6 behaviors that can lead to professional failure

All professionals strive for success, right? Regardless of what success means to their career, everyone wants to get somewhere specific and feel the satisfaction of having achieved it. On the other hand, no one wants to realize that they have reached professional failure.

Even though mistakes, failures and unfavorable moments are normal and expected throughout a career, they cannot be the norm. After all, it is possible to identify a series of behaviors that may be hindering your development and, consequently, putting you in a position of failure.

However, how do you know what these behaviors are? How can you identify if you are replicating bad patterns and be able to reverse this situation as quickly as possible?

To help you on this journey and ensure that you don’t go down the path of failure, we’ve put together the list below. It includes some key behaviors that are often found in professionals who fail to achieve their goals. So, check out the material and start implementing changes in your work behaviors right now.

Professional failure: 6 behaviors that could be hindering your career

1 – Underestimating the power of soft skills

A great classic about failure involves the famous soft skills , which are behavioral skills. They are quite underestimated and left aside, treated as an unnecessary whim for professional development. However, the reality is quite different.

The job market has already understood that the way you approach work is just as important as your technical skills, which are your hard skills . Therefore, you can be a highly qualified professional, but if you don’t know how to communicate, aren’t resilient, and aren’t organized, among many other skills, you will fall behind.

2 – Ignoring the importance of having a network of contacts

Another item that is greatly underestimated by professionals is the famous networking. Because it is an old recommendation that has overcome all changes in the job market, professionals often do not believe in its power. And they could not be more wrong.

Having a strong network of contacts and cultivating it all the time is extremely valuable to achieving success. These are the people who will help you grow, whether through important discussions, job opportunities, events, opportunities for improvement or technical learning.

So, stop thinking that networking is nonsense or false, and start dusting off your LinkedIn right now. Reconnect with your contacts, send connection requests to professionals you admire, start participating in events, conferences and courses and watch the change happen.

3 – Not accepting your mistakes and negative feedback

Nobody likes to make mistakes and receive negative feedback, right? However, both situations are inevitable. Professionals in the job market will make mistakes, that is indisputable. Even though the severity and frequency of “missteps” cannot, under any circumstances, be the norm, problems will happen.

So, if you can make the most of the lessons learned from these situations, you will turn a lemon into lemonade. Using challenging moments to learn will keep you away from failure, because failure usually affects rigid professionals who do not accept their own mistakes and are unable to learn from them.

4 – Being too competitive

In corporate environments, many professionals still deal with their teammates in a competitive manner. They try to do everything themselves, strive to highlight only their own results, are not collaborative and can even be dishonest, “pulling the rug” out from under other employees.

At first glance, this may seem like a good idea to stand out and advance in your career. However, we cannot ignore ethical issues, to begin with, nor forget that relationships are very important.

Closing doors and creating enemies will only hinder you, after all, companies want collaborative employees, and networking is much more positive than any competition you might face.

After all, being honest, ethical, collaborative and being able to deliver great results, even as part of a team, is what will really catch the attention of managers and help you grow.

5 – Letting procrastination take over your day to day life

Who hasn’t procrastinated a little, right? Putting off tasks and demands for later, often compromising delivery deadlines, is a true professional classic. Even though it may be harmless from time to time, procrastination cannot become a characteristic of yours.

It is quite negative and harmful to your career, both because it tarnishes your image and because it disrupts the entire chain of activities and responsibilities at work.

6 – Stop updating yourself and learning new knowledge

Finally, if we started the text talking about soft skills, let’s end it by highlighting hard skills. Having an active attitude to update yourself, learn more, specialize and become a technically better professional is essential to avoid failure.

After all, the world changes all the time, and when you stop studying, you fall behind, using outdated knowledge and techniques to do your job. So, what are you waiting for to start your specialization and banish professional failure once and for all?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *