Five Ways You're Selling Yourself Short
The Find: Your performance is probably better than you're getting credit for due to these five commonly made mistakes that may make you seem less productive than you really are.- The Source: The blog Cube Rules.
- Your status reports suck - Most people have to turn in status reports... This is the perfect time to show your job performance. Yet, most of us punt the status report thinking no one pays attention to it. So we put in little, or way too much, and focus on our activities instead of our accomplishments.
- Your e-mail practices are poor - Effective performers use e-mail to show their performance. They are short, to the point, and ask for what is needed up front. Too many of us have yet to learn that long e-mails, convoluted questions and poor e-mail response times hurt your job performance.
- Meeting management - We go to way too many meetings. If we organize them, they are done poorly -- lacking organization, an agenda, the right tools for the meeting and getting to decisions. If we participate in meetings, we are not prepared for our portion, take the meeting off-topic, and don't respect the opinions of others. We're not willing to advocate our solution -- if we have one.
- You communicate poorly with management - Too often we blindingly blather on about what we think the problem is and take forever to get to a solution. We don't lay out a path that the manager can follow. When you speak to management, you need to state your opinion up front, then talk about why it is your opinion. Without a road map to follow, management won't think you know what you are talking about.
- You whine about stuff you have no control over - Every team has one: the person who whines about what Senior VPs say in a meeting. Or how if only that other group would solve their problems things would be OK. In your work, you need to focus on what you can control and influence.