You might figure that if you do good work, you don’t need to worry about being fired. But there are some habits that can jeopardize even the best employee’s job — from getting angry at work to being more concerned with having friends in the office than with doing your job, and much more. Over at U.S. News & World Report today, I talk about habits that can get you fired. You can read it here.
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Number four is probably my biggest pet peeve ever. It drives me absolutely crazy to hear someone say, “That’s not my job.” You work here. Yes, it is.
Number three is pretty aggravating, too. We have one person who always makes an excuse as to why something wasn’t her fault when it clearly was. Doesn’t matter if it’s a piece of paper that fell on the floor. It’s not her fault and she can prove it.
I just cracked myself up b/c I left a comment on the US News site, but I accidentally typed the “captcha” as my name. I was wondering why it seemed like I had to type the captcha twice! So yes, hstori glama is me!
I agree with Dawn. #4 is my least favorite. No one likes to hear the word “No,” so if it’s in your power to say “Yes” and help someone out without breaking any legal or ethical rules, then do the latter. The former only gives you a bad reputation and makes you seem less like a team player and more like a lone wolf.
#3 is my coworker. I ran a meeting a few weeks back about all of the little things holding us back as a team, and wanted people to open up about why they weren’t solving problems that were in their courts. I was so past the “I can’t believe xxx is so lazy, when will he do it!” and just concerned with getting things done and understanding why they weren’t. Most people had (albeit excuses) good, workable answers to why certain things weren’t moving along as planned.
I, being the person at which all projects come together (i.e. I am the ONLY person to see EVERYTHING), I realized one person consistently makes accounts make alot less money than they could. So we have tens of accounts making 50% of what they could. This was always my suspicision, but one account we just stole from the competition and so I know their potential is 5X what he planned them for.
His reaction? Oh, every suggestion I have he already implements. He is just given bad customers with no potential. He can’t get to work because he has too much on his plate, even though he complains day to day that his biggest project is stalled. Just a bunch of excuses…..I trully thought I would hear “I can’t increase their revenue because of xxx,” or “the customer wants to start conservative,” or “I don’t know how to do or sell or plan xxxx,” or “the sales rep isn’t helping me,”…..there are tens of good answers for the #s I see. But he can’t even admit there is a problem, much less one caused by him. UUGGGGHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What I am curious about is managing the workload. Everything gets dumped on my department’s plate. I have a workplace where everything piles up on my department. It has gotten to a point where we are working from home, through lunch and before and after our 9-5 union shift.
Sorry I cut off my post. We are constantly having to defend ourselves from being even more overworked. We cannot get our jobs done and priorities change constantly. We have asked to have a list of priorities but no one has been able to give them to me. We are told to start then stop various projects then go back to them. I think you have good ideas though I don’t think they really fit some workplaces.
I’d say the flip side of #4 is probably true too. The employee who thinks everything under his/her responsibility. (Unfortunately, I’m probably this person!). Although I try not to say anything unless it’s something that is crucial because I don’t want to step on other people’s toes. In our dept, it’s such a fine line. If there are mistakes on our dept’s website, should I point them out?
On #4, I used to be very willing, without complaints, to help around with things that weren’t strictly in my description. However, one problem I found is that then you become “the guy” that gets the crap that nobody else wants to do — specially if you do a very good job, which is ironic. Eventually I was left with very little time to do the things that I really enjoy and am interested in, and went to school to learn, which sucks.
What aggravtes me too is that some folks (in my group, one person in particular) are given special treatment in that they get to work only on what they like, yet they get promoted, and given an office (while actual project managers, and people with the same title as this person have to sit in cubes).
Recently, this person dropped the ball in a major way with a critical audit report that needed to be updated as part of an overall project. He tried to shift the blame on the rest of the team by saying that we never made him aware of the project, but, unfortunately for him, I had a months long email trail proving he was a recipient in many of the emails, and an invitee on many of the meetings.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, though, he gets treated with kids gloves all the same. He let the problem drag on for more than a week, while our boss got pissed off every day that the problem wasn’t fixed. Instead of telling it to him, though, he would tell us who didn’t know about this dude’s process. Eventually he did fix it, but if we had let something that we were responsible for maintaining drag in the way he did, we’d probably get a yelling/breaking session.
Needless to say, I’m already looking for a new job.