Drawing
from 22 years of experience as an organizational coach, mentor, trainer, and
speaker and drawing from some insightful books and articles, I’d like to share
a couple of insights related to advancing your career. No guarantees, just tips
and thoughts. Use them to your benefit!
Diversity makes the difference.
Make sure
to gain experience in different industries, in different divisions, in different
job functions, and preferably in different cultures. People with international
experience are not only culturally wiser, they are more likely to create new
businesses and products – and they are more likely to be promoted. Another area
where I strongly suggest you actively create diversity is within your network. You
want to create a highly diverse network, where people don’t just echo your own
experiences and perspectives but add to them. Brian Uzzi and Shannon Dunlap in
“How to Build Your Network” in Harvard Business Review: “If your connections
know you and one another through similarities in experience, training, worldview,
background, or proximity, trust will be strong. But for your network to work
for you, it needs to be more than an echo chamber.”
Candid feedback makes the
difference.
Communicate
and actively demonstrate a sincere desire to find out what might be holding you
back from advancing your career and what might have caused you missing out on
that promotion. This will increase the likelihood that you will get useful
input from executives and colleagues. Input that you can translate into a
development plan. Input that helps you learn, grow, and become more self-aware.
You have to be willing to discover the unwanted, however. It might well be that
at some point in your career the desirable next step is really out of reach,
for certain reasons, for now.
A thorough assessment makes the
difference.
A useful
tool to help you prepare for promotions and to help you evaluate missed
promotions is John Beeson’s 3-legged model. Beeson’s framework helps you
identify and address any issues that may be getting in the way of promotions:
o
Non-negotiables,
without which you will not be considered for a promotion. Examples are
demonstrating consistently strong performance and displaying integrity and
character.
o
De-selection
factors, which eliminate you as a candidate even if you are otherwise
qualified. Examples are weak interpersonal skills and holding a narrow,
parochial perspective on the business and the organization.
o
Core
selection factors, which ultimately determine who gets the position. Examples
are building and maintaining a strong executive team and getting things done
across internal boundaries.
Three traits that make the
difference.
Three
leadership traits that Larry Bossidy, former CEO of AlliedSignal looks for when
evaluating job candidates:
1. The ability to execute – turning
ideas into reality.
2. A team orientation – good leaders
are able to work well with others.
3. Having a wide range of experience –
a factor already discussed above.
How do
you evaluate yourself on these three traits? And maybe more importantly, how do
peers, subordinates, and bosses evaluate you on these three traits?
Judging oneself makes the
difference.
Justin
Menkes uses the term “executive intelligence” and perceives it to be made up of
three components: accomplishing tasks, working with people and judging oneself.
The first and second of these components coincide with Bossidy’s traits.
Menke’s third one, judging oneself, is a hugely overlooked trait if you ask me.
I remember one of my clients ten years ago. In many ways he presented himself
as a promising senior leader. He also showed himself to me and to his peers and
bosses as someone who consistently misjudged himself in his capacity to engage
his team members and in his capacity to act decisively in times of crisis. Both
deficiencies resulted in the loss of some great team members and in difficulty
achieving top team performance. The biggest problem with misjudging yourself is
that if you do not have a good sense of where you are, it is hard to get to
where you want to be let and to choose the right path and the right form of transportation.
Judging oneself is a skill you want to develop in yourself and in anyone in the
workplace regardless of the position. It fits in perfectly with the now widely
researched and discussed self-awareness and emotional intelligence that I have
written about on several earlier occasions. With a good amount of
self-awareness and self-judging you are less dependent on the feedback of
others to discover previously blind spots, that you can now turn into growth
areas to further your career. You will know where you are and how you are as
well as what is still needed to get where you want to be.
Growing with, not just towards the
position makes the difference.
It is
important to realize (and act upon the fact!) that different levels of
responsibility and different positions in organizations require different
mindsets and different skills. The mindsets, skills and expertise that have
taken you to your new level, are likely not the ones that are most effective once
you’re in that new position. For you to succeed, behaviors and styles need to
evolve over the course of your career. When you advance your career, what lies
ahead is generally new terrain that often cannot be conquered with just the old
gear. Challenges are quite different and in some cases even the opposite from
what you have encountered in the past. Approaches that used to work are no
longer so effective. An in-company mentor or a coaching or training program
specifically designed to help you acquire or cultivate these new insights and
skills can help you make the transition successfully.
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