Expert shares 5 good habits for career growth

5 good habits essential for a successful career

September 13, 2024 5:30 AM

Kicking a bad habit is hard, but sometimes, building good habits can be even harder.

Forty-six percent of employees attribute their career success to having the right habits, according to a recent report from professional training and coaching platform Crucial Learning. This compares to just 22% of employees that credited the decisions they made and the 24% who chalked it up to natural talent, meaning that building a healthy work routine is twice as critical for employees looking to advance.

"If you look at your outcomes and results at work — good or bad — as well as your career and your relationships, so much of all of it is determined not by the things you do periodically but by the things you do habitually," says Justin Hale, a principal consultant in learning design and research at Crucial Learning. "So addressing those habitual behaviors is really the leverage point to trying to change your results long term."

Unfortunately, many employees build bad habits without knowing they're doing it. For example, getting defensive in the face of criticism instead of taking the time to reflect on what was said is a common workplace bad practice, according to Hale. Processing feedback constructively is crucial for career development, and without breaking that habit, finding success is made harder. Another example is as simple as looking at emails first thing in the morning. It forces employees to deal with the loudest problems first, rather than the most important, which sets them back in the long-run.

Thankfully, there are many options for employees looking to put themselves back on the right path — it'll just take some time to break old cycles and start new ones. One strategy is to simply replace certain habits with similar new ones so as not to start from scratch, which is often where people fail to make changes. This means that if an employee is used to looking at emails first thing in the morning, they can replace that by checking their Slack or Teams chats instead.

Hale also encourages the use of a habit loop to make sure new behaviors stick. This is when an employee rewards themselves with something that makes them feel good every time they choose a good habit rather than the bad one they previously had.

"When employees are thinking about the right habit for them, they shouldn't be copying other people's because they won't find the same impact and it will lead them to failure," he says. "Each person has to find the keystone habits for them that will create that domino effect for them."

And while there is no one-size-fits-all solution, Hale shared a few tips on where to start.

Learn when to say yes for growth and no for focus

"If you're in a place where you're trying to expand your role or if your goal right now for your career is to expand what you do and take on more important things to show that you can get stuff done, then say yes to things. Even if you find yourself questioning how to do it, saying yes gives you that opportunity and shows that you're eager and that you're interested. That being said, the other side of that coin is if you're someone who's trying to improve your career by just finishing what you have — maybe you just were promoted, maybe you're putting a new leadership position, or maybe you're just in a place in your career where the amount of stuff you have is just really overwhelming — you need to focus on saying no, not saying yes. And what I mean by that is learn to say no with integrity.

"When you already feel like you have enough on your plate and a new task comes in or new request comes in, fight the habit of immediately saying yes and trying to figure it out, and instead building the habit of respectfully declining by saying: 'My whole goal is to get the right stuff done, and I'm concerned that saying yes to this will jeopardize that,' or 'I'm going to have to unfortunately decline that,' or 'I really want to focus on the stuff I already had my plate.' If the task really needs to get done, you can even ask about reprioritizing the completion date. Sometimes saying no isn't just saying no, it's about renegotiating when someone needs your help."

Reprioritize your mornings

"Don't look at your email first. Instead, take two minutes to glance at your calendar and get a quick sense of the things you've already committed to doing that day. This includes meetings you have and calls you scheduled and things you need to do that have to happen that day that are time and day specific. Then take a quick glance at some of your key project lists and to-do lists and get a sense of how you'd like to spend your time between meetings and other calls in terms of the most high priority actions you could take and then you can go about your day. Then you can look in your email if you want, but I've found that people who make the change to look at their calendar and [their] key task list before glancing at their email end up creating this positive cascading effect because it improves your ability to judge if something is a real priority versus just a little fire trying to distract you and has a massive leveraging effect on the rest of your day."

Take action after reading an email

"Most people tend to just leave an email in their inbox after reading it. The problem with that? They have to then at some point come back to their email, find that email, reread it again only to remind themselves again about what the action is, which is maybe to take 10 minutes to call a client. It creates a pull on your mental psyche and your stress levels to try and remember to reread emails over and over again, especially when the truth is that people have such a volume of email they often don't come back to that thing. And when does that task actually end up showing up again? When they've already missed it. Instead, when you're processing your email, make a decision about what the action is that needs to happen and don't leave the email there anymore. Archive the email and park the action on an active to-do list or on a calendar to get done later. Don't leave your emails in your inbox."

Set up a weekly review

"Taking the time out of your week to review what you have planned out in your calendar is one of the greatest habits you can engage in. It's an opportunity for you to step back, clean up your physical space, clean up your digital space, review your priorities and your daily tasks and just recalibrate how you're spending your time. It's one of the keys to get more of the right stuff done and be more successful."

Give yourself a mental break

"Your brain only has so much capacity to think and consider and make decisions. The problem is, people will just drain that until it's done, and so one of the greatest habits you can have is a habit of giving yourself a mental break sometime in the afternoon during your day. What that means is stepping away from your computer and from thinking about work, even just for 10 minutes, go for a walk, grab a snack or some water to help your body, clear your mind and then come back. That is a massive habit that will help you actually re-energize your mind and your capacity, so that you actually finish the day not on fumes, but with some energy and some gas in the tank."