1. Assessing Your Career Credentials

Your accumulating education, background and work experiences provide you with a set of business, organizational and career credentials. Everything you do both inside and outside of work can add or take away from those credentials. (For example, taking on optional leadership roles or educational opportunities either in your company or in your community can add to your credentials. Conversely, accumulating a random set of unrelated job positions or educational programs can significantly take away from your job value).

Some job opportunities in your career may come by serendipitously. Yet, over time, there needs to be some logical progression of building greater job responsibility and personal capacity in one of three fundamental career areas: a) technical capability, b) management responsibility, or c) entrepreneurial venturing. There is also nothing wrong with shifting one’s career focus as long as past experiences add to the value of your current career focus. (I, for example, moved from a technical/engineering focus, to a management focus, and then to a management consulting practice over the 20+ years of my work life.)

2. Analyzing Your Job Roles

Each manager plays a number of roles in his or her position. Common "hats that managers wear" are:

1. Dealing with Individual Staff Members
2. Dealing with Your Department or Whole Staff Team
3. Dealing with Your Peers (in other department/divisions) across the Organization
4. Dealing with Outside Customers, Suppliers or Strategic Partners
5. Dealing with Your Immediate Manager (or other higher-level stakeholders)

In examining these roles, you need to be clear about the demands and expectations that each of these domains above (e.g., your customers, peers, etc.) are making of you. You also need to consider the responses, or services, that you are providing to these individuals or groups to fulfill those demands. Also you need to be clear of the demands you have of other domains (like your suppliers, staff, etc.) and how well they are responding to your expectations. Without clarity of expectations there can be misunderstanding, confusion and loss of efficiency. Also, you need to consider how your time is being allocated to each domain, and if you are spending enough time to develop, nurture or problem-solve critical work relationships (both from informational and interpersonal perspectives).

Dr. Kenneth Blanchard has said in his One-Minute Manager book that "feedback is the breakfast of champions." Gaining outside perspectives on your management role(s) is crucial to your management or executive success.

3. Building Your Job Skills

Not only do we play various roles in our managerial position, but we also need to develop critical skills to play these roles well. As well, these job skills are transferable from one job position to another job position. Typical job skills are:

1. Work Management (e.g., work planning, coordinating, budgeting, tracking, reporting, etc.)
2. Staff Management (performance management & improvement, leadership, etc.)
3. Peer & Boss Interaction (communication, influence, negotiation, etc.)
4. Customer Service or Relationship Skills, and Supplier Negotiation and Collaboration
5. Self-Management (e.g., time, stress, risk and change management)

It is crucial that you continually assess your managerial skills and work to develop and practice them over time. Building your managerial skills enhances your value to your organization and helps you to get things done more efficiently and effectively.

4. Developing and Balancing Your Personal Style

Like flavors of ice cream, we all have different personal styles. Most importantly, we want to ensure that our style fits our organizational position. For example, not long ago I worked with a company CFO. His boss, the president of the company, felt he lacked good time management and personal organization skills. After performing a style assessment with this executive, we determined that his preferred orientation was for new technical projects rather than maintaining systems and controls for accounting and finance. Therefore, according to this manager’s personal style, he was not well suited for his current job. Taking that information to the CFO’s boss, the president said "no wonder this person is having problems in their current job!" The President then started a process to find the right project-management position in the organization for his CFO.

Creating a reasonable match between your personal style and your job position can add to your energy, vitality, commitment to, and effectiveness in your job.

Style is also important form the perspective of personal development and interpersonal communication. Learning to balance one’s style approach allows you greater flexibility in your work Also, style flexibility (i.e., being able to speak in someone else’s style language) can help to make interpersonal communication more perfect and therefore improve organizational productivity.

5. Building & Exhibiting Character

• Initiative
• Integrity
• "Intentionality"

Summary

It is extremely important to keep yourself developing if you are to be a successful manager or executive. Continual attention to all these five dimensions will help you get and stay ahead in your professional work and career. Note that a 1% compounded improvement every day yields a doubling of your effectiveness over 70 days. Great, and valuable, managers and executive are those that commit every day to not only their personal development but also the development of all those around them.


Harvy Simkovits, CMC, President of Business Wisdom, works with owner managed companies to help them grow, prosper and continue on by offering innovative approaches to business development, company management, organization leadership and learning, and management education. He can be reached at 781-862-3983 or .