31–40 of 270 posts
Best: Decisions don't get made in meetings. Tailor your communication to your audience. Be diligent and ethically consistent and people will respect you for it. Worst: Stay in your lane.
* If you screw up, acknowledge it without passing the buck, take responsibility for it (works best if you have already worked out a mitigation strategy and timeframe to implement and can communicate this effectively)
Worst: some people will put all their effort into the performance of working but never actually work. You risk your own job calling it out because their speciality is hiding their incompetence.
I learned from my best colleagues: success is about trust. Nothing pays better dividends than being humble, being right a lot, and doing good work. This builds allies and allies build careers. I learned from my worst colleagues: don’t assume that anyone will protect you from toxic or abusive people. You must be willing to protect yourself. When people come for you and your project, either be willing to throw down (me…
Best: It was a lesson I got as a fresh grad. I was losing sleep over stress from work. "This is just a job," an older colleague told me. In reality, he really did his job -- he was always on time, his code was impeccable, and he used cool logic to solve any problem. And yet, he was never too emotionally attached to work. He always welcomed criticism of his work. He had the demeanor of a cool-headed hitman finishing h…
How do you not immediately report this guy to HR? His behavior is absolutely verbal abuse.
* I wouldn't task someone with something I wasn't willing to do myself * If you screw up, acknowledge it without passing the buck, take responsibility for it (works best if you have already worked out a mitigation strategy and timeframe to implement and can communicate this effectively)
Not only does your sarcasm need a tell, you need to have previously provided enough evidence that you're not actually an asshole. Otherwise, someone can be sarcastic all day, but no-one's really sure whether they're trying to be funny, or actually offering genuine asshole views coated in the plausible deniability of "sarcasm" for those who don't agree.
"I really can't tell if you're joking" is the first warning flag.
What did he teach me? He taught me that when I'm sufficiently pissed off, I can be vindictive. I retaliated more than once by doing mostly harmless things like sticking a floppy disk in his PC so it wouldn't boot, and then not helping him fix it so he could do his job (that should date this for ya...). He wasn't computer savvy, and I let him stew in it. That made me ashamed of myself later, and I have never taken the low road again. So he taught me something about myself, and I changed for the better because of it. I still vehemently dislike him and what he did, but that was a long time ago.
Bests: Hide your ambition the lazy will try to block you. The ambitious will try to remove you.
Worst colleague taught me to be loyal to people and not to companies. You can be friends with people, but not companies. Friends will reward loyalty and sacrifice, companies just want you to think they will.