Resume Reviver

Olympic Lessons for the Workplace

Each day during the Olympics, I’ll post a nugget relating a value of sportsmanship and the Olympics to your professional life.

Today’s Olympic Nugget: It's a losing strategy to try to get by doing the bare minimum.

Several badminton athletes were sent home from the Olympics for trying to lose their matches to secure easier competition. The matches are painful to watch and remind me of the South Park episode during which the kids try to lose their little league games.

We're all a little guilty of this to some degree. It's entirely exhausting and often inefficient to give every work responsibility or task 100%. Some professionals hang out in the danger zone of not giving their best effort or doing the bare minimum to get by way too much, and if you're in that group, you need to change your mentality, and quickly.

If you are approaching your job with the desire to get by with as little effort as possible, it will catch up to you. Companies care more than ever about maximizing the value of every investment, and that includes you. Others depend on you to do their jobs as well, and if you're doing only what it takes to not get yelled at given extra responsibility, you are letting down those folks. You are also poorly representing your company and their brand through such a reputation. We all know someone like this, don't we? It's hard to work with them or be around them, isn't it?

How guilty are you of doing the bare minimum? What are some ways to step it up to bring more value to your company and peers?

Photo by Dee'lite