Fostering Career Leadership

People with the right set of skills, background and ambition have more career opportunities than ever. However, with so many opportunities comes the responsibility of taking a leadership role in your career. Understanding important factors such as strengths, weaknesses and values can open up more doors and accelerate employee achievements.

Perfecting Raw Talent

Although most people think they understand their own strength, they are often wrong. Discovering strengths helps decode where you “fit” within an organization. The best way to understand strengths is to track the decisions you make and determine the results several months down the line. You might discover that you have a natural ability to negotiate important deals or a talent for building rapport with key decision makers.

This technique isn’t new, according to the Harvard Business Review. It was developed over 150 years ago by a German theologian. The result of this practice is a deeper understanding of natural abilities.

As an employee begins to understand their own strengths, areas of weakness will become apparent. It might be tempting to try and “fix” these areas. People should however focus their energy on improving strengths. Perfecting raw talent will take employee skills to new levels, providing companies with better long-term results.

Taking a Realistic Look at Performance

Employee development should consider a variety of learning styles. An employee must also understand how they learn. Programs that are tailored to a single type of learning won’t be successful for everyone. For example, some people learn by taking notes. If they don’t write something down, the concept doesn’t stick. Other professionals learn by fleshing out concepts with colleagues. When an employee understands their learning style, they can get the most out of development opportunities.

Employees should also understand a few characteristics about their performance style to better find their “place” in the professional workforce. Some people work best as subordinates while others are natural leaders. For example, forcing a person who is a loner into a heavy team environment won’t be a natural fit and may even hinder performance for the entire team.

Getting a Value Fit

Employees who are most effective are an organizational fit with the company’s values. People should evaluate a company’s ethics and ask themselves “Is the company’s ethics a good fit with my values?” For example, the Harvard Business Review explains that after a merger an employee was promoted to become a human resources director. The director was responsible for selecting managers and executives in the company.

The employee strongly believed that promotions should come from within the company’s talent pool. The new company, however, believed that high level positions should be recruited from outside of the organization. After several years of frustration, the human resources professional become frustrated and quit. The employee would have been much happier if she selected a company with shared values.

Another example of a “value mismatch” is an executive’s disagreement on short-term and long-term goals. Although most financial experts believe these goals can (and should) run concurrently, at times they might conflict. With some companies, long-term goals trump short term results; however, other companies have the opposite strategy. This is a fundamental philosophy that employees should understand before signing on.

Finding the Right Place

Most people don’t know where they fit career wise right off the bat. People that are highly gifted don’t usually find where they belong until they’re well into their twenties. Employees can narrow down career paths by thinking about what isn’t a good fit for their skills. For example, a mathematician may decide that she isn’t interested in managing people. Employees who understand their skills are able to say “no” when offered positions that aren’t a good fit.

Piggybacking on Co-Workers’ Talents

The majority of professionals work with co-workers on some level. When working with a team, employees need to understand their teammate’s strengths and weaknesses. Employees can draw from co-worker’s strengths, making the entire team more productive. This is also true when working with a new manager. Being intuitive about their strengths and weaknesses will help you understand how they like to manage business, anticipate areas where you can help, and build better strategies.

Creating a Challenge

Often times, after two or three decades of working, professionals get bored. Finding new ways to use strengths can revitalize your ambition. Sometimes the change is as simple as working in the same capacity, but at a different industry. While other times, a professional may apply his strengths to an entirely new career. As long as you’re focusing on strengthening and growing your core talents, a successful career will follow. Talents are mobile and being the driving force in your own career will prevent you from veering off course.

Resource:
Peter F. Drucker. “Managing Oneself.” The Harvard Business Review, January 2005.
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Mark Jordan is the Managing Principal of VERCOR, an investment bank that creates liquidity for middle market business owners. He is the author of “Driving Business Value in an Uncertain Economy”, “Selling Your Business the Easy Way”, “Enhancing Your Business Value…The Climb to the Top” and co-author of “The Business Sale…A Business Owner’s Most Perilous Expedition.” For more information, contact him at 770.399.9512 770.399.9512 or click here to email Mark.