Leadership and Performance: Exit The Common Crowd

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

I learned the value of exiting the common crowd by accident in my opinion. The reason I say that is because I naturally always wanted to do a good job at work. Maybe because that was just the way I was raised. My mother was a hard worker and so was my father so that’s probably the reason why this came so easy for me. Not only that, I was very motivated by money.

When I got into the workforce, I always worked hard but more importantly I watched and studied many of the people working around me in every job I ever had. I noticed what the best performers were doing and how they would get complimented on there work. On the other end, I noticed how the worse performers were always getting into trouble.

The best got rewarded and promoted. The worse got documented, suspended, and even fired. The biggest thing that I picked up from my findings was the fact that approximately ten percent were the best performers and approximately another ten percent were the worse performers. The remaining eighty percent were just average workers. To me that met that most people are just average performers in the workplace.

I did not want to be average. I wanted to be successful. I was average during the first nineteen years of my life and to be totally honest with you, I was sick of it. Being average didn’t do much for my past, present, and future. That’s when I decided to exit the common crowd.

I decided that I was not going to follow the ninety percent of average workers and especially the worse workers. I wasn’t going to take any advice from them. I wasn’t going to hang out with them. I wasn’t going to talk like them. Last but certainly not least, I was going to limit as much conservation with these individuals as possible. Instead I was going to follow what the successful people did.

If you do what common people do, you will also get their common results. My mindset was to do just about opposite of what most people did in the workplace. While some people called off from work, I was the first to volunteer to take those open shifts. While they were home watching television, I was home reading policy and procedures manuals. While they were complaining about how much work they had to do, I was getting mine done and thinking about how I can advance my career. While they were being negative, I was being positive.

I make happen what I want to make happen by studying and following the people who are making things happen. That’s the bottom line! I don’t listen to people unless I can validate the information they’re giving to me. If they can’t, I let it go in one ear and out of the other. Have you ever heard that saying, “Talk is cheap!”, well it is.

I believe that I am very fortunate to have discovered this strategy on my own early on. This is definitely one of the top leadership skills that is responsible for me turning my life completely around after thinking I was going to be unsuccessful for the rest of my entire life career wise.

I promise you that you will see a significant change in your life once you take action on this tip. Nothing completely changes overnight but if you start today, you will start to see a difference immediately.

If you want to learn more about “leadership and performance” skills click the link in this sentence to visit other blogs talking about this too!