Obviously, your career growth largely depends on your professional skills and on how much you contribute to achieving the common goal. However, how your colleagues see you matters a lot, too. So the impression you create could affect your chances to climb up the ladder.
Here are five behavior patterns which are more likely to ruin your reputation as a professional and so hindering your career growth.
1. Unconcern
When your supervisor is looking for someone who can take over the responsibilities of one of your colleagues, who needs some time off the office, you back off while someone else willingly takes the challenge on. That’s bad for you. By doing someone else’s job, you actually enlarge the scope of your knowledge and skills. And your boss won’t see you as a life-line, anyway.
2. Deflated Promises
You could be the hardest-working employee. But once you’ve failed to keep your promise or met a deadline, your co-workers and supervisors will have doubts if they can rely on you or assign responsible matters.
3. Know-It-All
That’s great when you bring your useful ideas or calculations to the table during the discussion of some urgent problem, helping your “stalled” colleagues to find the right direction. Remember, however, that if you do it with heavy-handed approach or overenthusiasm, it could feel like you are commanding rather than suggesting your point. You could draw condemnation from your co-workers. That kind of behavior is particularly harmful when discussing big joint projects which require effective collaboration. Be considerate when you put forward your thoughts and respect the right of others to dispute them, whatever hard you believe in them. Then your contribution will be seen as positive, though your advice might not be followed.
4. Escaping Responsibility for Failure
Any attempts to excuse bad performance always look disgraceful and unprofessional. So if you’ve screwed up, face the challenge openly and try to find ways to right it and make sure it won’t happen again.
5. Gossiping
When your office is humming with gossips and complaints about the job, don’t get involved. It’s not a bad thing to mix with co-workers, but getting involved into negative talks makes you negative. And this could upset your supervisors and impact the working relationships. Try to stay as far as possible from this kind of gossiping and mudslinging.
It is not necessarily that only big failures may ruin your promising career. Minor mistake may be enough. So ensure that your behavior never crosses the opportunities waiting for you out there.
Source of the image: flickr.com/photos/pulpolux.
