Transcription of Taking responsibility for your own development
1 Taking responsibility for your own development Published by the Institute of Leadership & Management and QMD Ltd 2006 Copied under licence Page 1 What must you learn to take on new roles and new responsibilities? Taking responsibility for your own development What can you do to get a promotion? Being a leader is not easy. When you are appointed to a leadership role you can t just decide I want to be a leader and automatically have the knowledge and skills you need. After all, that s why you are using Building Success 2, to enable you to become an effective team leader. But even when you have completed this programme, you will still need to keep on learning.
2 Learning how to apply what you ve learnt, learn-ing what works with your team and what doesn t, and learning to take on new roles and new responsibilities. As new ways of working, new processes, new technologies and new markets are developed, the people who work in organisations have to learn how to adapt. Although good employers will train their employ-ees, they are increasingly expecting employees to take some responsi-bility for their own development as well. This doesn t just mean going on courses; it includes employees recognising their own strengths and weaknesses, keeping up to date with what is happening in the industry and the organisation, using opportunities at work to learn and develop their own performance, and using colleagues as role models, coaches and mentors.
3 In this session we ll look at all these ways of developing yourself. What developments do you face at work? Taking responsibility for your own development Published by the Institute of Leadership & Management and QMD Ltd 2006 Copied under licence Page 2 The other half of knowing your own strengths and weaknesses is knowing what opportunities exist to develop yourself and your career. It also means being aware of any threats to your career that exist. These could be changes in your organisation or your industry that may lessen your chance for development or promotion, or personal changes that may make it difficult for you to take up any opportuni-ties.
4 Whereas strengths and weaknesses are personal, and are a result of your previous experience and current work, opportunities and threats are in your environment. They come from decisions that other people make, people you may never meet but who can affect your life. You can do something about personal strengths and weaknesses; oppor-tunities and threats are things that you have to recognise and respond to, but can t easily do anything about yourself. Assessing your strengths and weaknesses and the opportunities and threats you face is called a personal SWOT analysis, where SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
5 On the next page there is a table for you to fill in. In the session Assessing your own performance there is an opportunity to assess yourself against the 12 main characteristics of effective lead-ers. This asks you to rate yourself as: 1. I am known to be very good at this; other people model them-selves on me 2. I am quite good at this but there are ways I could improve 3. I am adequate at this, and do need to get better 4. I am poor at this and really need to improve a lot As you can see, this emphasises that you can range from being very good to being quite poor, with various points in between.
6 What s more, it also emphasises that you can always improve if you aren t the best. This is what assessing your strengths and weaknesses means. There will be some things you are better at than others ( your strengths) and some that you will be less good at ( your weaknesses). Having certain strengths doesn t mean you should only do what you are good at, and avoid anything that you are weak at. Taking responsi-bility for your own development is all about trying to overcome weak-nesses and also building on your strengths, so that you improve both areas. Being aware of opportunities and threats Assessing your own strengths and weaknesses Taking responsibility for your own development Published by the Institute of Leadership & Management and QMD Ltd 2006 Copied under licence Page 3 Laura works as a quality control team leader at a food processing company.
7 She has to check the food for contaminants, that the pack-aging is sealed correctly and that the weights and volumes are within the right limits. Laura was trained in catering, so she can handle the job at present, but she would like to progress within the quality as-surance area and needs to know more about this aspect of her job. She also knows that the Food Standards Authority is cracking down on food processing and that she doesn t know enough about the rules governing what she does or the science of the job. She talks to her manager about a course at the local college, to be-come qualified in quality assurance. He agrees this would be useful as the company is thinking about becoming ISO 9000 accredited and needs more properly trained staff.
8 He agrees to discuss with the training manager about Laura getting some time off once a week to go to college, and to pay her fees. Think about your personal strengths and weaknesses in your role and what opportunities and threats you face in developing yourself and performing your role more effectively. Case Study My personal strengths - what I m good at in my role My weaknesses - what I m not so good at Opportunities to develop and progress my career Threats facing me in developing and progressing my career Taking responsibility for your own development Published by the Institute of Leadership & Management and QMD Ltd 2006 Copied under licence Page 4 You may only just have become a team leader and not be thinking about promotion just yet.
9 However, it is important to have some idea how you want to progress in your career. You might want to move fur-ther up the management ladder or develop your technical knowledge and skills - or both. You may have career goals that involve a complete change of direction. You may want to get into a completely new type of job or organisation. It s worth thinking about how long you will be working. Someone com-pleting compulsory schooling at 16 today can expect to have at least 50 years working life in front of them, probably more! Now think back over the last 50 years and see how things have changed.
10 In the late 1950s over million men worked in coal mining, today it s a few thousand. Nobody worked in call centres in the 1950s, today over one million people do. Then a (very) few people worked with computers, today most people do, at least part of the time. When you look at the future of your career you need to think that you may well change the kind of work you do, and the industry in which you work, several times during your lifetime. You can t say what kind of career you will have over the long term, but you can think about the next few years and what you would like to be doing.
