Watch Your Back, Watch Your Front

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The most satisfying and profitable learning experience is learning from other people’s mistakes. Here are four of the ever-popular classics. These are decisions that over the course of your career you continue to regret – wishing you had the time to press reset on your thought processes.

• Hiring a friend or relative: If you would hesitate to sell them a used car (you just know it is going to backfire), why would you ever think that hiring them would be a positive experience?  Correcting this mistake can be painful.
• Ignoring Office Politics:  “I’m not very good at politics” is a poor response to an important reality that all managers must deal with.  It’s all around us, so pretending you’re above it all, or otherwise ignoring it, is likely to make you the victim.
• Your good performance will take care of everything:  No, it won’t.  Not anymore. In today’s work environment image and exposure have grown in importance, to the extent that just doing a good job is no longer enough to ensure career progression, or even longevity.
• “I was too busy for networking”: I usually hear this from people in transition, from those who failed to connect with colleagues, peers and industry insiders while they were employed. You build a network when you don’t need it, so it’s there for you when you do.
  
  This is only a small part of a big list. Can you think of ill-considered practices or policies that you made during your own career, and now regret? Of course there are. Make sure that you learn from them.
   
  Based on an article by Chuck Csizmar, CMC Compensation Group