Understanding the impact of respect and ethics on your career

To get anywhere in your career, it helps to be able to command respect from your co-workers. Unfortunately, you will find that it is extremely difficult to earn your colleagues’ respect if you have no ethical boundaries whatsoever. If you’re the kind of person who is prepared to do anything to get ahead, the chances are your career will not progress as quickly as you would like it to. In any work environment you have to be able to get along with your colleagues and if you bully and dominate them, undermining their confidence and generally being negative, you will soon find that your lack of ethics and respect hamper your career prospects.

 

If your colleagues respect you, it will be much easier for you to work together as a team and to get your ideas across. If you constantly try to bully the people you work with into accepting your ideas, eventually they will stop listening to you and so you will be fighting a losing battle to make them pay attention. You will therefore struggle to gain the respect of the people who you work alongside or who you are meant to delegate tasks and responsibilities to. When you need a favour, it is unlikely that anyone will be forthcoming with help and you can’t do everything by yourself.

Of course, if you’re looking to achieve career success you want to be able to highlight what a great job you’re doing to your employer. However, you will not be able to take credit for every single thing and so you have to recognise the contribution members of your team have made. Failing to do so will make your co-workers wonder why they even bother to make an effort, especially if you treat them like dirt most of the time. Taking credit for other people’s work will only get you so far, because if you are moved into a higher level position you will end up having to prove yourself eventually, anyway.

It is therefore a waste of time and energy trampling over other people to get ahead when actually you are reliant upon their efforts for your own career. Everyone has their own career goals and so you should focus less on halting other people’s career progress and more on what you can do to achieve success in your own career. It may be tempting to tell your boss that some of your co-workers are incompetent and to turn people against each other, but this is not the way to go if you want respect. You may not be bothered what people think about you, but if you’re career-driven then other people’s perceptions of you cannot be ignored.

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