“If you can find a path with no
obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.” –Frank A. Clark
Shifting the Focus
The corporate environment is ripe for women and minorities
to step into leadership roles. To maintain those roles, it will be important to
develop skills to handle larger obstacles. When you aspire for higher
accountability, you must be prepared for
unfamiliar obstacles and constant
changes.
While including women and minorities in senior management
teams is important, global competition demands top talent. Therefore, diversity
alone is not enough. Cultivating top talent, regardless of cultural background,
is an effective means for success when companies seek to differentiate
themselves.
If you, as a manager, are going to build high performing
teams, you and your people will need constant growth and loftier career
aspirations. However, you will have to become accustomed to operating outside
of your comfort zone. To do so, you will be required to consistently increase
your skills and competencies. And who is responsible for your professional
development?
As companies continue to provide training on a regular
basis, preparation for management positions, especially senior management, is
left to the individual. If you are
committed to securing a job with high accountability, you must be responsible
for training and developing yourself.
This may seem counterintuitive at first. Yet, when you look at professional athletics, the top
performers always work with someone who can advise or coach them to the next
level. The athlete is responsible
for creating those training structures and hiring the appropriate coaches.
In business, there is no difference. There is, however, a common expectation
that your employer is responsible for your professional development and to some
extent that is true. However, corporate training may not be able to fulfill
your unique training needs. For
example, functioning within senior management requires you to have a greater
comfort level with taking risks. To do so, you may have to get beyond many
personal issues and create a new mindset for yourself. Your company may not
have the training programs to accommodate you.
In fact, after extensive interviews within Fortune 100
companies, we found a major complaint was that people forgot most of what they
learned in corporate training classrooms; much of the learning was static and
not relevant to what they encountered day-to-day.
Preparing for
leadership
Many managers we interviewed requested training and
development (coaching) in real-time. This medium better prepared them for the
challenges of managing a dynamic environment as well as handling the
complexities of a diverse team or department. Therefore, seeking such training
structures outside of your place of employment would be in your best
interest.
Without extensive leadership training, management’s primary
function, producing results through others, can be frustrating at best,
especially when leading a team that has organized itself into silos. When
managing silos or a diverse population of staff and managers, leaders must
create a platform on which the entire team can stand. By doing so, there is less emphasis on the differences between
the people on the team and a greater focus on what all members of the team are
committed to achieving together. Once a common platform has been created,
diverse groups of people will see how in reality, they all share similar
values, ambitions and needs.
Leading diversity
When a team shares the same values and vision, they gel
better as a group. However, with
diverse thinkers, religions and so on, there must be effective management tools
to keep people aligned. Below is a brief outline of four strategies to lead
diverse teams and disperse silos. Additionally, these are important
competencies for women and minorities to acquire before they take on the
challenges of a leadership role.
1. Create
a new mindset.
Outdated mindsets create outdated conversations. Outdated conversations can inaccurately
predetermine what’s possible as well as what’s impossible. Part of the job of
leadership is to engage people in new conversations for what’s possible. In
those conversations, people have a chance to identify untapped opportunities.
In some cases, untapped opportunities can appear risky.
In the book “Risk Intelligence,” David Apagar says that “the
biggest problem people have when faced with risk is that they know too much…
[about] themselves.” People tend
to see themselves with presupposed limits and capabilities based on their
knowledge and experience. A change in leadership mindset will support a change
in staff and managerial mindsets.
One important conversation for leadership, as well as staff
and management is: For what kind
of company do I want to work? And
in what ways will I be responsible for making sure it happens? From this perspective, everyone is
responsible for the success of the enterprise.
2. Create
a problem.
This requires a different perspective when viewing problems
and may appear counterintuitive.
Yet, to create a platform on which people can stand together, leadership
must create a problem for staff and management to solve. This is not to say leadership is
looking for problems to solve. Instead, leadership must galvanize the entire
organization or team around the invention of a new product, service or
innovative productivity process. Because the project has never been done before
and there is no blue print, it can appear as a problem.
Creating problems is a powerful strategy for bringing
purpose to teams. Everyone is
focused on solving the problem.
When people have a problem to solve, it breaks down barriers and
dissolves silos. If the problem is
larger than one person’s knowledge and experience, the skills and competencies
of colleagues, suppliers and clients will be leveraged. It is a way to create
disruptive technology and move the enterprise beyond existing skills,
competencies and know-how.
3. Create
a common language.
In addition to enhanced skills and competencies, a common
language must be created to unify people. John Seely Brown, former Chief
Scientist of Xerox said, “…e-learning platform also
fosters a shared vocabulary, set of methodologies and perspectives regarding
technology architectures and evolution.
This helps to set the stage for deepening trust and enhancing the
ability to collaborate effectively. As a result, it also helps to increase the
potential for business innovation.”[1]
Common language also synthesizes disparate teams and thought processes. Everyone’s
efforts on common goals and objectives are concentrated when new language is
created.
4. Allow
people to fail.
With new language and a problem to solve, an environment for
accomplishment is fostered. Even though people will begin to galvanize themselves into action, they need to know that it is
permissible to take actions outside of the box. Those new and seemingly
irrational actions will require practice.
In the beginning it will look like failure. However, yesterday’s failures become tomorrow’s
breakthroughs.
To Sum It All Up
When organizations continuously innovate, staff and
management will have to become comfortable with greater accountability and
responsibility. For that reason,
there may be a greater return on investment from training people in intrapersonal
skills first - a clear understanding of the relationship with self, chaos,
opportunity, the future, change, risk, and colleagues - instead of teaching
people to understand the differences between themselves and others.
What do you think? I would love to
hear your feedback. And I’m open to ideas. Or if you want to write me about a
specific topic, let me know.
[1] From Push to Pull- Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources
by John Hagel & John Seely Brown, page 12. Working Paper, October 2005
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