Chocolate Is Good For Your Career

My first Halloween as a suburban homeowner was 2005. I had just got married in September, we bought a relatively new home in a development in Broadview Heights. Since it was a new development, every house had 3.5 kids. Expecting a Halloween apocalypse, I bought a lot of candy. There was a decent amount of candy left over, so I decided to bring the candy to work. I brought a huge plastic plain white kitchen bowl to put the candy in.

Initially I was going to put the bowl in the kitchen area, but I like chocolate, so I decided the best location for this bowl would be my cubicle. I put the bowl on a small table at the entrance of my workspace.

The few folks that I worked on projects with would pop by to ask a quick question, then help themselves to some candy. Those folks started coming by a bit more frequently for candy, and since they had already asked their work questions, we started talking about non-work stuff. I learned things about my project mates that I had not heard in the three years that I had worked there. When I saw the bowl running low on candy, I bought more candy to keep the conversations going.

Apparently word got around that the bowl was now a regular fixture at my cube, because I started getting visits from people that I didn’t work with at all. Since it’s awkward to come to someone’s cube for the express purpose of eating their candy without saying anything, everyone that stopped by had to say something. Most of those trips were short interactions, but I got to meet people that I never interacted with during the course of my work. Sometimes they would be short “what are you working on” conversations that would give me better insight into projects across the department. Sometimes I would get invited to lunch or happy hour. One person (Valerie) would make fun of my huge plastic plain white kitchen bowl while she was eating my candy (the audacity).?

The huge plastic plain white kitchen bowl helped me to get connected into the fabric of the organization in a way that I didn’t realize at the time. I became very active in one of our employee resources groups and was one of the founders for our young professional employee resource group. I joined our company’s United Way committee (I organized a Nintendo Wii Bowling Tournament as one of the United Way events, it was intense). This was all pre-kids, so I was at work a lot. The relationship building that I did across the organization was a major factor for me moving into my first manager position (a role that was way above my head). My new boss told me: “You’ll learn the ins and outs of the role, but the way you build relationships will be your strength.”

Moral of the story: if you want a promotion, put a bowl of candy on your desk.?

Actual moral of the story: find your own personal way to connect with people at a deeper level. Of course my way involved chocolate.