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There is an old joke about how much dedication is required to make a breakfast of eggs and bacon. “The chicken had to put in some hard work”, the joke goes; “but the pig had to really be dedicated!”

How dedicated are you at work? How much are you willing to give? Let’s say you work in an office where someone needs to stay late on a regular basis. It was your turn the day before, and you stayed. Today is Sally’s turn, but she had to leave work early because her child was sent home sick from school. Your boss asks you to stay again today. You have no real plans yourself right after work. Do you agree to stay or argue you stayed last night? Do you name another co-worker who should stay? Do you try and broker a deal with your boss? Sometimes, employees expect more dedication from their employer than they are willing to give themselves.

What defines dedication? As an employee, you don’t need to work longer and harder hours to prove you’re dedicated. In all honesty, you don’t have to be dedicated to the institution you work for or the job you currently hold. All you need to do is be dedicated to yourself, and to producing your best effort.

Preparing yourself to be dedicated to providing your best effort requires you to take a quick self-assessment. This can be accomplished by asking two questions:

Am I providing my best effort each and every day? 
What can I do which can increase my effort?

Determine your effort by starting at… well, the start. A bad start to the day will almost always impede your success for the entire day. Over the course of 44 Super Bowl games played, no team has ever come back to win after trailing by more than 10 points. In the biggest single game in all of sports, no team has ever succeeded when faced with a bad start. You can overcome your own bad starts by recognizing and correcting the issues which cause the bad start in the first place.

To be dedicated to providing your best effort, start with the basics. Get a good night sleep. If you feel sluggish and unproductive while only getting five hours of sleep each night, try to get six or seven. Leave your house five minutes earlier in the morning to avoid the hassle of trying to hurry to avoid being late.

I once had a female in her early twenties work for me. She was habitually late to work. That wasn’t too good for her, as my biggest pet peeve at work is lateness. When a person is constantly late to anything, especially work, they are telling me two things; their time is more important than my time, and they are too lazy to get their act together and get where they need to be at the time they need to be there. So after a pattern of lateness over a few weeks, I sat down with my employee to stress the importance of her reporting to work on time. I asked simply if she knew what time she needed to be in work. To her credit, she knew 8:30 was her scheduled time to report, and it took her twenty minutes from her house to the office. Now on average, this girl was close to twenty minutes late, which meant she wasn’t leaving her house until it was time for her to have already been in the office. I told her simply she needed to leave her house earlier. When she told me how much she needed to do in the morning to get ready for work I told her she obviously needed to wake up earlier. If that was an issue, I told her, she could consider getting to bed earlier the night before.

Now it’s not my responsibility to put a curfew on my employees, and I could see she had gotten annoyed. The simple fact is I didn’t care when she went to sleep or woke up. All I cared about was her being on time each morning. The lateness’s were completely under her control. If she was dedicated to getting to work on time, she would have found a way to do it.

Dedicate yourself to learn something new each day. Make it a point to watch or read something educational each day. When reading a book or magazine, read with the intent to teach. During leadership training, I conduct an exercise asking participants to list the last three books they read. The participants need to tell me one skill, idea, or concept learned from the book which they can apply to their job. You can learn an applicable function from almost any book read.

I had an employee once tell me he didn’t know enough about mortgages. He attended my training class, but still had questions. The questions he had were more about government regulations and practices than our bank’s specific policies and procedures. I told him to search for information online and read the real estate section of the Sunday newspaper. These were ways in which he could have taken the initiative to learn something new, even if it is outside of his normal work hours. Depending upon your line of work, I am sure there are things you can do outside of work to dedicate yourself to improve.

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Source by Michael Patterson