Asking For More Responsibilities For Promotion: It's More Than Meets The Eye

Directly going to the human resources manager and asking for a promotion may work for some lucky workers; but more often than not, such a strategy may not be a good approach to climb up the company's hierarchy. As a matter of fact, doing such an act has a better chance of turning your desire to be promoted into a joke. Instead of being tactless about asking for a promotion, a far more effective plan involves asking for more responsibilities.

Your willingness to take on more responsibilities is an indication that you are ready to move up the corporate ladder. It demonstrates, in simple terms, that you are prepared to get out of your comfort zone to achieve more things for your department or the company as a whole. Asking for more responsibilities demonstrates three characteristics that are important for someone who wants to go beyond the rank and file into a leadership position.

Readiness In Acquiring New Skills

Achievers in the corporate arena demonstrate a hunger for new skills and up-to-date knowledge about the functions they perform. Asking for more responsibilities is the single most important means of learning new skills without digging down in your pockets; you don't have to enroll in further schooling nor do you have to invest in books or other literature.

Readiness To Go The Extra Mile

People who go the extra mile are not only good citizens; they are also valued by the companies they are working for. Seeking for more professional responsibilities in the workplace shows your willingness to go the extra mile and hence your suitability of being promoted. Put simply, to get more for your career means you have to do more.

Readiness To Be Creative

Most people working in the office feel that there isn't enough time to do all the things that is asked of them. Now, here you come asking for more responsibilities. What does that make you? Seeking additional responsibilities on top of your current tasks and in the face of seemingly shrinking office hours makes your creativity as an employee evident. Just like the juggler in the circus who never fails to leave the audience enthralled by his tricks, you will surely amaze your boss by being able to shuffle multiple functions at the same time.

Truly, asking for more responsibilities is a time-tested strategy to get you promoted. Remember the next time you knock on your manager's door, don't just let him or her know that you are aiming for a promotion. Make sure you wear your goals on your sleeve by asking for more responsibilities. And be ready for the road to success.

Take A Cue On How To Act Professionally To Deserve Promotion

Many companies around the country employ hundreds or thousands of people each without actually realizing that the work force they employ are made up of highly skilled individuals and not professionals. In today's world of computers, sophisticated machines, and home office trends, the concept of professionalism is slowly being siphoned off to oblivion. Nevertheless, there are still the mighty few who believe that acting professionally in the workplace may be the one way ticket to a promotion.

Professionalism is simply putting effectiveness and efficiency in one's job. By acting professionally on your job, you are able to maximize your company's time and resources to perform the functions you are assigned to do. It is the basic requirement upon which you will be considered for a promotion. The following are the common tendencies that you should be able to imbibe if you are to act professionally to deserve promotion

Optimum Productivity

Professionalism in the workplace enables you to greatly maximize your productivity by enabling you to focus all your energies to the work at hand. Your attitude towards work should go beyond the amount that is being paid to you; and in some cases, acting professionally even transcends the kind of working environment in which you perform your tasks.

Constructive Collaboration

Acting professionally enables you to see the big picture. You realize that your job, no matter how far below the corporate hierarchy it seems, is a part of the whole system that enables your company in its entirety to do business everyday. True professionals value teamwork or constructive collaboration because it is the means of making all the other parts of the corporate operation function as intended.

Active Responsiveness

Professionalism requires active responsiveness. In fact, some call it the foundation of professionalism. Responsiveness and initiative are twins. When you are responsive, you deliver results above and beyond the call of duty. Without compromising your specialized function or peddling undue influence, being actively responsive makes you see and cut through the red tape in your company's bureaucracy.

Useful Innovation

Finally, all the three common traits of true professionals will lead to finding useful innovation within a job or the company as a whole. Acting professionally enables you to nurture ideas and turn them into actual game plan. As you alter inadequate procedures with resultant ones, your company is able to streamline its operation.

Professionalism in your work place not only makes your job or your company function like a well-oiled machine, given the traits mentioned, it also shows your manager that you are an asset to the company and hence deserve to be promoted.

Finding The Right Channel To Acquire New Skills To Get Promoted

Think about yourself as a spare tire and your company as a car. To get yourself promoted out of the trunk to being attached to the axle, you need to have a better rim, well-defined threads, and unqualified conformity with the terrain that the vehicle you are attached to is traveling on. The most important ace-up-your-sleeve when aspiring for promotion is to be on the cutting edge of the industry or the function that you are presently holding. And there is no other way of doing this than acquiring new skills every chance you get.

Indeed in today's tightly competitive corporate environment, being good at what you are currently doing isn't enough to get you up the corporate ladder. Always remember that getting to the top means more tasks and responsibilities; therefore, you need to continuously learn new skills so that you're prepared and more preferable for that office in the corner than the common cubicle. So just where and how will you seek to learn new skills to get promoted?

Sign Up For Volunteer Work

So you have been working on the same job for so many years and all you can do is file reports alphabetically and chronologically. In short, you aren't learning new skills on the job and therefore you have no added value for the company. The best thing that you can do to seek out new skills is to sign up for volunteer work. Most non-profit organizations, like religious chapters and homeowners' associations among others, are more than willing to welcome you into their fold; while filling in volunteer work, you have a better opportunity of learning new skills which you can apply at work to impress your boss.

Sign Up For Substitute Roles

If you have extra time, you can apply for substitute responsibilities within or outside your company. Filling up other's shoes can greatly enhance your learning capacity. As you are exposed to different tasks, you leverage your search for new skills by expanding your experience in other functions.

Sign Up For Classes

Schools are the best source for new skills; it is their job to impart knowledge and to keep abreast with what is new in the corporate environment. Attending continuing education programs in schools will provide you not only with new skills but a wider network of other professionals as well. While you don't necessarily need to get a second Bachelor's degree, short courses or programs offered by schools will definitely add value to you as an employee aspiring for a promotion.

Three Tricks To Acing Performance Appraisals And To Get Promoted

Your company's performance appraisal cycle is just around the corner and you have been dreaming of getting that promotion. Well, the importance of getting excellent marks during the performance appraisal can't be overemphasized if you want to climb up your company's hierarchy. Indeed, your performance appraisal translates to your line to professional success.

As with any aspect of life, always remember that there is no alternative for good preparation. So, the most dangerous move that you can take during your company's performance appraisal cycle is to act unconcerned and pretend that such an evaluation period isn't happening at all. Rather than being passionless, you must start preparing mentally and physically for the appraisal period days before it starts. Remember, luck and your manager favors the prepared.

Acing performance appraisals starts before you even sit down with your manager or human resource officer during the big appraisal. The following are three tips that can effectively raise your chances of acing your company's performance appraisal and eventually getting the promotion that you've always wanted.

Intentions Are Good, But Managers Prefer Results

Sure, you've committed time and effort in fixing your department's jumbled filing system. The only problem is you've never done it yourself. Performance appraisals are about your performance during the current cycle. More often than not, your superiors will look at detailed facts about the results you have brought into the company. The quantifiable results that you have contributed are your chips, your badges, to get excellent appraisal marks and eventual promotion; therefore, keep a record of the contributions and the extra miles that you have made to your company.

Self-promotion Gives You The Head Start

Discreetness or modesty will surely work in bowling games and religious institutions; but for someone who wants to ace performance appraisals, self-promotion is the name of the game. Think of yourself as a product to be sold; you will have a hard time selling a product if nobody knows that product exists! To get good appraisal marks, let the people you work for know that you exist. Make sure that management knows about the accomplishments you have made for the company as a whole.

Relationships Build Credibility And Get You Promoted Too

Some wise guy said it all; success isn't only about what you know but who you know as well. For your purposes, it is a good practice to maintain good professional relations with people who are above you; however, this shouldn't be confused with becoming a boot licker.

Corporate Accounting Scandals and Frauds: Alive and Well dispite Enron

Don't have time to post but here are a couple of links on corporate accounting scandals

WikiPedia Definition

Classic Scandals

Corporate Scandals Alive and Well

Anti-Money Laundering



tags: Money Laundering, corporate scandals, accounting frauds, white collar crime

Corporate Executive Get Caught, Citizens and Employees Pay!!

Enron Scandal, true the executive got in trouble, Employees paid the ultimate price in loss of pension.

Martha Stewart was accused of insider trading. Got in trouble for perjury. Now there are more strict rules for stock trading. Now everyone pays with more strict rules

Global Crossing, Adelphia, and Enron were all riddled with scandals. The rest of the companies pay with more strict SEC rules on reporting financials

Lockheed, and Boeing have had ethics violations, the rest of the employees pay with training. A few bad apples forces everyone else to pay.

Companies declare bankruptcy. Delta, United, American etc. Corporate executive get a bonus for completing restructing of the company. Creditors, and employees that had interest in the old company pays the ultimate price, i.e loss of pensions, medical benefits, wage cuts etc.

In the 80's Micheal Milken gets convicted for junk bond violations. Everyone else pays, because rules for handling junk bonds in the market become more strict.

Of course the latest scandal is the HP Spying scandal. Because of the spying scandal the term called "pretexting" has been brought into the spotlight. As a result of the spying scandal, now there are tighter control within the corporation. There are also laws in place to criminalize pretexting. The people that suffer are the victims where their privacy rights were violated.

Moral of the story corporate executive get greedy, break the law, EVERYBODY else pays.




tags: HP Scandal, Adelphia Scandal, Enron Scandal, Global Crossing Scandal, Delta Airlines Bankruptcy, American Airlines Bankruptcy, United Airlines Bankruptcy

Work Place Bullying: Breakdown

What is workplace bullying?

According to WikiPedia, Workplace bullying, like childhood bullying, is the tendency of individuals or groups to use aggressive or unreasonable behavior to achieve their ends. Unlike the more physical form of schoolyard bullying, workplace bullies often operate within the established rules and policies of their organization and their society.

Gary and Ruth Namie define workplace bullying as "the repeated mistreatment of one employee targeted by one or more employees with a malicious mix of humiliation, intimidation and sabotage of performance.".[1]

Workplace bullying is also referred to as mobbing, although mobbing can also mean any bullying by more than one person.


What can you do about this? Now there is legal recourse.

tags: workplace bullying, bullying, mobbing