I've made many mistakes in my career but the biggest ones involved my comfort zone. Let's face it, it's easy to stay in a role you know, systems you're familiar with and a team you've had years of experience working with, but something happens when you do that over long periods of time. Your skills become stale, you typically get bored and you get passed up for promotions which can cause anyone to become bitter.
There are three comfort zone pitfalls that stand out to me most. These aren't collected statistics mind you. I've personally fallen into all of them. But I also learned how to get out of them and move ahead in my career.
Learning a new skill
When I graduated from college I knew practically nothing related to systems. This was pretty common all those years ago but I threw myself into learning how to operate anything and everything and that included excel. I then inherited someone's excel workbook that contained macros, pivot tables, vlookups and all sorts of calculations. This terrified me. How was I supposed to learn this? For days I avoided the file and did rudimentary calculations outside it to perform my daily duties.
I started to get in trouble with my boss. He needed the formats and reports from that file.
So, I sucked it up and spend 12 hours going through this workbook teaching myself, through reverse engineering, how each and every formula, pivot table and macro worked. But you know what happened? I surpassed it and improved the gargantuan file to minimize not only it's size but it's function.
Climb out of the pit: If you find yourself having to adopt new technology or inheriting someone else's work that's outside of your scope:
Stop and ask yourself what is making you bristle to this change.
Do the dirty work and learn it. It will take you hours/days/weeks but it will save you time in the long-run.
After step 2 think of ways you can improve it. (that's how you get promoted!)
Presentations
Maybe the mere mention of this word makes you break into cold sweats. I know I used to feel this way until I had a job where I had to present weekly to the COO of the company. This was potentially my worst nightmare because not only would I be presenting but I could also create a career limiting move for myself by saying the wrong thing! Yikes!
But each Tuesday morning I performed this dreaded task. And sometimes I didn't have the answers but I learned by openly admitting that very thing I gained more respect. The main purpose of the meeting was to inform the COO of the state of the company. Once I learned his style I was better prepared for questions he could throw at me. To this day I think of those meetings as a badge of honor, a presentation bootcamp with high stakes that was the best classroom I've ever been in.
Climb out of the pit: So you've been selected to present to a client, your department or the entire company. Go you!
Know you've been selected to present because you are a subject matter expert in your field.
Prepare a pre-mortem. (I've talked about these before but I'll reiterate in case you're new.) Make a list of everything that could go wrong. From this list take the items that could actually happen and dig deeper. For instance, "I won't know the answer to a question", make a list of potential questions you don't know the answer to right now. Research those questions and you are now better prepared to answer anything.
Take a deep breath, hold it and then let it out right before you present. It takes some of your nerves with it.
Managing People
Why would this be uncomfortable? Because you have to also manage hard conversations with the people you manage.
I've done this poorly and well in my career (in that order) and let me tell you doing it well is incredibly uncomfortable.
I've handled conflict many ways but the worst was sending a strongly worded email with a bullet point list of things an employee needed to change. (I cringe thinking about this now) In turn I received a strongly worded email back from the employee and my name circulating the rumor mill for weeks.
Months later worse behavior transpired and this time I followed the list I provided you below and the information was not only received well, I also had the employee thank me for telling them.
Climb out of the pit:
Think how you would want to be treated. Wouldn't you want to know if you did something incorrectly?
Remember you are sharing facts.
Always make sure you are in person for hard conversations. Email is the coward's way out of confrontation.
End on a positive note about other things they do well but lead with the negative. This is how you want to receive information too right?