1. Tempered Tenacity
Respected achievers are incredibly tenacious. They do not allow
obstacles to stop them, at least not for long, chiefly because they’ve trained
their thinking to immediately seek out other ways of reaching a goal. To a
tenaciously driven person, there is never just one way to get there, and no one
will convince them otherwise. However, the sort of achiever we’re talking
about also keeps the well-being of others in mind, and if one of those
alternate routes will result in unnecessarily harming someone else, then that
route isn’t an option, period. To the respected achiever, it doesn’t have to
be, because they know there are other ways to get where they want to go even if
it takes longer to get there.
2. Consistent Commitment
Another hallmark of respected achievers is that they do what they say
they’ll do. They don’t spin out an elaborate vision, get others to buy into it,
and then run off to the next big idea because it has sparked their interest
more than the first. While nurturing multiple visions is fine (assuming they
are manageable), the respected achiever sets a high standard for her/himself
that what they commit to do on a project, they fully intend to do and will make
every reasonable effort to make it happen.
Granted, failure or unforeseen
circumstances are always a possibility, but those are the exceptions. The
respected achievers’ standard of following through is consistently
maintained whether or not adversity materializes, and others know that when
they collaborate with a respected achiever it won’t be a waste of their time.
3. Soulful Pragmatism
Respected achievers are typically pragmatists – they focus on what
works. If one approach isn’t panning out, they either figure out how to tweak
it in subtle or significant ways, or they abandon it altogether and adopt a
different approach. Their focus is on outcomes. But, implementing a pragmatic
approach without being mindful of how changes will affect others isn’t
commendable, it’s cruel. Respected achievers know this, so they balance an
outcome-focus with a situational awareness of the adjustments required by
others, and they work with them to make those adjustments. Again, this may
build a little more time into the process, but respected achievers don’t value
outcomes above peoples’ lives if there is any possibility of creating a
mutually beneficial arrangement. And if there is not, they take it as a
personal goal to help others transition into roles that will benefit them.
4. Strategic Resolution
Just like anyone else, respected achievers
can become negative when things aren’t going well, and just like all of us,
they may vent now and again about how crappy a situation is. What they do
not do, however, is drop anchor in that negative place and allow their
negativity to feed itself and eventually seep into the perspectives of those
around them. Instead, they experience the pain, recognize that whatever caused
it (business or personal) is now part of their repertoire of experience, and
then they resolve to strategically move on. In this case, strategy refers to a guiding set of action
steps to push forward – and, it also refers to decisions about what
not to do. Strategy is choice, and resolving into a strategic
mindset to pull out of a negative place requires making hard choices. Respected
achievers are seen by others as those willing to make those choices, and that
carries tremendous weight in any organization.
5. Responsibility Ownership
One less-than-admirable trait of many
driven people is that they’re good at figuring out how to avoid taking
responsibility for what went wrong. If that means throwing someone under the
proverbial bus, so be it. Better him than me. But the respected achiever sees
things differently in a couple of ways. First, if something went wrong due to a
mistake made by the team, the respected achiever owns responsibility whether or
not other team members do the same. Why? Because teams are essentially
organizations structured to accomplish specific goals, and if those goals
aren’t reached, then the team (not any one person) owns the blame, because the
team (not any one person) was given the responsibility to succeed. Respected
achievers own their role on the team instead of trying to explain why their responsibility
should be less than that of the others’. Second, respected achievers are
intuitively reciprocal people – they treat others in the manner they wish to be
treated. Their embodiment of the “Golden Rule” is not
situational; it’s a consistently applied maxim that guides their behavior.
curbed from forbes
No comments:
Post a Comment