7 Things You Should NEVER Do at Work

The first mistake I made and it almost cost me my entire career. I was working at a small and quickly growing startup. And aside from the CEO, I was the only executive in the office. Two points of context that will be very helpful in the story. First, organization structures and startups are about as chaotic as a Walmart on Black Friday. Half the team reported directly to me, the other half reported directly to the CEO, there was dotted lines all over the place, though. Second, the CEO and I had a generally good relationship based on mutual respect, and we valued each other's input. As a result of these two things, sometimes the CEO would make decisions that his direct reports didn't really agree with, and they would come to me. He doesn't listen to me, but he listens to you. Can you talk to him? I thought the fact that team members were coming to me meant that they trusted me as an advocate and recognized the influence that I had within the company. I was completely oblivious to what was actually happening there. I was the scapegoat who was willingly creating myself as a buffer from any backlash. Because as open and collaborative as that dynamic was, I also was becoming the person that was constantly questioning the CEO's decisions. This rapidly corroded our professional relationship. By the time I realized that it was too far gone. I was out of a job and I learned the lesson too late. Do not fight others battles. Looking back, there was dozens of ways that I still could have been helpful and impactful without sacrificing myself. The next thing you should never do at work is something that I'm also guilty of. And I was reminded of it last week when I accidentally texted my friend, I am disturbed instead of saying I am disorganized, a little bit of a difference there, no matter what your job is, no matter what the task is, there are baseline expectations that everyone is going to be held to at work. And the most fundamental expectation is effective communications, which includes not sending out typo written messages, I would love to send out flawless and correctly spelled messages. However, my brain is not a brain that's gonna let me do that. On more than one occasion, my emails have caused uprisings of the grammar. Regardless of your brain's disposition, we all have a lot of demands. And we are answering messages when we're on the go, and maybe not paying a lot of attention making us susceptible to autocorrect fails, we can shake our fists at the societal expectations of perfection. But at the same time, we can also help ourselves out. For instance, I use Grammarly to watch out for my typos, misspellings and nonsensical sentences. It does my proofreading for me, which saves me time, cognitive load. And let's be honest from embarrassment from typos and misstatements. I love Grammarly so much, they're not even paying me to plug them right now. Clear communication is crucial to success. And especially with hybrid and remote working nowadays, clear written communications could not be more important. And I love Grammarly because it catches my incoherence before I send it to my boss or give it as ammo to a toxic coworker. Of course, I think your ability to succeed should not be dependent on your ability to avoid typos. But it also should not depend on this. Every day I speak with talented, ambitious professionals who want to take their career to the next level. To do that they look to their boss for feedback. They look to their boss for mentorship and professional development opportunities. They want their boss to like them and advocate for them. You've probably looked to your boss for these exact same things because you know, a good boss is going to do these things and support and accelerate your career. But what happens when that boss leaves or they fall out of favor with a higher ups. Most professionals create a dependency on their boss in order to get promoted at work and it can cost them promotions and massive pay increases. You need to have advocates beyond your boss in order to succeed at work. Your boss does not have exclusivity on the decisions regarding your career growth. In fact, I'd suggest that the person most likely to create career advancing opportunities for you is not your boss. But if you're like me, you would avoid building relationships beyond the circle that you're in because the mere thought of bumping elbows with everyone makes me want to hide in a corner. But worry not because you don't need to be an extroverted networker in order to avoid this mistake. You simply need to identify the power players that can create opportunities for you and advocate for you in rooms you are not in. If you don't know who the power players are, and who has their ear and how to appeal to them, you're putting yourself at a disadvantage. Lack of clarity to the power structures is one of the reasons why I see people being destroyed by office politics at work. Knowing power structures can help you avoid office politics, take control of your career and get the pay promotions and praise that you deserve. This is so important. It is one of the focuses of my new workshop power moves mastery. This workshop is going to transform your career, you'll learn the seven power moves to escape the BS at work, increase your influence and take control of your career. Of course, power moves mastery is going to tell you more than how to do it. I'm going to walk you through exactly how you are going to implement them in your life in your career in a way that is authentic and aligned to who you are. Because I think office politics should not give you the check my description for a special promo code and you can learn more and sign up at power moves mastery.com. This workshop is also going to help you avoid the next mistake that you should never make at work even though it's probably a mistake you're making right now. Be honest. When I mentioned office politics without the egg, you probably thought that's impossible. Most people have that reaction when it comes to office politics. Because when you think of office politics, you think of your incompetent empire building boss, your co worker who takes credit for your work and the office gossip who has nothing nice to say. Those are dirty office politics. We hate those. We want nothing to do with those which I'm going to come back to in just a minute. But according to game theory, anytime that you have two players, ie two people, you've got yourself a game, which means anytime that you interact with your co workers, you're in a game setting all human interactions at work are part of the corporate politics game game theory looks at possible outcomes depending on what each player in a game chooses to do. And if we model that out for any political situation at work, the only way you're guaranteed outcome is to lose is when you refuse to engage in office politics. compounding this when you're constantly taking L's because you refuse to engage with office politics, you're making yourself a target especially for the dodgy co workers that you do not want to engage with because when you hand over the game and guarantee them the win, they're going to take it. Ironically, most professionals avoid corporate politics until they are dragged into dirty office politics, and a toxic co worker is trying to destroy the reputation, then they do the worst thing they could possibly do. It's the same response we've seen in the celebrity world recently, both in terms of what to do and what you absolutely should not do. Drew Barrymore recently made a very public blunder. Despite the ongoing writer's block at the time, which has since been resolved. She made the decision to cross the picket lines to return to production on her show in response to the backlash, she tried to justify her actions. And whether or not you agreed with her or not, one thing is undeniable, more outrage ensued, which was so intense, it actually forced her to reverse her decision, and her reputation took a hit. While that was happening, Sophie Turner, Queen of the North was also being dragged through the mud, which I made an entire video about her and her team took the approach of a non response, which made her impervious because she wasn't buying the story, which frame the stories of so wildly unbelievable, they shouldn't even be defended, which resulted in not only no one believing them, but there was backlash against the allegations made against Sophie, which actually brings me to something else that Sophie had on her side, it's something that you should absolutely have on your side, too. But you've probably been neglecting it, even though it's the difference between you being seen as a star team member who can do no wrong and your career being destroyed. Let's say that your difficult coworker dropped the ball in a project. But instead of taking accountability, they're pointing the finger at you. One of two things are going to happen here either the accusations they make against you are going to be believed and you are going to be held accountable for their mistakes, or you won't be but believability that results in accountability is not based on facts. You can have all the receipts that you did your job and some of your difficult coworkers in order to try to keep the project together. But if your boss believes you problem, you're going to get the blame. What makes or breaks the blame here is your reputation at work being intentional about creating and maintaining your reputation at work is a non negotiable for career success. At minimum, you need to know how to not destroy your reputation by saying one of the 10 things that you should never say at work I tell you about in this video.