Four Skills You Need to Get to the Top by Bill Hawkins
For the ambitious among you, those of you who really want to make it to the top of your organization, what does it take to get there? We all know sometimes there are what we call battlefield promotions. In other words, “Everyone knows that you’re not really ready for this job, but we need you,” and you learn once you get on the job. But to make it to one of the top slots in the organization, research shows there are four skills you really should master before you get there.
First, manage people. Can you assemble a team? Or as Jim Collins said in his book Good to Great, “Can you get the right people on the bus?” And then once you have them on the bus, can you get them to work as a team? Can you get people engaged, motivated, and excited to put in extra effort to get the job done? Can you deal with performance issues that are invariably going to crop up? Learn to manage people.
Next, you have to learn to start something from scratch. Start something new; a new product, a new initiative. Start something in a new location, build a new team. You see, there’s always risk involved in any new venture. So you learn to take calculated risks. You learn to work with a sense of urgency. You learn to work without all the resources you thought you’d have available, and make decisions without enough information. Learn to start something from scratch early in your career.
Also, you need to learn to fix something that’s broken. Learn to work in a situation with high visibility. Usually, this project starts out with the instructions “It’s broken; fix it.” When you learn to fix something that is broken, it usually involves broken relationships—internal and external to the organization. There’s a sense of urgency and focus to make it happen. You learn to work under pressure.
And finally, learn to influence without authority. This is counterintuitive, isn’t it? But the higher you go, the more important this skill becomes. And, in fact, the first time you’ll have the opportunity to pull out the power card to accomplish what you need to accomplish is at first line management level. At every promotion after that, you will have to increasingly learn to influence without authority until you’re finally the CEO of your organization.
Let’s look at the CEO of your organization. There are four key constituencies that she or he probably has to manage. One is to lead all the people in the organization; that’s with power. Secondly, Wall Street, the stock market; that’s without power. Another key area is the board of directors; that’s without power. And the fourth key constituency is the customers, again without power. By the time you make it to the top of the organization, three out of the four key constituencies you need to influence will be without authority.
So these are the four key skills you should learn before you snag that big job. Good luck.