The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the business lunch is slumping of late: The new trend, it seems, is for workers to eat meals at their desk brought from home instead, a development the Journal endorses as being healthier, less expensive, and more efficient to boot.
While those may very well be true, they are all secondary to furthering someone’s career, and lunch is central to that mission. Lunch is the one time a day a person has to connect with someone who could potentially connect them to their next job, and doing away with the ritual for the sake of saving a few minutes of time is a grievous mistake—especially for younger workers.
What younger workers often fail to realize is that the majority of good jobs are handed off to someone who has a connection of some sort to the people doing the hiring. The notion that a group of earnest, well-intentioned men and women will diligently look through a couple hundred resumes of sheer strangers for a posted job opening is quaint and unrealistic. People want to hire talented, hard-working and—most of all—compatible people, but none of these traits are easy to discern on a resume or even in an afternoon of meetings.
It is an easier exercise for these people to go through their rolodexes and think of people they know who have these qualities and might be looking for a job. So they start asking around in their universe of friends and acquaintances. And—if that fails—they start asking that same group to see if any of them might know promising candidates that they can vouch for.
The key to moving up the greasy ladder, then, is to have as wide a network of people as possible, so that your name comes up in such conversations as often as possible. And the best way to achieve that is to have lunch away from one’s desk. Every day.
There is no close substitute. Sending and returning emails and talking to people on the phone are fine, but neither is a close substitute for sharing a meal. Eating a meal with someone involves a modicum of intimacy that bolsters a relationship. People tend to share more when they are talking over a sandwich instead of over a desk. Jesus knew what He was doing when he made the breaking of bread an essential part of any gathering of His disciples.
Networking is a dirty word and people who pursue relationships solely for their own financial stake deserve nothing, of course. However, friendships of any depth are worth pursuing for reasons that go beyond one’s next career move: It helps improve one’s quality of life in ways that go well beyond the potential financial rewards. And a real relationship means looking out for friends and doing favors for them as well—which can be even more rewarding, in every way.
The key to remaining gainfully employed in a job that pays fairly for the services you provide is to never let your employer be a monopsonist for your services. If your skills, contacts, and motivation to find another job completely atrophy, you are completely at their mercy for raises, promotions, and continued employment, and the typical employer shows little mercy in these situations. Never count on the kindness of someone who is your supervisor.
My fifty-something friends who have found themselves in this predicament have found their work status to be precarious: Several have received demotions and salary cuts, with a concomitant warning that their continued employment at their business is no sure thing. It has made their lives stressful and miserable, of course, but they see no viable option other than to tough it out until retirement—or a layoff.
Lunch is a great way to prevent such a thing from ever happening. It is not a substitute from being productive, diligent, and an amiable team player, but it is the best way to leverage those assets into a job that pays a salary appropriate for one’s work.
Ike Brannon president of Capital Policy Analytics, a Washington consulting firm.
