Shaun Coffey

Nine work strategies for career success.

1. Taking initiative: accepting responsibility above and beyond your stated job, volunteering for additional activities, and promoting new ideas.
2. Networking:  getting direct and immediate access to coworkers with technical expertise and sharing your own knowledge with those who need it.
3. Self-management:  regulating your own work commitments, time, performance level, and career growth.
4. Teamwork effectiveness:  assuming joint responsibility for work activities, coordinating efforts, and accomplishing shared goals with coworkers.
5. Leadership:  formulating, stating, and building consensus on common goals and working to accomplish them.
6. Followership:  helping the leader accomplish the organisation’s goals and thinking for yourself rather than relying solely on managerial direction.
7. Perspectives:  seeing your job in its larger context and taking on other viewpoints like those of the customer, manager, and work team.
8. Show-and-tell:  presenting your ideas persuasively in written or oral form.
9. Organisational savvy:  navigating the competing interests in an organisation, be they individual or group, to promote cooperation, address conflicts, and gets things done.

Source:  Kelley R and Caplan J (1993)  How Bell labs creates star performers.  Harvard Business Review, July-August, pp.128ff