How To Enhance Your Potential While Working Your Current Job

MENTORS, seminars, multimedia, and books (and this site, of course) are great ways to learn about leadership and areas that you need to think about to round out your leadership capabilities. But nothing takes the place of application and practice. Leadership is not developed in the classroom. The problem (sorry, I meant challenge) we often run into is the opportunity to practice leadership. According to Cindy McCauley from the Center for Creative Leadership, “Seeking out new challenges while remaining in your current job is a practical, effective strategy to pursue.” Taking on new or different assignments allows leaders to intentionally develop new skills, practice new behaviors and improve on weaknesses. She suggests three ways to do this in her book, Developmental Assignments: Creating Learning Experiences without Changing Jobs:

• Reshape your current job. Adding new responsibilities or reshaping your job may be more realistic than you think. Changes may be permanent or temporary. Consider moving a responsibility from someone else's plate to your own, trading tasks with another or taking on a role or task that needs to be done but that no one currently "owns." Also re-examine responsibilities that are already a legitimate part of your job, but have received little attention.
• Take on temporary assignments. Look outside your job description or department for projects, task forces, one-time events and activities that you can participate in for a short period of time.
• Seek challenges outside the workplace. Other areas of your life often provide the same challenges found in job settings. You'll find plenty of leadership responsibilities in nonprofit, religious, social and professional organizations, schools, sport teams and family life. There are many opportunities to learn lessons of leadership through personal experiences.

Not every challenge is a prime opportunity to learn, says McCauley. Research shows that certain kinds of challenges stimulate learning more than others. "To adapt and grow, leaders need to be constantly seeking out new experiences and challenges that, by their very nature, foster learning.”

Ten key challenges are listed below, along with a few suggestions for ways to seek such challenges.

Type of Challenge	Ideas for Assignment
Unfamiliar responsibilities: Handling responsibilities that are new or very different from previous ones you've handled.	Ask your boss to delegate one of his/her job responsibilities to you Volunteer for a task that would normally go to a more experienced person Take up a new hobby Work with colleagues to redesign a work process
New directions: Starting something new or making strategic changes.	Participate in the start-up of a new team Work on a strategic plan for a community or professional organization
Inherited problems: Fixing problems created by someone else or existing before you took the assignment.	Take over a troubled project Serve on a task force to solve a major organizational problem Join the board of a struggling nonprofit organization
Problems with employees: Dealing with employees who lack adequate experience, are incompetent or are resistant to change.	Coach an employee with performance problems Resolve a conflict with a subordinate Coach a sports team
High stakes: Managing work with tight deadlines, pressure from above, high visibility and responsibility for critical decisions.	Manage high-profile customers or business partners Do a tight-deadline assignment for your boss's boss Manage a community event with high visibility
Scope and scale: Managing work that is broad in scope or large in size.	Broaden the services or products offered by your unit Serve on a team managing a large-scale project Serve as an officer in a regional or national professional association
External pressure: Managing the interface with important groups outside the organization, such as customers, vendors, partners, unions and regulatory agencies.	Train customers how to use a new product Take calls on a customer hotline Take on public relations or other boundary-spanning role for a community organization
Influence without authority: Influencing peers, higher management or other key people over whom you have no authority.	Manage projects that require coordination across the organization Represent concerns of employees to higher management Teach a course
Work across cultures: Working with people from different cultures or with institutions in other countries.	Manage a multi-country project Host visitors from other countries Travel abroad
Work group diversity: Being responsible for the work of people of both genders and different racial and ethnic backgrounds.	Hire and develop people of different genders, ethnic groups and races Lead a project team or task force with a diverse group of members Join a community group that attracts a diverse group of people

McCauley counsels to select a challenge that will broaden your experience base. Ask yourself: Which of the challenges have I had the least exposure to? Are there some that I haven't experienced in a number of years? Are there any that my current job never provides? Then choose a specific activity or assignment from the list or make up your own.

You can find many more specific ideas in Developmental Assignments: Creating Learning Experiences without Changing Jobs

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 05:13 AM
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