Part 2 of 4 – High Potential Blog series
In Part 1 of this Blog Series, I examined some of the reasons why high potential leaders are thinking about moving on to new employers.
If you are high potential and struggling with what to do next, then let’s understand why this is a challenge for your organization and how you can set yourself up for success in this environment. Before exploring what can be done, let’s consider the constraints many Senior Leaders are working with:
- An intense competitive marketplace means margins are increasingly under attack
- Industry Auto and Property results headed the wrong way have put even greater pressure on returns
- Strict expense constraints demand doing more with less
- Advancing many parallel initiatives leaves leaders short on time
- I.T. initiatives are consuming time and resources while disrupting existing process
In short your management team is likely resource-constrained, time starved and expected to deliver better growth rates and returns. In this context, how can they invest in people in a way that creates meaning and growth for emerging talent? It’s not like they can just make up new jobs and promotions – right?
Given this context, here are some practical suggestions for starting a dialogue with your boss to better support your growth and development:
Start a dialogue
Ask your boss to sit down and review how you can contribute more to your team’s success. Here are two areas to explore in that discussion: what areas or skills do you want to discover or enhance and what skills can you develop that will help create more value for the company. You may want to ask your boss for a summary of her/his goals, such that you can more fully understand the team’s mission and how you can help deliver more broadly.
Grow a new skill
As you seek ways to expand your skills and impact, talk to your boss about how to test drive a new leadership or technical skill. If you want to enhance your leadership skills, is it possible to mentor new staff, add a single direct report or two, team up with a weaker performer and help them improve their success.
Alternatively, if you want to grow a technical skill, then the ask of your boss will be a bit different. Can you team up with an expert in your area of interest and job-shadow them, or take a course and after completion share with your team what you have learned.
Offer to help with a strategic challenge
Identify a longer term strategic priority that is important to your business area (your bosses goals might be instructive here as well). Ask how you can engage on this topic. Would it be possible to work with a group of high potentials to better understand this challenge/opportunity and then make recommendations to push your unit forward. Working with other High Potentials enables you to learn from each other, build relationship bridges across the organization and find new ways to create value.
Follow through
When you activate a development dialogue, it is critical to set out an action plan and create a feedback loop to check in on progress. You will want to drive both the agenda and the follow up. You can do this by scheduling time with your boss well in advance and having a specific check in agenda for each session based on where you want constructive feedback. Remember – you own your development. View your boss as an enabler to help you successfully execute on that plan.
Written by Andrew Steen
Coming Soon…
Part 3 of this series: How do I know when I should move on to a new role?
