One of the most common questions people ask me is why is my growth so slow? Or why only a select few climb up the ladder rapidly? Or my peers get promoted, I don’t and so on….
I smile and respond, maybe they have something extraordinary😊.
Fact is that only a few grow rapidly in organisations because only they demonstrate those key success behaviours.
Everyone sure know their craft and that is precisely why they still have their jobs. Knowing your craft and keep getting better at it is imperative but to grow up the corporate ladder there are other key skills that are necessary. Those skills are not taught in schools and colleges. Those skills are acquired with experiences and by observing and learning from other.
So, the question now is what are those key skills or competencies?
The skills and competencies would differ with your level in the organisation. For the sake of simplicity, we will limit the scope to mid-level managers or middle management.
Although, there are many that I can elaborate on. However, I have zeroed down on few key skills that every mid-level manager must possess to succeed and move on to next level.
*Here, I am assuming that you know your craft well and therefore, you have reached middle management.
Understanding the expectation
At mid level, you should be able to understand the expectations of the managers. You may not know the big picture yet but you should be able to understand what is expected from you and your team or process and how you are contributing to the big picture.
If you are not clear on the expectations, you should ask that clearly until you are clear. No one can deliver the best output unless the end is not clear.
Ability to cascade the expectations
After you have clarity on what is expected from you and your team, you need to cascade that clearly and frequently. Your ability to connect their individual goals / deliverables will define their engagement levels to the results.
Each team member should understand their roles and what is expected from them clearly. Do this regularly as people have short memory. The need to be reminded.
Managing People
By far the most complicated skill is the ability to manage people and lead them. Human beings are the most complicated creatures on the planet. Every human is different from other and it requires, managers or supervisors to understand each one of them and deal with them differently.
Your job is to get the best out of them in challenging situations by making them feel secure, part of a the bigger picture and managing conflicts.
Organising
Every human being is different and therefore, their methods would be entirely different from one another. Therefore, it becomes imperative for the manager to be able to organise the process flow or task for the team to follow standard procedure while following their own approaches.
Define the process, approach, templates, format of the output etc.
The ability to organise work for self and the team is second most critical success behaviour.
Problem Solving
Yet again you are dealing with humans and they will either have genuine problems or self-created ones. Either ways, your job is to solve them for smooth functioning of the process.
Key here is to analyse the problem carefully and not get affected by complexity or stupidity of the problem. Respond and don’t react. People look up to you for solutions, give them what they need. Do not classify problems and taunt your subordinates. They are humans and they have emotions and feeling too. Deal with them like adults.
Monitoring
It is equally important to understand key success measures or key failure measures of your process, function or deliverables. You cannot oversee everything and therefore, you need to create a metric to constantly measure success and failure of the process.
Keep a close tab on the defined success measures and act accordingly, in case of deviations.
If you are willing to acquire the above three skills and demonstrate these behaviours consistently, you surely would board the plane to success.
Do your best!!!
