Grab All The Responsibilities You Can Hanle
Career Advice: GRAB ALL THE RESPONSIBILITIES YOU CAN HANDLE by
Ramon Greenwood
Each of us has three options for handling responsibilities. The
choice we make is one of the most powerful determinants of the
degree of career success we experience.
One option is to avoid responsibility whenever possible. That is
the G. I. Joe response. Recruits learn early that unless they
want to make a career of the military, "don't volunteer."
A second option is to accept responsibility when it is thrust
upon us. The commonly accepted wisdom is that this is the road
to success.
But wise careerists understand that merely accepting
responsibility is not enough. The real key to getting ahead of
the competition in the world of organizations is to aggressively
seek responsibilities.
Each of these options produces its own predictable results.
To just avoid responsibility means at best to stay in place and
in time to drift downward into the routine of bureaucracy.
To accept responsibility is to advance in lock steps with a lot
of other people in the pack who believe that is enough to
satisfy their ambitions.
To seek responsibility is the way to move ahead of one's peers.
The upwardly mobile person, however, also knows that the reach
for responsibility must never exceed the grasp - the ability to
handle it.
BE SURE YOU CAN DELIVER
Promise only what you can deliver and deliver what you promise
is wise career advice.
The irresistible urge to seek out and take on more and more
assignments is a sure sign of career health, if it is
controlled. But taking on additional assignments until there is
an impossible overload is a sure road to big headaches, if not
worse.
If your supervisor has seen you as a reliable, ambitious
producer, he will be only too glad to let you take on more and
more. However, he may not recall all that you already have on
your plate.
He gives you another responsibility and he expects you to do
your usual good job on time. But if the assignment is not
completed as promised, he forgets "what you've done for him
lately." His chagrin and disappointment will not be lessened by
the excuse, "I have had much to do. I have been here every night
until ten or eleven o'clock."
Lou Gerstner, the recently retired CEO at IBM, says the
ambitious person needs to learn early on that it is perfectly
acceptable to decline an assignment. That is, he says, if you
are already overloaded and know that you cannot deliver on an
additional project.
Far better, declares Gerstner, to say up front: "Sorry, although
I would like to do that job for you, I am so overloaded right
now that I simply can't deliver the kind of quality you and I
both want on the schedule you need. Can you give me a little
more time or can we delay delivery of another one of my
assignments?"
The message is clear. Reach out and grasp all of the
responsibility you can handle. But once an assignment is taken
there is absolutely no viable excuse for not completing it as
promised.
Ask yourself two questions:
* When I have finished an assignment, do I wait for my leader to
give me another one or do I go looking for the next task to do?
* Am I looking ahead to the challenge of increasingly difficult
responsibilities?
The answers to these questions are a sure indicator of the
direction and pace of your career.
XXX
Greenwood is a former Senior Vice President of American Express.
For information about his E-Book on "boss relationships" and to
subscriber to his f*ee semi-monthly newsletter contact him at
ramon@commonsenseatwork.com