TOP 10 things that can hurt your career

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It hardly matters how powerful or accomplished a person is, if you break certain unspoken rules, you can lose your job or ruin your career.

# 5

Control your tongue

An employee must never bad-mouth the boss. You should never, ever bad-mouth the boss, or your peers, for that matter.

If you think people won't find out you're wrong. Juicy stuff has a way of propagating. That's what happened to Allstate president Joe Lacher, who had some unsavoury things to say about his boss, CEO Tom Wilson, at a company event last year. Two weeks later, Lacher was gone "effective immediately", according to a terse press release.

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4

Stay away from online posts

Never put something in writing you wouldn't want posted on Yahoo's home page. It's hard to believe how often executives, managers, and employees document their stupidity by putting things they shouldn't in writing.

Whether it's email, texts, IMs, or anything else that passes through a company server, it can be made public. Even deleting it doesn't make it go away as there's always a backup copy somewhere.

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3

You are the company

Never disparage the company's products or customers. Especially if you're an executive, remember that anytime you're in public, at a conference, in an airport, even on your own time, you represent the company and that anyone with a cellphone can record you.

The same goes for talking with the media, or anyone else who just might repeat what you have to say. People talk just like you do.

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2

Privacy is not private

Never assume private conversations will stay private. Your expectation of privacy is far more limited than you think. If you're at home talking with your family, you're probably okay.

"Probably" because these days one never knows what your spouse or kid will post on the Web. Other than that, your privacy is so limited you may as well assume that whatever you say will end up on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.

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1

Do not get too social

Do not get too social with social media. Last year, Bloomberg reported that Scott McClellan, a vice president who had spent his entire 26-year career at HP, tipped off competitors about previously undisclosed details of the company's cloud computing strategy on his LinkedIn profile.

Shortly thereafter, he left the company. It may have been a coincidence but according to a Forrester Research survey, 82 per cent of 150 companies that monitor social media are primarily searching for competitive intelligence.