Mark Daye, tweeted a link to a LinkedIn article by Ilya Pozin, “The 7 Things Successful People Never Say.”
You want to be successful. Everyone does. But your actual words might be undermining your chances of success. The things you say in the office, no matter how innocuous they seem to you, might be knocking you down the career ladder and putting the top position you dream about out of reach.
1. “That’s not in my job description.”
2. “It can’t be done.”
3. “It’s not my fault.”
4. “This will just take a minute.”
5. “I don’t need any help.”
6. “It’s not fair.”
7. “This is the way it’s always been done.”
The 7 phrases that can be career breakers are familiar to all of us, but we need to be reminded often. However, although people who work in private corporations and who want to be promoted will take Pozin’s advice, the people who run our governments repeat versions of these phrases with impunity and get reelected.
They left out “my dog ate it”
Regarding #2 “It can’t be done”… That can be the right answer, and you may have to say it a lot if your boss is a moron. While it may endanger your job security or income level, if you measure success by internal measures rather than external, you’ll probably regard this as an indicator of success, not failure.
Every one of the phrases on that list would be entirely reasonable to say in certain situations. If the corporate world frowns on them regardless of context, the corporate world is being (as seems to happen quite often) a bit silly.
You’re not supposed to say that.
In fact, the things on the list are pretty much 90% of what I’ve ever personally heard any upper management that I’ve ever worked under say. All the way up to the President.
So something is off here. Maybe in the premise.