FSB Author Article
The 20 Annoying Workplace Habits You Need to Break Now
author of What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful!
- Winning too much: The need to win at all costs and in all
situations -- when it matters, when it doesn’t, and when it’s totally
beside the point.
- Adding too much value: The overwhelming desire to add our
two cents to every discussion.
- Passing judgment: The need to rate others and impose our
standards on them.
- Making destructive comments: The needless sarcasms and
cutting remarks that we think make us sound sharp and witty.
- Starting with “No,” “But,” or “However”: The overuse of
these negative qualifiers which secretly say to everyone, “I’m right.
You’re wrong.”
- Telling the world how smart we are: The need to show
people we’re smarter than they think we are.
- Speaking when angry: Using emotional volatility as a
management tool.
- Negativity, or “Let me explain why that won’t work”: The
need to share our negative thoughts even when we weren’t asked.
- Withholding information: The refusal to share
information in order to maintain an advantage over others.
- Failing to give proper recognition: The inability to
praise and reward.
- Claiming credit that we don’t deserve: The most annoying
way to overestimate our contribution to any success.
- Making excuses: The need to reposition our annoying
behavior as a permanent fixture so people excuse us for it.
- Clinging to the past: The need to deflect blame away
from ourselves and onto events and people from our past; a subset of
blaming everyone else.
- Playing favorites: Failing to see that we are treating
someone unfairly.
- Refusing to express regret: The inability to take
responsibility for our actions, admit we’re wrong, or recognize how our
actions affect others.
- Not listening: The most passive-aggressive form of
disrespect for colleagues.
- Failing to express gratitude: The most basic form of bad
manners.
- Punishing the messenger: The misguided need to attack
the innocent who are usually only trying to help us.
- Passing the buck: The need to blame everyone but ourselves.
- An excessive need to be “me”: Exalting our faults as virtues simply because they’re who we are.
Copyright © 2007 Marshall Goldsmith
Author
Marshall Goldsmith is corporate America's preeminent executive
coach and the
author of What Got You Here Won’t Get
You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful!
(Published by Hyperion. January 2007;$23.95US/$29.95CAN;
978-1-4013-0130-9) Goldsmith is one of a select few consultants who have been
asked
to work with more than eighty CEOs in the world's top corporations. He
has helped implement leadership development processes that have
impacted more than one million people. His Ph.D. is from UCLA and he is
on the faculty of the executive education programs at Dartmouth
College's Tuck School of Business. The American Management Association
recently named Marshall one of fifty great thinkers and business
leaders who have impacted the field of management, and BusinessWeek
listed him as one of the influential practitioners in the history of
leadership development. In 2006, Alliant International University
renamed their schools of business and organizational psychology the
Marshall Goldsmith School of Management.
For information, please visit www.marshallgoldsmith.com or www.whatgotyouhere.com