Switch & Shift

3 Business Life Lessons: How To Progress Through Positivity

Working in any sector of business can be stressful, and it’s easy to lose sight of your own personal goals and progression, which often fall to the wayside in favour of deadlines and number crunching. Many people feel inundated by their workloads, causing their career to control them – and if that’s you, now is the time to take back control of your career. These three business life lessons can help you regain a positive outlook on work, keeping your personal goals, progression and happiness at the forefront of your mind.

1. Audit your Self Development

In the competitive business world, it’s easy to lose sight of your goals and become lost in a high stress position, with some employees even switching to autopilot, approaching their day-to-day work with a robotic sense of detachment. But no great leader ever got anywhere by painting inside the corporate lines – and the core lesson here is not to lose sight of what you want from the future of your career.

No great leader ever got anywhere by painting inside the corporate lines. @winthatbid

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Keep track of your goals with a regular self-auditing process, recording new skills you’ve learned or responsibilities you’ve taken on. You can look back over time to see where you’ve progressed and where you’re diverting from your ultimate objectives. This information not only allows you to monitor your development, but also to identify your deficiencies and address these areas going forward for optimal impact.

2. Adjust your Work-Life Balance

Striking an effective work-life balance is essential if you want to maintain a long and successful career. Employee burnout is no frivolous matter, with people under more pressure and working longer hours than ever. According to the Mental Health Foundation, 40% of employees regularly neglect their home life due to excess pressure in the workplace – and the volume of overtime directly correlates with unhappiness and stress.

Work-life balance is the responsibility of both the employer and the employee – so wherever you are on the career ladder, this should be a priority. Being overworked is in no one’s best interests, leading to dramatic declines in productivity and employee retention, and a negative culture of resentment towards the workplace. Take a positive approach by proactively managing time, setting realistic time limits for projects and compartmentalising your work and home life through effective organisation and planning.

Work-life balance is the responsibility of both the employer and the employee – so wherever you are on the career ladder, this should be a priority.

3. Invest for Returns

Everyone has ambition in their job, whether they are confident enough to admit it or not. But the way many business leaders choose to pursue their ambition can often be grossly misinformed, leading to unsustainable successes. Selfishly prioritising your own business goals, be it profit margins or growth, isn’t going to get you to where you want to be for long. In order to grow organically, it’s your colleagues’, clients’ and customers’ priorities that need to make up the core priorities of your business. Keep them happy, and the rest will follow.

Under pressure and time constraints, it’s easy to deliver the bare minimum and hope for the best when it comes to returns. However, taking the time to go the extra mile and deliver your best work at every opportunity is a far more effective approach. By the time you see returns come full circle on your invested effort, you will have naturally expanded and developed, providing much more stable growth.

 

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  • http://karmicallycoaching.com/ Vatsala Shukla

    Work-Life Balance was the predominant reason given by at least 60% of the employees during their exit interview at a previous employer’s workplace. The Partners asked the management to look into without thinking that perhaps the stress was percolating downwards and corrective policy decisions had to be taken at the top. An employee may not feel empowered enough to assert himself and the best option is to change employment and continue seeking the elusive work life balance. In the end, no one will win unless the matter is treated, as Sarah points out, on a priority basis.

  • http://IndigoOcean.org/ Indigo Ocean

    I enjoyed this article, especially the suggestion to make regular “self-checks” a part of one’s “routine.” I would add, sometimes it helps to reduce big goals down to tiny first steps, so that you can start seeing improvement in the right direction. When someone is over-whelmed at work, self-audits can be really discouraging. They may see again and again, week after week, that they are not finding the time for the things they have clarified they value beyond immediate work responsibilities. Yet there are small things they can do, in just 5 minutes a day, to start building momentum toward their core values.

  • There’s a more human way to do business.

    In the Social Age, it’s how we engage with customers, collaborators and strategic partners that matters; it’s how we create workplace optimism that sets us apart; it’s how we recruit, retain (and repel) employees that becomes our differentiator. This isn’t a “people first, profits second” movement, but a “profits as a direct result of putting people first” movement.

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