Stage-1: Do the Job Well

Principles for a Successful Career

At every Stage, the principles for building your career focus in sharply different ways on the same fundamental things:

• harnessing yourself
• harnessing others
• handling outcomes, both good and bad.

More

The Mode values emerge from the nature of the Type and deal with:

• harnessing yourself:

1. the challenge (i.e. what is essential and usually difficult)
2. the benefit sought by addressing the challenge
3. the means for handling the challenge
   

• harnessing others:

4. dealing with groups
5. dealing with individuals
   

• handling outcomes:

6. the requirement for significant success
7. the response to inevitable failures

Applying Market-Centred Principles

You start by looking for a job, applying, and getting a job. Once in the job, you have to do the job and keep the job.

You are competing in the job market and then with your co-workers, so you start at Market-centred mode.

The principles and dangers are described in detail here. But this provides the story in a nutshell:

Why Move On?

Anyone who is content with just «having a job», opens themselves up to exploitation and the raw end of office politics. Sticking with job-focused principles alone will almost certainly generate unpleasant effects:

• exploitation — infliction of power on you;
• exhaustion — depletion of your power;
• being exposed — threats to your power;
• over-extension — waste of your power;
• envy — activator of power against you;
• unimportance — the lack of your power; &
• unfair attacks or sabotage — operation of crude power against you.

All in all, the downside of job-focused market-centred principles alone is considerable. Read more.

Where Next?

Building a career means standing up for yourself, being strong and dealing effectively with situations of all sorts by handling people and situations firmly and positively. The necessary transition is obvious. You must now recognize power as a factor in the quality of your work-life and rewards.

For the power-centred principles that you absolutely need,
go now to Stage-2: working the system.

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• Before you do, check out alternative responses to office politics.

Originally posted: July 2009