Essential?
What is it that will really drive your career forward? Functional expertise is, of course, important but to an extent it is a 'given'. Increasingly organisations are looking for leaders who can see beyond the functional silos and see the bigger picture. A new set of essential skills have emerged for managers associated with:
- understanding customers and markets
- recognising and managing, proactively, performance drivers, especially intangibles such as relationships, knowledge, skills, culture
- talking confidently about concepts such as brand, shareholder value, core competencies, the balanced scorecard, working capital, customer lifetime value, the value chain
- developing robust business plans and justifying investment using a variety of criteria
- balancing short-term results against long-term value creation
- identifying major strategic opportunities and threats before competitors
- influencing and persuading others
- operating efficiently - making things happen - getting things done
Achieving sustainable competitive advantage requires managers who are not anchored in the present - or even worse the past. Managers need to be able to:
- see - the indicators, clues and signs suggesting major threats and opportunities. HardSkills can help to awaken managers to the factors that are changing the competitive landscape. This is what the gorilla represents on our website and literature [click here for a fuller explanation]
- understand - managers not only need to see, they must interpret what they see and create meaning
- implement - thought must be followed by action - action that delivers long-term value, not short-term results
- communicate
- upwards - so that senior managers are aware of the signals from the grassroots that should shape strategy
- downwards - to translate plans into consistent effective action with their teams
- sideways - because outstanding performance depends on departments and functions working seamlessly together
- lead - the correct path is rarely obvious and leaders need to influence others - and the foundation of influencing is credibility which flows from seeing, understanding, implementing and communicating
