Survival in the workplace can come down to recognising certain signals

People often aren’t aware they are performing poorly at work but there are signs if they know how to look for them.

It starts with an uneasy feeling: you’re left out of meetings you used to attend. The boss stops ­offering suggestions. Once-friendly colleagues turn cool. How can you be the last one to know you’re failing or flailing at work?

“I never saw it coming,” Nancy Halpern says of a lay-off years ago from a job as a division head for a retailer. “I thought I did a great job. I ran a department and had achieved great results. I prided myself on being very dedicated and committed.”

She sometimes had disagreements with her boss, and her boss occasionally cancelled meetings with her, Halpern says. She didn’t respect her supervisor enough to try to forge a closer bond.

She realised too late that her boss placed a high value on loyalty and saw her behaviour as insubordination. She should have asked her for frequent, specific feedback, such as “What should I do less of? What should I do more of?”, says Halpern, principal of KNH Associates, a New York leadership-­development consulting firm. And she might have taken a few cues from peers her boss favoured and picked up on strategies they used.

Misreading important external factors on the job, such as your boss’s values or priorities, is a common misstep. “When your manager starts ignoring you, there’s a reason for it,” says Elaine Varelas, managing partner of Keystone Partners, a Boston career-management consultant.

Scott Samuels sensed trouble when his supervisor stopped giving him feedback during a previous job as a general manager of a food retailer. He also found himself left out of ­important meetings. He later ­realised he hadn’t understood ­exactly how his performance would be evaluated.

He says he was striving to build revenue and keep customers and employees satisfied. But senior managers were intent on posting short-term profits, and “to move up and get promoted, one of your primary roles was to make your boss look good. It was sort of a shocking experience,” says Samuels, founder and chief executive of Horizon Hospitality Associates, an executive placement firm. He soon quit to start his own company, where he makes a point of explaining his own yardsticks of success to new recruits.

Other employees spin blindly off-course by misjudging their own skills.

One of the most common blind spots is “an overinflated sense of your strengths and capabilities”, says Kevin Cashman, Minneapolis-based author of Leadership From the Inside Out and global head of Korn Ferry’s chief executive development practice. “The second is a lack of awareness of your (personal) vulnerabilities.”

One common distortion is called top-down thinking: people who have a preconceived belief about their skills, such as thinking they’re good at logical reasoning, tend to assume they’re performing well at any task that requires logical reasoning, research shows.

Also, in a pattern called the Dunning-Kruger effect, people who are poor performers in a specific domain lack the ability to recognise they’re performing poorly in that arena, and they ­resist efforts by ­others to clue them in.

People who lack emotional intelligence, for example, tend to disparage negative feedback, saying it’s inaccurate or irrelevant, according to a 2014 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Strengths of even supposed ­superstars can blind them to their weaknesses and leave them on thin ice. People who are good at core job skills, such as sales or accounting, often believe those capabilities give them such a powerful advantage that getting along with others doesn’t matter, says Ralph Roberto, president of Keystone Partners.

The boss may tolerate the problems these egotists cause by clashing with others until they ­become more trouble than they’re worth. Then the boss delivers the message: “I don’t care how good you are. You’re gone,” he says.

Bosses are often slow to criticise staff who are struggling. “Some people send a subtle signal: ‘I don’t want negative feedback,’ ” Roberto says. “And managers dread delivering it because they know it’s going to be a big fight.”

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL