Success strategy in the company

You conscientiously carry out your tasks and you are 100% focused on your work, but you have been avoiding promotions for several years. At the same time, you can see that your company is promoted by people who spend much more time on the "social life of the office" than on real work. Which strategy is better - focusing on work or building a circle of acquaintances among colleagues?

Choosing a strategy - hard work or time for a chat?

It would be a great exaggeration to say that the most important factor for success in the company is to build a wide social circle around yourself. As examples of famous managers show, also people closed in on themselves, focused on their tasks, and not on office gossip, can achieve significant success. Some of them are even people who do not like interpersonal contacts, deserving to be called "robots" or "cyborgs". On the other hand, however, every person who has worked for at least a few years in a large organization (company or state office) can easily point out examples of careers owed not so much to competences in some field, but rather to building a suitable position among superiors and associates. - explains Małgorzata Majewska, expert of monsterpolska.pl.

Which strategy is better - is it better to be a hardworking loner or a sociable idler? You have to find a compromise at work - you cannot build your entire career on relationships, sooner or later you will reach the threshold of your competences, above which being nice and liked is not enough. On the other hand - in most cases, you cannot count on building a career in isolation from how your colleagues perceive us. Unfortunately, there is no single recipe for success, as it depends on many factors.

Difficulty verifying the effects of work

Whether we socialize at work or not may depend on the type of tasks we perform. If the effects of our work are easy to measure (for example in the form of income for the company), we can be sure that focusing on work will sooner or later bring the desired effect, i.e. a raise and a promotion. In professions where it is easy to calculate the individual success of an employee, just creating an aura of success around you will not help much. Every six months or once a year, a person's work is assessed (often called employee evaluation), and then it is easy to see who worked how.

On the other hand, there are many professions in which the effect of work is elusive, immeasurable. How to check if a cartoonist working in an advertising agency is doing his job well or not? Some people may like his designs very much, others may find them fatal. How to evaluate the effects of a driving instructor's work? After all, he is not the one who passes the driving test, it has no influence on whether the student / ward behaved in the way he or she was taught. Similar examples can be enumerated for a long time, and each of us has dealt with them.

Also in the work of each of us, you can find elements that are "immeasurable". The boss ordered the employee to prepare a report, which he then found to be perfect in terms of content, but unreadable to the recipient. At the same time, other people who read the same report (e.g. colleagues who were supposed to check it) agreed

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it too bright and clear. How to measure the workload in negotiations with a new client that were broken for incomprehensible reasons? Perhaps the goal set for the employee was unrealistic from the beginning, so it is difficult to blame him for failure - says Małgorzata Majewska.

In the above-mentioned professions or types of tasks, as important as competences is also advertising among colleagues and superiors, creating an aura of success around you. It is possible that you are doing everything well - but no one knows about it (including - unfortunately - your boss). You need to advertise yourself, and the people you work with need to know that you are doing your job perfectly.

The personality of the boss and colleagues

The chosen career development strategy should also depend on the personality of the boss and the character traits of the people you will work with. Not all teams will tolerate someone who undeservedly exudes an aura of success, even if they are very social, and will pour out jokes during lunch breaks. - notes Małgorzata Majewska. If you are lucky, you will find a supervisor for whom your competences and the results of your efforts are the most important. If it doesn't, however, you'll need to make other arrangements to get a promotion or a raise. You will increase your chances if other people praise your work.

Qualifications and professional position

A person who is a valued specialist in his field can afford to "not overdo it" on a daily basis. It is enough for him to speak up from time to time, advise, suggest and evaluate. The rest of the time can be spent drinking coffee or surfing the internet. It may seem like she doesn't do much, but her opinion matters very much to the company. However, this type of behavior is not very sensible in the case of a young person without adequate professional background.

Correct flow of information

Attention should be paid to the very practical aspect of participating intensively in the "office social life". By cutting ourselves off from colleagues, e.g. by not going out for lunch, we also cut off extremely important information. In most companies, a lot of information does not spread through official channels, but rather over coffee or a cigarette - emphasizes Małgorzata Majewska. This is not because someone maliciously blocks the flow of information, but because this is simply the nature of large organizations - someone has not thought, someone forgot to say something at an official meeting or write an email to everyone on the team. A person who is "standing aside", not going out for coffee or lunch, may be surprised to find out that a project he is working on has been interrupted a week earlier. He may also find out that the head of department changed the guidelines for another project, but he was busy, so he did not provide this information in an e-mail or at a meeting, but only mentioned it to one of his subordinates, hoping that he would pass it on to other people. Such information reaches the "office loner" with a long delay.

Usefulness of a circle of friends

Under "normal" circumstances, your business relationship may not be the most important. However, it also happens that the sympathy of the right people is very useful. In this way, for example, you can get support in a conflict with your supervisor. It can also be useful to have unofficial information about a vacancy in a certain position, so you can apply for it early enough, before the search for candidates from outside the company begins.

Fair evaluation of colleagues

Remember that judging someone as lazy, spending too much time on office gossip, we can be very wrong. Perhaps we do not know everything about his work, which could result in an unfair judgment. The person we judge as lazy can actually be very productive and does everything faster than others, so he has some time for the "office social life". It may also be that during working hours he does not give 100% of himself, but instead performs some of the tasks at home. Let's try to be sure before labeling someone "idle spending half a day on coffee, cigarettes and gossip." And, of course, before we start gossiping about this person during a coffee or cigarette break ... - sums up Małgorzata Majewska.

Author: Małgorzata Majewska, expert at monsterpolska.pl