St. Louis Business Journal
Dot.com workers need new skills to work in traditional companies

By Anna Navarro

February 2002 - Jason is a dot.com casualty who has had a very difficult time making it since the collapse of his company. It's NOT because he couldn't find a job. The problem is that he failed to realize he needed to assimilate into a traditional business culture.

Jason has excellent technical skills, and when his dot.com collapsed he was snapped up quickly by a very large, multi-national company. The company was beginning to use the web for internal processes, from expense reports to employee training. Jason's expertise was a great addition.

But Jason didn't understand how different he was from the people in the company he joined, and he behaved in ways that got him fired within a few months.

The thing that got him in the most trouble was his attitude of being an equal to everyone in the organization. In his dot.com days, egalitarian collaboration led to many creative breakthroughs and was a highly valued behavior. But Jason didn't realize that ethos was unique to the culture he had inhabited, and that it didn't translate well to the broader world.

He raised eyebrows when, as the lowest ranking person in a large meeting, he tangled with a very senior manager and expressed his opinion in a way the man thought disrespectful. While he held his ground in the argument, he lost a lot of credibility in the group as a whole.

He committed other transgressions without ever realizing he was out of line.

At lunch with his boss and his boss' boss to discuss how to solve a difficult problem, he ordered scotch on the rocks. He wasn't a heavy drinker but he and his dot.com colleagues occasionally drank at work, especially if they hit an impasse that called for thinking out of the box. So he thought nothing of ordering an alcoholic beverage at lunch. His lunch companions ordered soft drinks and later wondered out loud if Jason had a drinking problem.

A week later he had lunch with two of his old dot.com buddies to celebrate the fact that one of them had finally found a job. When he returned to work with alcohol on his breath his supervisor asked him if he had a drinking problem.

Jason also had trouble adjusting to an 8:30 to 5:00 schedule. He arrived late on numerous occasions, he often stayed late to finish a project. He got in trouble for both. His boss called him on the carpet for his morning lateness. His peers sneered at him for working overtime.

The final blow came when he was put on an IT team with a man who had just been made group leader after five years in the department. He was not as bright as Jason or as technically skilled, But he expected Jason to be deferential. Jason, acting on the norms he had unconsciously internalized from his dot.com days, directly challenged him in front of the team.

When his boss fired Jason, he told him it was because of his inability to work with others and numerous other problems like punctuality and drinking during the work day.

When he came to see me, Jason was devastated. Having lost two jobs in the space of less than a year was a shattering experience. He was questioning whether he should get out of technology altogether.

As I worked with Jason, his history helped me understand why he'd run into problems. He was now in his mid-twenties and he'd never worked for a traditional company in his life. He had been a computer "geek" in high school. In college he started his own dot.com company with several of his buddies. And he rode that wave till it crashed.

His main problem was that he didn't understand that he was like an alien from a strange planet who needed to observe and imitate the behavior of the locals or get wiped out. Gradually, as we sorted through his most recent experience, he began to see that operating in a traditional business environment required a whole new set of skills: those of assimilating into a different culture.

He is now looking for another technical job in a traditional company. I will probably coach him through his first few months of work, just to be sure he is paying enough attention to the native mores, and making appropriate adjustments. But I'm not worried about him. Now that he can see through a different lens, I think he'll do just fine.

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that trains independent career strategists and consults with individual clients.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.