Employment Attorney Reveals The 3 Rare Traits Of Truly Effective Workers

We spend so much time at our jobs that they can often end up making or breaking our lives, so it’s important that things go as smoothly and positively as possible while we’re there.

But sometimes it can be really challenging to know how to navigate the workplace, especially when the going gets tough. So how do we make ourselves resilient so that we can ensure we thrive, no matter the circumstances?

An employment attorney shared three traits of effective workers that make them excel at any job:

Craig Levey is a Boston-based employment lawyer, so you could say he’s seen a thing or two in his day when it comes to what makes workplaces, and especially workers, tick.

In his experience, what allows professionals to truly thrive at their jobs, no matter what those jobs might be, ultimately comes down to their choices in how they respond to the more difficult aspects of work.

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Anyone can thrive and grow when things are easy, after all. But Levey’s observations suggest that it’s when the chips are down that truly makes the difference. To that end, he laid out three skills the most effective workers have that keeps them rising to the top, no matter what.

1. Consistent results, no matter the circumstances

Levey said truly effective workers are able to get the job done, and done well, regardless of what extenuating circumstances might be flying around the office.

“Whether the economy is bad, if there’s issues with leadership, perhaps there’s a bad market,” he said, “effective and strong employees always find a way to add value and satisfy the duties of their jobs.”

Conditions may not necessarily allow for perfection. Nobody will blow away their sales goals during a recession when no one’s buying things, for instance. But there is still always room for wins, and in the end, it’s all about seizing those opportunities,

As Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck explained in her landmark work on growth vs. fixed mindsets, we can nearly always choose to view difficulties as either roadblocks or opportunities to, at the very least, learn and grow.

2. Being able to separate private life from work life

“Every employee experiences some type of personal issues that affect their work,” Levey said. We’re all human, after all, and bad things happen to all of us — that’s just life.

“But successful employees can somehow compartmentalize the two so they can still get their work done and be effective even while experiencing issues in their personal lives,” Levey explained.

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That might seem like a tall order, especially if you’re going through something difficult — and there are plenty of personal life challenges that are so big they’ll inevitably take over. Levey said it’s equally vital for employers to be understanding and accommodating to this reality.

But it’s also important for professionals to be as proactive about their personal lives as they have to be about their work lives, from prioritizing self-care to maintaining relationships and asking for help when you need it. And doing so ultimately requires everyone’s current favorite buzzword: boundaries.

3. Flying above office drama.

As anyone who’s fallen prey to this pitfall can tell you, this is one of the surest ways for your job performance to start suffering.

“We all know those employees that just do not get along with their colleagues, or if there’s an issue with their supervisor, it completely affects their work product,” Levey said. “An effective employee can navigate that office drama, not get involved and get their job done.”

Here again, is where boundaries and perspective come into play. Therapists say boundaries are actually about your own behavior, not others. It’s about how you choose to respond to others’ actions rather than trying to control them.

You don’t have to like someone to work with them, and you don’t need them to like you to get the job done, right? We can all choose whether or not to engage and what sort of office drama is actually worthy of a response, or simply tuning out.

It’s important to remember that sometimes, situations in our workplaces really are untenable. There are times when the only real solution is simply quitting and finding another job, and it’s important to give ourselves space to make those choices when they’re the right ones.

But most of the time, these are three areas where we can all choose to shift our focus our energy accordingly so that we can always bloom where we’re planted.

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John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.