Leadership Caffeine: Developing as a Senior Contributor
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Professional Growth, Quality Systems Management, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
I regularly use the label “Senior Contributor” (SC) to reference a state of management maturity that tends to exist somewhere between upper mid-level management or senior knowledge worker and the executive layer. While the hierarchical comparison may be imperfect, it’s an easy way for people to understand my intent with the phrase.
The SC is a professional (manager or individual contributor) on the brink of executive qualifications and someone that has displayed effective formal and informal leadership skills, value-creating critical and strategic thinking abilities, credible executive presence and a strong operating and quality orientation.
The SC is an individual that whether by design or accident has consistently been challenged to deal with complex and ambiguous business situations and has proven capable of rallying efforts, forming high performance teams, and facilitating results that create value for customers, improve operations and thump competitors.
This is one super contributor!
Sound like a mythical super-hero that was graced with unique powers beyond those of us mere mortals, and that dons his/her mask and cape to fight bad business in the dark of night? While you’ve got to be sharp to be a SC, you most definitely don’t need to be from a planet with a red sun or to have encountered a radioactive spider to lay claim to your own mask and cape. However, you do have to deliberately focus on developing and honing your skills to gain membership into this league of outstanding professionals.
Senior Contributors are Made, Not Born:
I’ve yet to meet an SC that wasn’t personally and professionally driven to learn, grow, overcome weaknesses, develop talents and place himself/herself in challenging situations as part of the development process. While some people have natural gifts that lend themselves to certain situations, membership in this league is open to anyone willing to put the effort forth. However, not everyone has the Intestinal Fortitude (IF) to succeed.
7 Suggestions for Developing as a Senior Contributor:
1. Look in the mirror and recognize that this battle to develop and excel is all up to you. Your firm doesn’t owe you this and cannot train you on it, and you certainly won’t achieve the level of SC through seniority and marking time.
2. Face your fears. Given my description of the SC above, almost everyone will have to face and overcome some areas of discomfort. Typically, the development of advanced communication and presentation skills (and the confidence behind the skills) is the most frightening area for people to face. Ironically, these may be the easiest to learn, practice and refine. Others like critical and strategic thinking capabilities require a conscious effort to rewire long-standing ways of thinking and acting. Easy to describe, but truly difficult to achieve.
3. Learn to adjust your altitude. SCs are capable of scaling heights from the big picture of market and industry forces and changing customer attitudes and perceptions to the nuances of process and operating improvements. As part of the “rewiring” or better yet, new wiring, emerging SCs must focus on connecting tasks to strategies and market forces and vice-versa. Take some mental Dramamine, because the altitude adjustments will be fast and furious.
4. Quit looking for silver bullets. There is no training course that once completed will bestow upon you the certificate of Senior Contributor. There are many, many, many resources, experiences and opportunities to gain insights and hone skills, but there is no silver bullet, so quit looking for it.
5. Great managers and mentors are priceless. A good manager and/or a good mentor can help you along the way. A manager that is committed to supporting the development of her people understands how important it is to challenge and coach team members. A mentor offers the perspective and context of experience and can serve as a valuable navigator. For those of you that lack one or both (a good manager and a mentor), the bad manager can serve as inspiration. I long ago developed a mental list of “things never to do,” when it was my day to lead.
6. Use your time wisely. Read, read and then read some more. From Harvard Business Review to Fast Company to historical biographies, you cannot spend enough time soaking up the teachings of successful people and people that have experienced and persevered through remarkable hardship. Make certain that most of your reading takes place away from the business bookshelf and tends towards history, biography and even literature.
7. Adopt a personal quality improvement program. Just as Franklin and Jefferson diligently recorded their decisions and their daily progress and activities, find a way to begin recording your own actions. Set goals, monitor and measure progress and strive to improve.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
As a senior executive, you want high performers and SCs driving my organization. What are you doing to foster an environment of constant learning and continuous challenge to support the emergence of SCs?
As an aspiring professional, responsible for forging your own brand in a complex world over a career that will easily span 50 years in many cases, what are you doing to step it up? Turn off the television, back away from the urgent unimportant, learn to overcome your own natural resistance, and get on with the good and hard work of developing yourself!
Strategic Awareness: The Second Leg of the Emerging Leader’s Three Legged Stool
Filed under: Career, Current Affairs, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Professional Growth, Strategy, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
One of the things that I truly love about this time we are living and working through is the front-row seats that we all have to some fascinating experiments in strategy. Things happen so quickly and with such widespread coverage in today’s world, that it often looks and feels like a strategist’s living laboratory on Miracle Gro.
A quick scan of the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) on my remarkable e-book reader, Kindle, indicates that Google Plans to Launch an Operating System for PCs and that Kodak’s CEO is Betting Big on Printers. Take a second and comprehend the strategy issues and implications of that last sentence. At least two out of three are staggering (Kindle and Google) and one is either the last gasp of a dying giant or a brilliant move to disrupt an entrenched industry.
There’s more:
As a consumer, I’m in the process of switching phone service providers for two of my family members and the one that I’m moving to cannot get the newest iphone in under a week. Sold out.
Just yesterday, my oldest son approached me about a new application for the iPhone that converts it to a true navigation device like those we buy in our cars from Garmin and Tom Tom and others. Hmmm, wonder how that meeting is going inside those device makers.
We live in an era where the platform is King. Think iTunes and the remarkable and industry-disrupting ecosystem that has sprung up around it. Consider Twitter and how it has revolutionized interactions and network building and how it supported a near-revolution in Iran.
The Three Legged Stool of the Emerging Leader/Senior Contributor:
I make no secret about my belief that emerging leaders…the executives and senior contributors of tomorrow must develop remarkable competence in three areas: leadership, strategy and communication.
Effective communication skills can be taught and with practice mastered. Learning to lead is difficult, and experience is the only teacher, but individuals armed with good philosophical underpinnings and supported by good mentoring and feedback can develop and improve their leadership skills.
The remaining leg: developing a sense of strategy and ultimately developing the ability to see and pursue strategic vectors is the most difficult to cultivate. It’s abstract, it’s creative, it’s often risky and there is little in the way of developmental support for emerging strategists.
Business schools tend to treat strategy as history lessons (cases) or as a sterile simulation game. Both are interesting and even fun, but of little use in my opinion in fostering the type of thinking, experimentation and action that leads to winning strategies.
The strategy events and processes inside corporations are often so dysfunctional and poorly managed that an invitation to be involved can seem like a ticket to the county lock-up. The best outcome is getting out.
Guidance for the Emerging Leader on Developing a Sense of Strategy:
While I’ll stop short of offering a “how to” prescription on developing as a strategist, there are certainly some actions and steps that an individual can take to increase their strategic awareness.
- Study and monitor the many strategic experiments occurring in real-time right in front of you. Is the Kindle the spark that rewrites the publishing business, like iTunes was to the music business? Can a floundering old giant regain its footing on a technology that consumes resources in the electronic and green era? Is Google’s move to an operating system brilliance, arrogance or just plain futile in a Microsoft dominated world? And for that matter, can Microsoft…the strategy giant of two decades ago reinvent itself?
- Think about your business and your products in the context of the most compelling and uncertain experiments occurring in front of you. Do you have a mini-platform option in your industry? If you truly understood your customers needs, what business and products would you create from scratch?
- Quit thinking about your competitors from a mimicking mind-set. In fact, quit preoccupying on their every move. It’s healthy to monitor but it’s better and even to battle, but save some gray matter for rethinking the business in a manner that ensures your competitor is obsolete.
- Beware the Innovator’s Dilemma. If you don’t know what that is, read the book!
- In addition to Innovator’s Dilemma, read: Tuned-In and Inside the Tornado and Crossing the Chasm. You could do much, much worse than base your strategic thinking on the principles espoused in these great works.
- Get involved in shaping, executing and monitoring strategy in your area of influence.
- Ask questions of those around you to better understand your firm’s situation in the marketplace and its strategic objectives.
- Work hard to ensure that your activities connect to the firm’s core strategies.
The Bottom-Line:
The world and the workplace are filled with people going through the motions, taking orders and executing and acting without really thinking. Strategists on the other hand are constantly striving to connect ideas and patterns to needs and value creating activities. Great leaders have a strong sense of strategy. Take responsibility for developing your sense of strategy and for supporting that development in others. You might just find that life and work are a lot more fun and rewarding this way.
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