2 Critical Traits for Career Advancement - Love and Faithfulness

When it comes to getting promoted there are two extremely powerful forces that you simply cannot do without. These two must-have assets are a good reputation and favor with your superiors. It is simple common sense that bosses promote people who are known as top performers. It is equally well established that bosses promote people they like. Given that, it is abundantly clear that the fastest route up the company ladder is to have a great reputation and to be well liked.

It is important to note that these are not necessarily the same thing. I have seen people who were extremely talented top performers who were also a real pain in the neck and were widely disliked. These folks might advance at first but their luck usually runs out at a certain point. During downturns when companies start laying off workers these folks are sometimes the first ones who find themselves on the curb. After all it is normally tough to justify firing a person for being a pain if they also do good work. But when a mandate comes down from senior management that X number of people need to be let go it can be tempting to include a troublemaker in that unfortunate group.

On the flip side, it is not much better for a person to be liked personally but to also be known as incompetent. This type of person might get invited to all the company parties and might have a certain amount of job security since everyone likes having him or her around. However, it will be tough for a person like that to really move ahead.

Therefore, the real secret is to have both favor and a good name. This leads to the obvious next question. How does one go about getting these traits? This is where Proverbs 3:3-4 comes in:

‘Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart. Then you will win favor and a good name in the sight of God and man.”

It really is that simple. We have two verses (verse 3 and verse 4) which identify two characteristics (love and faithfulness) which in turn produce the two desired results (favor and a good name).

Let’s drill down a bit now and look at how this applies in the workplace.
We’ll start with love first. The good news is that this verse does not mean you need to run over with sweet emotions towards every person in your workplace. Comforting, isn’t it? If that were the criteria I know that, speaking for myself, I would have a very tough time indeed.

Rather, I believe that love refers to Paul’s definition of love. It refers to treating everyone in your workplace with kindness and patience. It means not being boastful or demanding your own way all the time. It means having tolerance for others and being very slow to anger. You might not personally like everyone you work with but as long as you exercise the discipline to treat them in a loving way no matter what your feelings are then I believe you are operating in love and you qualify for the rewards that come with it.

When we define love in this way it becomes easy to see how we would benefit from walking in it. If you are kind and patient with people it is just natural that they will be inclined to like you. Now throw in a tendency to help any way you can, a resistance to quarreling and a willingness to respect other people’s opinions rather always insist on your own and you are just about guaranteed to win the favor of those around you and those above you.

I once observed a young associate who joined our company and was tasked with acting as a liaison between the marketing team and the product development team. His job was to collect information from the marketing team about what new features would be desirable in our products and communicate that information to the product development team to help them come up with improvements that would make our products more marketable.

Now there was a certain engineer on the product development team who was notoriously impossible to get along with. He had the attitude that he was superior to everyone around him and he would openly argue with anyone whose opinion differed from his own.

Since nobody in marketing wanted anything to do with this rather difficult engineer the new marketing associate ended up being stuck with him. This posed quite a challenge for our new associate. This was to be his first project and the initial opinion that his colleagues and his superiors would form would be based largely on how he performed on this first task.

The good news is that our young associate was blessed with a very pleasant disposition. He always had a smile on his face and was friendly toward everyone. He was an excellent example of acting in love in the workplace. When the engineer would get upset about a particular request from marketing the associate would patiently hear him out and document each objection carefully. Then our associate would go back to marketing and very diplomatically translate the engineer’s complaints into quite reasonable follow-up questions for marketing.

In some cases the thoughtful way in which the questions were presented caused the marketing folks to reconsider the requests. This would score points with the engineer because he began to see the associate as an advocate for his positions rather than an adversary to defeat.

In other cases, the marketing team would hold the line and insist that their ideas be implemented. When this happened the associate would gather some additional facts about why the change would be beneficial. Then he would go back to the engineer and very patiently explain that he fully understands the engineer’s objections, however, he has gathered some additional information that changes some of the original assumptions and he would request that the engineer reconsider in light of the new facts.

This diplomatic and respectful approach gave the engineer a face saving way of reversing his objections without the need for an argument. The engineer would typically just say something like “Well, you should have told me that before, of course I’ll agree with Marketing in this case.” Then our very wise associate would overlook the insulting part of that remark and instead of getting offended he would simply thank the engineer for his help.

This approach turned out to be wildly successful. Most projects with this engineer were behind schedule due to communication breakdowns and deadlocked arguments. However, our associate managed to orchestrate the entire project on time and on budget. Furthermore, both Marketing and Engineering were pleased with the final outcome. It was nothing short of a miracle.

So far, we have seen how acting in love leads to favor and a good name. Be sure to watch for Part 2 of the series where we will see how faithfulness picks up where love leaves off and boosts your reputation even higher.

Stumble it!

Tags: career, faithfulness, job, love, work