“Catch a Rising Star”—yours. Part II
[Part I appears on Talking Story.]
As I had said in the introduction to the MWAJ program:
… the reality of life is that you can’t always start at the beginning. We’ve all had experiences where we get excited about ideas we know hold promise for us, but there’s no going back and there’s no starting over. The trick it seems, is to just start where you are, and do what you can. You are already working. You already have responsibilities. You want to initiate small improvements one at a time, and as you can, simply starting from where you are right now.
The other part to this is that you have to stop in your tracks, refocus, recommit and take an important first-action step sometimes, when things are brought to your attention that you instinctively realize you should pay attention to— now.
That’s what happened to me this morning because I read something with my full attention for a change, versus the quick skims that unfortunately have been my frenzied practice lately in the busyness which is my life (yep, me too.) Everything I had planned for this Saturday morning went by the wayside when I read this:
Top talent has never been more valuable, nor the competition for it more fierce… today—after 500 years or so—the scarcest, most valuable resource in business is no longer financial capital. It’s talent. If you doubt that, just watch how hard companies are battling for the best people… the stakes are getting higher… ask executives [at Microsoft or Google] what the company’s core competency is, and they don’t say a thing about software. They say hiring.
Do you understand what your own talent is?
Are you doing what it takes to groom those talents you do have into marketable strengths?
If you aspire to be a great manager and the kind of leader we desperately need in our world today, I hope you take my advice and read Geoffrey Colvin’s article on the war for top executive talent. It’s about two pages long: Print it, and read it a couple of times.
There are a couple of things I want you to notice in your own circumstances with the magnifying glasses that article gives us, helping us to see them:
1. Understand what the market is demanding. Market demand = your opportunity. Connect what Colvin talks about globally as a trend, to the first-step opportunity you see before you in the company you are working in right now.
2. Understand what a company willing to pay for your talent wants to see connected to your talent:
“Instead of someone who gives orders, they want someone who asks probing questions that force the team to think and find the right answers… the No. 1 skill companies seek in managers is "ability to motivate and engage others." … Ranking a close second is ability to communicate, a trait clients also increasingly want. Standout leaders should additionally have on-the-ground operating experience outside the U.S…. and they'll need megawatts of energy to meet the demands of global travel and a 24/7 world.”
3. Articles like this one are about our personal financial literacy. Read carefully and understand the paragraph about halfway through Colvin’s article which begins,
“Companies like Microsoft and Google are great examples of how today's info-based economy lets businesses create vast shareholder wealth using very little financial capital but loads of human capital.”
Yes, labor is expensive, but your own labor only costs you when you waste it… One of the things this paragraph got me thinking about is how this calls for a new breed of “venture capitalist,” where the “currency” they provide is human capital.
4. “[Bill] Gates once said that if you took the 20 smartest people out of Microsoft, it would be an insignificant company. Imagine. The world's software colossus reduced to insignificance by the loss of just 20 people.”
Who would be considered in that elite group of people in the company where you work right now? Do you have a relationship with them? Have you asked them to mentor you yet, so that you can learn all you can from them, thereby putting yourself in a great leadership experience you can grow within?
5. If you are now a GM, CEO or COO, or any manager at any level who feels you have the freedom to set your own schedule, you MUST read this paragraph and take immediate action with the reinvention of your own calendar:
“Sponsorship from the top is key. "There's lots of pontificating, but this is hard stuff," says [Noel] Tichy. "When a company says it's getting serious about management development, I say great--just let me see the CEO's calendar." Not many bosses will match the 70% of his time that Jack Welch says he put into development when he was running GE…”
6. And this:
“Even companies with the best intentions often create near-useless development programs that rarely change anyone's behavior… Steven Kerr suggests a simple exercise: "Ask your company's best leaders to name the most powerful learning experiences they've had." They will hardly ever mention a class and will almost always name a real-life experience in business. The challenge is to find ways to replicate those experiences.”
When something works well, debrief immediately, and in your debriefing, try to duplicate the experience. Rarely will repeating a sequence of events for others in different circumstances give you the same result —your effort must be to replicate the experience as driven from positive, catalytic changes introduced in their circumstances.
7. Go back to the quote I started with about the importance of hiring: Add it to this statement later in the article.
“To their credit, companies increasingly realize their pipeline is broken… 77% of companies say they don't have enough successors to their current senior managers. Yet they have a miserable time doing much about it. The reason isn't mysterious. At companies that are lousy at leadership development, they think it's HR's job. Successful companies know it's actually the job of all the managers.”
Does this mean you ignore HR? Not at all, it means you accept your own responsibility, and then you aim to a newly reinvented partnership with HR as a different kind of resource for you. Start to think about that; it’s a topic we’ll visit again soon.
[Sidebar: If you are attending the 79th World Conference on Club Management for CMAA in Hawaii, I have been asked to give a seminar on this very subject. I will speak on The Reinvention of Human Resources in Innovative Business on Tuesday, February 28th at 2:00pm.]
As you can imagine, Number 6. is very affirming for me in my passion about Managing with Aloha as a workplace philosophy: Values drive behavior, and the right behavior creates the right experience.
I would love to hear from you on these, and any other insights you may gain from Catch a Rising Star.
technorati tag: Alaka‘i. MWA index: Alaka‘i.
--------------------Tracking MWA Jumpstart:
NEXT JUMP: Panic at Inappropriate Times.
BACK TO THE LAST JUMP: Looking for the good in people.
These are great ideas Rosa. I wonder how many people really believe on this. It´s not a just a casualty that many talented people have decided to start leading their own projects outside the walls of the corporate world.
Posted by: Felix Gerena | February 12, 2006 at 01:25 PM
Felix, I love working and coaching in the corporate world, however what you have noticed is a good thing too in regard to people leading their projects in different venues. The point is to find your own opportunity in the world as you can best fulfill a need with your talents, and with the managerial and leadership talent you have.
As for the corporate work world, those who choose a leadership role within it must get smarter and more effective at grooming their own talent, and then keeping their talented people challenged and feeling they are appreciated.
Thank you for speaking into this.
Rosa
Posted by: Rosa Say | February 12, 2006 at 04:40 PM