St.Louis Business Journal
A SLIGHTLY DISHEVELED STYLE CAN WORK, BUT NOT FOR JOB HUNTING

By Anna Navarro

May 2007  

Author's note: Client stories in this column are based on actual situations fictionalized to protect privacy and told with permission.



Somewhat disheveled people can be very productive. They often make important contributions, but just as often they struggle with getting recognition and finding jobs.

Hal was a tax attorney whose clients loved him and who billed a lot of hours. He was a little disorganized, and often a little late, but he ultimately did a great job of whatever he was asked to do. Though his desk was piled high with papers, he knew exactly where to find everything. He often came up with brilliant solutions to puzzling problems that had been dogging everyone.

He worked in a very “buttoned down” firm that didn’t treat him well. He was underpaid relative to other lawyers who billed fewer hours. Worse, he was the consistent dumping ground for support staff who performed poorly and were being given one last chance before being booted.

He knew he needed to leave because he was never going to fit in with the culture of the organization. But his efforts to look for another job hadn’t been successful. He came to see me to help him figure out what to do differently.

It wasn’t hard to figure out what the problem was.

In our initial meeting he came across as the proverbial absent minded professor. During conversation he had a way of pausing after being asked a question that left the impression he wasn’t really paying attention. It became evident later that he was developing an insightful answer. But the pause made me feel abandoned in the midst of a discussion.

It had also been too long since his last haircut, his shoes were unpolished and down at the heels, his clothes were rumpled.

We dealt with the easy items first. I suggested he get his hair trimmed, his clothes cleaned and make sure his shoes were in good repair and polished. His assignment was to come to our next meeting dressed as if he was going to an interview.

He showed up for our session impeccably dressed and asked with a smile if that was all there was to fixing the problem. That was a great opening for discussing the need to stay in visual and verbal contact with the person he was talking to.

He understood the problem once I described it, but it was an established habit that he had trouble breaking. We did some role playing to see if he could alter his behavior, but after a few tries he would slip back into his normal way of operating and leave me in the midst of a conversation to ponder something in his mind.

Finally I suggested that he consider raising the issue early in his interview. I suggested he say, "People have told me that I have a disconcerting habit of seeming to go away in the midst of a conversation. I hope you will bear with me if that happens. What’s going on is that I am thinking hard about what you’ve just said.”

He was comfortable with this approach so I asked him to start each of our future sessions by working that comment naturally into our conversation. He never failed to do it gracefully and with humor, and from then on I found myself dealing easily with those moments when he seemed to space out. We couldn’t eliminate the habit, so we introduced a new one that normalized his odd behavior for interviewers.

Hal also needed to find a law firm that would value him for what he could contribute and not hold his slightly disheveled and odd way of operating against him. Otherwise he could end up in the same situation he was currently in.

I urged him to look for clues about whether prospective employers accepted and valued people with a non-buttoned down style. Among other things, I suggested he asked to tour offices to see if there were any “pilers” (versus “filers”) among the senior partners. He also did some discreet networking among his peers to get information about firms' culture and operating style.

It took nearly a year, but Hal was ultimately able to find a firm that was a good fit and treated him fairly. He was careful to use a very buttoned down approach when he interviewed them. But he determined through direct observation and gathering information from his network that the firm had several highly valued partners whose style of operating was a little odd and somewhat similar to his own.

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.