Here’s a sure-fire technique you can use to destroy your reputation during your first few days on the job. You can even use these techniques to have the offer that was extended to you rescinded before you even start working! This is mighty powerful stuff! If you want to, oh, I don’t know, actually succeed on the job, then perhaps these techniques will not appeal to you so much as guidance as a warning.

Make your first week on the job a success and avoid these pitfalls.

Announcing Vacation

Want to have that nice job offer rescinded before you even start? Let the hiring manager know, after they extend an offer to you, that you plan to take a vacation during the first couple of months you will be working for them. Better yet, tell them you cannot start on the date they are asking because you will be in Hawaii.

Your goal during the interview process is to show high energy and enthusiasm for securing the job. You do this by sitting forward, looking the hiring manager in the eyes, and making a closing statement where you ask them to give you the job.

The halo effect this creates is completely neutralized if, the first days you are on the job, you announce that you have a long-standing vacation plan that you never made anyone aware of before you were made the offer. In fact, your boss is likely to get pretty ticked off.

When I’m job shopping, I cancel all vacation plans. I don’t interview for jobs when I have vacation plans pending. I recommend you do the same.

Doctor and Dentist Appointments

Shiela was on the job for less than three hours before she announced to her boss, “I have a dentist appointment I can’t reschedule this afternoon. I’ll need to leave early.” Her boss stared at her with a look of disgust, waved her hand, and the magic was over. A week later, she was fired after a couple of other incidents where she had to leave early, come in late, or take a long lunch for various reasons.

You can trash your reputation quickly by coming to your boss and asking for things. Your job, when you are hired, is to provide service to your boss and do work for them. You are supposed to be helping your boss, not asking them to help you. Anytime you talk to your boss and it sounds like, “I need something from you,” you are making a withdrawal from your account with them. Until some time has passed and you have proven yourself, there is not a balance to withdraw from, and your boss will resent your high-maintenance needy way.

Reschedule these the moment you are hired. If you lose a month or two, so be it. If you have to pay cash to go to a doc-in-the-box to get by for a couple of months - do so. Unless you are being treated for terminal cancer or need kidney dialysis to survive, your first months on the job should be relatively appointment free. Make yourself entirely available for work.

Day Care

If you are a single mom with kids in day care, say so up front and let your future employer know that you have constraints you have to work around. They deserve to know. The first day on the job, if you are packing up your desk at 4:00pm because you have a two hour commute and need to be at the day care by 6:30 to get your kids, you’re already sinking fast.

There are two important steps to take to prevent job loss due to day care: warn your hiring manager in advance of your situation, and accept responsibility for and fix the situation.

Can someone else pick up your kids? Anyone? A neighbor? A family member? No? Why not? Fix it. Why do you have a two hour commute? Move. Seriously. If you aren’t willing to move closer to work so you can work more hours, you aren’t serious about the job. Don’t be surprised when you are let go for working 7 hour days.

Working Through Lunch

Working through lunch does not entitle you to leave early. A lot of people think it does, so they tell their boss “I’m eating at my desk and working through lunch because I have to leave early.”

Here’s what your boss thinks: “Idiot.”

Working through lunch in most corporate offices is not a way to go home early - it’s expected. I didn’t say it was right, it’s just what a lot of people do. It does not entitle you to leave early. Your boss paid for you to be around when they need you. If you leave at 4pm, and your boss leaves at 5pm, your boss is unshielded and does not have you to help them for an hour in the afternoon. If you think it doesn’t bother your boss to walk up and down the cubes and see them all empty at 4:30pm, you’re wrong. It does.

You see, your boss probably does that same walk against at 7:00pm, long after you thought the work day was over, and that guy that is still sitting there hammering away? He’s your next boss.

You can choose to let that happen if you want, but realize you are making that choice.

Working From Home

Want to be despised during your first week? Ask what the work from home policy is. That’s a great way to have your boss call up the recruiter that found you and have him bless them out for bringing him lazy people to help him. You might think that work from home is the defacto standard for work these days, but it isn’t.

In a lot of offices, work from home (WFH) is indulged in only by bottom performers. Top performers show up, because they know that to be seen and to see others is to be prominent in the organization and build a reputation for success.

Even if telecommuting is offered, don’t make any use of it until you have solidly entrenched yourself and have built a rock-solid relationship with your boss.

Casual Dress

Here’s a great way to destroy your reputation early on: interview in a suit, and then show up in jeans. Let your coworkers and boss set the fashion standard within your team. Fit in. If they all wear jeans, then wear jeans and fit in. If they don’t, and you feel that it isn’t important and you do, your job performance will be meaningless and you will find yourself hovering on the brink of being let go right off the bat.

Recommendations

How do you avoid these pitfalls?

• Cancel all vacation when you start interviewing or take your vacation before you start.
• Postpone all dentist and doctor appointments until 60 days past your start date no matter how hard it was to get those dates.
• Get someone else to pick up your kids from day care.
• Commit to reducing your commute by moving closer to the office and do so quickly.
• Don’t work through lunch - work your full workday.
• Forget about working from home during the first 60 days
• Dress like other members of the team

All of these points revolve around a single, theme: You think you are entitled to certain things on the job. You think there are rules, and you believe your boss has to play by those rules. You believe that a boss that won’t let you do these things is unreasonable. You believe that success on the job depends upon things being done right.

Wrong.

Success on the job depends entirely upon whatever your boss thinks it does. If your boss thinks no one should ever take lunch, unless you are a union worker protected by labor laws and union contracts, when you take lunch, you take your career in your hands. Your boss might not get you for taking a long lunch, but when you fall out of favor, your boss can easily find some other rule to enforce that you might accidentally break in order to drive you off or destroy your ability to ever be promoted.

Should things work this way? Maybe not. But, they do work this way, and smart people learn to work with the system they have or accept the limits of their success when they refuse to play the game.