Unlock Your Leadership (eBook)

Secrets & Straight Answers on Standing Out, Moving Up, and Getting Ahead as the Leader You Really Are

Damaris Patterson Price (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2019 | 1. Auflage
286 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-5439-8872-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Unlock Your Leadership: Secrets & Straight Answers on Standing Out, Moving Up, and Getting Ahead as the Leader You Really Are is an essential resource for early or mid-career professionals who want to attract and accelerate leadership opportunities at work. Written by Damaris Patterson Price, a Human Resources veteran and practicing executive coach, Unlock Your Leadership takes a look at why you're not being offered leadership positions and what to do about it by exploring:- What may be getting in the way of your next promotion. - The key differences between people who attract choice career opportunities and those who do not. - The nuanced walk and talk of professionals who are considered promotable leadership material. - Strategic behaviors that can help you demonstrate that you are ready for what's next - right now. Getting ahead at work often means learning the hard way - and usually on your own. Unlock Your Leadership is a supportive partner that will offer a development plan and honest insights about career climbing that, unfortunately, most professionals will never get. If you don't have a personal career coach, this book is the next best thing.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

Confessions of a Corporate “HRian”

The truth about the path to leadership at work

Let’s not beat around the bush because we both know why you’re here: you want to be promoted into leadership. You want to be lifted to the next level. You want to be respected as the team’s thought-leader and go-to person. You want to be followed. You want to be listened to. You want to cause things to happen. You want to be invited. You want them to see you, and, while doing so, you want them to see a leader. Understood. Now, where’s the first place you go? Most employees who want to fast track their careers toward leadership roles go to their boss. The luckiest among you have nurturing managers who have long identified your potential—perhaps even before you did—and have been grooming you, whether you realized it or not. Equally lucky are those among you who find your managers open and receptive when you approach them with your aspirations for next-level growth. They are responsive to your expressed interests and start walking with you on the road that leads to you being at the right place, at the right time, with the right skills when the lightning bolt of opportunity strikes. But for many without access to a nurturing guide, building your repute as a leader is lonely and mysterious work.

Throughout my years of coaching, I’ve heard many clients report feeling as if invisible and powerful forces were at work as they chased their next-level dream. Some of those forces seemed aligned with their aspirations to move up, whereas others seemed to be opposed. That’s when the paranoia would begin: a feeling that, at worst, the deck was stacked against them and, at best, a promotion process that should be fairly black and white was much more complicated than they ever imagined. The truth was, and is, the same: most of these people aren’t paranoid, and neither are you. With nearly three decades of experience in the people development business, I’m telling you that what you sense is real. There are forces and little-known processes influencing the paths toward leadership.

But be encouraged. Although these forces and realities deserve your respect, they are not something to fear. Instead, study them, as we will. Understand why and how they operate, and how to operate with them, and you exponentially increase your chances of managing your career to arrive in a good place. But if you ignore them, you won’t get very far at all. The sad fact is that some employees have to go it alone. They have to make their own luck—and their own development plans. For those of you pursuing leadership opportunities on your own, for those of you supplementing the generous guidance of others, and for those of you who are here to sharpen your confidence and competitive edge, let’s begin. But first, we’ll need to go to church.

Behind the HRian Curtain

I am the product of a career spent in Human Resources (HR). And one thing I know for sure is, your average HR department is severely underrated and scarcely understood. HR departments are not organizational profit centers; that is, we don’t make money for the company, we consume it, and we are often seen as a bland and fiscally inconsequential shared service of the enterprise. But what HR lacks in revenue generation, it makes up for in influence. If the organization is a community, HR is its church. The sacred keep of the organization’s values, laws, social norms, and belief system, just like a house of worship, HR is the caretaker of the organization’s philosophical ideology, with a reach that spans the entire enterprise. All organizations have a culture—a shared understanding of how the organization works, a shared knowing of right and wrong, a shared memory, and even a shared mythology. And for most midsize or larger organizations, HR is their temple. Managers are its local ministers. And HR professionals—or HRians, as I affectionately call us—are the temple priests and priestesses. HRians author the instructive hymnals and generously dispense them for employees to sing-song along. HRians are the organization’s storytellers and historical archivists as well as its most zealous and adoring amen corner.

So, why am I telling you this? For many employees, human resources, HR, or personnel is a shadowy and enigmatic space, with a thick and impenetrable culture of secrecy and tentacles woven throughout the organization. Most know it is HR you call about sick days or 401(k)s. And most know HR will be calling you if they find you on the wrong side of policy. But what many don’t see is the elaborate system of philosophy, practice, and process that results in some employees easily crossing over into leadership while others don’t, despite really wanting to. These employees are among those who believe promoting into leadership is just a matter of strong performance or being on their boss’ good side (or just not getting on their boss’ bad side). They are mistaken. If only it were that simple. Still, let me be very clear: the relationship you have with your manager is of the utmost importance if you intend to climb. Their local influence, coaching, and advocacy of you and your ability are critical. But the power to move your career doesn’t begin or end with them. Of all of the power managers in midsize and larger organizations can wield, the truth is, they take their agency and cues from somewhere else—HR.

Much like missionaries, HRians spread the principles and philosophies considered by that organization as the indisputable gospel. These “truths” are the organization’s system of good and bad, what it considers strengths and flaws, and what is expected and accepted among the organization’s righteous citizenry, especially among those it will call to lead. HR evangelizes about what exemplifies the exceptional, who are, in turn, blessed with more authority, more responsibility, more money, and more influence and are called leaders. HR, in alignment with the business units, elevates and promotes the people who are considered extraordinary and beautiful exemplars of whatever the organization values. At certain levels of the organization, these beautiful ones may even be regarded as untouchable, sacred cows, or in a political sense, even divine. Indeed, they giveth these gifts and they taketh away. And who, specifically, are they? They are HRians like HR Business Partners, talent management consultants, executive development folks, training and development professionals, and recruiting agents, as well as hiring managers along with other hierarchies of leadership in the business unit. The theys are all the organizational bodies that decide what leadership is, what it looks like, who has it, and who doesn’t.

More Than the Stars Need to Align

I’m no heretic when I describe HR as a kind of church; I’m a true believer. I’ve been an HRian my entire professional life, and HR is where I learned the craft of helping people become who they could and would be. But as you pursue the next level of your leadership career, you should know the truth. And among the first things to understand is this: when you are looking at being elevated to the next level—especially if that means moving into a management position—look first for alignments. Like the stars align to form the celestial gods and goddesses of mythology, you must align and find connectivity within the constellation of your organization’s systems, culture, and philosophy.

Finding this alignment may prove challenging. As with any ideology, what HR and the organization prize most may or may not line up with your particular priorities, logic, what you deem as reasonable or fair, or your personal values. You look in the mirror and see someone who is ready to lead or lead more extensively. But the organization looks at and measures the individuals it will promote against the most fundamental of motivations: surviving and thriving. Take a marker and highlight that: the organization’s first, last, and most basic drive is self-preservation. Surviving and thriving are your organization’s alpha and omega. Who you are and what you want has little to do with it.

An organization’s leaders and managers are the most direct way a company advances these most basic objectives. An organization’s leaders are its standard-bearers and culture carriers. Leaders adopt, model, and push the organization’s culture down into the departments, where the employees live and breathe. Therefore, the organization recognizing you as leadership material is not so much for your benefit—although, for the leader, there are many benefits to be had—as it is the organization materializing what it needs for its own well-being. There is nothing wrong or diabolical in that. That’s just smart business. Equally smart is looking for people who are willing and able to carry the organization’s values into the departments and work teams with vigor and enthusiasm, where those values can be infused into coaching, business directives, and the messaging employees hear and work by.

If you are going to be a leader in a given organization, it is essential that your values and its values align; after all, you, as a leader, will be heavily leveraged to inspire employees’ attachment to the organization’s culture and adherence to its norms. Organizational values include the words or phrases that underpin its philosophy, code of behavior, and the essentials of its success. Values serve as the organization’s conscience and compass as it navigates its way through change, risks, opportunity,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 11.11.2019
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Beruf / Finanzen / Recht / Wirtschaft ► Bewerbung / Karriere
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Unternehmensführung / Management
• ISBN-10: 1-5439-8872-5 / 1543988725
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5439-8872-7 / 9781543988727