Terrible Guidance

As last week's Newsletter was a little controversial ;-) we thought we'd be a little more lighthearted this week.

Mark and Wendii are collecting webpages with terrible career guidance on them. This was prompted by a webpage we found with a flowchart to decide whether you should ask your boss for a raise. The first question was 'do you have another offer?' The implication, of course, is that if you have another offer, you'll use that as leverage in getting a raise for your boss.

This is terrible guidance for two reasons. One, the only reason for interviewing and getting another offer is to explore opportunities that you're interested in. If you're not intending to leave the role you're in for this new role, you'll turn down the offer and so there's no reason to tell your manager about it.

Second, if you do try to use it as leverage, you may win an increased salary, but you'll lose all the goodwill you have with your manager. He'll never trust you again, and, potentially he'll hold your actions against you - preventing you from progressing in the future. Is this worth the raise you just got? Not often.

So in the spirit of lightheartedness - you're all professionals - what's the worst guidance you've seen? What raised your professional hackles? We've started a thread on the forums here so that you can share.

Whether it's IT or legal advice, marketing or productivity - share with us the advice you know to be wrong.

DiSC Profiles

Our recent podcast about High I's and email was very popular - particularly with the High I's :-) We do have similar casts for the D's, S's and C's planned, and they'll be released in coming months.

Understanding your profile and that of others and being able to adapt to them is one of the most important things we learned professionally. If you haven't yet discovered what your profile is, you can do that here. We have lots of free podcasts which will help you in using that knowledge. You can find all of them here.

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