don’t do enough PR to point out the stability of the systems that I am responsible for … I am working on that. I used to think that it was just part of my job to do the right thing right. Why should I have to make a big deal about it?, after all that is what I get paid to do. Well, if I don’t who will, sometimes your manager will — I have been pretty lucky over the last 10 years to have managers that do look out for me. Part of ones job now-a–days is publicity, and good publicity is even more important. If no one knows you are doing a good job, then hey — no one knows it. Where I work, as a department we have started initiating ways of pointing out the good things, the successes so that people get rewarded for the right things. If rewards are being given out for the wrong reasons, then those that do good work will eventually become so frustrated that when the job market gets better they will be out the door looking for greener pastures.

I guess the point is — take a marketing class and learn how to market your successes. It will be important for your career.

– More than just curious — been there

Dear Been there …

You won’t get an argument from me, although I’d probably view the situation from a different angle.

There are several pieces to what you’re calling marketing. One of them really is marketing, pure and simple – doing your best to receive recognition for your work.

A second piece is more neutral. Not all managers do a good job keeping track of each employee’s accomplishments – perhaps because they don’t know how, perhaps because their company is stretching them too thin, or perhaps for other reasons. When that happens, it is up to each employee to help their manager keep track of what’s going on. That isn’t, to my mind, marketing – marketing has an element of persuasion to it. This is more in the vein of simple information-sharing.

Then there’s the third piece. Call it educating your manager. If an employee has a manager who rewards heroics while ignoring actions that successfully prevent the crises that lead to heroics, instead of complaining about the manager’s poor priorities it makes sense to help the manager see the value of a better way of doing things.

Perhaps I’m making fine distinctions that don’t need to be made. But perhaps not: Many people have a negative reaction to the whole notion of marketing themselves. Even with this reaction, they can still engage in the other forms of communication that can help improve their organization’s performance.

– Bob

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