How being a Workaholic Affects your Relationship with Colleagues
It is clear that being a workaholic affects every area of your life, including your ability to interact with people on a professional level and in your private life. If your main priority is getting as much work done as possible and spending every minute of the day in your office you’re bound to get yourself noticed as someone who is prepared to go the extra mile. This can be a good thing if it leads to promotion and career success, but can also be a bad thing if it leads to resentment among your colleagues.
It obviously depends on the kind of environment you work in. If you happen to have a profession that is characterised by competitiveness there is a good chance all your colleagues also feel the pressure to work overtime and bend over backwards to get their name known. There may be those who are jealous of any success you have, while others recognise that just because your career is in the ascendancy at the moment doesn’t mean this will be the case in future. How you handle your successes and failures will, undoubtedly, affect your colleagues’ perception of you.
If, when you get a promotion, you continue to brag about it you may rub up your colleagues the wrong way so that when your career begins to unravel they find it rather amusing. Of course, to your face they will congratulate you on your success, but in private they will, no doubt, end up criticising you behind your back. You may or may not be aware of this, but if you are aware that you are unable to command the respect of your colleagues you just tell yourself it’s because they’re jealous of your success. It’s no so easy to do this when your career is in a downward spiral.
You may think that being a workaholic is bound to lead to career success, but a workaholic isn’t just someone who works long hours; they actually have a compulsion to work. If you work all the hours that god sends because you feel you have to, you may not be producing high-quality work, especially if you’re continually stressed and sleep-deprived. Your colleagues are unlikely to think very highly of your abilities and may resent having to cover for your ineptitude, especially when you seem to show them up by being the first to volunteer for jobs no one else wants to do.
Consequently, being a workaholic is unlikely to help you in the workplace, since it can have such a damaging effect on the relationships you have with work colleagues.
