Building Bulletproof Competencies
There are lots of different schools of thought on which competencies are most useful to help you achieve your career ambitions.
I’ve thought about this a lot over my 40 years in businesses…
… working my way up from the bottom of the food chain to the top, and more recently, getting a window into our vast array of clients’ businesses has helped me to distill the things that really matter, and those that really don’t.
What are the 4 focus areas that would help you to build bulletproof competencies to underpin your career?
I’m going to give you a strategic map of the playing field, which you can then use to focus your professional development efforts at any point of your journey.
- The hard skills of business… finance, marketing, strategy, business law, economics, operations…
You can develop these through a plethora of readily available content, and it doesn’t necessarily require formal education – a lot of this content can be found in books and podcasts.
But unless you commit to formalized education, it requires focus and dedication.
Putting aside even an hour a week to further your hard skills will translate into long-term competence… if you’re serious about your career, this is a prerequisite
- Astute judgment.
Judgment comes from experience… So, of course, you’ll naturally acquire better judgment over time.
It’s all about learning from your mistakes… this is why, with some intentional focus, you can develop your judgment much faster than you would if you decided simply to rely upon it happening organically.
When I say intentional focus, I mean not just rolling along casually through your workplace experiences.
This means you have to critically review the decisions you’ve made by conducting your own personal post mortems…
You have to measure the progress of your teams against the original targets you set, not the 5th revision of the target as more and more things went wrong…
You have to put more effort into scenario planning, and “what if” analysis.
If you’re intentional about improving your judgment, you’ll accelerate your development.
- Political acumen.
Even though it pains me to say this, attention to politics is essential, if only as a risk mitigation measure to protect against other equally ambitious but less scrupulous people.
I’ve been bitten—hard—in the past by not paying attention to corporate politics, so I learned this competency the hard way.
- Everything else comes from leadership.
When you become a strong leader, who’s unafraid to set high standards, to stretch your people to produce their best work, and to hold them accountable for their performance, you’ll see how powerful leadership can be.
Somewhere in the last 450 episodes of NBL, there are going to be key leadership tips that will massively improve your leadership performance.
Just pick one area of your leadership repertoire that you think will be most useful in your development, and commit to it for 30 days. You’re looking for the biggest bang for buck!
This will help you to build the strength of character that you need so that you can amplify other people’s brilliance.
Taking personal ownership of your development – growing your business acumen, your judgment, your leadership skill, and (yes) your political savvy, will help you to build the bulletproof competencies you need for a stellar career.