Cross-training approach for leadership?

My bag usually contains the odd article for reading in bus transit mode on way to and from work.

I’ve been reading a Harvard Business Review reprint article from the October 2011 issue by Zenger, Folkman and Edinger entitled ‘Making Yourself Indispensable’.

The Argument

This argues that “Doing more of what your already do well only yields incremental improvement. To get appreciably better at it, you have to work on complementary skills”. It also argues that what is sets people out in organisations is not being good at lots of things, but outstanding at a few that matter to it.

The authors then identify sixteen leadership competencies with strong associations to being valued by businesses. To each of these they assign a number of related competency companions (associated behaviours). 

They argue for a cross-training approach to improving leadership competencies by 1) identifying strengths objectively (what others think, not what you believe), 2) deciding on a strength to focus on “according to its importance to the organisation and how passionately you feel about it”, 3) selecting one of the competency companions associated with that behaviour and working on improving that; 4) developing it in a linear way.

Aligning strength, passion and importance

I particularly liked the comment in this (my bold) that “we recommend that developing leaders focus on a competency that matters to the organisation and about which they feel some passion, because a strength you feel passionate about that is not important to your organisation is essentially a hobby, and a strength the organisation needs that you don’t feel passionate about is just a chore.”

They suggest various questions to ask yourself when seeking to identify the competency to focus on including

“Am I energised, not exhausted, when I use it?”

“Can I imagine devoting time to improving it?”

“Would I enjoy getting better at this skill?”

So what you’re supposed to do is look for area’s of convergence on the sixteen competencies between the ones you are most competent at currently, the ones you are most passionate about, and the ones that matter most to your organisation and use that as a grid to decide which competency to focus on and then identify a competency companion associated with it and plan how to develop that further.

How easy is alignment?

I think the overall argument it makes is correct in the need to align what is important to the person, the business and what the person has flair for. I’m not hugely convinced it’s quite as simple to do.

It may be working through this process there is a clear result, but equally it has to be possible that it throws up a somewhat mixed picture and there are various paths that could be gone down in result if you decided to follow it and you would have to trial and evaluate to decide which to go for.  Or perhaps there would simply be no three-way convergence.

Having had a very rough and ready think through mine it’s slightly out of convergence. But it’s certainly an interesting article to ponder…