The “It’s Your Career” series at Management Excellence is dedicated to offering ideas, guidance and inspiration for strengthening your performance and supporting your development as a professional. Use the ideas in great career health!
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Our core body muscles groups…those muscles in your pelvis, lower back and abdomen all work in harmony to provide stability and to help propel us through our daily lives. A strong core is critical to long-term fitness health and stability, while a weak core leaves us susceptible to muscle injuries, lower back pain and other muscle-related maladies.
For the past seven months I’ve been involved in a rigorous physical regimen…a midlife makeover of sorts and for as much as I would gravitate to what my trainer calls the “mirror muscle” exercises, he has pushed me hard to balance my work and to ensure proper focus on my core muscles. The results for me have been transformational.
Much like our physical core, there’s a set of professional core muscles that require on-going exercise and development for optimum health.
Your Core-4 Professional Muscle Groups:
1. How we lead others…our leadership skills.
2. How effectively we translate noise and issues in the external world into patterns and then decisions and actions—our perceptual acuity.
3. How we present and handle ourselves in a variety of circumstances—our professional presence.
4. How well we’ve mastered the art and science of running our businesses—our operational acuity.
As we advance in our careers and strive for that next level of responsibility, our Core-4 professional muscles provide stability and support for our efforts and they help us propel through the issues in our businesses with confidence, character and energy.
For individuals living through what I term a Level-Up experience—a new role filled with ambiguity and uncertainty, the Core-4 professional muscles are what you will draw upon to navigate the new challenges in front of you.
When these Professional Muscles Atrophy, they Set Artificial Limits on Our Advancement:
I frequently encounter professionals who need help reviving or developing one or more of these professional muscle groupings as part of strengthening their own performance and/or striving to get to a new level of responsibility in their careers. In many cases, one or more of these under-developed professional skill sets serve as limiting factors in a person’s advancement.
- A project manager had outstanding technical skills yet struggled to win the hearts and minds of her teams. The feedback on her was that she viewed people as resources to plug in where needed and her command and control style was off-putting to many. It was not viewed as a good day when someone was assigned to one of her projects. As she adapted her style to take on a more personal-professional approach, her team performance and post-project reviews both increased.
- A great product manager striving for a promotion to vice-president was perceived by colleagues and senior managers as cold and aloof. While his business acumen and success in identifying offerings were undeniable, the presence factors worked against him at promotion time in a big way. Through video feedback he was able to see how others perceived him and coaching helped him strengthen his presence with staff and executive audiences. Once the presence improved, the barriers to promotion melted and he earned that VP slot.
- A tactically excellent promotions manager was perceived as topped out because of his weakness in contributing to strategy work. A blend of education/training and strong coaching on looking externally and translating competitor and customer issues into ideas and opportunities for his firm helped strengthen his perceptual acuity and supported his rise to a new and broader opportunity.
- A star on the factory floor was viewed as an excellent candidate to move into a broader operating role, however, his limited understanding of how other parts of the business functioned was viewed as a barrier. A blend of external education and internal assignment rotation helped round out his understanding of individual functions and how they connected, and several years later, he’s a star in a much more expansive operating role.
All of the individuals in these examples benefited from a great boss interested in helping them develop and grow. And all required development in one or more of the Core-4 professional muscle groups. While we’re not always fortunate enough to have that great boss…or in my case, that great physical trainer, every one of us is accountable to ourselves for spending time in our “professional gyms” and strengthening those critical components of our successful success.
Are You a Professional Couch Potato?
How hard are you working on developing your Core-4 professional muscle groups?
Much like the mid-life spread that too many of us fall victim to, it’s easy to let these muscles atrophy. When meeting prospective new coaching clients, I look and listen for how they spend their time developing themselves. What are they reading? What are they writing? Who do they engage with in social media? Are they pushing themselves by taking on new experiences in the workplace? Have they invested their own time and money on strengthening their skills?
It’s common for me to find mid-career professionals who have spent years metaphorically sitting on the couch doing nothing to exercise those critical muscle groups. Yes, work-life balance, children, family obligations are all facts of life for most of us as we move towards mid-career, however, ignoring the needs of your professional self for development is akin to ignoring the need to exercise and stay fit.
The next few “It’s Your Career” posts will offer you some practical guidance to help you assess your own Core-4 conditioning program and to identify and begin strengthening in those areas. And while having a trainer to guide your efforts, you still need to do all of the hard work.
Ready to hit the professional gym?
Here’s Your Warm-Up:
Our next post in this series will focus on one of the most overlooked of the Core 4…strengthening professional acuity. While the term is a bit odd, this focuses squarely on helping you improve your critical and strategic thinking. In preparation, invest some time scanning different business publications (FastCompany, INC, Forbes, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review) or their respective websites and look for examples of firms doing interesting things with technology, design or their business approaches. Take a few notes and we’ll put these to work in our next post.
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