Job Description Business Manager: Fill & Download for Free

I was making more than $500k/year working as a network engineer, but I’ll be the first to admit I was *very* much an outlier.I’m pretty sure most of my value came not from my skills as a network engineer, but as a supernode in the informal connectivity matrix of a Fortune 100 company. I listened to everyone who had concerns about the company, who was struggling with projects that should have been succeeding, but weren’t, or teams that weren’t working together as well as they needed to in order for the effort to succeed. I would link people together, when a resource was needed, but they didn’t know how to get in touch with the right teams to get those resources. When there were areas of the company that were having a severe crisis of faith in the mission, I’d talk to the CEO and recommend they make it a point to address it at the next company-wide all-hands meeting. I spent enough time working with the CFO’s team to grok at a high level the business drivers that the company was trying to manage, and when meeting with technical teams, I’d probe into whether they’d evaluated their project against those business needs, to see if it actually made sense to do it. Sometimes, they’d convince me the technical need outweighed the business need; but in those cases, I still provided recommendations on how to adjust the pitch to address the business objections right up front, so the CFO’s team knew their concerns were valid, visible, and evaluated, and that the team felt there was still enough of a reason to push the project forward.I wasn’t in management, nobody reported to me; but I was on stage often enough at company meetings, on camera in front of the microphone, and in people’s inbox in the company-wide mailing list enough that everyone knew me, and the CEO made a point of mentioning that if people had concerns, or issues that needed to be raised, that I was a good person to raise them with. My business card title eventually just listed “Whatever is needed” as my job title—because I worked with so many different teams, on so many different projects all around the world, it was never the same thing twice.My day-to-day job was working as a network architect, mentoring and training up-and-coming network engineers, and developing new platforms and tools for the team to use. But by itself, I don’t think I would have been paid half of what I was getting paid. Most of my value came from outside my job description, as the corporate culture and communication troubleshooter, linking people and teams together in ways the formal org chart never could.You’re unlikely to get paid that much just for doing what’s listed on a job description until you reach executive levels. But if you’re unafraid to fail, unafraid to fall, and can create a unique role, filling a need people weren’t even aware existed until you came along and made things better on a global scale…At that point, you’ll discover your value to the company goes far beyond what your job description would entail, and your compensation can be adjusted to match that.Best of luck!

Designations do not matter. Pay does. Do not fall for flashy designations during appraisals. Demand a pay raise instead.Do not climb up the ladder by pulling someone down. This ‘upgrade’ does not last long.Avoid colleagues who gossip. If he talks to you about someone, he will talk about you to someone else.If you don't like the job, quit. Do not stay and grudge.Understand that no one, not even the Founder is bigger than the system. Nobody is indispensable.The colleague who is not good at what you specialize is no fool. He might be good at something else. Respect everyone.Whenever a work is assigned to you, ask why.Do not expect deadlines to be assigned to you. Set one for yourself. Bosses do not prefer micro-managing people.If you feel you are too good for the company, quit. Something better awaits you.Know your rights.Understand that you are in a legal contract. You provide your service to your employer and he pays you in return. No one favors anyone. Be business-minded.If you are assigned work that is not in you job description,demand more money. Quit if the demand is not met. You are too good to be there.

“As a police officer, do you have a great ‘not in my job description’ story?”So… there I was, driving along, minding my own business, when…I was dispatched to an “injured animal” call on one of the main roads leading through my jurisdiction. I was told to meet the caller, who was concerned about an injured cat in the roadway, in front of a fairly busy bus stop on the road.Warning: Icky stuff described below!I arrived a few minutes later and the guy flagged me down. The “injured cat” was actually a dead “squished and popped open cat” which had obviously been hit by a large vehicle — likely one of the many buses which frequented that bus stop. In fact, it had probably been hit by a couple of those buses.I pulled up alongside the bus stop and turned on my squad car’s overhead lights. I got out to talk to the man. He was very concerned about the dead cat and wanted me to “call someone” to clean it out of the street. This was around midnight on a Friday night, mind you, and I knew that Public Works was not going to send anyone out just to clean up a dead cat. I explained that to the man, who then suggested that I clean the cat out of the street.Ummmm… no. While I agree with Zach Cooper that my job usually means doing a lot of things which aren’t exactly in my job description, cleaning animal carcasses off the street is not one of those things.I did offer, however, to let the man have a pair of protective gloves if he wanted to clean the cat up. Since my car was already in a position to block traffic from the cat’s location, I suggested he grab a couple newspapers out of the nearby box and use one to scrape the cat onto another, then he could dump it in a nearby trash can. He seemed to think that was better than letting nature take its course on the roadway, so I got some gloves for him while he got the newspapers.I showed him how to fold up one of the newspapers to make a fairly firm spatula, then he spent a few minutes moving the cat onto the layers of newspaper.Unfortunately, I was distracted by something when he went to pick the cat up, so I only got to see the aftermath of that attempt. If I had noticed what he was trying to do, I would have warned him, as the end result was of a fairly predictable nature:He apparently attempted to pick the cat up by wrapping the newspapers around it and then lifting the newspaper bundle by one end, but he must not have realized that the other end of the newspaper bundle was still open. As he lifted the bundle, the cat’s entrails fell out the back end and splattered onto his shoes.Ugh. Messy.He managed to get (most of) the cat into the trash can before vomiting. He left the splattered entrails in the street and traffic took care of them before long.