New Business Ideas 4 U

Posts Tagged ‘business management’

Confidence 1

This is the second of the areas in which you need to excel identified by Debbie Benton in CEO Material. It comprises six elements.

Feeling broadly adequate

Many people have problems with this one. Is broadly adequate enough? Surely it’s the outstanding people who get to the top? I suggest that isn’t really so. Indeed there are some absolutely  outstanding managers and CEOs, but actually not all that many. If a group of middle managers were asked to name the most outstanding manager they know, I suspect that only a few names would be on each of their lists. Is your boss outstanding? Is your boss’s boss outstanding? (You do not have to share these thoughts with them!).

Debra Benton suggests that if you accept that you are broadly adequate, you have reason to feel quite self-confident, and self-confidence is what you need.

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Craftsmanship

In her book,  CEO Material, Debbie Benton identifies 16 areas on which you should work if you want to be regarded as CEO material. The first of these is Craftsmanship, which is a concept not generally used with reference to managers. A craftsmen is more often a skilled manual worker, who gains the ‘craftsman’ title by being especially skilled at his/her job. The author identifies four areas of managerial skill in which you should make yourself extremely competent. Let’s check them out.

Having a good track record

I don’t think too many people would disagree with this one. Success breed success in the climb to the top of the managerial ladder. But this is not so straightforward as it might appear. It is possible to be seen as ‘skilled’ if you avoid any serious stuff-ups as a junior manager. But Ms Benton, in common with many writers on management, suggests that the way to get noticed is to do something, rather than not doing something. In other words, toeing the party line and playing ultra-cautious is actually not the way to get noticed – to be seen as having a good track record. On the contrary, doing things successfully is what gets you noticed.

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The Socialized Mind – an Example

In the last posting I talked of the way children are socialized when  they are young. This also happens in business, with even more pernicious results. Let me share a story with you.

Many years ago, I was consulting to a large Asian conglomerate – name withheld to protect the guilty. One of the responsibility areas of my specific client contact was international recruitment. My client contact spent a lot of time – and company money – traveling the world talking to young nationals who were on the verge of graduating. His purpose was to entice these national graduates – from the best business schools in Europe and America – to return to their homeland and work for this company.

That is fair and fine.

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In the previous postings, we explored the authors’ concept of levels of mental complexity. This was a new concept to me, and it probably is to you too, so we should explore it a bit further, because it is important to understand it since the rest of the book is based on it.

The following table explains the concept in a bit more detail:

The Three Adult Plateaus Described

So what does all that mean?

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