Dr. Robert Wiley

Avoiding 7 Key Job Mistakes

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Your Situation or Challenge:

Hi, I’m a marketing communications specialist for an electronic components company based in the Northeast.  This is my second job since graduating from college 3 years ago with a bachelor’s degree in marketing communications.  My first job was with an advertising agency, but I quickly learned that that highly competitive environment wasn’t a good fit for me.  I kept taking on things people asked me to do, just to keep up with everyone else.  I soon ran out of time and energy to get everything done I said I would.  I think I got out just in time.  I was sinking!  Luckily, I had a very good client relationship where they wanted me to join their marketing department.  I jumped at the chance.  Now, I think I’m doing pretty well in the early months of my job, but I find myself worrying a lot about making the same mistakes again.  Yes, I’m concerned that I will drown again in all the things people want me to do, but I also worry that I could fail at other things like having problems with my peers or not being taken seriously by senior management when it really counts.

Your Question to Dr. Robert Wiley:

 Can you help me with some kind of road map so I don’t crash in my journey here?

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

In previous blogs, I talked a lot about personal learning and positive action steps most people will benefit from to get a job, deliver strong first year performance, get promoted early and build sustainable career passion (and success).  In this blog, because of your questions, I am focusing my attention on managing the “dark side” of success – avoiding key mistakes that many of us make that can derail us in a current job and even longer term in our careers.  By being insightful about these potential mistakes and taking preventative actions, like in your situation, you can greatly reduce your risk of job failure and, thereby, substantially increase your probability of job and career success.

Avoiding 7 Key Job Mistakes

Over my 25+ years in human resources management and people development, I have commonly encountered the following 7 key job mistakes that often result in poor performance and even job loss:

1. Taking a job that doesn’t fit you
2. Failing to leverage your strengths and manage your weaknesses
3. Losing sight of your performance priorities
4. Misunderstanding what your manager really wants and needs
5. Failing to build effective interpersonal relationships and influence
6. Lacking a broader perspective around your job
7. Losing credibility

Below, I have identified some of the fundamental considerations for each of these mistakes and suggested practical actions for managing or avoiding them altogether.

1. Taking a job that doesn’t fit you.  I noted in my October 16, 2011 blog that a person’s risk of performance anxiety, frustration and possibly failure increases substantially when the gap between job skill requirements and their current skills exceeds about 20%.  A 20% skills gap doesn’t condemn someone to performance failure, but the probability of failure increases rapidly as the gap approaches 40% or more.  The skills I am referring to include technical / functional based “hard skills” and social / personality based “soft skills” that are needed to varying degrees in almost all jobs.  I previously suggested a systematic approach to assessing the presence of any significant job / skill gaps.  To avoid this potential derailment mistake, I suggest you avoid taking jobs where your skills gap is near 40% or greater.  This applies to promotions you may be offered as well as new hire opportunities.  Job failure often begins at the start when you take the wrong job for you.
2. Failing to leverage your strengths and manage your weaknesses.  Making sure you have the right job/skills fit as you start a job usually requires a great deal of objective insight about your own career-oriented strengths vs. weaknesses.  I previously suggested a thorough self-assessment covering strengths vs. weaknesses in several areas including work activity preferences, aptitudes and skills, core personality characteristics, work/life values, career dreams, company culture, and manager personality.  As suggested by many experts in the field of career development, it is critically important to know and leverage your strengths.  This means doing work that is strongly supported by the strengths you have or that you will rapidly develop.  It also means knowing your weaknesses (knowledge, personal characteristics, hard skills, soft skills, etc.) and either (a) avoiding work that requires substantial competence in your weak areas, or (b) ensuring that you have others around you who’s strengths will directly compensate for your weaknesses to get the job done.  Option (a) is available to any working individual, while option (b) is much more available to managers and team leaders.  For either option, what really matters is that you manage your weaknesses so they do not interfere with your job performance or derail you in your career progression.
3. Losing sight of your performance priorities.  In my December 19, 2011 blog, I recommended taking charge of creating a written performance plan, with clear objectives and measures, as a key to succeeding in year 1 on a new job.  I suggested that maintaining a sharp focus on achieving those objectives, by using a project management approach, is an important ingredient to your performance success.  It is equally important to avoid getting sucked into spending a lot of time on a daily or weekly stream of requests or demands from others that do not directly contribute to achieving your written performance objectives.  In the management world, this is known as setting your business priorities and staying focused on executing them (and getting the targeted results) before taking on less important projects or activities.  While all of us do some work activities that seem unrelated to our primary performance objectives, a guiding principle for job and career success is to never lose sight of your performance priorities (your 6-8 most important job objectives).  When you do, you can become like a sailboat without a rudder – blown about this way and that by whatever wind prevails.  Whether in sailing or in your job, the risk of doing this is running aground or capsizing.
4. Misunderstanding what your manager really wants and needs.  While most employees have multiple stakeholders (such as one’s manager, co-workers, internal customers, external customers, senior management, etc.), the one with the largest and most immediate impact on your job success is likely to be your manager.  If you do not accurately understand what your manager wants and needs from your work, your job success and security will quickly falter.  Of course a key part of understanding what your manager wants and needs should be reflected in the detailed performance plan I referred to above.  But, this is usually only half of it.  The other half involves how you do your work and how you interact with your manager so that he/she (and you) can be more successful.  You need to understand and deliver the work processes and quality of results your manager expects.  You also need to understand and deliver what your manager needs in your approach to information, communication, preparation and interaction.  As I noted in my January 17, 2012 blog, managers are people who vary enormously in their personalities and approaches to their jobs.  The most successful employees quickly learn how to interact and work with their managers in a way that effectively accommodates their personalities and management styles.  Failure to do so will soon lead to mutual frustration and disconnection with your manager.
5. Failing to build effective interpersonal relationships and influence.  Without contradicting what I’ve said above, it is also usually important to one’s job success to build effective, influential working relationships beyond the one you have with your manager.  Most employees have co-workers or other employees around them where some degree of collaboration or mutual assistance is necessary to achieve the desired results.  If so, failure to effectively collaborate can damage the results your manager expects and reflect negatively on your performance.  Even if this were not the case, other employees’ opinions of you can affect how your manager views your contribution and potential.  Many companies institutionalize this reality by periodically using written “360 degree” feedback to clarify how an individual employee is viewed by their key stakeholders.  Any substantial amount of negative feedback can damage your performance review and continuing job prospects.
6. Lacking a broader perspective around your job.  Going to work and just doing your job, no more and no less, may seem like an ok idea, especially if you usually think in terms of doing what you’re paid for.  Most managers, however, think in terms of what value your job must contribute to the results of their department, business unit and company as a whole.  If you fail to learn and communicate how your job performance contributes to the broader organization and overall enterprise results, your manager and other employees are likely to see you as narrowly focused and replaceable (somewhat like a cog in a machine).  Failure to substantially understand how your contributions fit into the bigger picture also tends to reduce the effectiveness of your basic performance because you will be less able to come up with new approaches or solutions for the business.  Senior management of your company is likely to be particularly unimpressed with employees who don’t proactively connect themselves to the bigger picture, particularly when such employees seem otherwise interested in pay increases and promotions.
7. Losing credibility.  There are lots of ways to lose credibility as an employee, all of which you should be aware of and consistently try to avoid.  Here is a partial list of some of the most potent ways to lose credibility once you have taken a job with your employer:

• Exaggerating or lying – it seems that only politicians can get away with exaggerating or lying, since the public seems to expect it in their role!  Everyone else cannot do it very much without losing their credibility.  When other employees cannot rely on what you say, they tend to denigrate and dismiss you in their minds and in their decision making.
• Failing to meet commitments – an occasional “miss” on delivering expected results can be acceptable, if circumstances dictate it and you have consulted your stakeholders ahead of the deadline.  Frequent failure to meet your commitments, either timing or results, will carry the message loud and clear that you are not reliable.  If you are not reliable in a business setting, you have little credibility since businesses thrive on meeting their commitments to customers, suppliers and employees.
• Talking negatively about others – it is all too easy for many employees to make sport out of talking negatively about others particularly behind their backs.  This may seem to some like a cool thing to do, especially when people are trying to impress others or form alliances.  However, it is a credibility killing behavior that soon backfires into distrust toward the speaker.  Listeners will quickly begin to wonder when it will be their turn to be criticized, and they can also wonder if the speaker is covering up something about themselves by focusing negatively on others.
• Failing to collaborate – cooperation across functions and business processes is almost the essence of today’s complex business organization.  It typically takes the coordinated effort of many specialized employee roles to produce, deliver and get paid for the company’s products and/or services.  Simply stated, collaboration is a business necessity up, down and sideways for the vast majority of employee roles.  When one is reluctant to collaborate on the job (or ineffective at collaborating), other employees recognize almost instinctively that this employee’s credibility may soon be at risk.  The loss of credibility in this instance has to do with violating a basic necessity of the organization.  If you do that blatantly or consistently, you will soon be seen as someone who cannot be trusted to be a team member.
• Being self-centered – while being self-centered can be related to failing to collaborate, they are not identical.  Being self-centered is often about giving most of the credit to yourself and little to others, and it usually involves an obvious pattern of focusing on your own concerns, preferences and ideas ahead of or instead of others’.  Self-centered employees may be collaborative in the sense that they expect others to collaborate with them (i.e., follow their direction or meet their needs) rather than the reverse.  With consistent self-centered behaviors, an employee will soon be negatively categorized and even shunned by many other employees.  People do not typically like feeling “invisible” or “second class” in their relationships with other employees.
• Failure to lead as a leader – while the vast majority of employees are not in management or supervisor roles, those who do must be consistently competent at leading others, or else much of their credibility in the organization will be lost.  The basics of leading others involve giving direction, engaging collaboration and motivating employees to achieve the organization’s objectives.  When a manager or supervisor cannot do this competently, the common view is that they are weak (as a leader) and, therefore, have little credibility in the organization.

To recap, there is a positive side to sustaining success in your job and career, and there is a negative side.  The positive side is based on knowing and leveraging your strengths and preferences.  The negative side is based on knowing and minimizing your weaknesses along with knowing and avoiding key job mistakes that can derail you from your job or even your career.  Take care of both sides and you will almost certainly find success!

Dr. Robert Wiley

February 6, 2012 - Posted by Dr. Robert Wiley | Career Advancement, Career Direction, Career Passion, Career Success, Co-worker Relationships, Job Decisions, Job Goal Setting, Job Objectives, Job Promotions, Manager Relationship, New Job, New Job Success, Performance Management, Performance Review, Relationship Building at Work, Uncategorized, Underemployment | assignment, career, communicate, company, company perspective, derailment, effective job skills, face to face, hiring manager, human resources, job credibility, job failure, job mistakes, job opening, job skills, leadership, managing relationships, managing up, performance, performance goals, performance priorities, personality, professional, promotion, relationship, sell yourself, strengths vs. weaknesses