How to Show You are a Good Investment
By Jeffrey Yipp
Nothing teaches leadership like experience, but often those powerful lessons don’t have a place on a resume or performance review. In fact, they can easily be overlooked.
In a new book, Return on Experience: Learning Leadership at Work, Jeffrey Yip pulls together key themes of CCL’s leadership development expertise to introduce a new framework for learning from and leveraging work experience.
By acquiring what Yip calls “a Return-On-Experience mindset,” you are able to understand and clarify accomplishments that may not be measured easily, but are essential for leadership success. The ROE approach allows you to evaluate and communicate important lessons from previous experiences. Just as important, it can drive your on-the-job learning from today forward.
Think of your experience as having value in three ways: mastery, versatility and impact.
Mastery is about sharpening existing skills, building greater depth of skill or knowledge. To increase leadership mastery, the first step is to identify what needs to be learned or improved. You’ll want to look at this from two perspectives: the needs of the organization and your own needs. Then ask yourself, through your work, what skills are you building? How can you sharpen your existing skills and ability to lead? To heighten your skills, seek experiences that offer challenges that will stretch your capabilities and deepen your expertise, such as job rotations or strategic assignments.
Whereas mastery represents a move toward more expertise, versatility represents a move toward breadth of capacity. It is about the expansion of your capacity through learning. If your experience is too narrow, you can begin to expand your repertoire of skills and abilities by working across different organizational boundaries:
- Go vertical. What assignments require you to work across organizational boundaries of level and hierarchy? Examples include supervisory responsibility, mentoring roles, managerial responsibilities with hierarchical-reporting relationships and special assignments with senior executives.
- Reach across. Horizontal assignments require managers to work across organizational boundaries of function and expertise. Examples include job rotations, working on a cross-functional team and action-learning projects involving different subject matter experts.
- Engage with outsiders. Stakeholder assignments require managers to work across the boundaries of the firm, to interface with stakeholders. Examples include managing joint ventures, working with vendors and being responsible for public affairs or corporate citizenship functions.
- Cross geographic boundaries. Assignments that require managers to work across geographically-defined boundaries of regions and nations also enhance versatility. Examples include international assignments, regional or global management responsibilities and management of geographically-dispersed teams.
- Discover new demographics. Some assignments require managers to lead or work with members from different demographic groups: age, ethnicity, gender, nationality. Where geographic crossings involve cultural boundaries by location, demographic crossings often occur in the same location, with members of different cultures. Examples include working in or managing a culturally diverse team, being responsible for organizational diversity initiatives and mentoring employees of a different culture.
Finally, the true measure of learning is impact — your ability to apply it. To have value, learning must be transferable to different situations and to other people. Consider how your lessons learned have (or can be) applied in other ways. Pursue strategies for transmitting your knowledge to others in the organization. Look beyond your current scope and seek out relationships or processes to help you capture and disseminate lessons learned.
Printed with permission of Leading Effectively, Center for Creative Leadership.
