By: Michael DeVenney
One of the worst things you can do for career success is being really good at one thing.
Bring smart and effective at getting things done will get you noticed and considered for promotion. Yet many high potential stars derailed – despite earlier successes – as they had too narrow a perspective from excelling at one thing and failed to learn other contexts and environments from experience.
Without developmental experiences, you will not know how to apply what you know and many high-potentials get trapped in not understanding how to move with new situations.
Studies show the four critical learning experiences are key jobs, important people, hardships, and training.
- Training is being shown how to do something – it is a core part of development but does not give the focus on application needed for implementation in new situations.
- Important people such as good bosses and bad bosses (we often learn more from bad bosses about what not to do) as well as mentors can have a tremendously supportive role in our development.
- Hardships without question are one of the most profound learning experiences – if we are open to reflecting – and one of the distinguishing features of many successful leaders is what they learned from difficult situations. We do not generally plan hardships for learning – they happen and we need to be aware and build on what we take from them.
The greatest benefit for future career success is generally derived from learning on the job – taking on stretch assignments that help you grow and expand your perspectives.
A critical foundation for success following promotion is planning and following a series of developmental job assignments to grow and expand your competencies. Being smart and capable is not enough to get you where you want to go.
The challenge for many high-potentials lies in knowing what assignments will be developmental and then how to access these opportunities in the organization.
Where do you start?
For the first five to eight years of your career, you should focus your development on building your technical knowledge and expertise. With a firm foundation of functional intelligence, you now need to plan for development outside your core knowledge base.
The first step is business-awareness. Understand where your organization is going, what the forces are that will affect success, where the greatest challenges and opportunities are for the business, what are the strengths and weaknesses for your company, and what competencies will be needed to successfully move the organization forward. In knowing your business, you can predict where you need to develop and grow to support the success of the organization.
Talk to your boss, the organization’s management, and pull down the annual reports and strategic plans from the website. Ask questions, read about your industry, and understand the competitive landscape.
Now become self-aware. Knowing what the organization needs, you can assess where you are now and where you need to develop. Clarifying your strengths through psychometric assessments and understanding your impact through multi-rater or 360 assessments defines your starting point and where the trip should take you.
With knowledge of the organization and your own position, you then look at job assignments that will help you build your experience and strengths to progress your career.
What types of job assignments are developmental?
In their ongoing research, the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) has identified the key aspects of job assignments that build the experience and perspectives:
- Taking on responsibilities that are new and different from what you are doing now
- Creating change by starting something new, fixing something that is broken or resolving employee problems (such as a poorly performing team or functional area)
- Heading projects that have higher levels of responsibility with greater scope and scale than you have had before or a more visible, high-stakes situation with clear deadlines and impact
- Learning how to manage boundaries taking on projects where you have to succeed with influence rather than authority or where you are dealing with external parties (customers, media, suppliers, regulators, etc)
- Dealing with diversity in terms of working in new cultures or bringing together groups of different people
From your assessment of the business, identify projects or situations that would be developmental for you and also support the success of the organization. Assess the proposed project or situation against the key aspects of developmental assignments and see if it meets the requirements.
Such projects will most likely be six months or one year in duration or longer. The time involved could be 20% of your current investment in your work.
Prepare for the ask – put together a proposal that presents the project idea like any other business proposal (focused on the benefit to the buyer – your boss). Make sure you are managing your current workload well and show how you can fit in this new project as well without hurting your performance. Present your case.
Despite many great project ideas, there may be reasons why your organization can not accept your proposal. We all work with limitations. There is another route to gain the needed experience.
If you have blocks to the developmental assignments you need within your organization, look outside. Charities, volunteer and non-profit organizations are always looking for smart people to help them – their resources are limited and the demands on them high. Some of the best developmental learning occurs in volunteer assignments. Your bosses and future bosses will value these types of assignments just as highly as official projects for the business.
Find the experiences you need for future career success and build your perspective. You are responsible so don’t wait for it to happen for you. Be proactive and look for what you need. Being smart and capable will only get your attention – it does not guarantee success.
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