The Most Important Thing You Didn’t Learn in Business School that Will Determine Your Success

Now that you have the technical and analytical skills afforded by your MBA, you might think that the keys to success are at your disposal. One of the things I have learned in my many years as a career coach is that some of the most important professional development work happens after the degrees are handed out.

I am going to tell you something that your professors never told you. The secret to success is not related to your grade point average or coveted internships. The secret to success is being self-aware because knowing your strengths and weaknesses will help you determine if a job is right for you, give you insights to navigate internal politics, and will give you a competitive advantage that is crucial in today’s business world.

Self Assessment should happen early on.

If you have done the work of understanding yourself better, you can come to job interviews prepared to explain how your competencies and experience match the needs of the organization and the position for which you are interviewing. You will have additional information to speak on how you can help the company, division or department solve its problems and how you can contribute to its success.

One of the first things new drivers learn to do is to check their blind spots. Undertaking self-assessment before stepping into the depths of your career can help you avoid dangerous blind spots and derailments. Learning to lead is like driving, it’s crucial to always check your blind spot and assess current road conditions before proceeding.

Here are a few ways to determine your strengths and assess areas of growth:

1. Take a Personality Assessment like The Myers Brigg Type Indicator – This test is administered in workplaces around the world and is one of the most popular ways to gain insight about yourself. It assesses your personality type and behavior patterns based on the way you use perception and judgement. It identifies your strengths and weakness based on 16 personality traits. Take the test here.
2. Find Out Your Key Strengths by Using Strengths Finder 2.0
This assessment helps you find your natural talents and the best way to understand your work environments. It also provides you strategies to help your natural talents to flourish. This book focuses on helping you develop your strengths and on the premise that a career where you utilize your core strengths is the best way to thrive. Learn more about it here.
3. Understand Emotional Intelligence
What makes you tick? What are your emotional triggers? Decades of research demonstrates that emotional intelligence is the critical factor to build good professional relationships that will be instrumental in your success. Some have suggested that emotional Intelligence might be more important than your IQ. Emotional Intelligence involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this info to guide one’s thinking and actions. You can only understand this if you understand yourself and your emotional triggers. Learn more about it here.
4. Invest in a Career Coach
Coaching might sound out of your reach but it is absolutely instrumental to your professional development. While your MBA gave you a valuable set of tools, a professional coach has expertise on how to navigate organizational structures and make sure that your work is being noticed and valued by your employer. A coach will help heighten your self-awareness and people skills; particularly, in the areas of empathy, self- regulation and ability to navigate change. While trusted mentors are great advisors they may be too invested in your growth and not adequately skilled in assessing areas where you need to improve. Colleagues might seem ideal because they are navigating the same waters you are but lets be honest they are more interested in their own growth or lack the experience to give you appropriate feedback. A coach is invested in you but also keeps his/her eye on the big picture, sees how you fit in, designs a strategy that captures your strengths and can scope out problem areas.

Utilizing tools like, Strengths Finder 2.0, MBTI and learning about emotional intelligence are great ways to get started on the path to understanding yourself and leveraging your strengths. This is a sure way to make sure that you are on the right path, as it would be a shame if you thought you were a quarterback when you are actually a wide receiver. Identifying your personal strengths and areas for development is also great way to know what you need from a professional coach. The right coach can help you understand how your technical and people skills can be maximized.

But remember even a coach cannot help you if you are not willing to take a hard look at yourself and assess your strengths and areas for growth. Staying curious will help you keep a growth mindset and help you continue to expand your skillset. Only by experimenting with fresh approaches and being open to redesigning some aspects of your life will you find career success and personal contentment.

Monica Blake, PCC., is a Professional Certified Coach with expertise in Executive, Career and Life Coaching. Monica earned her coaching credential from the International Coaching Federation (ICF). She is also a Business and Human Resources Consultant and a Motivational Speaker. For the last 15 years she has helped hundreds of individuals reach their personal and professional goals through her In Action coaching practice which is founded on three decades of human resources executive and senior leader experience at internationally recognized companies including Mars Inc., ExxonMobil and General Motors. Monica can be reached via email at monica@inactioncoach.com

Increase Productivity without Paying a Toll

The sign of our times has two words: Burn out.

We may be working at our desk job for the same number of hours, but many of those hours are spent continuously multi-tasking in a vain attempt to be productive.

In today’s work environment, our work boundaries have disappeared. We no longer stop to smell the roses. Thanks to our high-tech, gadget-prone society, we don’t leave work at the workplace. Now we are connected to our work at home, at play, and while driving.

If you phone clients while driving, reply to emails on your laptop while at meetings, and take lunch breaks in your office, your productivity may be suffering big time.

The shocker, if you’re a multi-tasker, is that you are taking more time (an average of 25% more) to complete a task. This is because your concentration isn’t fully on the main task.

Greater productivity will come by doing two simple actions: set specific time allocations for concentration, and make your work breaks work-free.

As an individual, do these:

1. First things first. In the morning, do the highest priority item first. Try doing this in a private area that’s free from distractions and interruptions. Set aside a defined time frame lasting 60 to 90 minutes.

2. Set a regular time for deeper thinking. Long-term goal setting, strategic planning, or creative musing all come under this heading. Try doing this in a stress-free location.

3. Treat your vacations as “no-work zones.” Fully disconnect from work. Your productivity (and your health) will be the better for it.

For the manager, do these:

1. Set meeting limitations. Meet for 45 minutes, max. Your people can stay focused better than if you met for an hour or more. Plus, at the conclusion of the meeting, they can evaluate the results, and decompress before the next meeting or task. Start each meeting at a specified time, be a stickler about ending in 45 minutes, and, like the movie theaters, don’t tolerate any powered-on mobile devices during the show.

2. Treat your people like humans. They are not email inboxes that reply instantly. Grant them the time to focus on their priorities and not interrupt their productivity.

3. Broaden break-times. Get your workers to take genuine total breaks from work. Consider having onsite exercise programs, massage therapy, or even napping sessions.

Bottom line: Greater productivity will come with focused concentration during specific time allotments, and from breaks that are truly time away from work.

Be A Strategic Visionary

Many managers think only about the day-to-day issues, and face unexpected problems in a reactionary rather than proactive mode. To keep a project or an organization on task, you need to view things globally (the big picture), like a general (CEO, senior leaders) surveying the battlefield, observing the major movements and logistics, and developing a battle plan. And leaving the fighting in the trenches (the details) to the majors, captains, sergeants (the managers).

By being a strategic visionary, you can have a panoramic view of the way things are and a sense of how changes can affect your situation, as well as question the prevailing presumptions and identify patterns.

Use It or Lose It
Thinking strategically is like most skills: It improves with use; it declines with disuse. Try the following to develop this skill.

1. Think strategic questions. Get the big picture, then ask the broad, long-range questions. Use your curiosity and imagination asking questions like “What would our project look like in the next quarter?“ “What can our company change to increase productivity?” It requires playing the “What ifs” — What if cancer is cured? What if some aspect of our business becomes government regulated or outlawed? Nobody knows the answers, but good strategists know the questions.

2. Follow the Visionaries. See how strategic visionaries do their magic. What’s their methodologies in creating the big picture? What questions are raised? How are issues dealt with? What are the dynamics along group participants? How do they speak? Do you know the latest strategic buzzwords? Read these words that are in strategic gurus’ books, in Harvard Business Review, and Strategy and Leadership (a publication of the Strategic Leadership Forum). Every discipline has its lexicon. Sometimes you learn more from watching and listening.

3. Study the past. Find a company event that could have used strategic thinking and imagine 10 alternative possibilities that could have been used. Go over as much information as you can find to flesh out the 10.

4. Study the latest. Stay current with the latest research and findings. Go to conferences, read trade papers/magazines (e.g., Wall Street Journal, Fortune, HBR, The Economist), join workgroups. Track a single issue or trend to see as many sides of it as you can.

5. Test the future. Apply your strategic mind-set to future scenarios for your company. Ask: How is this similar to something you are doing? How could you use some of your insights?

Steering the Future
There are more people in organizations that are good at producing results in the short-term than there are visionary strategists. Said another way, these are the individuals that can take a hill rather than predict accurately which hill it would be best to take.

Team members and others in your work environment may not think strategically, so be a strategic visionary. Get those around you to follow your lead, and you can enhance their ability to think strategically. Your company’s future successes can be greatly influenced by you and like-minded employees.

Direct Reports: Your Staff
– Involve direct reports in situations requiring strategic thinking.
– Role model strategic-thinking behaviors.
– Show your value of strategic thinking by rewarding it.

Managing Across: Your Peers
– Share relevant research findings and articles. Read widely: e.g., Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, Business Week. Join Strategic Leadership Forum and read their publication, Strategy and Leadership.
– Ask questions to challenge conventional thinking.

Managing Up: Your Boss and Senior Leaders
– Model the strategic thinking behaviors you have observed.
– Sell them on a decision you have made which involved making projections of several variables at once to see how they came together. Projections should be in the context of shifting markets, international affairs, monetary movements, government intervention.
– Ask “What If” questions to enhance the quality of decision making.