Taking The Leap... With My Latest Book
Well, I always urge people not to be shy about tooting their own horn to get ahead, so this month I'm taking my own advice and delivering a blatant plug for my new book, Taking The Leap: Managing Your Career in Turbulent Times...And Beyond, co-written by Beth Banks Cohn, Ph.D. It was sometimes a labor of love, but as those of you who have written their own books know all too well, it was mostly labor with a capital 'L.'
There are countless books written on managing your career. Each purports to give you the secrets, the silver bullet, if you will. Taking the Leap does neither. Instead, we focus on career strategies and leadership qualities, mostly because they go hand in hand. We have concentrated on the critical few foundational strategies - personal leadership, communication, and change management. Here is an edited excerpt:
Personal Leadership: Bringing the Inside Out
By creating a clear image of who you are and what you stand for, you will find that others place more faith and trust in you. Your credibility level can be a strong base of power and will certainly assist you in more effectively working through others. Making your core beliefs and values visible to others through your words and actions is the foundation of your personal leadership. When you operate from your personal strengths and talents, you create your most effective model for leadership. You are truly operating at your best.
Trustworthiness:
As a leader, the most important thing you can do is to act in a trustworthy manner. People follow people they trust. Doing what you say, standing up for what you believe in, acting consistently, saying the same things in private that you do in public - all of these are actions that show your trustworthiness.
Trust is easier to build than it is to rebuild. Being trustworthy - and consequently gaining the trust of others - is the single most important leadership trait you can develop.
Courage:
The dictionary defines courage as firmness of mind and will in the face of danger or difficulty. In their book, The Courage to Act, Merom Klein and Rod Napier define courage as having five factors: candor, purpose, will, risk, and rigor.
Candor is having the courage to speak and hear the truth. Speaking the truth doesn't mean being cruel or unproductive in your conversations, but rather having the ability to speak the truth with compassion and keeping in mind the recipient. Hearing the truth can sometimes be challenging, both because it is sometimes difficult to hear and sometimes difficult to get people to tell us.
Purpose is the courage to pursue sophisticated and daring goals. This takes courage because it is easy to just go along with easy goals, goals that aren't hard to achieve, and that don't look beyond a short-term win. Long-term goals like a company's vision can and should be more lofty and sets the tone for how work gets done.
Will is the courage to inspire optimism, spirit, and promise. The future is bright, not because you say so, but because there is a plan in place that will lead you to that bright future. Your ability to show others your vision of this future is a combination of communication skills and your own belief in what you can accomplish.
Risk is the courage to empower, trust, and invest in relationships. Trust is the foundation on which all leadership is built. You will also need to depend on others for your success. Trusting and investing in relationships are risks that as a leader you must be willing to take. We are not saying to trust blindly or to invest in relationships that are not healthy. We are simply saying that you can't do it all alone.
Rigor is the final factor. Rigor is the courage to invent disciplines and make them stick. This speaks to not just pursuing success but measuring it. Rigor is not about rigid rules that you must follow to the letter, but rather understanding what success looks like and the measurements needed to check progress along the way.
Passion and Compassion:
Passion is an emotion that is deeply stirring. The power of showing your passion gives people a glimpse of what is going on inside of you. In our society, we rarely see that in people, so when we do, it is quite powerful. Compassion is defined as a sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it. Showing compassion is about trying to understand why people feel the way they do or do what they do. You need to balance passion and compassion; one should not supersede the other.
Confidence and Humility:
Being self-assured, allowing others to see how confident you feel, is important. When you are confident, people will be comfortable following your lead. You create self-confidence internally and build it by how you respond to what life throws at you. Self-confidence is like the foundation of a house that everything is built on; self-esteem is more fleeting and based on whether you see the day as sunny or cloudy.
Humility means understanding that, although you might be successful, you are still quite dependent on others for your success. Humility softens or tempers self-confidence and ensures that it is not perceived as arrogance.
Inspiration:
Your ability to connect with others is the basis of inspiration. As you communicate your ideas and vision, people will be inspired to join you in working toward your goals. That happens because of the way you speak - it draws people in - and the sincerity that is behind it. Bringing your passion and your sincerity to the outside is what will inspire people - not just when they hear you speak, but when they go back to their desks and work day after day to make your vision come to fruition. Inspiration has nothing to do with status. You don't need to have a title to inspire people.
Political Savvy:
Political is being able to read the landscape of an organization. Savvy is the ability to navigate the landscape in a manner that is non-manipulative. Understanding how to use politics to your advantage is foundational in your ability to get things done in your organization. This is not about being scheming or underhanded. Mindfully creating relationships and rapport with those who have power and authority can make things happen. Map out those people who can champion your ideas, vision, and ultimately your career. Also understanding the power structure - who has positional power, and more importantly, who has informal power - is essential.
Exercise: Gaining Awareness - Reading the Landscape
Take a blank sheet of paper and draw out the different departments/divisions in the company. Now fill in names of individuals you feel have positional power in those different departments/divisions. Next, identify who has informal power. Last, think about who is connected to whom, who talks to whom, who relies on whom for information or support.
Look at this map and try to understand your company's landscape. What events have happened recently? Reorganization? The launch of a new product? The acquisition of a new product or company? A new hire at a high positional level? All of these can you give you additional information that can help you understand your company's landscape even better.
Reading a company landscape gets easier and in time becomes almost second nature. Eventually you won't need a physical map but will be able to continually read your company landscape just by looking around.
Taking The Leap: Managing Your Career in Turbulent Times...And Beyond is now available directly from my website.
Enjoy,
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