Three habits of highly effective & ineffective employees

Let’s talk about what it takes to succeed — and not just get by — in the workplace.

Flexibility:
Do you know an employee who, every time he is told about a new goal or task, wastes a good hour grumbling about how it won’t work? Can you imagine how frustrating that is for a manager who is trying to guide strategy for his department or company?

One lesson I’ve learned having worked for a couple of successful start-ups in my lifetime is that you have to take chances to grow; this requires you to put aside any trivial misgivings you may have and just try to make things happen. If that new initiative does fail, you want to be known as the employee who tried to make things work. There’s no glory in being known as the employee who knew it wouldn’t work from the beginning.

Self-motivation:
Many employees measure their success in a company by the ratings or words in their yearly review. If their review indicates they need to take on more projects or increase their workload, self-motivated employees don’t need to be told — they just do it because some internal gauge tells them to step in when something needs to be done. You’ll seldom hear a self-motivated employee say, “That’s not part of my job description.”

Initiative:
I admit that it’s difficult to exercise initiative in some environments. There are bosses who want to control every aspect of work. This creates a workforce that is so scared of repercussions that employees learn to be comfortable “in the box.” But those employees will never be rewarded for doing just what they’re told.

One of the greatest compliments I ever received was from a manager of a different group in my company for whom I’d volunteered to do a project. He gave me the basic instructions and told me his vision of the end product. When I produced the product without having to hound him at every interval for answers to problems I figured out on my own, he said I was a “closer,” meaning that I was the type of person who could see a project through to its end.

Let’s say someone asks you to put together a model car. You’re given the raw materials and are shown a picture of what the car should look like in the end. If you have to call that person every step of the way to verify an action, you’re kind of negating the value for him. He’s not saving time if he has to babysit you. Make yourself valuable by developing your own instincts and following through on them.


OK, this one may hurt.

Think you have what it takes to dig a career hole for yourself and then stay there? If not, here are three tips that are sure to get you the kind of attention nobody really wants.

Miss deadlines:
If each person in a company operated in an independent vacuum, a missed deadline might not be such a big deal. But, as you well know, almost every action of every employee has some kind of effect, either direct or indirect, on the performance of another employee. Let’s say Person A has four days to complete his part of a project; Person B has four days; and Person C has three days to complete the parts of the project that have to happen after yours is complete.

Since you’re not that hung up on specifics like deadlines, you take another day to get your portion of the project done. Person B has now missed an opening window of time for getting his portion launched so he, in turn, borrows another day. Now poor old Person C finds himself at the end of the project, and his deadline is one day away. As in DEADLINE. Not Ailing Gray Area. Person C probably has to work late and miss his daughter’s soccer game where, consequently, she scores the winning goal. And it’s all your fault.

Complain too much:
OK, look, most people like to complain. They do it more often out of frustration if they feel like it’s not feasible for them to take any real action — but that’s not letting you off the hook. Like it or not, your job is to make things happen for the company you work for. If you can find fault with everything that entails (everything legal, that is), your input will lose its value. Constant complainers have no credibility.

Of course, you complain because you think you know better than those who make the decisions. Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. Either way, you don’t want to get a reputation as the person who will point out all the bad aspects and have to be dragged kicking and screaming into every new endeavor. It’s exhausting for everyone you work with.

Be the company doormat:
This is the Complainer’s polar opposite, but it’s just as toxic. Are you the guy who helps everyone? The one everyone knows they can dump work on because you’re so nice? And if everyone likes you, they respect you, right? Wrong. Your manager probably interprets this helping tendency as an inability on your part to set boundaries. The ability to set boundaries is something you need to have if you want to move up in the company.

Although your intentions are good, your desire to help everyone may result in your workload being too much to handle, which could make you a deadline-misser (see my first point), and you don’t want that.

Source:Internet