The Path to Opportunity
Keys to Getting Ahead in a Well-Run Company
Introduction
As an executive coach and organizational development consultant, I often encounter the issue of how to help clients move ahead in their careers or help clients develop their subordinates.
Recently I read two books that touch on the issue of great performance: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. These books inspired me to develop a model to help my clients understand the key factors that lead to getting ahead in a company and to help them diagnose what is helping or hindering their careers or the careers of subordinates.
Three caveats about this model:
Ø The model assumes you are working in a relatively well-run company where politics and nepotism are much less important than performance.
Ø Success comes in many forms. Here, I am only speaking of getting ahead, not necessarily to the top, but ahead in a company. For the purposes of this model, it means taking on new and more responsibility, having more impact in your organization, and receiving increased compensation and benefits in return. It means doing this ethically.
Ø While the model focuses largely on the individual, key points about the role of the boss and company are unavoidable.
Let me say a few words about reading the model on the next page. Where does one start? Follow the numbers. There are three main parts to the model. Boxes 1-9 (aqua background) constitute gaining access to one’s initial significant opportunities; opportunities one can build a career upon. Boxes 10-14 (grey background) have to do with one’s ability to perform on the opportunities presented. Finally, boxes 15 and 16 (darker blue background) constitute the success loop, where performing well on one opportunity leads to other meaningful opportunities which enables one to develop a portfolio of capabilities and accomplishments.
The Importance of Opportunities
The underlying assumption of this model is that one progresses in a large organization by succeeding when given opportunities. That one learns and grows the most by taking on significant challenges. Therefore, access to opportunity is critical to being successful. No matter how competent and motivated one is, without the right opportunities, one’s career will not progress significantly. This is not controversial; this is the main message in much research and many books, including The Lessons of Experience by McCall, Lombardo and Morrison.
Gladwell’s Outliers does a wonderful job of demonstrating the importance of opportunity to greatness and shows that opportunity often comes in unexpected ways. Do you know why 14 of the 75 richest men/women in the history of the world were born within a nine-year period in the 1830s and 1840s in the U.S.A.? Or why professional hockey players disproportionately are born in the first four months of the year? Or why so many of the giants of hi-tech were born between 1953 and 1956? The intersection of opportunity and luck is often a key factor - more about these examples later.
The Path to Opportunity
If a person needs opportunity to succeed, then factors that impact the “Path to Opportunity” are critical to one’s career success. The “Path to Opportunity” covers boxes 1-9 in the model.
Ø In any large organization there are decision makers who decide who gets what opportunities. Therefore, it is critical to build trust with these decision makers and people that influence the decision makers. The boss is always either a decision maker or decision influencer, but there are many others.
Ø The three white boxes (1-3) are the key components of building trust. My friend and colleague Robert Shaw wrote an excellent book on trust entitled Trust in the Balance. His research found that results, integrity and concern are the keys to building trust.
Ø Boxes 5 & 6 – “Quality and Size of Your Network” and “Visibility of Contribution to Decision Makers” are two factors that play a significant role in gaining access to opportunity. The importance of boxes 5 & 6 are closely related to the quality of a boss’s ability to influence the organization in one’s behalf, and the quality of a company’s career development system to unearth diamonds in the rough. If the boss is unhelpful and/or the career development system has significant weaknesses, then improving your network and enhancing your visibility take on increased importance.
Ø Luck is important too. The answers to the three questions I posed from Outliers above all have to do with the intersection of Luck and Opportunity. Space permits taking only one example from the book. In the case of the 14 richest men/women born in the U.S. in the nine-year period in the 1830s and 1840s, their success had to do with the tremendous opportunities presented after the Civil War and the opening of the West in the U.S. A person with ambition and competence had a much better opportunity to strike it rich in that period of history. Some of my most successful clients will attribute at least a bit of their success to luck, according to Gladwell, Bill Gates attributes some of his success to luck.
Ø Taking initiative and seeing the opportunities presented by certain situations is commonly regarded as very important for success. I agree and have seen significant examples of this over the years. The more entrepreneurial the environment, the more important this factor is for success. However, remember it is very hard inside a large organization to take meaningful initiative if you have not established trust with decision makers and lack visibility.
Succeeding on the Opportunities Presented
Once a person gets an opportunity, what contributes most to success that is under the control of the individual? From my perspective, there are four key factors (boxes 10-13). These four factors represent areas that the individual should be constantly developing so he/she can take advantage of the opportunities that arise. Some necessary comments are included regarding the organization’s role in creating an environment for development and success.
Ø “Emotional Intelligence refers to the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships (Daniel Goleman in Working with Emotional Intelligence, p 317).” The contribution of Emotional Intelligence to individual success is well-documented. It is the responsibility of the individual to constantly develop his/her emotional intelligence and to develop an understanding of how to compensate for weaknesses in important areas. For example, a person needs to understand how to build a team to complement his/her strengths and not duplicate them. The role of the organization is to provide developmental mechanisms that motivated individuals can capitalize on as well as to recognize the importance of emotional intelligence factors when matching individuals to opportunities.
Ø There is much to be said about the right fit; only the highlights are touched on here.
§ Gladwell and Colvin found domain expertise to be extremely important to success. Research has shown that it takes about 10,000 hours of experience and deliberate practice before one can become outstanding in one’s field. The intersection of luck, opportunity, and domain expertise helps explain why so many of the gurus of high tech were born between 1953 and 1956. When scientific breakthroughs in hardware ushered in the dawn of the PC, these future gurus took advantage of luck and unusual opportunity to develop strong domain expertise in software skills while in their teens. They seized the day. Colvin cites a study commissioned by Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE, which showed that GE was most successful in its businesses where leaders had deep domain expertise.
§ I think most would agree that matching a person’s motivation and interests as well as his/her real competencies to an opportunity is critical to success. Here, the challenge for the individual is self-knowledge. Many times, lack of self-knowledge has led to taking wrong opportunities and can be a major reason for derailment of one’s career. The challenge for the organization is to have enough good information to make the match consistently. This is the province of talent management systems and leadership development. I recommend, “Job Sculpting: The Art of Retaining Your Best People,” by Butler, Timothy & Waldrop, James, Harvard Business Review in the September-October, 1999 (reprint 99502), which outlines key concepts regarding what motivates you and the connection to job success.
§ Timing (Box 11) means that an opportunity that might be a good fit for an individual might occur at a time in his/her life when it would be very difficult to succeed. Having the emotional intelligence to recognize this can avoid major career missteps.
§ Smart Enough (Box 12), what does that mean? Gladwell, in particular, spends a lot of time reviewing the research on IQ and its relationship to great performance. In the complex, challenging work we are most concerned about in business, it appears that an IQ of 130 is smart enough. Beyond that, the correlation between IQ and success is not a factor. Emotional intelligence, competencies, motivation, and domain expertise are much more important. Do you or your organization put too much emphasis on smarts?
§ Learning Agility and appropriate coaching and mentoring are the other significant ways top performers develop. Learning Agility is the ability of an individual to understand the challenges faced and find effective ways to learn to cope with those challenges in a timely manner. Gladwell and Colvin both argue that it is hard to find top performers in any field who did not have excellent coaching and mentoring. Further to their findings, my experience with top people is they often reach out to a variety of sources both inside and outside their organization to learn what they need. In addition, I suggest that in business the nature of the coach/mentor and expertise of the coach/mentor must change with the circumstances and needs of the individual. Top executives and leaders faced with significant organizational challenges need master coaches with specific domain expertise in areas were the client is challenged. This is one of the reasons I strongly argue that leaders who take on significant challenges, like starting up a new unit, turning around a failing unit or integrating units after a merger have access to coaches and mentors that can help them navigate the challenges they face. It is important to the company because a better batting average on these significant organizational challenges distinguishes great companies from average companies. Sink or swim developmental thinking is not good for the company.
§ Feedback is critical to one’s self-development. Most large companies have systems that provide regular feedback, think performance appraisals and 360 systems. However, I would like to suggest that one’s emotional intelligence and the quality of the coaches and mentors one has is most critical to utilizing feedback for development. This is true for two main reasons: 1) it is more likely that the feedback will be understood and lessons learned, and 2) feedback is gathered in a more timely manner when one’s emotional intelligence is acute and one has skilled coaches/mentors to help.
The Success Loop
The success loop starts with managing boxes 1-9. If someone is early in their career then he/she has to find small opportunities within the confines of their job or at the boundaries of their job. It is important to find these opportunities to demonstrate outstanding performance. At some point performance earns the right to take on significant organizational opportunities. These opportunities come in many sizes and shapes. The ability to recognize something as an opportunity is an important competency for both individuals and organizations to develop.
There are many levels of these opportunities in a large organization. A well-run organization is structured to recognize these opportunities at many levels and has effective processes to match individuals to these challenges and learning opportunities. This is one of the reasons action learning programs have become popular. Effective action learning programs provide high potential employees specific organizational challenges to address and accompany these challenges with both process and behavioral coaching. If a large organization executes this process of recognizing opportunity and matching talent effectively to opportunity hundreds and thousands of times a year, it will increase the likelihood of being a great organization.
A person earns the right to take on another opportunity when he/she succeeds in a prior opportunity. But what if one fails on a significant opportunity, is one’s career derailed? How should one handle this emotionally? If you think that only talent (emotional intelligence, competencies and smarts) counts, failure is more likely to deliver a knockout blow to your self-esteem. However, if the issues of “right fit,” “luck,” “timing,” and the quality of “coaching/mentoring” provided with the opportunity are considered, you might draw very different conclusions. Individuals need to know that many successful, famous people failed a number of times on their way to success. Individuals frequently learn as much or more from failure as success.
From an organizational perspective, understanding why someone failed in a significant opportunity should be an important part of a talent management system. When a lot of time has been spent on developing talent, sidelining the talent should be done with care and only after a full assessment of the factors impacting failure.