Whether it’s the Monday blues or you just want to get some work, sometimes you just want to lock yourself away from the rest of your colleagues. However, one shouldn’t be so quick to turn away from your team. Sitting right there next to you, they are a source of skills, talent and knowledge.
Take a look around and you may encounter some characteristics from your colleagues that you want to try to pick up and add to your professional skillset. Here are five key traits that you should look out for.
Managing work-life balance
It’s the one thing that working professionals are all looking for nowadays. While you seem to consistently have a work overload pushing you to labour late into the night, there always seems to be that one person in the office who manages to leave on time and finish all their work.
This person doesn’t have superpowers. Achieving a work-life balance coming through careful management of work, time and one’s team. If you take some time to pay attention to the way they work, you will notice they always discuss the team’s workload, carefully calculating how best to split up work, managing timelines and expectations.
These people aren’t just dumping their work on other people so they can go home on time. They are project managing with the whole team so nobody is overloaded and unable to complete their work on time.
Meeting management
Everyone has been in meetings that seem to last an eternity, yet somehow, have failed to accomplish anything at all. There are, however, a few meeting magicians, who somehow can guide meetings to be highly productive and efficient.
When you encounter this type of person, watch how they structure their meetings, outline the expected outcomes in advance, and keep people on the right track. It takes lots of practice to master, but if you aim to adopt this trait for your own sake.
Inspiring leadership
There are two types of leaders: those who lead with passion and those who lead with fear. The latter is much more common, and many of your colleagues will undoubtedly have horror stories to tell!
When there is a strong leader, the culture, performance and efficiency of the team or company can improve dramatically. Become an attentive employee and spend time with the leaders in your company. Try to pick up their working style and mannerisms. Important things to watch out for are the way an inspiring leader speaks to the team, keeping in mind language and tone, as well as behaviour when faced with difficult situations.
Productive Feedback
When a mistake is made, a project fails, or a deadline is missed, it’s easy to start picking apart the problems and pointing out where everyone failed. Pointing fingers, however, never accomplishes anything and results in bitter teammates and broken relationships.
Providing productive feedback is a trait that is difficult to acquire, requiring the finesse of emotional intelligence and the grit of strong professional knowledge. When someone skilled in giving productive feedback comes out of a meeting where a problem was tackled, everyone emerges feeling positive and aware of what went wrong, why it went wrong, how to prevent it next time as well as what the next steps are for the current situation. Learn how to do this, and you’ll be well on your way up the promotion ladder.
Creativity
Being dragged into a brainstorm at the end of the day is often the last thing you want to do. You’re mentally drained from the full work day, and have due items on your to do list preoccupying your mind. Despite this, some people always seem to be able to come up with creative ideas and solutions, no matter what the situation is.
These people weren’t born this way, their creativeness comes down to two key components: confidence and curiosity. Those looking to pick up on this trait should monitor how creative people aren’t afraid to bring up their ideas and how they keep their fingers on the pulse of the industry they work in as well as what’s happening around the world.
