Harvard specialist shares her No. 1 ‘undesirable’ trait CEOs see in workforce: It’s ‘a large pink flag for me’

Harvard specialist shares her No. 1 ‘undesirable’ trait CEOs see in workforce: It’s ‘a large pink flag for me’


Of the quite a few features folks bring to the workplace, a person stands out as an complete “have confidence in breaker,” in accordance to a Harvard profession professional.

It really is “using credit rating for other people’s suggestions,” claims Heidi K. Gardner, a expert management advisor and distinguished fellow at Harvard Regulation University. “To me, it signals a person of two points,” she tells CNBC Make It. “Lack of trustworthiness or deficiency of competence.”

It is unethical to pass off anyone else’s do the job or thoughts as your own, and it presents off the effect that you don’t respect your colleagues, Gardner claims: “Possibly they are not able to in fact see how significantly benefit the persons all-around them carry to their personal accomplishment. And that lack of ability to appreciate other people’s contributions is a big red flag for me.”

You may well not even understand you happen to be demonstrating indicators of using credit score for the function of other folks — like accepting your boss’s praise for a team venture as an alternative of sharing it with your teammates, or presenting an concept that you and a colleague brainstormed jointly without having exclusively mentioning their contributions.

This doesn’t imply you want to cease collaborating. Teamwork is crucial for any company’s good results, and by extension, your have results, Gardner states.

Alternatively, you have to have to be transparent when an thought is just not your own to stay away from coming throughout as untrustworthy.

“I have to believe that somebody is not a jerk in get to collaborate with them. I have to feel that when they are demanding me or questioning me, they’re performing so from a spot of genuine constructiveness,” Gardner states. “If someone normally takes credit rating for an individual else’s function or ideas, they are not reputable in that feeling.”

That echoes one particular of billionaire Warren Buffett’s long-held tenets: Trustworthiness is any employee’s most valuable trait. In a 1998 speech with MBA learners at the College of Florida, Buffett shared the a few important traits he seems for in a potential worker or business lover.

“We glimpse for intelligence, we search for initiative or strength and we search for integrity,” he reported. “And if they never have the latter, the first two will kill you. For the reason that if you are going to get an individual without having integrity, you want them lazy and dumb.”

Gardner states the important to results is “good collaboration,” a expression she coined to explain when colleagues perform together on a process that could have been carried out alone. It outcomes in amplified believe in, efficiency and high quality of function, she states — as extensive as everyone’s transparent about who contributed to the task, that is.

Plagiarizing and staying untruthful are “anti-collaborative,” and that’s the No. 1 trait experts ought to steer crystal clear from, says Gardner.

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