Irrecoverable Career Mistakes: Misaligning with Your Boss
One of the worst mistakes you can make for your career is misaligning with your boss.
Misalignment happens for a variety of reasons - changing priorities, misunderstanding in communication, etc.
What’s important is that you and your boss uncover misalignment quickly!
The worst situation is when the misalignment happens over an extended period of time, say: a year or a performance review cycle.
When you and your boss uncover a misalignment at a performance review, the most likely course of action is a bad performance review.
This is what makes recovering from this mistake so hard - the record of your mistake is on your performance.
To recover from a performance mistake, it will take a whole performance cycle.
Problem is, you must work at least twice as hard to recover to get back to neutral performance, and twice as hard as that to get back to net positive performance.
It’s important to stay aligned with your boss.
This is why it is paramount you communicate with your boss how you are spending your time and effort on a weekly basis.
Discovering a misalignment that’s happened for a week is recoverable. Discovering after a whole performance cycle - devastating.
No matter who’s at fault for the misalignment, you will always suffer the consequences.