You may be right for the job, but is the job right for you? John D Moulton, author of The Instant Sales Director – Ready from Day One, recalls the time he took a well-paid role without thinking it out first…
One of the most valuable lessons I learned during my furniture trade career was that job interviews are a two-way process. I spent too many years allowing companies to choose me, rather than me choosing them.
Some years ago I was flattered to be head-hunted by what was then the Stag Furniture Group. The position was sales director of the group’s William Lawrence Furniture subsidiary. The salary, company car and sheer prestige drew me in – but once on board, my joy was very short-lived.
I spent my first week with my sales team, meeting key customers and asking what their hopes were for the company’s future and how I could best help make good things happen. During the second week I met with my co-directors responsible for production and finance to ask the same questions, before drafting a provisional plan of what I believed to be a viable pathway ahead.
Well prepared, I attended a meeting with my boss, the group marketing and sales director, who had his group marketing manager by his side.
They quickly brushed off all I had prepared and set about showing me their plan to boost sales of the brand. I was shocked. Not just by their dismissiveness or learning that none of their proposals had been tested, but by a sudden realisation. I wasn’t really a sales director at all – I was a sales supervisor.
My job was to accept their brief, present it enthusiastically to my sales force, then get out there and sell alongside them.
Later I was to find myself sitting in the head office boardroom with the other group ‘sales directors’ justifying monthly results to the CEO. Neither the group marketing and sales director or head of marketing ever attended those meetings. The strategy was entirely theirs, accountability was entirely ours.
I learned many lessons from my Stag experience. The one that underpins this piece is what I call ‘Survival of The Fit.’ The products and promotions presented often failed to fit market requirements, and I was beginning to realise I didn’t fit this organisation.
In business we often hear the expression ‘survival of the fittest,’ yet Herbert Spencer's original idea – and Darwin's later use of it – was not about strength or dominance, it was about the actual fit between an organism and its environment.
‘Fit’ is a much broader concept than the narrow-minded version so often expressed by big business, and applies to individuals every bit as much as it does to corporations. Fit is not about being sure to spend time at the gym, or aggressively dominating your workplace, colleagues or competitors – it’s about being sure you actually ‘fit’ the environment you are working in.
I realised much later that I was so blown away by the offer to join the organisation that I failed to ask a few critical questions before I committed (a day in the life of this sales director, the level of control I would be granted, and how involved I would be in high-level strategy).
Instead, a tough lesson came my way – career satisfaction has far less to do with company prestige or fancy packages than being sure my own values genuinely matched those of the business I was working with.
The best opportunities are rarely those with the biggest names or pay cheques. More often, they are those where the fit is right.
