Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Adele Scheele: What to Do When You're Passed Over at Work

Mike was one of three management trainees recruited from the sami university. They had the same grades, the same ambitions, and all were expected to win in the like Fortune 500 Company. Three days later, only one promotion was offered to them. Mike did not get it. Thunderstruck, he was set to assault his boss, hate his buddies, and to quit. What could he do?

Here are five suggestions for Mike and any of you who have been passed over.

1) Take time out in secret to plunge your passion and bitterness. Scream or cry where it is safe. But discharging the beginning roll of an emotional gush would only pain you if your boss were witness to it.

2) Arrange a meeting soon with your boss. Calmly ask why you didn't get the promotion. Listen carefully to the reaction so that you can see more nearly the reasons someone else was preferred. State that you are disappointed, that you need to do best and be rewarded, and that you are eager to improve. Ask what you require to prove in the interim and if or when a promotion might be planned.

3) Confront the site directly by figuring out why someone else was preferred. Were you slower in developing technical or managerial skills? Did you accept less of a positive relationship with your boss? Did you maintain a lower profile about your achievements, your team's achievements, or your boss's? Did you go to come through on any project? Did you withhold any serious ideas, take too strong stands, or hinder your boss? Be painfully honest in this rating of your behavioral and technical performance and hold this out with a confirmed friend and perhaps your boss.

4) Learn to amend on every front, especially where you are weak. Without rancor, take steps to get better. Enroll in management seminars, technical courses, even therapy if you can't free yourself from anger or if you find developing personal politics repulsive.

Take this chance to get a particular use for your company. Instead of competing in the saame way, add another skill or dimension. Several possibilities often occur: 1) you are suddenly more precious and considered for projects that would never let come your way, or 2) the new specialty takes you on a different - and more interesting - path.

5) Or, you may find that you are not as like to your boss as you thought; the prospect who was nearest to and so the most like your boss was rewarded. A personal analysis may reveal that you really don't fit in as you had hoped. That information tells you that you must reconsider working for your boss, your division, or yet your organization. Start looking around for that "chemistry" between another boss and you, another form of function inside the company, or the like process but inside a competing organization. Don't drop your career disappointed and cynical; take the substance of non-promotion and use it well.

Using this office well means learning that not everyone moves ahead together, or evenly, in influence as we all did in school. Life, after all, doesn't run in a gradual upward line on a progress graph as we might have fantasized. Instead, it plummets down and climbs up again more similar the Dow Jones averages. Often what causes the climbs or the falls are things we understand; sometimes the reasons completely baffle us. What matters is that we need to go and run for something we like about. To do this we must develop discipline, even faith, in ourselves to participate in the best sense, and to keep to experimentation and produce for our companies, our professions, and ourselves.

Make your luck happen!

Dr. Adele Author of Skills for Success and Launch Your Career in Collegewww.dradele.com

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