By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!


You've just started your career or perhaps you've been rolling along smoothly or at least fairly smoothly in your career for some time.

If you've been working for some time, sure, you've perhaps been pushed out of one or two companies or felt that it didn't feel like you were growing (no promotions) or the atmosphere changed (a new co-worker or new boss arrived with a bullying attitude).

But overall life is good.

And that's the danger. Life is good now. But have you stopped to consider given your age, career to date, skill set and the industry you are in what your shelf life is?

Shelf life? What's that? Isn't that just related to things like food? Well sure, but it goes beyond that and for our purposes allow me to define it :

Shelf life: The period or length of time for which an item or good remains fit or usable for consumption, or remains salable.

Think of this not as the expiry date (the date where it's not salable or that consumption is not possible) but as the freshness date.

If I eat that day old bread, sure I won't get sick but it won't taste as good as fresh bread nor would I pay as much. In fact, I would buy almost any fresh bread of any variety (french baguette, sour dough, etc.) before I would consider a day old bread of my favorite variety.

And that, my friends, is how shelf life works in the employment and business field.

So we need to think about our shelf. In general, most of us are safe until age 40. But at age 40 (it used to be 50 to 55), boom! We are given no quarter.

Our entire career, every move, every company and so on is scrutinized. If we are looked at at all.....mostly we may just be passed over.

This is why up to the age of 40 it is critical that you carefully determine your career moves as well as the work you do at each company you are employed at -- you must work to build a visible and proven portfolio, create cumulative advantages while decreasing or destroying cumulative disadvantages.

We almost all start in "technical positions" but along our career path we must move from being a "doer" to a manager -- whether we manage people, products, projects or plans.

The "P"s" as I call it.

It's equally critical that we don't just run and jump ships at the first sign of bullying or poor management, because we will face more and more of that the older we get, especially after age 40, so we must learn to engage and fight -- office politics, influencing, persuasion...

Sure, at some point it's time to move but it's a lot less than you might think and only after certain goals or objectives are realized.

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!


Who do I find to be among my most appreciative clients?

Well, I've noticed that for the individual career or executive coaching clients (as opposed to group-based skills training), the most appreciative clients (based on the feedback as well as unexpected gifts and dinners I've received) fall into broad two categories.

1. The Long-term Unemployed and the Chronically Underemployed.

These are clients who often have all but given up hope or who feel that their lives and careers are now on a depressingly difficult linear path.

I find that there's nothing like working to assess their situations, take a skills inventory, develop a gap analysis and then tear down and rebuild them from the ground up, equipping them to not just land "suitable employment" but to land a job that puts them back in the "race" or to where they were supposed to be before they hit difficult times.

2. The Victims or Targets of Office Bullying and Office Politics.

There's two aspects to this.

One aspect is helping the victim to carve out some breathing room as well as develop the ability to maintain their job/income/paycheck while considering options and an action plan.  This may be to keep their job and undone the work of the bully, transfer out to a new group or division or move on to a new company.

The second aspect, and I must say my favorite aspect, is working with a client to efficiently and effectively take out the office bully or politicker. This often entails setting snares, traps and/or pitfalls whereby the bully or politicker is hanged by their own petard.

This most often resolves itself when. using the proper techniques and methods, the bully or politicker has their actions exposed and/or reputation ruined (due to their own actions). In other cases, we'll see the bully or politicker fired or, of their own accord, they will see that there is no future and promptly leave of their own accord.

I have had great success with this across industries from high-tech, startups, pharma, medical devices, banking, insurance, commercial real estate brokeragess to fashion and luxury goods as well as across countries and cultures  from the US (north, south, east, west), Japan, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Australia, England, Germany, France and beyond.

The greatest feeling of all of this  is to enable and empower the "good guys" to win, effortlessly and completely.

After all, shouldn't the good guys win once?

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!

Over the years I've seen a few patterns emerge from otherwise talented people:

1. They give up too soon. As soon as the going gets tough, they fold. Often this is due to the obedience / approval seeking behavior taught within the school system. That may be fine for a student who just needs to graduate, but in the "real world", that is, post-school life, well it will harm you and your career often greatly.

2. Many folks label and then internalize valuable market feedback as "failure". Let me be clear here: It's only failure if you:

(a) label it as failure
(b) don't learn from it
(c) refuse to get back up

Stop labeling your experiences as a "failure" and start extracting value from these experiences by conducting post-mortem review. These reviews can be as simple as spending 10 minutes thinking what you learned, good and bad, from this experience, making some notes and seeing what could be tweaked or improved next time. Beyond that, see your "failure" for what it is -- a learning experience. And when we are learning, we make "mistakes" - they different between failure and mistakes couldn't be clearer.

(a) a failure is an outcome, not one event. It means you most likely haven't learned and the process is over because you didn't get back up.

(b) mistakes happen when we learn. It is an ongoing process and the most valuable part of the mistake is the lesson or lessons that we learn. 

Start to reframe your view of the world that way and see how fast you will improve.