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The 12 Bad Habits That Hold Good People Back: Overcoming the Behavior Patterns That Keep You From Getting Ahead (Paperback)
by James Phd Waldroop , Timothy Phd Butler
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The two Harvard Business School psychologists-authors describe twelve patterns of behavior that keep people from being successful at work, to help you get ahead in business as well as in life. |
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Author: James Phd Waldroop , Timothy Phd Butler
Publisher: Currency
Pub. in: October, 2001
ISBN: 0385498500
Pages: 352
Measurements: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00817
Other information: Reprint edition
ISBN-13: 978-0385498500
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- MSL Picks -
"The ways people fail in their careers, however, are quite limited. People fail in the same ways, for the same reasons, over and over again, from one industry to another, from the lowest level to the highest... Moreover... many... people are amazingly unaware of the patterns of behavior they exhibit that are resulting in failure."
Think of this book as a psychologically-based opposite to Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The authors are both business psychologists, executive coaches for those with career problems, and directors of MBA career development at Harvard Business School. The book is well illustrated with examples of their concepts, drawn from actual cases they have worked on.
Part I of the book identifies 12 behaviors that can hold you back.
1. Never Feeling Good Enough (acrophobia or fear of career progress)
2. Seeing the World in Black and White (meritocrat or not seeing the relevance of loyalty, self-interest, or personality)
3. Doing Too Much, Pushing Too Hard (a hero, with an Achilles heel from overdoing it)
4. Avoiding Conflict at Any Cost (peacekeeper, who avoids even healthy conflict such as that required to overcome misconceptions)
5. Running Roughshod over the Opposition (bulldozer, a male role similar to an offensive lineman in football)
6. Rebel Looking for a Cause (rebels, who want attention more than results)
7. Always Swinging for the Fences (a home run style swinger who strikes out most of the time)
8. When Fear Is in the Driver's Seat (a pessimistic worrier, a naysayer out of fear)
9. Emotionally Tone Deaf (Mr. Spock from Star Trek, low emotional intelligence)
10. When No Job Is Good Enough (Coulda-been, who moves on because they feel inadequate, but don't want to face up to that)
11. Lacking a Sense of Boundaries (People who talk out of school)
12. Losing the Path (Alienated people who have lost their career vision of what they want from a career)
For each habit, the book describes:
i) The symptoms of each habit
ii) The impact on the organization
iii) How to break the pattern
iv) How to manage people like that too.
Each chapter in Part I contains a description of the dynamics of each pattern, how that role plays out in an organization, what the origins of the pattern are, and how to break the pattern. In the last case, the advice is sometimes different if the pattern is your own versus when you are trying to help someone else (such as a subordinate or peer) to do so. These are at least two examples in each section, evenly balanced between women and men.
In Part II, the authors look at the four psychological causes of these 12 behavioral problems:
1. Having a negatively-distorted self-image.
2. Not seeing the perspectives of others.
3. Not coming to terms with authority.
4. Not being comfortable with using power.
The authors describe in the chapters of Part I which of these base causes are involved with which patterns, and chapter 16 gives you help with examining your self-image. There is also a good section in Takeaways for ways to make the needed changes. The chapters also contain useful material to understand your own perceptual style from a Jungian perspective.
- From quoting Donald Mitchell
Target readers:
For anyone who wants to manage his or her career and life
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James Waldroop, Ph.D., and Timothy Butler, Ph.D., are directors of MBA career development at the Harvard Business School and developers of the Internet-based career self-assessment and management program CareerLeader, currently used by more than 100 corporations and MBA programs worldwide. They are the founders of Peregrine Partners, a consulting firm in Brookline, Massachusetts, specializing in executive development and employee retention. They are the authors of Discovering Your Career in Business as well as articles that have appeard in the Harvard Business Review and Fortune.
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From the publisher
Have you ever wondered why some people seem to rise effortlessly to the top, while others are stuck in the same job year after year? Have you ever felt you are falling short of your career potential? Have you wondered if some of the things you do?or don?t do?at work might be hamstringing your ambitions? In The 12 Bad Habits That Hold Good People Back, James Waldroop and Timothy Butler identify the twelve habits that?whether you are a retail clerk or a law firm partner, work in technology or in a factory?are almost guaranteed to hold you back.
The fact is, most people learn their greatest lessons not from their successes but from their mistakes. The 12 Bad Habits That Hold Good People Back offers the flip side to Stephen Covey?s approach in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, zeroing in on the most common behavior that can impede a career. Based on over twenty years of research as business psychologists, the authors claim that the reasons people fail in their jobs are the same everywhere. Only after these detrimental behaviors have been identified can the patterns that limit career advancement be broken.
Using real-life accounts of clients they have worked with at Harvard and as executive coaches at such companies as GTE, Sony, GE, and McKinsey & Co., Waldroop and Butler offer invaluable?and in some cases, job-saving?step-by-step advice on how readers can change their behavior to get back on track.
For anyone seeking to achieve his or her career ambitions, The 12 Bad Habits That Hold Good People Back is a powerful tool for unleashing true potential.
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Never Feeling Good Enough
In a world overpopulated with outsize egos, Paul seemed to be an anomaly. He had an ego that was too small for his considerable abilities and his position. A big international bank in New York hired him away from a smaller bank in Texas for a high-profile job taking charge of a group of loan officers who, after some heady early successes, had involved the bank in several dangerous arrangements in Latin America. When the Mexican peso collapsed, the bank had taken a financial bath, suffering tens of millions of dollars in losses. Paul's assignment was to rein in the lending group, to ensure that the necessary "due diligence" had been done on major loans before any further commitments were made.
Paul, who was in his early forties at the time, clearly had both the intellect and the experience to handle the job. Although he had never been a manager, he had considerable know-how as a banker, and Latin America was his specialty. Moreover, Paul had succeeded at everything he had ever done. He had been a top student in both college and graduate business school, and he was promoted quickly through the bank he joined in Dallas after getting his MBA at the University of Texas.
But in his new position Paul was suddenly a misfit - or so it appeared, and so he felt. He was self-conscious and awkward, unable to speak with authority, and unable to comand the respect that he needed to excel. He felt like a little fish tossed into a very big pond, a small-town kid from fly-over country way out of place among East Coast elites. Sure, he had been at the top of his class in school, but in schools without prestigious names. Now he had to take charge of a herd of headstrong and arrogant deal makers with degrees from Harvard, Colombia, and Wharton.
The coterie of loan officers who had been operating on their own before Paul arrived understandably were not delighted to welcome an outsider charged with keeping them under control. Still, if Paul had presented himself as a confident manager, he might have been able to defuse their resentment quickly enough to establish himself as their skillful leader.
But he never demonstrated the confidence and as a result never took command in the fullest sense. He had a look of intensity and concern that sometimes seemed to approach panic. He worked long hours, much too long--and work that he should have been delegating, he took upon himself. His superior, who had hired him, was afraid that Paul was going to burn out. In the eyes of the lenders Paul supervised, he was respected as a hard worker and a technical specialist, but not really admired and certainly not looked up to as a commander.
Troops want a leader who exudes self-assurance. In a battle at sea, sailors want to look up at the bridge and see "the old man" calmly overseeing the battle - not struggling nervously into his life jacket! But everything about Paul said worry. He had no stature in the lending group; people avoided him.
But at his new job, instead of strolling through offices in comfortable command Paul scurried down the halls with an intense, inner-directed gaze on his face that signaled to everyone that he was in trouble. When he stopped to talk to people he was all business, almost curt. There was never any small talk.
Paul was telling people, without knowing or intending to, that he couldn't get away from them fast enough. It was as though if he lingered too long, people would see through him and would recognize that he didn't belong, would know that he was in over his head - and the fact was, he did feel over his head. Instead of looking upward and contemplating whether he might be CEO someday, or at least head of all of International, he was frightened that he had already risen too high. He wondered whether he didn't really belong a peg or two below where he was.
Those in the department followed his instructions when necessary, but they didn't seek out his advice. Nobody invited him to lunch. Meetings were held without Paul being aware of them. One of his colleagues said of Paul, "He's a hard worker... and it shows." Another said, "He's very smart, and everybody respects him - but nobody want to be him." When Paul stepped outside himself and took a close look, he didn't want to be himself either! That was the point at which he came to us.
The Dynamics of Pattern
Paul's actions and feelings fall into a pattern that we've come to think of as a kind of career-related acrophobia. Acrophobia is the term for a fear of heights, or more to the point, of falling from those heights. Paul's "career acrophobia" was born of his belief that he was incapable of surviving on the heights he had somehow scaled. He felt in his heart of hearts that he didn't deserve to be where he had been placed. It's a feeling a surprising number of people have to a greater or lesser extent.
There is a metaphor involving an elevator that graphically conveys his agony and that of those like him. People like Paul feel as though they are on an elevator with their feet stuck on the fifteenth floor while their heads have been carried to the fortieth floor, with their bodies stretched in between. The feel - in fact, they absolutely know - that they're really fortieth floor people and promote them accordingly. That tension sounds excruciatingly painful, or course, and what these people experience is indeed anguishing - we are not, after all, made of rubber.
In fact, the tension is so difficult to bear that people have only two choices. The first is to somehow unhook their feet from the floor down below and "rise to the occasion" of having been picked to move up to a fortieth floor. This is the happily-ever-after scenario. Less happily, people in this position commonly sabotage their own careers, doing things that get them demoted to the level where they think they belong. One person we worked with had committed a series of gaffes so spectacularly stupid that he actually got himself fired - for no better reason, as we discovered, than because he felt he didn't belong where he was.
Of course, Paul's case is somewhat extreme. But a lot of people, because of lack of self-esteem, feel that way and, subtly or more calamitously, undermine themselves or find ways to hold themselves back so they never "suffer" the fate of rising too far or too fast in an organization in the first place. They simply never rise out of their comfort level. One of our clients, a woman who was a competent scientist in her own right, had spent her career acting as the aide-de-camp to a series of others. Another client worked for many years as an editor of others' work. He wrote his own essays and articles but only occasionally allowed himself to "rise up" and take the risk of submitting them for publication.
This pattern of acrophobia carries some special dangers. If you are "running roughshod" over people (Chapter 5), it's going to be obvious to those around you, and you can see evidence of it by stopping to look at the bodies you leave behind. Not feeling that you deserve to go higher and sabotaging your career advancement, on the other hand, is likely to be invisible to other people, and the fear is so difficult to face that it may be invisible to you as well. It takes an extremely astute and psychologically minded friend or manager to notice what you're doing to yourself and point it out to you. Yet without facing the ways you are hamstringing yourself--perhaps by being late with projects, by procrastinating, by failing to exercise initiative or by not going the extra mile you know will get the job done right--you may lose out on new assignments, be overlooked for raises or promotions, and potentially even jeopardize your job if the environment changes.
Michael, for example, discovered this pattern of acrophobic behavior in himself when he was interviewing for jobs in his last year of law school. Michael was a generally self-confident individual with an apperntly high level of self-esteem. He was unaware that he was communicating a sense of uncertainty about himself in his interviews. It was brought to his attention by an interviewer, who pointed out to him that during the interview, every time she (the interviewer) signaled to him that he was the sort of candidate they were looking for, Michael started backpedaling, expressing concern that maybe he really didn't have the experience they needed, saying that he wanted to make sure they knew what they were getting, and so forth.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-05 00:00>
I use the words complexity and perspicacity to discuss this book because the nature of the material the authors write about--the human mind and its behavior-is necessarily complex, while the authors display a very acute sense of those complexities.
If you are a well-read, emotionally literate, self-aware person, this book contains many ideas and tools you can use to "get ahead" in business. Its scope, however, is not limited to the business world. One would think that Bridget Jones et al would do well to use the ideas presented in this book. At heart the book is not so much about the behaviors that hold you back in the business world, but, rather it is about the behaviors that hold you back, period. The business world just contextualizes the nature of the consulting practice the authors have and the audience to whom they write (typically business students and executives). |
James (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-05 00:00>
Many of us, including myself, spend a huge amount of time and energy trying to "get the job done" not realizing that some of the behavior patterns are making our work lives more stressful, less effective and in some cases making you - or your employee - a difficult person to work with.
I picked this up after searching online for a career transition book. The authors, two guys from Harvard, have written a really fantastic guide to managing your career. If you know anyone who has had negative performance review, has problems being a "team player" or if you are a manager that has an employee that everyone in the office perceives as "difficult", do yourself a favor and pick-up a copy of this book.
These guys have practical exercises and explanations for some of the bad behaviors we have at work - procrastinating, falling behind, constant feelings of stress or anxiety. Far from the "touchy feely" approach of many of the self-help schmaltz out there, these guys are from the business world and offer real steps and real solutions to modify the negative behaviors. In my opinion, a must read! |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-05 00:00>
This is truly a remarkable book! Much more than a selp-help book, rather it's more of a physchological profiling/business management book. As I read the 12 bad behaviours, I saw myself posessing a few of them. That acknowledgement or awareness of your own Achilles Heel, by itself, is worth it alone.
This book offers an in-depth discussion of all the bad behaviours and even offer advice on how to handle employees that possess them. Knowledge of the bad habits is crucial.
My only beef about the book, is that there is no strong how-to section at the end to show how we can manage our own bad behaviours, and truly achieve "maximum success". I felt the discussion on the bad habits were deep enough, but did not have a how-to section to wrap up how to reach maximum success. Perhaps, that's harder said than done. Perhaps reaching maximum success is an individual path, a unique journey, that each of must see through the balance of our life-times.
In any case, still a must read. Just like everyone needs to know Covey's 7 successful habits, you also need to know the 12 bad habits. |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-05 00:00>
If you want to achieve your goals and activate your sales like never before, you need to break through your bad habits. This book helped me do that! The barriers that I had put in front of myself crumbled like so much rubble at my feet and now I am charging ahead, surpassing my goals and wowing everybody around me. I've streamlined my whole organization, begun to see every human interaction as an opportunity for me to win, and become a customer-focused consulting machine. This kind of success once seemed impossible, but it was really just a matter of turning a few bad habits around. Thanks Jim & Tim! |
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