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The Helm Report: Tools, Tips, &
Techniques for avoiding hiring mistakes and developing
people
Published on the second Thursday of each
month
Barbara Otto, Editor (mail to mailto:botto@helmtest.com
Visit us online at http://www.helmtest.com/
Word count for this issue – 851
Approximate time to read = 3
minutes
This
Month: ARE YOU AN EXCEPTIONAL EMPLOYEE?
This email is typical of several I
received regarding the December and January
newsletters:
“I
enjoyed your article about how to hire people who will be
exceptional employees. And that got me to
thinking, ‘Am I an exceptional employee?’ I think I do pretty
well, but I guess there’s always room for improvement. So, do you have any
suggestions for how those of us who already see ourselves as
good employees, but recognize that we could do even
better?”
Good
question! I think
that most of us think of ourselves as being good at our jobs
but, as the email points out, there is always room for
improvement. Here
are three suggestions for ratcheting up your professional
competence.
Suggestion #1: Engage in a hard-nosed
evaluation of yourself
There are two parts
to this evaluation. First, evaluate the
current state of your job knowledge, skills, and your ability
to handle your position’s duties and responsibilities. To do this you need to
take a cold, hard look at your overall professional
competence.
Second, and just as important, evaluate your
management/personal style. That is, evaluate how
effectively you interact with your boss, your coworkers, and
your subordinates. Let’s look at these
two areas a little more closely.
Begin the evaluation
of your professional competence by listing your duties and
responsibilities.
Then, rate yourself on each one. Use a five point
rating scale where “1” is “Excellent” and “5” is “Barely
Satisfactory.”
Next, educate yourself more thoroughly about your industry,
your company, and your job. Progress and new
developments in almost every field are coming faster and
faster. Are you
keeping up? Check
with your professional organization for workshops. Your local community
college may have a number of courses designed for working
professionals.
Think about your next promotion. Where do you want to
be in three years, in five years? What do you have to do
now to prepare yourself for promotion? What skills do you
need to add or to enhance if you already have a working
knowledge of them?
Second,
remember that being good at your job means going beyond merely
getting along with your coworkers. It actually means
growing trust in all your business relationships, encouraging
growth in subordinates who can do more and, above all, setting
the example.
Use your
Professional Development Guide to help identify areas of your
management and personal style that could be strengthened. Be open to the
possibility that you may have some bad habits. Face head-on those
things about yourself that need changing. Use the Action Plan at
the back of your Professional Development Guide to formulate
specific actions that you can take to strengthen both weak
areas and enhance areas that are already strong. Ask a couple of
coworkers whom you trust for their feedback on your action
plan. Pick the
action step that could make the greatest difference and do
that action step at least once a day. When you find that you
do that action step regularly, go to the next most important
action step.
Suggestion #2: Push yourself out of
your comfort zone
Too much
comfort can make us lazy, and most of us have a few areas of
our work that we just coast through. For some tasks, “good
enough” may be good enough, but you should look for
parts of your job where the distance between “good enough” and
“Excellent!” can make a big difference. Ask yourself what it
will take to get results that go beyond “good enough.” Growth happens when
you push yourself out of your comfort zone. Remember, getting out
of your comfort zone is uncomfortable. But that doesn’t mean
you can’t do the uncomfortable new thing; it only means that,
because it is new, you haven’t yet developed a sense of
comfort doing it.
Becoming comfortable with the new action or step will come
with repeated use of it.
Suggestion #3: Find ways to
work smarter
Look at your
routine tasks with a new eye. Based on your
knowledge of them and this fresh perspective, put your mind to
figuring out how could they be done more efficiently, better,
faster. Try
writing your own job description, based on what you really do
rather than what the company’s job description says. Look at each task you
have written down and ask why it is important. Write down your
answer. Then set
this aside for a day or two and come back to it with a fresh
eye. Evaluate
what you have written as if it were the job description of a
subordinate that you were going to counsel on how to get more
done. Write down
the three most important changes needed in order to get better
results. Be sure
that you are specific in the behavior needed to make these
changes.
Have You Heard All Of This
Before?
These
suggestions are not new, but they will work if you will work
them. Someone
once said that a good definition of “crazy” was doing the same
thing in the same way and expecting different results. If you want different
(better) results, you have to do things
differently.
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