What exactly is a key player? A "Key Player" is a phrase that I've heard about from employers during just about every search I've conducted. I asked a client—a hiring manager involved in a recent search—to define it for me. "Every company has a handful of staff in a given area of expertise that you can count on to get the job done. On my team of seven process engineers and biologists, I've got two or three whom I just couldn't live without," he said. "Key players are essential to my organization. And when we hire your company to recruit for us, we expect that you'll be going into other companies and finding just that: the staff that another manager will not want to see leave. We recruit only key players."
究竟什么是关键人才？“关键人才”这个说法，我几乎在每一次招聘过程中都从雇主那里听到过。我请一位参与近期招聘的客户——一名招聘经理——给我下个定义。他说：“每家公司在某个专业领域都有少数几名能让你放心把工作交给他们的员工。我的团队有七名工艺工程师和生物学家，其中有两三个人是我无论如何都离不开的。关键人才对我的组织至关重要。我们委托你们公司招聘时，期望你们到其他公司找到的正是这种人：别的经理不愿看到离职的员工。我们只招关键人才。”
This is part of a pep talk intended to send headhunters into competitor's companies to talk to the most experienced staff about making a change. They want to hire a "key player" from another company. Every company also hires from the ranks of newbies, and what they're looking for is exactly the same. "We hold them up to the standards we see in our top people. If it looks like they have these same traits, we'll place a bet on them." It's just a bit riskier.
这是给猎头人员打气的一番话，目的是让他们进入竞争对手的公司，劝说最有经验的员工换个工作。他们想从别的公司挖来一名“关键人才”。每家公司也会从新人中招聘，而他们寻找的特质完全相同。“我们会用公司顶尖人才的标准来衡量新人。如果他们看起来具备同样的特质，我们就会在他们身上押一注。”只不过这样做的风险更大一些。
"It's an educated guess," says my hiring manager client. Your job as a future employee is to help the hiring manager mitigate that risk. You need to help them identify you as a prospective "key player".
“这是一种有根据的判断，”我的招聘经理客户说。作为未来的员工，你要做的是帮助招聘经理降低这种风险。你需要让他们认定你是一名潜在的“关键人才”。
Trait 1: The selfless collaborator. John Fetzer, career consultant and chemist, first suggested this trait, which has already been written about a great deal. It deserves repeating because it is the single most public difference between academia and industry. "It's teamwork," says Fetzer. "The business environment is less lone-wolf and competitive, so signs of being collaborative and selfless stand out. You just can't succeed in an industry environment without this mindset."
特质一：无私的合作者。职业顾问兼化学家约翰·费策最先提出这一特质，尽管人们已经对此谈论很多，但仍值得重申，因为它是学术界与产业界最明显的区别。“关键是团队合作，”费策说，“企业环境不像学术界那样崇尚独行和竞争，因此合作与无私的表现格外醒目。没有这种思维方式，你不可能在产业环境中取得成功。”
Many postdocs and grad students have a tough time showing that they can make this transition because so much of their life has involved playing the independent-researcher role and outshining other young stars. You can make yourself more attractive to companies by working together with scientists from other laboratories and disciplines in pursuit of a common goal—and documenting the results on your résumé. This approach, combined with a liberal use of the pronoun "we" and not just "I" when describing your accomplishments, can change the company's perception of you from a lone wolf to a selfless collaborator. Better still, develop a reputation inside your lab and with people your lab collaborates with as a person who fosters and initiates collaborations—and make sure this quality gets mentioned by those who will take those reference phone calls.
许多博士后和研究生很难证明自己能够完成这种转变，因为他们过去的大部分经历都是扮演独立研究者，并努力胜过其他年轻才俊。你可以与其他实验室、其他学科的科学家为共同目标合作，并把成果写进简历，从而提高自己对企业的吸引力。介绍成绩时多使用“我们”而不只是“我”，再配合这种合作经历，就能让公司对你的印象从独行者变为无私的合作者。更理想的是，在实验室内以及合作伙伴中树立善于推动和发起合作的名声，并确保接听背景调查电话的人会提到你的这种品质。
Trait 2: A sense of urgency. Don Haut is a frequent contributor to the aaas.sciencecareers.org discussion forum. He is a former scientist who transitioned to industry many years ago and then on to a senior management position. Haut heads strategy and business development for a division of 3M with more than $2.4 billion in annual revenues. He is among those who value a sense of urgency.
特质二：紧迫感。唐·豪特经常在 aaas.sciencecareers.org 论坛发帖。他曾是一名科学家，多年前转入产业界，后来又进入高级管理层。豪特负责3M公司一个年收入超过24亿美元的部门的战略与业务发展。他非常看重紧迫感。
"Business happens 24/7/365, which means that competition happens 24/7/365, as well," says Haut. "One way that companies win is by getting 'there' faster, which means that you not only have to mobilize all of the functions that support a business to move quickly, but you have to know how to decide where 'there' is! This creates a requirement not only for people who can act quickly, but for those who can think fast and have the courage to act on their convictions. This requirement needs to run throughout an organization and is not exclusive to management."
豪特说：“商业一年365天、一天24小时都在运转，这意味着竞争也从不间断。企业取胜的一种方式是更快到达‘那里’。这不仅要求你调动支持业务的所有职能迅速行动，还要求你知道如何判断‘那里’究竟在哪里！因此，企业需要的不只是行动迅速的人，还需要思维敏捷、敢于按照坚定判断采取行动的人。这一要求应贯穿整个组织，而不只适用于管理层。”
Trait 3: Risk tolerance. Being OK with risk is something that industry demands. "A candidate needs to have demonstrated the ability to make decisions with imperfect or incomplete information. He or she must be able to embrace ambiguity and stick his or her neck out to drive to a conclusion," wrote one of my clients in a job description.
特质三：风险承受力。产业界要求从业者能够坦然面对风险。我的一位客户在职位说明中写道：“候选人必须证明自己能在信息不完善或不完整的情况下作出决定。他或她必须能够接受模糊性，敢于冒险推动事情得出结论。”
Haut agrees. "Business success is often defined by comfort with ambiguity and risk—personal, organizational, and financial. This creates a disconnect for many scientists because success in academia is really more about careful, studied research. Further, great science is often defined by how one gets to the answer as much as by the answer itself, so scientists often fall in love with the process. In a business, you need to understand the process, but you end up falling in love with the answer and then take a risk based on what you think that answer means to your business. Putting your neck on the line like this is a skill set that all employers look for in their best people."
豪特对此表示赞同：“商业成功往往取决于一个人能否坦然面对模糊性以及个人、组织和财务风险。这让许多科学家感到不适应，因为学术成功更强调谨慎、深入的研究。此外，杰出的科学既看答案，也看得出答案的过程，因此科学家往往迷恋过程。在企业里，你需要理解过程，但最终要迷恋的是答案，并根据你认为这个答案对企业的意义去承担风险。像这样敢于把自己置于风险之中，是所有雇主都希望顶尖员工拥有的能力。”
Another important piece of risk tolerance is a candidate's degree of comfort with failure. Failure is important because it shows that you were not afraid to take chances. So companies consistently look for candidates who can be wrong and admit it. Everyone knows how to talk about successes—or they should if they're in a job search—but far fewer people are comfortable talking about failures, and fewer still know how to bring lessons and advantages back from the brink. "For my organization, a candidate needs to have comfort discussing his or her failures, and he or she needs to have real failures, not something made up for interview day. If not, that person has not taken enough risk," says Haut.
风险承受力的另一个重要方面，是候选人面对失败时有多从容。失败很重要，因为它表明你不怕尝试和冒险。因此，公司总是在寻找那些能够犯错并勇于承认的人。每个人都知道如何谈论成功——求职者理应如此——但敢于谈失败的人少得多，能从失败边缘带回经验和收益的人更少。豪特说：“在我的组织里，候选人需要能够坦然讨论自己的失败，而且必须是真实的失败，不是为了面试临时编造的。如果没有真正失败过，就说明这个人承担的风险还不够。”
Trait 4: Strength in interpersonal relationships. Rick Leach is in business development for deCODE Genetics. Leach made the transition to industry recently, on the business side of things. I asked him about this key trait because in his new business role, interpersonal abilities make the difference between success and failure. "Scientists spend their lives accumulating knowledge and developing technical acumen," he says, "but working for a business requires something else entirely—people skills. The scientist who is transitioning into the business world must prioritize his or her relationship assets above their technical assets. To suddenly be valued and measured by your mastery of human relationships can be a very scary proposition for a person who has been valued and measured only by his mastery of things," says Rick.
特质四：强大的人际关系能力。里克·利奇在 deCODE Genetics 公司从事业务开发。他最近才转入产业界，并进入商业领域。我向他请教这一关键特质，是因为在他的新业务岗位上，人际交往能力决定着成败。他说：“科学家一生都在积累知识和培养技术才干，但在企业工作需要的是完全不同的东西——与人打交道的能力。转入商业世界的科学家必须把人际关系资产置于技术资产之上。一个过去只因驾驭事物的能力而受到评价的人，突然改为因驾驭人际关系的能力而被评价，这可能会非常可怕。”
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that strong people skills are required only for business people like Leach. Indeed, the key players I've met who work at the bench in industry have succeeded in great measure because they've been able to work with a broad variety of personalities, up and down the organization.
不过，如果认为只有利奇这样的商务人员才需要出色的人际交往能力，那就错了。事实上，我在产业界遇到的那些从事实验工作的关键人才之所以取得成功，很大程度上正是因为他们能够与组织内上下各层、性格各异的人合作。