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Career Stallers & Stoppers

Many ambitious workers spend their whole careers toiling and strategizing to get ahead. If their career trajectories plateau, they may blame the bosses who failed to recognize their brilliance and promote them, or the corporate politics that hampered their ascent, or the no-win assignments they took on. They point at everyone and everything except themselves.

But experts say that a half dozen very common traits and actions frequently stall out high performers, impeding otherwise rosy career paths. “When you see these behaviours in yourself or teams, they’re something that you really need to pay attention to and adjust.

Here are the four behaviors and traits that most often obstruct performance and stall promising careers. They are to be avoided like your career depends on it—because it does:

- Overdependence on one skill.

A common example is overreliance on technical abilities. In managerial roles, where skills such as effective communication and the ability to balance competing interests are essential in overseeing others’ work, technical brilliance becomes a side player.

- Blocked personal learning.

This is a common weak spot among high achievers, who are usually very successful with their own skills and methods, and therefore not proactive in learning new behaviors and strategies.

- Failure to build teams or staff effectively.

“Lone wolves don’t do well in most corporate environments”. Though you might imagine what an employee who doesn’t get along with others is like, in practice these workers may be high achievers who appear to run functional teams.

- Non-strategic thinking.

This is often the shortcoming of high performers who are prone to focusing on details—or even to getting mired in them. “They can’t deal with assignments that require strategic thinking. The problem is simple: Managers and leaders need to oversee many moving parts and cannot create effective approaches without seeing the whole chessboard. Korn Ferry researchers found that it is the second-most potent way to stall performance at all levels of an organization.