Are You Running in Place When it Comes to Your Professional Development?
Unlike the resolutions that so many of us make in January and discard just as quickly by February, our own professional development requires a deliberate and consistent effort to improve.
While most people in our organizations run in place when it comes to their own skills and knowledge development, a few committed souls manage to fight the gravitational pull of doing-nothing and break-away from the pack.
Is this your year to break-away?
Professional Development Success Stories to Motivate & Inspire:
Here are just a few of the examples I encountered in my work last year. They are to be commended for their efforts and results. Names changed for privacy purposes.
- Julie set her sights on moving into a front-line leadership role last year and was just promoted. Along the way, she took on every possible assignment she could glom on to that taught her what it took to lead. Not only did she prove to herself she was cut out for the role, she proved it to the people she worked with and importantly, she proved it to the person who had to select her for success…her boss.
- Mark had long struggled mightily with self-esteem issues in spite of his stellar performance. With guidance, coaching and a lot of effort on his part, he’s become more comfortable with himself, and his excellent performance is now matched with an appropriate level of self-confidence.
- Susan was given a battlefield promotion into what seemed like a no-win situation with the project from you-know-where. She inherited a demoralized and burned-out team and cost-overruns that would choke a good-sized horse. Six months later, after working unceasingly to lead and support this team and project back to health, the organization is looking to Susan and this groupas the model for how a high-performance team should function.
- Juan, consistently displayed great passion for his work, but was limited by his confidence…in part due to his struggles to master English. He did it…and his boss described to me that he could see Juan’s confidence and contributions grow overnight.
- A little over one year ago, Adam was told that he needed to develop more “executive presence” to break through to the next level. Armed with the world’s most ambiguous advice (“You need more executive presence”) he researched and worked to strengthen his presence, authenticity and yes, confidence. He got the promotion.
I love these stories…because their examples inspire us all. Will you write your own success story in the next year?
7 Quick Ideas to Help You Take That First Step Forward:
1. Call a personal time-out. Stare in the mirror for a few minutes and think about where you are going professionally and if you are comfortable with your vector, pace and progress. You know if you are running in place. You also know in your heart of hearts when it doesn’t suit you.
2. Ask Questions About You. While uncomfortable, you will be well served to find someone or some small group in the workplace and ask them what they think of your professional performance and areas for development and your visible strengths. Fair warning…not all feedback is created equal, so you need a few perspectives before you decide where to focus.
3. Mine the Performance Feedback on Your Reviews. While there’s not enough space here for me to pick apart most review processes, I’m a fan of mining them for nuggets of truth or at least clues to the truth.
4. Start Small and Build. You’ll be tempted to tackle the Ironman of professional development and “fix” yourself all at once. Resist this temptation…it’s a formula for failure. You’re better off running a 5K. Identify one thing to get better at…and develop a strategy for doing just that. Remember, if you improve 1% per day… , well, you do the math. The outcome will be impressive. Expand your areas of emphasis once you score some victories and build confidence.
5. Read Widely and Read Mostly from Outside the Business Genre. Regardless of my role as a management and leadership author, you’re much better suited reading about people who have overcome adversity and accomplished great things in the process. Histories and biographies are great! (Although, my Leadership Caffeine book, makes a nice mid-day energy boost!)
6. Get Away from the Naysayers. You are better off reorienting your workplace relationships to those who like you are striving and moving forward. Don’t let the “Run in Place” crowd hold you back.
7. Celebrate the Victories, No Matter How Small. Give yourself a psychological break or reward. When you’ve scored a point, moved the bar a bit, overcome a historic weakness or fear, celebrate for a few moments. And then get back to it.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Remember, if you are running in place, you’re falling behind. Here’s to moving forward!
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Art Petty is a developer of leaders and a strategy consultant. Art frequently speaks on leadership and management, and his work is reflected in two books (Practical Lessons in Leadership and Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development) and over 1-million words published at The Management Excellence blog. You can reach Art via e-mail to learn more about his leadership development, speaking and management consulting services.
Leadership Caffeine: For Better Results, Quit Telling and Start Letting Go
Filed under: Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Performance
The odd quirk that seems to bedevil so many who occupy roles of responsibility for others is their overwhelming urge to tell other people what to do. While a certain amount of “telling” is OK, particularly during crises and anything involving safety or security, for the most part, your communication efforts should focus on listening and asking.
Starting this year, shift the focus to you and your role and your daily habits, and for everyone’s sake, quit telling people how to do their jobs. No one loves a micro-manager, and trust me, this includes those being micro-managed and those above you looking for talented leaders to promote into positions of increasing responsibility.
When You Talk, Make Certain It Counts:
Yes, you certainly owe guidance, encouragement, constructive and positive feedback and help with direction setting and development planning. You also are responsible in many instances for teaching…directly and indirectly. However, the talking stops…or at least the telling stops when it comes to people doing their daily jobs.
Change Your Thinking on the Capabilities of Your Team:
We all know that you think they won’t get it right or that your involvement will ensure optimum results. We’ve all also heard you complain about how frustrated you are that you have to be involved with every little detail and how little time you have for other elements of your job.
Overheard:
Nothing gets done right if I’m not involved.
I can’t trust them to do the work without checking the quality.
Or my (least) favorite:
If my team substituted brains for gunpowder, they wouldn’t have a firecracker between them.
While your own phrases might be different (and much softer), if the sentiments about your team are similar, it’s time to take a close look in the mirror and then to shift the focus of your micro-managing to the person staring back at you. (Of course, if the sentiments are genuine, you need a new team, and no amount of micro-managing the wrong people will solve the problem.)
Nine Ideas for Letting Go to Promote Better Results:
1. Provide direction not instructions. There’s a profound difference.
2. Ask for input on performance targets and work to understand and resolve differences between your views and theirs.
3. Deliberately reduce your direct contact time with your team members. Yes, call this MBNWASM (Management by Not Walking Around So Much.) Give people some room. Everyone will benefit.
4. Recognize that you’ve conditioned everyone to wait for your commands, and that you will need to encourage them to take initiative on their own. This takes some time to sink in for people who have been on auto-pilot for a long time.
5. When the inevitable happens and someone mucks up, count to 10,000 and then have the following discussion: “What did you learn?” “How will you improve next time?” And then say, “Good, go do it.” And shut up.
6. During trouble-shooting situations, talk last. Ask questions, solicit input and if required, offer ideas, but don’t strong-arm people into doing it your way.
7. Start asking people what they need from you in terms of support and resources to help them execute their jobs. And then do something with the input!
8. Try rotating responsibility between team members for elements of operations and quality meetings. You can approve the agenda, but teach others how to lead sessions like this and watch the value of the events go up tremendously.
9. Spend more time figuring out how to help your boss. Seriously.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Just like “telling ain’t teaching,” it’s not managing either. Your primary job is to develop others capable of free thought and independent action in pursuit of supporting firm/team goals. While you might perceive they’re not up to it, more often than not, it’s you that’s the problem. Starting this year, fix the problem!
Note: because most chronic micro-managers spend little time reading about professional development, this post might make a nice print-out and leave-behind! I’ll let you decide whether it’s an anonymous leave-behind.
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Art Petty is a developer of leaders and a strategy consultant. Art frequently speaks on leadership and management, and his work is reflected in two books (Practical Lessons in Leadership and Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development) and over 1-million words published at The Management Excellence blog. You can reach Art via e-mail to learn more about his leadership development, speaking and management consulting services.
Thoughts on Your Personal and Professional Success in the New Year
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Leading the Generations, Management Education, Performance, Professional Growth
Hang out with really smart people and teams and some great lessons can’t help but rub off on you.
I was truly gifted in 2011 to gain access to and work with and support some remarkable professionals across a number of different market segments…from high tech to professional services to manufacturing, and I learned something with every engagement and encounter.
Here are Six Lessons Learned that Can Help Us All in the New Year:
1. It’s Critical to Think Deeply About Your Business: Strategy still counts. The strongest teams/firms I observed are the ones who took the time to step-back and evaluate their situation and rethink their futures. And then back all of that lofty thinking with action, learning and adaptation.
Call it what you want…I call it strategy work…and done right…asking and answering tough questions and then backing the ideas with key hypotheses and experiments is the corporate equivalent of a continuous fitness program.
2. Operational Myopia Guarantees Mediocrity (or worse): Conversely, the firms and teams mired in the muck struggled to get beyond the endless operational discussions and move towards the tough questions that help assess the current state and begin to identify options for the future. Yeah, everyone needs to make sales in the here and now. We all know that. Adding in the work of thinking about and adapting your business in pursuit of better serving customers, finding new customers, extending into larger growth areas or more attractive categories takes that extra level of discipline that separates the big winners from everyone else.
3. Leadership Counts. More than ever…and not just at the top. High performance firms have an unrelenting focus on developing people who can think critically, lead others to challenge convention and stimulate people to provide their best results. And given the past decade or so of leadership failures, people are quick to sniff out and mentally discard the disingenuous leaders. If you are leading others, you need to bring your “A” game, and the game isn’t about you…it’s about everyone else and what you can do for them!
4. Behold The Rise of the Integrator Leader: individual contributors who embrace the role of integrator…bringing together disparate groups and resources to solve problems are the future formal leaders in organizations. We are all well served to view our own roles through the filter of the new integrator leader. Build your network(s) internally and externally and learn to connect networks in pursuit of solving problems.
5. Diversity is a Strategic Asset to Build Competitive Advantage: While we predictably and annoyingly gravitate to those who act, think (and yes, look) like us, the true opportunity for greatness is in bringing together people of disparate backgrounds, ethnicities and ages and setting them loose to change something significant. The best leaders get this. The rest are still mired in the misguided thinking from another century.
6. If You’re Not Learning, You are Failing. Learning is more important than ever. The top performing professionals are learning everyday in the workplace (through experimentation), are pushing themselves personally to continue to grow in their respective fields, are filling classrooms and demanding more from an old and mostly broken educational system, and leveraging technology and unparalleled access to information to expand their thinking. There are no time-outs allowed when it comes to gaining and applying new knowledge.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The short form:
Strategy isn’t a four letter word. We all need to find ways to break out of the day-to-day crunch to assess and learn and plan. Leadership skills are more critical than ever…and the best and most powerful leaders might not have people reporting to them. Diversity isn’t just an H.R. initiative, and if you aren’t learning every single day, you’re moving backwards at an accelerating pace.
May 2012 be a year of learning, growth and professional success.
Art’s Weekly Leadership Message: Get Engaged to Help Your Project Teams Succeed
I hear from hundreds of professionals every year in workshops, via coaching assignments or in classrooms, about the challenges they have working in and on project teams. From almost every student’s worst nightmare, the classroom group project, to major strategic initiatives with high-level sponsorship, the complaints are consistent: we as leaders don’t do enough to support team development and performance.
While the list of things that can go horribly wrong on project teams is long, these 5 consistently rise to the top of the lament list.
5 of the Most Frequently Heard Project Team Laments:
1. The importance of the initiative is not clear. How does this connect to strategy?
2. The Executive Sponsor’s role is vague and he/she is often only involved at a cursory level. Aren’t you supposed to help us knock down some walls to get this done?
3. Team members are priority conflicted based on their involvement in multiple initiatives. Which one takes precedence?
4. The Team Leader doesn’t actively support the development of standards for performance, accountability and collaboration. If we don’t know what’s expected of us and how we’re supposed to work together, you’ll get whatever we give you.
5. The scope is vague and the customer is invisible. Hey, we’re not clear on who the customer is here and what’s in or out of scope.
No Rocket Science-The Answers are in the Problem Statements:
There’s little more than the basics of good leadership involved in fixing these items on your team.
- Always connect initiatives to strategies, otherwise, they are just more work.
- Check-in and don’t check-out until the team succeeds. If you’re the Executive Sponsor, you are responsible for the initiative’s success (or failure). Get involved to support, help knock-down walls and reinforce accountability. Never micro-manage, but do get involved!
- Promote the establishment of team values and standards. Performance is a function of the team dynamics. Ensure that you or the team leader works hard to support the development of a team culture around expectations for performance.
- Recognize and help manage priority conflicts. As the sponsor or team leader, know that these conflicts leave people….well, they leave them conflicted. Your job is to help sort out conflicts and negotiate priorites with team members and other teams and bosses.
- Call a Time-Out if the team is drowning in ambiguity. If the customer isn’t clear and therefore the scope vague, hit the “Stop” button immediately.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
If an initiative was important enough to organize a group of people and ask them to put their gray matter and to invest their time in dealing with it, we as leaders owe them crystal clear guidance on the 5 issues above and much more. Walk in the door today and everyday and look for opportunities to help your project teams succeed. Your firm will thank you, your employees and team members will thank you and your competitors will hate you. That’s a formula for success that balances nicely.
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Want More? Check out Art Petty’s latest book, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. Created for fast-moving and highly motivated professionals and leaders, Leadership Caffeine offers more than 80 short, idea-packed essays for the critical leadership and professional development situations in your life. (All royalties on purchases through 12/2 will see the royalties donated to a local food pantry. See original promo note for specifics.)
Join the many groups and management teams and meeting/conference organizers who have adopted Leadership Caffeine as a discussion and development tool. The collection makes a great gift for the newly promoted leader or for your team during the holidays.
- Single and Kindle copies on Amazon.
- Group and Volume orders, visit Marathon Books for the best service.
About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach and Strategy Consultant, helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement or to inquire about being a guest on The Leadership Caffeine podcast.
Art’s Weekly Leadership Message: Step Up to Cure Effective Dialogue Deficit Disorder
The medical community and drug companies have their ED malady and cure, but too many management and project teams suffer from their own form of ED…with two more D’s…EDDD… Effective Dialogue Deficit Disorder.
It’s not that people aren’t talking. There’s no deficit of hot air swirling around most meeting rooms. The issue is all about the quality of the dialogue.
Consider:
- All the firms who use last year’s operating plan and budgets as the basis for next year’s plan, without vetting and refreshing on what’s really happening in their markets and with their customers and within their own businesses. The future is difficult enough to predict in the best of circumstances. It’s laughably impossible to do it by focusing on the images in the rear-view mirror.
- Strategy meetings where the swirling discussions include opinions, facts, emotions, ideas and yes some political posturing, all without order, direction or purpose. Kudos for getting people together for the right reasons. Now, focus on managing the discussion flow to ensure purpose and progress.
- Performance evaluation processes that don’t connect to professional development steps. Your job is to connect evaluation to forward progress and development. You’re not a movie critic…you’re responsible for helping someone create the next scene in their own professional movie.
- Project Teams that develop detailed risk assessments at the onset of their initiatives, and fail to constantly refresh and update on the risk plan. The pesky thing about dealing with risk is that it is annoyingly unpredictable in many circumstances. Vigilance and review beats static advance planning here everyday.
- Ideation or brainstorming sessions that develop long lists of ideas that are forgotten as soon as the flipcharts come down. Ideas are truly horrible things to waste.
5 Ideas to Help Cure Effective Dialogue Deficit Disorder:
1. Don’t preoccupy on the past. Use past results to assess where YOU failed to anticipate and execute, and then focus on asking the hard questions about what’s changing with markets, customers and competitors. Build your plan around what you should be doing to succeed in the emerging world, not on what you did last year.
2. Change your discussion approach. Learn and apply the process of parallel thinking and discussion to eliminate the swirl and sort facts from emotions, opinions and ideas. De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats is a great place to start.
3. Learn to feedforward. Every opportunity to offer “feedback” on prior performance should be better viewed as an opportunity for what Marshall Goldsmith describes as “feedforward.” Again, cut out the rear-view mirror stuff and help people design their way forward.
4. If is was important enough to “assess” and develop a document, it’s very likely important enough to revisit and rethink. Don’t ask people and teams to just comply with a step or process (i.e. create a risk assessment). Instead, encourage frequent return trips to check assumptions and incorporate new learnings.
5. Never waste ideas! Don’t ask people to exercise their creative capabilities and then lose the precious output. Build an idea inventory and reference it frequently.
The Key Point:
Teach your teams to engage with purpose. Plan and manage your discussions to include reflection, assessment, direction and action. Every discussion is an opportunity to design something going forward. Throw in a consistent serving of accountability and you are on your way to building high performance into your working environment.
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JUST RELEASED! Check Out Art’s New Book: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development
Want More: Sign up for the new, Leadership Caffeine e-Newsletter. I’ll guard your e-mail address with ferocity, while sharing ideas to energize and inspire.
About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach and Strategy Consultant, helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Art’s second book (an edited, annotated collection of the most popular leadership essays), Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, was released at the end of September in 2011.
Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement.
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