The Girl Who Gets Promotion.
How it is managed. Why one girl will get on while another will fail.
“NONE of us can think why Madge Saunders was pushed up into the job!” exclaimed a girl-clerk the other day, when she was telling me of an extremely good promotion which had been given to one of her colleagues. "Everyone thought Miss Whitty would be advanced," she went on. "She has been at the office ever so much longer than Madge, and never makes a mistake in her work, and has all sorts of certificates. It doesn't seem quite fair that Mr. Davis should have passed her over when this vacancy came along. "
INDIVIDUAL MERIT COUNTS.
ON the face of things, it did seem a bit of a conundrum, but later on in the day the business man for whom the girls worked gave me the key to the mystery.
"It is all true, so far as it goes. A good many people seem surprised at my choosing Miss Saunders for advancement," he said thoughtfully. "Some people can't realise that promotion is a matter of individual merit rather than of length of service. The fact is, Miss Whitty is an efficient worker without initiative, while Miss Saunders combines resource with trained competency. Routine workers are all right as cogs in the business machinery, but one does not usually choose them for filling posts of responsibility. It is the trained girl who can use her brain who gets on in the world."
WHY THEY "STICK IN THE MUD."
IT is worth thinking about. If you consider for one moment, it is not hard to see that the girls of the business world can pretty well be divided into two classes—the girls who progress, and the girls who stand still. There are scores of well-trained girls who have been wage-earning for years, who have given up hope of making further headway in the world, and who think it is because "luck is against them" that they cannot find the key to open the gates of promotion. Nothing of the sort. The essential thing is to realise at the outset that training and proficiency certificates in shorthand and typewriting alone will not make a girl get on, unless she also has common-sense in dealing with everyday matters—and uses it. Being a successful business girl is something more than writing letters correctly at dictation, being punctual at the office, and obeying orders.
A TRUE STORY.
ONE girl obtained a first-class position through her tactful exercise of initiative. One evening, after her employer had left the office, a telephone call came from another business man saying that he could not keep an appointment for the following day as he was going abroad in the morning. The rule of the firm was for late 'phone calls to be kept until the next day, but in this case the girl used her common-sense, and herself carried the message to her employer’s private house, thereby saving him the loss of a most important contract. Her action made the man watch her carefully. He found that he never had to repeat questions or instructions to her, and that she never asked an unnecessary question; she was accurate at the work she was engaged to do, had a reliable memory, which she used, exercised resource, studied her employer's methods and peculiarities, and took real joy and interest in her work. To-day the girl is in control of an important branch business.
Quite contrary was the case of a business friend who recently told me that: he wanted a private -secretary for some special work which he was about to undertake. He would have liked to have given the job to a girl-clerk who had been with him for several years, but could not do so because "she seems afraid to do anything unless she is actually told to do it, and my growing work leaves no time for giving unnecessary orders. If I ask Miss Blank to do something to-day which does not come in her ordinary routine work, she does it gladly enough; but it never seems to enter her head that she might do likewise to-morrow without my asking her."
Some girls are apt to think that this or that thing doesn't matter, because it "doesn't come in their actual work, " and is really a matter of no importance. Or such girl systematically forgot that her employer took no milk in his afternoon cup of tea. She was mentally marked by him as having an unreliable memory, and not to be recommended for responsible work.
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