What does a workplace wimp look like? Before you determine whether you’re surrounded by them at the office (or even if you could be one yourself), update your definition of “wimp.” Instead of picturing a meek-minded colleague hiding in a cubicle somewhere, replace your image with:
- The colleague who didn’t realize that she could be making $10K more per year if only she had found the courage to negotiate her salary during her job interview
- The boss who refused to go to bat for his team during his last meeting with the company’s bigwigs
- The employee who obsesses over his boss’s latest comment (which kept him up all night), rather than actually communicate with his boss about it
- The entrepreneur who knows he needs to reach out and network on a more regular basis in order to get business and get referrals but doesn’t
- The manager who puts up with a poorly performing employee, rather than taking the necessary steps of letting the employee go and refusing to allow the employee’s lousy attitude to infect the rest of the team
- The job seeker who takes the first job she is offered because she is scared she’ll never get another offer — even though she doesn’t like the job in the first place
- The professional who has accepted a career of “it pays the bills,” rather than living a life of “it’s time to do what I really want”
Consider something that you know you need to do (like networking, for instance) but always find excuses not to do, and you can see how wimpiness rears its ugly head in your own work life. Even if you’re as bold as brass, you may struggle against your inner wimp from time to time in your own career.
And while it may not seem like a big deal to suffer through the occasional night of insomnia over a comment your boss made, think about the kind of damage that not being “willing to deal” can inflict over the long term: the consequences of less money or job misery are anything but wimpy and can inflict serious damage on our careers.
If you’re sick of your inner wimp and sick of avoiding what you need to do to take your career to the next level, consider what you can do to avoid some common career mistakes wimps make.
Wimp mistake #1: assuming that other people really know what you’re capable of.
One of the biggest complaints I hear from employees goes something like this: “It’s not fair! My boss keeps giving me boring work to do when I could be doing so much more.” Or, how about the entrepreneur who wonders why his existing client only hires him to do X when he could also be doing Y and Z, even though he’s told his client more than once about his suite of services.
Wimp mistake #2: telling people what you are capable of without showing them, too.
A few years ago I decided to write and perform a one-woman show. Guess what people said when I told them I had decided to take on this endeavor? After the confused looks and polite smiles, many expressed a kind of polite wonder which seemed to say, “Can you really pull this off?”
These friends weren’t trying to discourage me. After all, I had never done this kind of thing before; I wasn’t an actress or speaker by profession, so it’s only natural that some weren’t easily convinced that I could handle it. The fact is that the only way I was going to show people I could do this was to do it. It wasn’t until I was literally up on stage that people could see something in me that I had seen sooner. If I had waited until someone had said, “Gee, you seem like you’d be great in a one-woman show,” to do one, I might have been waiting a very long time.
What can you do, right now, to show people what you are capable of? What proof, what evidence, can you offer (besides simply telling them) that you really can handle the job? Can you do this type of work for someone else to showcase your talents? Can you write an article, volunteer for an association, join a public speaking organization? You get the idea — there are probably plenty of things that you can do, but you’ve got to actually do them for other people to start to see the results.
About the Author
Elizabeth Freedman, MBA, is an award-winning speaker and business columnist and is the author of Work 101: Learning the Ropes of the Workplace without Hanging Yourself and The MBA Student's Job-Seeking Bible. She was a 2005 finalist for College Speaker of the Year, an honor awarded by the Association for the Promotion of Campus Activities, and runs a Boston-based communications and career development firm that helps new professionals look sharp, sound smart, and succeed on the job. Clients include the Gillette Company, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and the Thomson Corporation. For more information about the author, please visit www.elizabethfreedman.com.
