Post by Santosh Puthran on Oct 18, 2005 19:09:14 GMT
The most important step is to recognize that your professional performance and reputation are indivisible. Managing these aspects of your career simultaneously can ensure that nothing you do or achieve is wasted. It ensures that your professional reputation always reflects solid business performance.
You need to understand how your achievements and behavior at work are shaped by your inner needs and drives. How do these drives affect your everyday attitudes and behavior? Which should you cultivate and which should you try to change.
1. Quality of Performance
If you really want to get ahead, start quality improvement focus in your work; it can be become both a consuming passion and a competitive weapon. A good time to begin is when there is a change in circumstances.
McClelland identifies the following three personality drives:
Achievement - the need to do things well and, as much as possible, by one's self from beginning to end.
Affiliation - the need to maintain close interpersonal relationship, even if this means compromising the objective requirements of the task.
Power - the need to feel strong or to justify one's self by exercising influence or making an impact on others.
2. Determination
A way to help heighten your awareness is by this four step method. 1. Think 2. Fantasize about making it happen 3. Talk about it 4. Do it. You will increase your abilities to analyze and act positively by cultivating concentration. Make extraordinary demands on yourself. Organizations are managed by example. In every structure there is one element which has to bear the load. Keep strong, healthy, active and up-to-date.
3. Energy and Stamina
Stamina is the ability to be always alert, ready to grasp an opportunity on the one hand and to withstand the trauma of disasters and upheavals on the other. Survival depends on stamina.
Building your reputation
If you are truly committed to achieving your full potential, you need to start your quest at a deeper level - you need examine your emotions and attitudes before you can move to behaviors and skills. How well you perform, how well you respond to change and new challenges is determined by your most profound sense of who you are.
1. Developing Self-Esteem
Self esteem grows with practice. It is an aspect of personality which need to be nurtured consciously and carefully so that it exerts a beneficial, liberating influence in a person's life and is not a barrier preventing him or her from grasping new opportunities and challenges. The ability to change comes only when a person grows in maturity and begins to develop a balanced understanding of their worth.
The challenge for personal growth then, involves three key factors: a. consciously developing a realistic, balanced sense of self worth; being open to change; and being willing and able to take control.
2. Setting Goals
In setting the goals leading to planning your career, you need to discover what you are capable of doing well and what you could develop further by training, education or work experience. Just as the level of nutrition you had when young affects your physical growth, so the input from your surroundings affects your knowledge and ambition.
You should make plans for:
Reviewing your present skills against your future goals.
Analyzing your learning style
Identify what you need to do to perform better.
Setting standards of performance - how do you work best?
Initiating the openings to acquire information/training.
2.3 Career Planning
Consider the company you are working for now. Can you visualize yourself in the same conditions in five or ten years time? What you would like to be doing then?
Now is as good a time as any to start planning. Begin by describing your life today, very briefly: your personal life and your work life. How satisfied you are? Is anything changing in your life? What are the components? Your work? Your relationships? You? Where is the pressure to change coming from? The situation? Other people? If so, who? Or is it coming from you? What changes do you want now in your life?
Face the real implications of what is happening, and what the outcomes will be if you continue in your present mode.
Big companies are generally not interested in the small company generalist who are immersed in detail. Big companies want strategic thinkers who can get things done, so it is easier to move from the big to the small. Better training facilities in larger organizations means that joining Mars, Procter & Gamble or IBM early in your career will make you well prepared for big or small companies.
2.4 Visibility
Start well. Go to the best company you can find in 'your' sector, or at least to a firm of professional caliber which is appropriate to your aims.
Working out your ultimate goal is time well spent - even if it takes several years. Practice looking up from your own little patch and getting the global view. (This is sometimes called the 'helicopter approach'). Learning to see as much as possible of the big picture that is your life in order to recognize the pieces and how they fit together.
There is more to success than just wanting it - you (and the company) need leadership, challenge, decisiveness, speed, clarity, mastery of the basics, firm objectives and acceptance of change. They are all capable of development, and both your personal ambition and the corporate entrepreneurial success will thrive on a success driven, supportive and sustaining environment backed up with acceptance and training.
2.5 Gaining recognition
When establishing yourself in an organization you need to be easily recognizable. Suggestions for achieving this include:
Have a trademark, habit or phrase that people associate with you.
Cultivate your idiosyncrasies for the same reason.
Keep a sense of humor - it is all right to laugh at yourself.
Be positive - optimism is a magnet to other people.
Love yourself - then others will love you too.
Be assertive - uncertainty and indecision loses friends and followers
Realize that it's OK to say "I don't know" - but not too often.
Make money - keep it and share what it buys at the same time.
You show your charisma when you are seen to be:
A born persuader
Dynamic and active
A confident speaker
A frequent user of hand gestures
Alert in your body language
Easily believed
Creating an image:
How you present yourself to the world is a form of management. You are a competent person with valued experience who has achieved a senior position, so say so in the way you speak, walk, sit, dress and communicate. By projecting your status, your credibility will grow and you will be recognized for what you are.
A serious businessman is known by the quality of his worsted, his cotton handmade shirt, his silk tie and highly polished leather black shoes, well trimmed hair and absence of moustache.
Using the media
Your business strategy will work better the longer no one knows about it - you are better advised to keep your secrets than to court the Press so that the world hears about what has been achieved. However, good press attention when you want it for a product or management change, is a different matter. This is the tip of a big iceberg of handling the Press carefully over a long period, so that when you want to feed a story, you have credibility and they will co-operate.
Your career belongs to you. It is your plan, your dream, your life. You will have many jobs in the course of your career - even if you only have one employer. You will do each one well, but you will be looking beyond each one even as you are doing it. You will be calculating how it can lead you to the next job on the career ladder. You are not just seeking a better job, you are seeking a successful career.
Maintaining Your Reputation
In your quest to reach the top, you need to learn as early as possible how to conduct yourself in such a way that every meeting and project with your colleagues leaves them in no doubt about your leadership abilities and eventual entry into senior management. Who better to learn from than people such as your boss and one or several mentors in various parts of the organization?
3.1 Mentors
You owe it to yourself to fuel your own development by identifying a person or a style you would like to emulate. But don't view a mentoring relationship as your sole vehicle of learning. Keep up to date with papers, magazines and books on subjects related to your corporate life so that you will be better equipped to participate in groups, either within or outside your company. This will be even more effective if you have the benefit of in-house training.
3.2 Dealing with criticism
Everybody is sensitive to criticism, so you need to prepare yourself to deal with it. There will always be someone who will criticize you, and sometimes it may be constructive. In order to protect yourself and to be able to recover quickly from being put down or being made to look small, you must learn how to avoid being trapped.
Your reaction to this will depend upon:
Who is the critic
Where you are criticized
What the criticism is about
A way to react to the critic includes the following three steps:
1. Agreeing with the critic
Usually when you being criticized, the other person is stating opinions rather than facts. It is important to clarify the situation by using the following statements that seek to minimize conflict and maximize communication : (a) Yes - I can see why you are saying that, I understand what you are saying or (b) Yes - I would feel exactly the same if it had happened to me.
By agreeing, you are avoiding being manipulated. You are not confronting the other person so you are not feeding the aggression. This way you reduce the threatening possibility and make yourself more approachable. You are simply showing that you are receiving - that you are listening.
2. Positive criticism
If the criticism is valid, listen and accept it before trying to deal with the situation, and remedy your action where possible.
Learn to express your annoyance, fury or disappointment for someone's action or lack of it, by being strong, fair and determined not to let it happen again. You will be the strong manager when you sort out the reasons for the problem and avoid repetition. You may need to give support to the person/team for a while, but it is most likely you will gain respect if you do not demonstrate total loss of control. By never getting angry, you win a reputation for serenity and calmness.
Assertive skills are part of learning to deal with other people at all levels and to harness strong emotion skillfully. These abilities in turn will help you grow your reputation for maturity, strength of character, stamina, flexibility and gain respect and recognition.
When your critic has stopped talking you have an opportunity to take more control, try to direct the discussions into ways of solving the problem. Take one step back, avoid being defensive or aggressive yourself, and you will reduce your sensitivity and thereby enable yourself to be objective.
3. Reflecting the criticism back
The technique follows on from agreement. If the criticism continues and persists, and if your critic is clearly not satisfied with your reaction, it will not be enough simply to try and defuse the situation by agreement. You will need to find out what the real problem is - if only in the mind of your critic.
Say "Will you tell me what is wrong? How is it wrong? When was it wrong? Please give me an example." Not that you do not ask why is it wrong? That may encourage another long diatribe based on opinion. "Why" may provoke anger.
Checklist to deal with criticism
Keep calm, face the critics, look them in the eye.
Agree with their statements.
Find out what they are talking about.
Keep probing until the real problem emerges.
Make them respond to you.
Draw them out by asking, "Tell me".
When you have the problem stated, go to the solution.
Get agreement.
Formulate an action plan to finish off the problem.
4. Negotiation
Career planning of negotiations increases your rate of success. You have to assess the position and define your goals for each specific occasion or project. What do you actually plan to achieve? What is the minimum you require and will settle for? And what are you prepared to give to get what you want?
You need to try and anticipate what opposite number will be trying to win from you - and cogitate on what potential tactics might be used and how you will counter them. You should have some alternative solutions and approaches prepared on the basis that nobody will say 'no' to everything.
Having worked out what points you will be trying to make, ensure you have the research and some back-up information ready. The more you know about the situation, the more confident you will feel, and you will be less 'fased' when an unexpected aspect of the negotiation emerges.
Once you have established that you are negotiating with the right person, then you can go ahead. Memorize any statistics or formulae you will need to make your points and be realistic, but do not aim too low: you can always come down from your starting point but can never go up. Keep your expectations high also helps to bolster your confidence.
Major points to keep in mind when negotiating are:
You will keep the upper hand more easily when you arrange to meet in territory which is familiar to you.
Wear whatever makes you feel good.
You will help yourself by encouraging the other person to start the proceedings. By listening actively you will then be able to calculate your own starting power and gauge the mood.
Do not be afraid to ask - what you do not attempt you will not achieve. No matter how valid your request is, there is no guarantee that you'll get it granted, but how you ask could make all the difference to the reaction you receive.
Do not demand - you will come across as threatening, and even if you win the other person will remain defeated and wish to be unobliging.
Do not beg or threaten - this shows vulnerability.
Keep cool: body language lets either side know how the other is feeling. You should emulate the poker player who is pleasant but gives no sign of what is in his or her hand.
Assertive rather than aggressive is more effective. Persuasion is a good way to win, and is much better than intimidating or trying to bully the other person into submission.
Losing your temper loses your control.
You will build up a positive atmosphere by agreeing over items as they arise rather than leaving everything vague for a final denouement.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Keep your leverage points by using them economically. Mystery is a good ally - always try to keep your trump card until the last minute.
Practice the art of the possible. You are never going to get everything you really like, be alert to the maximum which is possible.
Negotiation is not a test of power.
Compromise is not a sign of failure.
When you reach agreement, summarize and record the discussion and make sure that both sides understand clearly what has been determined.
