Career Capital - Useful traits

What are the personality traits that are associated with a good employee?  When hiring, what should you look for?

Conversely, we all work for somebody so what are the traits we should develop in ourselves?

I saw this list some place.  It isn't mine, but I can't remember where I found it.  It's a good list:

1. Action-oriented
2. Intelligent
3. Ambitious
4. Autonomous
5. Leadership
6. Cultural fit (personality)
7. Upbeat
8. Confident
9. Successful
10. Honest
11. Detail oriented
12. Modest
13. Hard-working / results-oriented
14. Marketable / presentable
15. passionate

I think one of the most interesting ones on that list is "marketable/presentable".  I know many people who fail to separate their work persona from their personal life persona.  I sometimes struggle with this, as well.  There is a constant battle between being authentic and being marketable.

If your personal life persona is naturally highly-polished, buttoned-down and carefully worded then that's probably fine -- lucky you!  If your natural persona is not highly diplomatic and you aspire to a role that requires careful diplomacy then there's a conflict -- adopt a different work persona or adopt a different career objective or prepare for a pretty frustrating slog.

"Decision Intelligence"

What are the steps of successful business strategy?

• Market Intelligence (outside facing)
• Market Sizing/forecasting
• customer trends, workloads, size, growth
• drivers, sensitivity, elasticity
• current customer groups, neighbors.  things your products could serve
• what are the customer needs for each group of customers?  what measures of performance and quality are important to them and what is their utility curve?
• Design Win Pipeline
• What RFQ and RFP are in the pipeline?
• What products best fit the customer requirements, both on roadmap and off roadmap?
• What are our chances for each opportunity?
• probability of the win
• size of the win, assuming we do win
• Prospect Estimations (workload / sku mapping)
• how will products play in the market, given the needs of the customers?  how do the performance/quality characteristics of these products match up to the needs of the customers?
• What does the competitive environment look like?  How do our products stack up?
• How much market share can we expect to capture?
• How much can we charge for our product?
• Business Intelligence (inside facing)
• Product Roadmap / communication
• what products do we have in the market now?  what about our competition?
• What products are in the pipeline?  What products are we not currently developing but could be?
• what are the important performance/quality characteristics of those products?
• what is the cost structure for those products?
• Project Planning/execution
• When will our products be ready?
• What resources will we need to develop our product?
• What resources will we need to bring our product to market effectively?  To support our customers?
• What risks are there to our project planning?  How can things go wrong, and if they do, what will the impact be?
• Execution Risk
• Upstream Roadmap risk
• interrelationships between project decisions  - 
• what projects are required for other projects?  
• what projects are required to build a product?  
• what projects help shape the markets? 
• what projects are required to take a product to market?
• Decision Intelligence
• Project strategy (portfolio) / funding
• funding decisions - what projects to do / cancel / keep alive
• Enterprise Risk
• What major pivot factors exist that would radically change the value of our company?
• What decisions would we make differently if we had perfect information?
• How can we hedge our bets most effectively?