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“Creating Successful Leaders”

Tag Archives: Lifelong Learning

August 14, 2013 Rethinking The Career Path: Stepping Stones, Not Ladders

So many today feel disillusioned with their jobs, and I think much of it can be attributed to thinking about the career path all wrong.

In an article on the Harvard Business Review blog, Nathaniel Koloc, CEO of ReWork, writes that “as many as 70% of working Americans were unfilled with their jobs,” according to a Gallop Poll conducted in 2013. The reason for this is a general sense of disconnection many feel between the work they do and the values they hold. What’s more, a lot of folks don’t see their career path progressing toward anything they find meaningful, and so, they settle for mediocrity as the norm.

This type of thinking can be detrimental, as it leads to boredom, apathy and the very unpleasant feeling of being helpless and stuck. It’s a cycle, too: when you feel stuck and then settle for mediocrity, you’re less motivated and inspired to take risks and chase after what you really want.

A way to rethink this is to challenge the traditional “career ladder” model of professional life. “Sure,” writes Koloc, “many people accept that the career ladder is broken, but most still attempt to increase the ‘slope’ of their career trajectory.” The idea that our careers are linear progressions is pretty deeply embedded in our society. We still assume, despite the rapidly-changing job environment, that our work will steadily move “up” in salary, stature and social impact. Then, when it doesn’t, we become discontent.

Our professional paths are much more like stepping stones laid out horizontally, not ladders. In other words, we have opportunities all around us we often don’t consider when we have the “ladder” mentality, which tells us that in order to be a good worker, we must always being looking up.

A great point Koloc makes is that our interests and passions change as we grow older, and thinking of your career path as a series of stones all around you fits much more aptly with this natural part of human growth. Are you interested in the very same things as you were ten years ago? Probably not, and even if you are, I’ll bet you’ve added a few more interests over the years. Koloc’s point, I think, is that because we change gears all the time as people, there’s no reason to cling onto the career ladder approach to jobs, because even if you get a promotion in the field you’ve been working in for years, your true passions may have shifted away from your work while you were busy on the ladder.

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August 7, 2013 Leading As A Moderator, Not An Enforcer

Leaders often burden themselves with being the only ones to make tough decisions and stick with them, even when they may not be popular with everyone on the team. There are times when you as leader must make this type of call and deal with a bit of unpopularity for a while.

But there are other instances–the majority, in fact–where leaders tend to take on too much when it comes to making tough or controversial decisions. They feel, rightly so, that because they’re the ones who must take ultimate responsibility within their organization, they also must personally decide, execute and maintain new systems or standards.

While it’s true “the buck stops here” when it comes to leadership responsibilities, we must remember that those we work with and manage have loads of helpful ideas we might otherwise not have thought of ourselves. We must also remember that our coworkers and/or employees are capable and eager to do a good job (and if they aren’t, then you have a problem with your hiring strategies).

With this in mind, we should take advantage of our teams when it comes to making, implementing and maintaining decisions.

Moderate The Decision-making Process, Don’t Make All The Decisions

As a leader, you should work to get your team involved in the process of making key decisions. Your role should be to moderate the group, keeping the discussion focused and realistic, and also to help peers work things out should disagreements arise.

Workers who are involved with decision-making feel more engaged and connected to their work, getting a sense of ownership for the visions the team has come up with together. This inevitably leads to better performance across the board, because ownership and meaning behind one’s work always gives them that necessary fire to push toward excellence.

Leading As The Vision-Implementer, Not The Productivity Police

If a team feels they are being micro-managed, they tend to become distant from their work. That is to say, a babysat team can easily be made to feel that they are not smart or capable enough to do their own work.

On the other hand, we all need standards in place to keep us all on the same page. A great team is well-organized, highly communicative and grounded in a mutual understanding of the standards and expectations.

You can see why involving everyone in big decisions can help you as the leader in the long run, when you need to begin implementing the vision (aka, the daily expectations of each team member). If and when you run up against disagreements or unproductivity, you can always point back to the standards the whole team came up with. You aren’t the dictator, you’re the one tasked with making sure everyone fulfills the requirements they set for themselves.

Maintaining The Vision

Things don’t always apply perfectly from the white board to real life. And, since the business world constantly changes along with the rest of the world, it’s necessary to constantly reevaluate the value of decisions you’ve made and implemented in the past. This means you’ll need to tweak things as you go and ask for feedback from the team, thereby keeping everyone directly engaged in the process.

This, my friends, is the recipe for good leadership, and for a functional, happy team.

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July 24, 2013 Learning Agility In Practice

To wrap up this series on learning agility, I thought I’d provide some examples of how this set of attributes leads to greater success.

We can better understand what learning agility is when we set it up alongside what it is not. As outlined in the post from two weeks ago, learning agility can be broken down into four categories: Innovation, Reflection, Performance, and Risk-taking. The Center for Creative Leadership out of the Colombia Teachers College breaks it down in this way:

Innovation:

Do you challenge the status quo when trying to make improvements, OR, do you make do with what you have at your disposal?

There’s nothing wrong with making do with what you have. But when that becomes your M.O., then you are probably limiting yourself in vision. When it comes to all the major breakthroughs we see in history, they all shared the same characteristic of bravely pushing the envelope on what is possible.

Performance:

Do you stay calm in the face of a stressful situation, OR, do you use stress as energy to get things done more quickly?

This skill can be especially difficult. We all like to think that in stressful situations, we always remain calm and focused. But if we’re honest, we can point to many instances when our stress and emotions got the better of us.

Being an agile performer means that we release the rigid expectations we apply to ourselves and to those around us. The more we stay entrenched in a stubborn view of how everyone else ought to behave, the more stressed out we get. The more stressed out we get, the worse we perform. I’m sure you see how this can become a pretty miserable cycle.

Reflection:

Do you use past failures as lessons, OR, do you quickly put your failures behind you and focus on the next challenge?

If you tend toward the latter, you’re probably repeating many of the same mistakes without even knowing it. Examining how you screwed up is hard, since it shakes up our ego. But a good learner swallows their pride and uses their failures as lessons, which reduces failure in the long run.

Risk-taking:

Do you take on challenges that are ambiguous, new, or otherwise challenging, OR, do you take on challenges where you know you’ll be successful?

Too many of us avoid throwing ourselves into anything unfamiliar, but because an agile learner uses failure as a lesson, they know that new experiences may yield short-term discomfort and failure in return for long-term success. When failure is reduced to a necessary discomfort with a life lesson inside it, the idea of taking on something new becomes much less scary.

All these characteristics enable the agile learner to see opportunities and fearlessly pursue them, embracing failure as  a catalyst for insight, and new challenges as welcome motivation. And this can be you! It starts with the little challenges and reflections, a bit of open-mindedness, and it snowballs from there.

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