You have the opportunity to reinvent, retool and rejuvenate your career with these ten essential elements. We are adding ten skills to your arsenal and ten abilities that will increase your effectiveness and help you stay at the top.
Up the Ante 10+10+10
Essential Ellement #1: Vision & Values
Skill: Communication | Capability: Reinvention Readiness
To become the CEO of your company, you must develop a long-term strategic plan that will take you at least three years. This involves imagining the future, and perhaps realigning your professional and personal goals and values. A career roadmap will provide you with key navigation points, which you can review every quarter and adapt as necessary to realize your vision. Reinvention readiness helps you think on your feet and be flexible, adaptable, and pivot-friendly.
Essential Element #2: Entrepreneurship
Capability: Managing Inflection Points
The whole brain thinkers are able to use all three parts of their brains: the creative, analytical, and emotional. Studies continue to support the idea that mathematically gifted individuals are more adept at integrating and relaying information between their cerebral hemispheres. These individuals can leverage both their brains.
You can increase your entrepreneurial abilities by applying whole brain thinking. This will help you to be more disciplined and have the ability to solve complex problems. Today’s business requires us to use all of our resources and not limit ourselves by focusing on one or the other brain functions for each challenge we face.
Essential Element #3: Navigation
Capability: Connecting the Dots
Peripheral vision is the ability to see beyond what you are seeing, or “seeing around corners”. You will need to have sharp observation skills and stronger intuition muscles to navigate in the new business world.
Essential Element #4: Responsible Risktaking
Capability: Managing Ambiguity
Including accountability in your decision-making process will ensure that you and your team ask the right questions about the downstream and upstream impacts of your decisions. Transparency is a key component of product innovations. This includes responsibility for the entire process, from where and who manufactures it to how it is made to the working conditions and the environmental impact at the end of their life.
Companies that consider the impact of their products on families will be able to differentiate themselves from the rest in the market for consumers and workers. Professionals will increasingly seek out partners and employers who share their values and “walk their talk”.
Essential Ellement #5: Disruption and Discontinuity
Capability: Ability to Mobilize Change
Self-disruption has become the new way to manage change. It’s about disrupting before it’s necessary and ending before it’s forced to. It takes both a mindset and skill to be a catalyst for positive change. You can own your career disruption and also contribute to the creation of disruptive innovations within your organization in the new business world. Old world business thinking is based on the notion that “it’s how we’ve always done things” and complacency.
Essential Element #6: Experimental & Exploration
Capability: Analyzing Big Data
Isn’t curiosity something that we are born with, and not necessarily a skill. Both yes and no. Yes and no. We are curious creatures by nature. Just look at children playing. But somewhere along the line we lose our curiosity, experimentation, and adventure. Companies need people who are curious and can analyze Big Data. Data management that is intuitive and creative uses curiosity and creativity to find the “big story” in the data.
Essential Ellement #7: Innovation & Invention
Capability: Tapping the Power of Ecosystems
Innovation is a currency that can be used anywhere. If you are a collaborator and help drive innovation within your teams, your career opportunities will increase exponentially. Your innovation capital will grow the more you collaborate with global, cross-functional teams. Without it, you’ll lose influence and negotiating power.
Essential Element #8: Training & Transition
Skill: Listening | Capability: Life Long Learning
What amount of listening are you doing today? Do you listen so fast that you can have your reply ready before the other person finishes their thoughts? We are more likely to miss important information in today’s fast-paced workplaces and make poor decisions if we only listen to “sound bites”. You can improve your intuition and listen to what others are saying.
Essential Element #9: Networking & Collaboration
Capability: Building a Web of Influence
Collaboration is key to solving complex problems. Effective use of humor and storytelling are two skills that can help you build trust and rapport with others. These skills will be useful as you expand your influence through team collaborations. Tap into your network of influence to increase your decision-making power. This will allow you to rise to leadership positions with more visibility and accountability, knowing that your human network(work) is there for you.
Essential Element #10: Execution
Capability: Getting the Job Done
Companies expect to increase the importance of getting the job done in 2013, and will tie compensation dollars toward key roles, functions, and high performers. According to the 2013 Pay: Making a little go a long way article (hat tip to Joanne Sammer), companies plan to increase their pay to those employees who have a significant influence on company performance. According to the survey, 65% of respondents expected companies to make pay differentials among different employee groups. In a 2011 similar survey, only half of the companies reported using this approach.
This year, make it a memorable one by adding 10+10+10 and 10 to your career mix!
Risktaking for Success is where I am a Reinvention strategist and an organizational change practitioner. My focus is on the people aspect of technological transformation. Seeding Change, an online training site for career professionals, is the author of Innovation in a Reinvented World. It focuses on preparing people to adapt to changing workplace and business environments.
