Rahul Aswani

In other words, you trust someone because their behavior is consistent across weeks, or months, or years.

The reverse isn’t true. As an extreme analogy, you might have a terrible boss who tells you the way to get a promotion is to shut your mouth, fetch her coffee every morning, and do any busywork she assigns you. Now, maybe you check off these boxes and get a promotion. Cool. But would doing this actually help you in the long run? Would doing this teach you new skills and make you a more attractive hire for some other company down the line? Probably not. Maybe what happens is that you rise in the ranks of that company only to have it go bankrupt later on. (Hey, this isn’t unreasonable given the organization seems to possess questionable management practices). Post-bankruptcy, you realize you don’t have many marketable skills in this rapidly-changing economy, so it’s hard to get a job at a similar comfort level to what you had. Life sucks. You get bitter.

The same is true regarding your career. If you focus exclusively on improving your skills and your impact to your organization (or to the world at large), the promotions, raises and accolades tend to come as a byproduct.