Once you know your strengths, are influencing the fit of your role within the organisation, and are leading with the right intent, there will come a point where you need to break from the pack and own the path you are on.
Assuming the pay is acceptable, you will now have put yourself into a position where your contribution is starting to be noticed by those further up the ladder in the organisation. These will normally be your boss (hard line reporting), other leaders who are peers of your boss (soft line reporting) or leaders from cross-functional business units. The time has come for you to identify the next steps on your personal pathway and the projects that you can lead that will ensure your star still rises.
PATHWAY: your next move will most likely be one of three ways:
- Vertical: A direct promotion within your core line of business;
- Horizontal: A transfer into another line of business at a similar level, often with increased scope;
- Diagonal: A promotion into another line of business
Depending on your success to date, you can be explicit about your expectations at performance review time with your manager.
Whichever is the most logical next step, to guarantee your success you need to master two things:
First, the art of successful career transitions. This is where the work of both Michael Watkins and Padraig O’Sullivan come into play.
Michael Watkins is the globally recognised thought leader for mastering career transitions at all levels.
His book The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting up to Speed Faster and Smarter is widely recognised as the bible for rapidly getting on top your path to profitable performance.
His Ten Key Challenges are worth noting here, and I strongly encourage all of my clients to buy his book and follow his approach:
- Prepare Yourself (make the mental break from your old role)
- Accelerate Your Learning (how to rapidly invest in the right type of learning)
- Match Strategy to Situation (accurately diagnosing the current status quo)
- Negotiate Success (building a productive working relationship with the new boss)
- Secure Early Wins (figuring out and executing on top priorities)
- Achieve Alignment (becoming an organisational architect)
- Build Your Team (inheriting a team and changing it)
- Create Alliances (Identifying support and mapping levels of influence)
- Manage Yourself (How to avoid vicious cycles, act with efficacy and build your advisory network)
- Accelerate Everyone (Embedding a framework to accelerate team development)
Padraig O’Sullivan’s work extends on Watkins by applying transition thinking to the world of expat transitions – that of moving to another culture. Even transitions from one country to another when the language spoken is the same can be fraught with hidden traps. His PALDER framework (Pre-Arrival, Arrival, Look Listen & Learn, Decide, Energise and Review & Renew) is at the leading edge of supporting foreigners who are tasked with leading into another culture.
Second, the science of successful project identification. Ideally, a project needs to be a discrete initiative that will provide rapid, sustainable, transformational and ideally profitable change to the organisation.
PROJECTS: identifying the right types of projects will depend on where you sit within the organisation and how far your sphere of influence extends.
In identifying the sweet spot within your organisation, I use a framework I co-developed with one of my clients, called the 12 Profitable Projects. Designed based on the philosophy of the theory of constraints, it recognises that all of us operate in a resource constrained environment and to improve any area of the business depends on the maturity of leadership capability that exists within that area of the business. The framework identifies 12 discrete areas of influence where projects can be sponsored, designed and executed that have the opportunity to significantly move the improvement needle.
There are two questions that any improvement program must base its justification on:
First, did the business as a whole make more money (operating cash flow) as a result of this program? And second, did this improvement in operating cashflow when divided by the net assets of the business measurably improve the %Return On Investment (ROI) of true profit to the business?
The 12 projects are represented in the diagram below.
You will notice that the projects are bounded by three broad “levels” of improvement progression (foundation, transition and transformation), and four broad category “pillars “ (customer, product, systems and people) that set the context and scope for each projects’ activity.
I'll write more about each of the 12 projects next post, with a brief case study of how they work in real life.
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Nathanael Small is passionate about strengths, performance and the world of the intrapreneur - the team leader or leader of leaders within the organisation - helping them move their career from high potential to peak performance.
Nathanael has over 25 years of acquired wisdom in leadership development. His unique perspective and combination of skills allows him to work with intrapreneurs to realise their ambition to be deeply engaged and leading with their strengths.