Goodwill is easy to gain at work for a tautological reason: you’re working at that job or for that client. Therefore, by definition, on day one, he has goodwill towards you. If they don’t, they wouldn’t have hired you. Rare are the cases in which you hire someone you don’t have positive feelings for, or positive expectations for. (There are exceptions: what if for legal reasons they are forced to hire you against their will? What if the person who hired you is different than your direct manager? What if you’re in a country where there is culturally very little goodwill towards people they don’t know well? And so forth. But even if your case is the exception and the Goodwill wasn’t there to begin with or was hard to win—the conclusions and suggestions from this chapter will still stand strong regardless.)
Half of this entire series is about getting goodwill from your boss or client. Treating them according to these principles should result in massive amounts of goodwill from them. In my experience, this will always be the case unless they are a true [insert offensive word here]. And if you do great work, for the work itself—even better, and even more goodwill.
But today’s chapter is concerned with an important fact about goodwill: it can be lost in an instant. With one slip, months or years of goodwill-building are gone. There are a few things in life that are hard to gain but easy to lose: money is a classic example. But goodwill, particularly in a work context, falls into another category: easy to gain, but even easier to lose.
Goodwill, in this sense, is comparable to trust. So, think about it from a trust-building angle. Since your relationship with your boss or client is another type of relationship, it’s easy to understand it by looking at it from the eyes of another relationship, like dating. Just imagine your long-term girlfriend or boyfriend—with whom you’ve built up years of high trust—one day makes That One Near-Unforgiveable (Or Just-Unforgiveable) Big Mistake: years of trust vanish in an instant.
It’s the same with your boss or client. Just think about extreme examples: if your boss catches you stealing money, he will think you’re a thief and depending on the amount will act accordingly. However, even if you only stole a tiny amount, he’ll trust you a lot less with money.
The same holds true for even smaller offenses than theft. In fact, it holds true for tiny little things that you may not even register as problems.
He catches you one time getting really, really angry for no reason, then he thinks, “He got angry for no apparent reason. Therefore, I need to trust him a bit less around clients, because he may get angry with them for no reason.” That may not result in any immediate action change on his part, but it’s a little fact he will note. Enough little facts will result in a behavior change towards you on his part.
He catches you one time shipping a product with dozens of errors that you didn’t catch but you should have, then he thinks, “He did truly mediocre work, failing at the basics. Therefore, if this keeps up and isn’t a one-time thing, I will need to double-check his work—oh, how disappointing.” That may not result in any change on his part, and he’ll continue giving you the benefit of the doubt, but he’ll note it and with enough little notes, things will change.
The conclusion is, you need to always be on your best behavior, even for the small comments and small actions.
To make this easier for you, you may want to derive a set of rules that you can follow to ensure you are never in situations that are more likely to result in your own bad behavior. You need to create your own rules, and follow them, because everyone knows their own Achilles’ Heels better than anyone else’s. But for inspiration, here are two rules I follow myself in work contexts that may be useful for you to consider: I never discuss politics in a way that could reveal my political opinions on hot-button issues and I never drink more than a few sips of alcohol in business contexts. What rules would work for you?
Why does this even matter at all? For a simple reason, that is easy to forget, even though you shouldn’t. In almost all cases, your work or contract (your employment) depends more than anything else on the other side’s goodwill. It’s a precious gift, and treat it as such.
