(ThyBlackMan.com) Ever saw a company running out of business? What happened to it? What was wrong? Some people say it was a marketing disaster, some say the products were just bad, while others blame the management. It’s an everyday story in the corporate world. Many businesses come and go, many people become jobless, yet many of us fail to find the root cause of the problems – the obvious and not so obvious career traps.
Sometimes, it’s not just about marketing or management team, there are common traps that most people fall into and when it happens, things go out of control. Let’s have a look at these 6 career traps that trip smart people and how you can avoid them.
- Emergency cost-cutting
Pressure from the uncertain business environment or unstable business leads many companies to go for cost-cutting. Cost management is often done in a panic that makes these companies suffer as they sometimes lose valuable assets and skilled workforce. When making cost-management decisions, one should focus on proper cost optimization and long-term value and cost-efficiency.
- Downplay business complexity
Setting financial goals based on revenue, size, and competitor performance is what most companies do. This is a trap because organizations often downplay business complexity. Aligning your finance strategy with corporate goals is how successful businesses achieve better results. Business leaders must look at finance resources when setting cost targets.
- Spread resources equally
This is probably one of the worst career mistakes people in finance make. They spread resources too thinly across the organization and processes. Not prioritizing high-value activities leads to poor effectiveness of any change initiative. Spreading resources in highly targeted areas can not only help businesses drive more value, but it can also create more effective transformation.
- Misuse of power
If you don’t want to be one of those entrepreneurs or employees that is forced to leave the role, you must be very careful and not fall into the power trap. Sometimes, people don’t fail because they lack talent, they fail because they don’t know how and when to use their leadership traits. Successful professionals smartly avoid this trap. They know how to use their authority to manage people and work processes. So what are those negative traits? Boastfulness, lack of personal accountability, manipulation, and a sense of entitlement are some negative qualities that make people a bad manager or a bad leader.
- Mistaken Priorities
Prioritizing your people and skills over the goals is the way to succeed. Executives and business leaders often forget the fact that activities and strategies from their previous engagements may not bring results in a new environment. They need to focus on each team member’s individual strengths and skills to help them achieve their personal and professional goals. As a professional, you need to keep yourself away from situations that set you up for failure. If you’re lacking skills, taking the help of a mentor or an advisor is a better option.
- Overloading yourself
Today’s companies and their people tend to overload themselves with too much to do. Teams start trying to do everything and mostly fail to do it well. Capacity planning is needed not only in organizations but in our lives as well. People need a plan to manage capacity and reflect the changes. While low resources working to achieve a high target seems inefficient, adding more resources to work above that target can turn out to be costly and full of errors.
Evaluating your performance and awareness with an eye on common career traps will help you in many ways. It will strengthen the impact of your efforts and it will keep your career on track. The good news is that you can always learn from early failures to avoid these common mistakes.
Staff Writer; Corey Shaw
Have any Tech Tips? News? Hit up our Tech Guru at; CoreyS@ThyBlackMan.com
