The higher up you go in a corporation's hierarchy, the value of your technical skill declines while the value of your interpersonal skills increase. The further an executive rises, the more he or she must deal with high-caliber people who know how to get what they want, are difficult, strong-willed and have a sharp appetite for power.
Here are three questions that executives should ask themselves to assess their own leadership potential:
To reach higher office and to fulfill its obligations, you must continuously make choices that will affect other people's money and lives.
Too many executives set themselves up to fail because they don't realistically assess the role they are pursuing in comparison to their true capabilities.
2. What are you willing to invest?
Admitting to yourself what your limitations are can be difficult. But if you want to lead, you face tough choices about how much effort you must put in and in which areas you need to grow.
While it has bad connotations for some people, the appetite for power is a necessary condition for reaching posts of high responsibility. There will be pleasures that you must give up. Certainly, there will be implications for your personal life--about finding a sustainable work/life balance for the long term.
3. How will you keep it up?
Over several decades, you need ways to keep yourself going when you are not being recognized and rewarded for your performance--and to deal with criticism, resistance, setbacks and people disliking you or what you are asking them to do.
Periodically, senior executives must create time-outs to review where they are investing their time and energy, to ensure that they remain capable of generating new behaviors to deal with new challenges.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2009
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