Coming this September! Drive Your Career: 9 High Impact Ways to Take Responsibility for Your Own Success where you’ll learn the nine principles of career success, and how to implement them in your own working life. From creating great relationships with your superiors to using the power of empathy in your employee interactions, you’ll be empowered with the knowledge and personal insight to steer your career to where you want it to be.
Are you worried that you may be jeopardizing your relationship with your boss? Here are some of the most common reasons why your relationship with your boss may not be as good as you’d like. Next week we’ll go over some tips for overcoming these barriers.
When you have a positive relationship with your boss, many wonderful and career-enhancing things are possible. Opportunities, praise, promotions, pay increases are just a few. Your life as an employee is easier, you have more impact, and you’re in a stronger position to drive your career forward. When I think of the benefits of having a positive relationship with your boss, I come up with an acronym that spells the word “help.”
You may feel that you should not respond to colleagues until you have the answer to their questions or requests. Or you might assume that others know you are working on their problem and you don’t feel a need to keep them updated. You may rationalize that you are too busy to get back to anyone except your boss. But here’s why responsiveness is important.
The ability of others to connect to you frequently and instantly highlights an interesting human behavior. The speed in which a colleague reaches you creates an identical expectation as to how long it will take you to respond. Similar to a fast-paced ping pong game, your colleagues expect you to be responsive just as quickly as they got the ball to your side of the table.
“Responsiveness is the degree to which you get back to colleagues and foster progress.”
Below are some typical hurdles to accessibility and suggestions for improving them in your organization and industry.
Being Accessible does not mean you are available 24/7/52. We all have limits on the degree to which we can be reached by co-workers, and you should feel comfortable enforcing and expecting others to honor these limits.
Can you be too successful at modeling accessible behavior? Is this an example of “too much of a good thing”? We all know that sunlight is a good thing, yet too much can cause skin cancer. We know that the human body needs sugar to survive, and yet too much may cause diabetes. If you’re wildly successful at being accessible, you may find your calendar under attack.
Your goal is to make sure you are being accessible to serve the needs of others, not to become their servant.
It is not enough that you are highly accessible to your colleagues; your colleagues must also benefit from the interaction. After all, if accessibility doesn’t benefit your colleagues, what’s the point?
Being readily accessible benefits everyone. Ram Reddy is the Chief Information Officer at The Rockport Group, offering high-quality dress and casual footwear to customers globally. Despite the daily challenges he faces in his busy workplace, Ram is committed to being accessible to those who reach out to him.
Reputation is the intangible ways in which we connect with others. This is where activities and behaviors that help you be known in your organization and industry exist. I like to think of reputation as the echo you leave when you exit a room. Your reputation is what your colleagues say about you when you’re not there. Perhaps your colleagues are commenting on a presentation you just gave, an interaction you just had, or your candidacy for a promotion. Do you know what they are saying about you? More importantly, what do you want your colleagues to be saying about you?