Sabotaging your own career can happen irrespective of whether you are a non-performer or a performer!

Your career getting into serious trouble would be quite obvious if you are a non-performer. Non performance can be gauged easily by tell tale facts: inability to meet targets, falling woefully behind committed delivery schedules, inability to work smoothly in a team, difficulty in managing your sub-ordinates, perceptible lethargy at work and so on.

However, the possibility of sabotaging your career when you are a recognized performer is also a stark reality. How?

As you grow up in the corporate ladder by virtue of your performance and skills, there is yet another thing growing stealthily together with you - your egotism. This egotism at times overtakes you in your growth and if you are not watchful, it has every potential to sow the seeds for sabotaging your career.

Let us see how you have to be watchful, if you are not to trample upon your own steps of success.

DO NOT RUB WITH YOUR BOSS ON THE WRONG SIDE:

Highly skilled, knowledgeable and competent people develop a tendency to "look down" at incompetent people - and many times it includes the boss! Intentionally or unintentionally, this "looking down" gets expressed in reactions, gestures and at times, even in words.

Even the boss is only a human - he is not an extraterrestrial being. He has his ego to be buttressed, whether he is competent or otherwise. If he develops a grouse against you, he won't mind playing dirty games against you. A boss is a boss - whether he is in that position deservingly or otherwise. Your judgment about him (even if it is hundred percent accurate) does not really matter; his position has been given to him by his higher-ups and it is what matters.

So, lesson number one to learn if you are not keen to sabotage your career - be careful in giving your boss due respect to his position and do not rub him at the wrong side.

DO NOT ENGAGE IN LOOSE TALK:

Your accessibility to higher management many times will get you privileged information about the goings-on at top levels - organizational politics, advance information about promotions and demotions, possibilities of closure of plants and large scale retrenchments, confidential and sensitive information about new products' design features etc. One has to be extremely careful in keeping one's mouth shut though the temptation to boast about the knowledge of the sensitive information will be too compelling.

• 1
• 2
• 3
• next page >>

---

Add your voice

Know something about How to avoid sabotaging your career?
We want to hear your view. Write now!