You may be proactive with your training and skills upkeep. You may be taking workshops and attending conferences in your field to make sure you’re up-to-date with all advancements and expectations of your work. Maybe you even have some of the best ideas and input at your organization. And yet, you may still feel unfulfilled and underwhelmed with your career trajectory as a leader. After all, your hard skills are not all that’s necessary to succeed in a given job function.
You’ll need to examine and consider what soft skills you may or may not be able to improve upon. It could very well be the difference between having unsuccessful and unfulfilling career and having the career you’ve worked so hard to earn.
5 Ways to Improve Your Career Trajectory
As Kerry Goyette writes in “6 Habits That Hurt Your Career — and How to Overcome Them,” those in leadership roles often practice detrimental habits and behaviours that limit their abilities to lead effectively and grow their career. These are often characterized as “derailing” habits—those that inhibit the abilities of team members and their collective strengths.
And these habits, as Goyette notes from psychologists Eric Nelson and Robert Hogan, are often the main reasons a team does not function as effectively as they otherwise would be able to.
What’s worse is these derailing behaviours initiate from the limbic system—that is, the part of the brain that triggers our flight or fight response—meaning these habits can be difficult to break.
It all starts, however, with acknowledging existing patterns and actively working against such behaviours by replacing them with beneficial ones. Take, for example, the first way you can improve your career trajectory as a leader.
1. Do Not Stray Away from Conflict
Conflict avoidance, Goyette notes, is one of the main ways leaders fail their teams. And conflict avoidance is not merely avoiding difficult conversations with employees. It’s rather about using avoidance as a means of masking insecurities and uncertainties.
To break this pattern, then, Goyette suggests labelling your tendencies to avoid conflict; this makes it easier to acknowledge and approach. Then, write down an action plan that you may take to confront the source of the problem head-on.
And as Goyette admits, this can sometimes be challenging to do on one’s own. So, seek advice from others, whether they are a superior or someone external (an expert in leadership management, for example). This way, you can be sure that you are both addressing the areas of conflict head-on and are doing so in a way that holds you accountable.
2. Reflect Meaningfully on Decisions before Acting
Many leaders, Goyette notes, act impulsively when working with teams. This might happen as an emotional response to a stressful situation. But it may also be a habit that comes out of wanting to get out of an uncomfortable situation quickly.
Nevertheless, this impulsive behaviour can be both detrimental to your own work and to the cohesion of your team. Impulsiveness can often mean there is a lack of consideration for others, meaning team members might get hurt in your processes. But moreover, it can also mean acting without meaningful reflection on past lessons, so you may have the tendency to fall back on bad habits.
In order to avoid impulsive behaviours, then, and to more meaningfully reflect on your decisions before acting, Goyette suggests you consider the following:
- How might your intended actions be perceived by others inside and outside the organization?
- What kind of experience might this action create for my coworkers and those following my direction?
- What might I be missing or fail to acknowledge in this course of action?
Even a brief moment of pause to reflect meaningfully on your plan of attack can better inform how your actions might play out. And this small step might very well save you from making a critical mistake.
3. Take Ownership of Your Actions
As leaders, we often feel we need to role model perfect behaviour; after all, we want to be the change we want to see in the workplace. But, of course, wanting to model perfect behaviour can lend itself to harmful ideas of perfectionism. And when you inevitably make any kind of mistake, you might then feel the need to place the blame elsewhere.
This might manifest in suggestions and thoughts of being blameless because
1) you/your team did everything they could, and therefore could not be responsible for failure, or
2) you lack power or control that might have allowed you to overcome such obstacles, therefore rendering you the victim.
Both of these ideas, however, allow leaders to avoid responsibility and accountability—meaning nothing will change.
To break this pattern then, you will need to actively take responsibility of your actions, acknowledge where you personally and your team went wrong, and hold yourself and your team accountable for such actions.
4. Overcome Your Need for Control
As with the previous point, leaders are notorious for not being able to relinquish control. This may be because leaders feel the need to avoid failure. It may also be because leaders sometimes feel a need to assert control over others to reassert the hierarchies within the company.
But no matter what your intentions are, an overuse of control will inevitably manifest as unhealthy workplace habits, such as micromanagement.
If you find yourself micromanaging your team members’ work or are having difficulty releasing control, as Goyette suggests, consider replacing your helicopter habits with periodic check-ins.
That is, instead of hovering over and having to have a hand in each employee’s work, take a step back to only periodically return to an employee’s task to ensure they’re hitting their goals and are continually improving their metrics.
This can both empower employees—namely, by showing that you trust them at least enough to work on tasks on their own—and demonstrate that you’re willing and happy to support them in achieving their goals.
Eventually, you may feel comfortable checking in with employees less frequently, thereby releasing that much more control and allowing them the ability to learn how to constantly self-regulate.
5. Abolish the Idea of Perfection
Perfectionism is often the most difficult challenge to overcome in the workplace. This is because too little effort toward perfection can manifest as missed goals and opportunities. But too much perfectionism, however, can be equally as restricting and detrimental to growth. After all, if you never feel your work is good enough—that is, perfect—you may never find yourself able to hand it in.
So, striking that balance between effort and acceptance of imperfectness is key.
Here, Goyette suggests checking in with the expectations and standards of others. This way, you can be sure your work is hitting the marks it needs to. Check in with others, then, periodically to make sure each step of the way, your work is where it ought to be. This can also help reduce chances of needing to redo work that was incorrectly done in its entirety.
Then, encourage your workers to do the same. This will also encourage you to check in less periodically with your employees and enable them to do so on their own. In turn, this will inevitably foster a more mentor-mentee-based relationship with your employees, rather than one of control and hierarchy.
Do you recognize any of the aforementioned negative habits recurrent in leadership roles? How have these impacted your relationships with your colleagues in the past? What changes have you made since recognizing these patterns? And how have these actions changed your relationships in your organization?
Leave a comment on our LinkedIn post for this blog sharing your experience. We can’t wait to hear your insights.
