How Being Selfish Will Limit Your Career Success
We’re living in the Information Age, but relationships are still the currency of business – perhaps even more so, thanks to e-networking. Just as currency values rise and fall, so can the quality of relationships. The most common cause of a squandered relationship is selfishness – focusing on your own self-gratification, prioritizing your needs over others’, wanting to always be right, taking sole credit for the work of many, and other “Me First” behaviors.
Selfishness is a poor approach to effective personal branding; it has an incredibly negative impact on relationships, and relationships are the key to your career success and upward mobility. On a bigger scale, selfishness in a leader impacts the team’s morale, engagement, retention and productivity. Selfishness also makes work less interesting.
Unfortunately, “fend for yourself” is the norm in some corporate cultures. If you need help creating a more effective path, read my three-step approach for getting in the habit of giving, published in my post “Make Giving Your Personal Branding Strategy.” But be careful: not all generosity is created equal. The highest form of giving is what I call genuine generosity. It is the true antidote to selfishness and a powerful technique for bolstering relationships while increasing your personal success and fulfillment.
What is genuine generosity?
The purest and most powerful form of generosity can be defined with the following formula:
Selfless intention + Sacrifice + Need = Genuine Generosity
Let’s look at each element separately.
Selfless intention.
Selfless intention has to do with your motivations. If giving comes with an expected payoff for you, the quality of that generosity diminishes. If you have a slew of A-list sales leads, and you give one to someone with the expectation that they will give you something in return, your intention is about getting your needs met, not about theirs.
People can see through self-motivated generosity. When your intentions become apparent (as they always do), your colleague isn’t going to feel grateful; she’s just going to feel used. When you help someone, do so with no expectation of a reward. Your assistance should be a pure gift, not a loan that has to be repaid with interest.
In successful teams, members care about each others’ success as much as they care about their individual triumphs.
Sacrifice.
Let’s say you have a slew of A-list sales leads because your website generated far more interest than you anticipated; you’ll never be able to personally contact each lead before their enthusiasm grows cold. If you pass along some of these leads to a colleague, you’re being generous, but you’re not making a sacrifice. Sacrifice occurs when it costs you something to take care of the needs of someone else. Forgoing your own satisfaction – whether it’s in the form of a sales commission or something intangible, like public recognition – is an essential element of genuine generosity, which genuinely helps others.
One of today’s most valuable commodities is time. We have so little of it to spare; giving away our time can be a significant sacrifice. The busier you are, the more it means when you sacrifice the time to provide valuable feedback and mentorship or to write a personal message of gratitude or congratulations.
Need.
How Being Selfish Will Limit Your Career Success
We’re living in the Information Age, but relationships are still the currency of business – perhaps even more so, thanks to e-networking. Just as currency values rise and fall, so can the quality of relationships. The most common cause of a squandered relationship is selfishness – focusing on your own self-gratification, prioritizing your needs over others’, wanting to always be right, taking sole credit for the work of many, and other “Me First” behaviors.
Selfishness is a poor approach to effective personal branding; it has an incredibly negative impact on relationships, and relationships are the key to your career success and upward mobility. On a bigger scale, selfishness in a leader impacts the team’s morale, engagement, retention and productivity. Selfishness also makes work less interesting.
Unfortunately, “fend for yourself” is the norm in some corporate cultures. If you need help creating a more effective path, read my three-step approach for getting in the habit of giving, published in my post “Make Giving Your Personal Branding Strategy.” But be careful: not all generosity is created equal. The highest form of giving is what I call genuine generosity. It is the true antidote to selfishness and a powerful technique for bolstering relationships while increasing your personal success and fulfillment.
What is genuine generosity?
The purest and most powerful form of generosity can be defined with the following formula:
Selfless intention + Sacrifice + Need = Genuine Generosity
Let’s look at each element separately.
Selfless intention.
Selfless intention has to do with your motivations. If giving comes with an expected payoff for you, the quality of that generosity diminishes. If you have a slew of A-list sales leads, and you give one to someone with the expectation that they will give you something in return, your intention is about getting your needs met, not about theirs.
People can see through self-motivated generosity. When your intentions become apparent (as they always do), your colleague isn’t going to feel grateful; she’s just going to feel used. When you help someone, do so with no expectation of a reward. Your assistance should be a pure gift, not a loan that has to be repaid with interest.
In successful teams, members care about each others’ success as much as they care about their individual triumphs.
Sacrifice.
Let’s say you have a slew of A-list sales leads because your website generated far more interest than you anticipated; you’ll never be able to personally contact each lead before their enthusiasm grows cold. If you pass along some of these leads to a colleague, you’re being generous, but you’re not making a sacrifice. Sacrifice occurs when it costs you something to take care of the needs of someone else. Forgoing your own satisfaction – whether it’s in the form of a sales commission or something intangible, like public recognition – is an essential element of genuine generosity, which genuinely helps others.
One of today’s most valuable commodities is time. We have so little of it to spare; giving away our time can be a significant sacrifice. The busier you are, the more it means when you sacrifice the time to provide valuable feedback and mentorship or to write a personal message of gratitude or congratulations.
Need.
การแปล กรุณารอสักครู่..