10 Ways to Poison Your Career

Your career is your most valuable financial asset and managing it correctly can earn you millions of dollars in extra income throughout your lifetime. Part of managing it correctly is making sure you don't torpedo all your hard work by doing something stupid. As this piece on ten ways to poison your career from Career Builder says, "it takes anywhere from three to 15 months to find the right job -- yet just days or weeks to lose it."

The same goes for your career. It takes years to develop a good, solid reputation, but you can lose it in a few months. How? here are Career Builder's ten ways to poison your career:

1. Possessing Poor People Skills

2. Not Being a Team Player

3. Missing Deadlines

4. Conducting Personal Business on Company Time

5. Isolating Yourself

6. Starting an Office Romance

7. Fearing Risk or Failure

8. Having No Goals

9. Neglecting Your Image

10. Being Indiscreet

My thoughts on these based on my 18 years in the working world:

1. If you can't get along with people, your career is going to be significantly hindered. Yes, you even have to learn to deal with the jerks -- and there are a lot of them, unfortunately.

2. Being a one-man-show will only get you so far. Again, you need to work with (and through) people.

3. This is one that really burns me as a manager. If an employee of mine is consistently late, he's not going to get far in my organization.

4. I'm ok with a certain amount of personal business being done on company time -- especially for those employees who I know are working on business stuff after hours and on weekends.

5. See my thoughts on #1 and #2.

6. Don't do it. I did early on in my career and let me just say this -- 9 times out of 10 it ends as a very bad situation.

7. You have to take risks to be successful -- but be sure they're reasonable risks. If something you thought of goes south, most of your supporters will abandon ship and claim they didn't support it (I've actually had this happen to me). You need to at least show it was a reasonable course of action in order to survive the storm.

8. If you don't know where you're going, that's where you'll end up -- or something like that. Part of managing your career effectively is to set goals and work to achieve them.

9. Yep. This is what Career Intensity is all about and one reason I love the book.

10. Use common sense. Please. And be considerate. Simple, common courtesy goes a long way in the workplace.

Comments

[Matt Laswell]

That's an interesting list, and I agree with pretty much everything there. Interesting, though, that there is little said about integrity in the workplace. Getting a reputation as a snake will usually hurt your career pretty badly.

Unless you're a car salesman, I suppose.

--
Matt Laswell

[Financial Reflections]

In my opinion, #1 is far and away the most important. I work in technology and have seen more people let go for personality issues than outright technical incompentence.

[partiallobotomy.com]

I would expand "Missing deadlines" to "Not keeping your commitments". If you tell someone you're going to do something -- whether there's a timeline attached to it or not -- your competence and integrity are about to be demonstrated.

If you don't follow through, you've just provided proof that you either fell behind or you don't care. In other words, it's proof that you lack competence, integrity, or both.

--
Paul Eastham