Ranking
An article by Jim Connolly
Have you ever wondered why some people take great pleasure in watching a colleague make a mistake? Perhaps you have witnessed someone deliberately trying to get a colleague into trouble and wondered what motivates such behaviour?  In either case, I am going to show you why this happens and how to deal with it!  It's all down to something known as 'RANKING'. 

Here’s why it happens AND how to deal with it
As an employee, we have just two ways to increase ‘how good we look’ in the eyes of our employer or manager.

The first route is to become truly excellent at what we do:
This places us above all those in our team or organisation who are just doing enough to keep the boss off their back . Thus, our ‘ranking’ or profile increases accordingly. If we work hard enough and show the correct attitude, we can quickly rise to the very top of the pile. Fortunately, this is the route followed, to a lesser or greater degree, by most people in the workplace.

The second route is to stay as we are – but hope that the ranking or profile of our colleagues falls:
If Tom works in a group of 7 people and is an ‘average’ employee, he will have three people ‘ranked’ below him and three people ranked above him. However, if he maintains his current quality of work and the three people above him start making mistakes or the quality of their work decreases sufficiently, Tom is suddenly elevated to the top of the pile! This improved ranking happens, even though Tom has not actually done anything proactively to increase his value to the team or his organisation.

The major problem with using the latter approach to career development is that it simply does not work! Organisations and teams reward people that bring value; the greater the value the greater the reward. So, if Tom becomes the top achiever in his team, but he and his team are underperforming ineffective and failing to reach their targets, the team will eventually be replaced by more effective and productive people. No business can afford to employ people that are not delivering value.

Sadly, a sizeable minority of people fail to understand this and as a result, spend more time focusing on what their colleagues are doing wrong than on what they themselves could be doing better. These people are extremely easy to spot in any department or team. They have a tendency to gossip negatively about their colleagues and are always one of the first people to inform a manager or boss when someone else has messed up.

If you have a colleague that fits this description and it’s frustrating you, you will be pleased to know there is a foolproof solution: Just focus on what you are doing and do it as well as you possibly can.  

You see, by focusing on your own effectiveness and productivity, you will actually be beyond their reach. Those who want you to fail need you to provide them with the ammunition first! By robbing them of the ammunition required for their pointless endeavour, you become untouchable. In my experience, these people always eventually press the self-destruct button on their career and are either fired or have to leave.

Never let your career be derailed by allowing those negative influences in the workplace to impact you. The route to career success is to constantly invest in yourself. The happiest and most rewarding careers belong to those who constantly invest in themselves. The very fact that you are reading this article proves that you are one of those rare people who already understand this.  

Set your standards high and focus on your own effectiveness – you cannot but succeed!

To your success,

Jim Connolly
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