How Will You Differentiate Yourself?
If you want to be successful in any organization, you have to have a ticket to the dance.
By that, I mean that there are certain prerequisites you have to meet… these might be in the form of qualifications, or capabilities, or experience.
Once you have your ticket to the dance, you have to work out how to differentiate yourself from everyone else.
What you’ll notice as you go up through the ranks is that your peers are really smart too… increasingly so, the higher up you get.
At the top of virtually every organization, being really smart is the norm – it’s no longer the differentiator that it might have been at lower levels.
Of course, even smart people rise up for a variety of reasons:
- Some have an emphasis on showcasing their intellect
- Some focus more on accumulating expert knowledge
- Some rely almost entirely on political astuteness and managing up
So this begs the question: “what’s going to differentiate you from all the other smart people?”
What if I told you that there’s another ballroom that few people gain access to? I call it the “VIP ballroom”
Think of it like an exclusive backstage pass: to get access, you need to have your ticket to the dance, just like everyone else…
But, over and above that, you need to have something else that sets you apart.
I learned over the course of my executive career that the percentage of leaders who are actually prepared to do the hard yards of leadership is surprisingly small.
To get access to the VIP ballroom, you need to grow your leadership capability with the same commitment that you approached your technical career.
You’ll realize that you can’t just rely on your “smarts”… and you’ll work on becoming a professional leader.
- So, you’ll study, read, and educate yourself in leadership
- You’ll learn from the leaders around you (both good and bad)
- You’ll overcome your natural conflict aversion
- You’ll put time and energy into building capability and growing talent
- You’ll set high standards for behavior and performance; and
- You’ll hold people accountable for meeting those standards
You’ll also develop behaviors that set you apart from other smart people:
- The internal fortitude and discipline to do difficult things when they need to be done, without hesitation or rationalisation
- The willingness to put respect before popularity
- The selflessness to subordinate what’s best for you personally for the good of the company
- The sophistication to turn your natural resilience into Grace Under Pressure, and
- The deep empathy and compassion that will galvanize your team
You can’t overlook the capabilities that secure your ticket to the dance…
… but if you want to differentiate yourself from your equally smart and ambitious peers, you need to earn that ticket to the VIP ballroom.
And the only way to get that ticket is by developing extraordinary leadership capability. This is the path to delivering the sorts of results that they can’t ignore.