There are millions of books that will tell you the key secret to being a model employee. They discuss generally small things like posture, body language, attitude, morality and ethics. I have found a way to bypass all of that unnecessary crap. It's not as if my body language or ethical moral code ever made a difference at any jobs I've ever had. All these books and blogs tend to leave out the most important piece of advice: sabotage.
Now, I don't mean go out and ruin someones career for shit's and giggles, or even be a total open douche. I present a passive aggressive solution that combines almost two contradictory ethical codes.
Laziness pays off now. Hard work pays off later.
That's right! You can do both! You can have your cake and eat it too if you follow my simple guidelines. How do you do that, you ask? Please keep reading to learn my priceless secrets.
No one is excellent at any job when they first start. I was just downright awful when I started my last job. I couldn't do anything correct. Use this to your advantage when starting any job. Gradually ease into the job. Establish that you take your time and might be a slow learner. This sets the stage for how people will percieve your future work ethic. Decent, but not great is what you want to aim for. If you work hard with a good attitude, it just sets you up to do more thankless tasks than you can possibly imagine.
Everyone loves a hard worker. You don't have to thank them as often and they tend to pick up slack with few complaints. Everyone hates a lazy worker. They get paid the same amount for doing less and are generally less respected. Plus that just puts them in the crosshairs for the next round of layoffs. Thusly, you will need to set your work effort to "aggressively mediocre." This means you do the job properly, but not poorly. This also means you don't excel. You just stay in the middle. People won't expect as much from you but won't expect less as well. This works well in your favor. No one asks you for more things, but they also don't float rumors about how worthless and lazy you are.
Now this is where it gets good. This is the key to your success. Let's say you have worked at this job for a year now and you have been deemed competent enough to train somone new. Let's say your name is J and your trainee's name is W. W is nice and enthusiastic. Wants to excel but doesn't have as much background in the job. J is tired of the job, wants a raise, and wants to appear better at the job without working harder. The right thing for J to do is under-train. Now I don't mean don't tell them very important things. That's a dick move. Plus if someone else trains them on days you're not there, you will seem super incompetent for having not mentioned something so very important. What I mean is, leave out small things. Small things add up. People remember small things and make a bigger deals about them. It's a fact of life.
So while J is training W, J casually forgets to say a few things about an obscure task that isn't used that often. However, the job requires you know this task, just in case. J actually forgets to go over many of these small things. These things are small enough that another trainer would likely forget them as well. After W is done training, W is supposedly ready to be autonomous and somewhat reliable.
W is now in some trouble. These small tasks keep coming up and they can't do them (or they think they forgot how to do them. Pefect!). People remember these things. W can't do most small tasks but is reasonably good at the bigger ones. Rumors start going around that W isn't very good or kind of slow. People start to mumble things like "This wouldn't have happened if J were here." or "J would have known what to do." J's value just increased by 100% without having to work harder. J is now percieved as more valuable. The more W screws up, the better J looks. Now of course, people can look back and say "Well J trained W. It's J's fault that W sucks." This is a minor complication that will be forgotten soon. Most people aren't in agreement with blaming trainers. Plus J can remark about how they had to explain EVERYTHING when training. If there is something people hate in the workplace, it's someone who has to be babied during training. Now this remark doesn't have to be true. It just becomes seemingly true the more W messes up and needs small tasks explained. This leaves the rest of the workplace longing for the good ol' days of when J worked. Ah, yes things were better when J was around. Things got done.
This laziness pays off long term. It will take W a while to get used to the job and be competent. J's value will increase as a result. Eventually, J's value as an employee plateaus when W gets to be decent at the job. But the beauty part is that the process is repeatable with each new employee J trains. It will seem as though the department is bad at hiring good people whereas J's value coincidentally increases with each new hire. If the new hire has experience within the company and is known to already be competent, this scheme will not work. J will probably be caught being lazy when the trainee appears more competent. J's stock in value will drop to all time lows. Someone may even catch on to the the grand scheme of under-training to increase one's value.
You get the point. It's quite repetitive. But it's gold, I tell you! Gold! I would even daresay, it's platinum! Perhaps even uranium. It's that good. It works every time.
Just for ego's sake, we'll call it "The Walker Maneuver."
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