Credibility – that magic word – that attribute that acts like a multiplier. If you have credibility, nothing else matters -if you don’t have credibility, nothing else matters. Many new executives and sometimes senior managers just do not realize that credibility is not just a function of their knowledge, talent and skill, it is intimately linked to their behavior. Here are 4 behaviors that can ruin your credibility…

Being late – regularly

Notice how some people always turn up late – to the office in the morning, to meetings. Ten minutes after the meeting was supposed to start, they will send an SMS saying they are 5 minutes away. The funny thing is they’re always 5 minutes away and then twenty minutes later they’ll rush in looking hassled and tell you how the traffic was just terrible this morning.

People who are habitually late are those who do not appreciate or respect the importance of time particularly other people’s time. They will be late for meetings; they will miss deadlines; they will screw up projects due to last minute rush jobs . They will gain a few minutes or hours extra for themselves and lose their credibility in the process.

A small amount of effort and planning is all it takes to be consistently on time, even ahead of time. The secret is to start early and make this a priority!

Saying but not doing

“I’ll send you an email first thing tomorrow morning” is an often used sentence. This kind of promise is so easy to keep. All you have to do is to send an email the next day or if you can’t, ask for some extra time. The reality however is that less than 10% of people will actually deliver on this promise. Most will be late (see the “being late -regularly” paragraph above) and quite a few will not even bother to send that email.

In my own experience, the people who give importance to relatively minor commitments like responding on time to emails or arriving on time for meetings are the same people who also deliver on the bigger commitments. The ones who do not honor their word or think it is not crucial to do so do not understand how much they damage their own image.

Saying I am good – but he is not

One of the great temptations in work life is to knock someone else – a colleague, the boss, perhaps someone at head office. People do this to elevate themselves or gain some support by putting someone else down but it simply does not work. All this does in fact is to reduce the credibility and the trustworthiness of the person putting someone else down.

If you have an issue with someone else, do not put this person down in front of others rather take it up directly with that person. If you can’t do that, then keep your opinion to yourself.

Mixing up work and personal life

Nothing is more irritating than a colleague who does not leave personal life behind when coming to work. Chatting with friends on facebook, talking to buddies on the ‘phone for long periods of time, getting calls from the wife and kids about problems at home – all of this is acceptable if it is done once in a while. But if this is happening often, you are not doing this unnoticed. This kind of person can’t wait for office time to come to an end because there are so many more pressing priorities!

If you don’t know how to leave your personal life behind when you come to work and you think stealing a bit of company time every day to handle such matters is perfectly legitimate, think again. You are just kidding yourself and it is probably a better idea to just stay at home in this case.