5 Top Career Skills You Can Work on Right Now

[Owen Geronimo]

Source: Wells Fargo Bank

If someone gave you the assignment to develop and market a certain type of exciting, important product, you'd probably approach it with gusto. But when it comes to advancing their own careers, too many managers take a more subdued approach. It's a mistake, though, because it's too easy to fall behind and get lost.

The Department of Labor says that by the year 2000, 50% of the jobs in this country will be ones that didn't exist in 1990. More to the point, the 1990 recession was the first in which white collar positions were permanently eliminated. "It's grow or die," says William J. Rothwell, the author of "The Complete American Management Association Guide to Management Development," and whose State College, PA-based company, Rothwell & Associates, provides a full range of HR development consulting to major organizations from coast to coast. His key piece of advice: "Apply to your own career the same approach you normally apply to project planning and development in your organization. Do not wait for other people to provide direction or opportunity. Instead, do your own thinking about your career, and take action to make your plans a reality." Other experts concur.

Because of companies downsizing, the bad economy and lay-offs, elaborate succession-planning and management-development programs have largely disappeared. They're replaced by an emphasis on keeping top managers more narrowly focused. "If you're to break out and advance your career," says Shena Crane, author of "What do I do now?: Making sense of today's changing workplace" (Vista Press), and president of Mentor Career Services, Irvine, CA, a consultancy for people making both voluntary and involuntary career transitions. "You must take responsibility for your own development, even to the point of re-packaging yourself as a viable, marketable commodity in today's highly competitive business environment." Assuming you've already mastered the fundamentals of business management, here are the five most important skills and abilities you can beef up to quickly and easily improve your career prospects:

1. Learn A Foreign Language

Overseas assignments are hot topics right now, so take the time to develop your own language skills-before you're asked. Knowing any foreign language is better than knowing none, but the most important languages to consider are German, Spanish, French (used in many nations), and Japanese.

According to Rothwell, expatriate assignments used to be three months long. Today, there's a new breed of highly desirable "transnational managers" who depart their home nations for long periods of time--perhaps even the bulk of their careers. These managers tend to specialize by area of the world--such as Asia, the Middle East, or Southern Africa--and take assignments anywhere within their region. Language skills are important for at least three types of international assignments:

The crisis abroad. You're told to take the first plane and fight a distant fire. There's little time for training or preparation.

The short-term assignment. You may get some notice on these, enough to wrap up your affairs at home and move abroad, perhaps enough to take some training in the foreign culture. But it's still difficult to gain language skills in a short time.

The long-term assignment. You're expected to move abroad and open a new division or market. These usually entail many personal pressures, and having to learn the foreign language just adds to the burden.

2. Develop A Longer-Term Perspective On Problems And Solutions

Some people call it "managing ahead of the headlights." Change is happening so fast that you can't do well simply by reacting to problems and cleaning up messes that have already occurred. Instead, the most successful managers are learning how to look ahead to the consequences of their actions and to prevent problems before they occur. "For example," says Rothwell, "in shifting from hierarchical to team-based management, a canny manager will predict problems in HR, customer relations, work methods and equipment, information systems, and so forth. Then he'll try to work solutions to those problem right into the original changeover." Just asking questions about potential problems helps you defeat the human tendency to be reactive and deal only with short-term concerns.

3. Adopt A "Leadership" Approach

"Today's managers are giving up the dictatorial style in favor of facilitation," says Crane. Instead of giving orders and expecting results, they're serving more as leaders, coaches, and facilitators helping their subordinates do more problem solving and make more choices. "You don't have to be a baby-sitter," says Crane, "but you should learn to take their pulse a lot more often than before."

4. Build A Broader Perspective On Your Present Organization

A lot of successful managers came up through marketing or finance, so they're weak in manufacturing, service delivery, HR, strategic planning, or dealing with Boards of Directors. With less attention paid to succession planning, these managers can suffer along with skill deficits for years. Don't tolerate this. Pursue work assignments in different areas of responsibility and activity. "Get yourself onto committees, project teams, and new product launches," suggests Rothwell. "This not only enhances your visibility, it builds your awareness of how the whole business operates."

5. Strengthen Your Self-discipline

"It's more important than creativity and education," asserts Richard Andersen, who conducts seminars nationally on building self-directed work teams and who is the author of: Getting Ahead: Career Skills That Work For Everyone" (McGraw-Hill). "You can get farther on self-discipline than any other management skill," he advises managers wanting more success, "and you're not going to get any farther on your other skills without it." Andersen says you can bolster your self-discipline several ways:

Practice accomplishing more tasks in a given amount of time. Your quantity and quality level of results are very direct measures of your self-discipline.
Develop more control over your day. Plan your schedule the night before or first thing in the morning, and follow your plan. Concentrate on making things go the way you want more often, reducing that chaotic feeling, and positioning yourself to handle obstacles and ambiguous situations.

Aim more directly toward your goals, and your interim objectives leading up to these goals. Andersen says setting up your own performance and deadline targets along the route to your goals, and working to hit them, helps you develop self-discipline and makes you a better manager.

[ramchandra patidar]

[ramchandra patidar]