“Making Yourself Indispensable,” an October 2011 Harvard Business Review article by John Zenger, Joseph Folkman and Scott Edinger, could mislead you into thinking that job security is possible. View their findings as a method for assuring career indispensability through complementary skills.
Zenger Folkman Inc., the authors’ leadership consulting firm in Orem, Utah, owns a database with relevant information – more than 250,000 360-degree surveys – from thousands of developing leaders. The authors conclude that increasing your output of one skill “yields only incremental improvement” in leadership effectiveness. They recommend building “complementary companions” so that 1 + 1 equals more than the sum of the parts.
The authors continue that you need not be “good at many things but ... uniquely outstanding at a few things. ...”
They write that you create more value for yourself in your company (or career) by focusing on a skill the company (industry or occupation) needs and feeling passionate about it. Environment is essential. With passion and no need, you have a “hobby;” with the reverse, a “chore.”
The research suggests that leadership effectiveness climbs from 34 percent with no outstanding strengths to 64 percent with one and 91 percent with five. In other words, complementary companions increase leadership effectiveness.
A MANAGER-LEADER
What’s missing in the authors’ research? What other factor could promote something closer to indispensability in an organization and, by extension, one’s industry?
Jeremy Bielski, manager of Emerging Markets at ITAGroup Inc., a $250 million employee recognition firm headquartered in West Des Moines, Ia., illustrates how on-target the article is, with one caveat. He had no knowledge of the Utah company or the article discussed here.
Bielski has invested in his employee-owned company, which he says “helps foster great collaboration and an innovative culture.” Company combined with personal investment creates an extremely solid foundation.
In his previous position Bielski was a financial analyst collecting and analyzing financial data for a sales solution. Seeking advancement, he capitalized on a leadership group training drawing people from 15 parts of the company. Some of the courses at Drake University duplicated what he’d learned en route to his MBA.
Ultimately, though, the group “developed, designed and pitched some initiatives we thought would engage us and the company to move and innovate,” he says, “and put Emerging Markets in place in September.”
Bielski utilized his skills in financial analysis while throwing himself into less analytical and technical skills, softer skills such as formulating an idea, building a business plan, planning the marketing and now managing the initiative.
The multi-faceted nature of the business planning process allowed him to expand his financial skills, gain others and apply them in a new area for ITAGroup. He hopes to build something close to a $50 million market – “once the department is running like a well-oiled machine,” he says.
His passion for the emerging markets concept and the work he did to exploit a niche rings true. The scale of the untapped volume appeals to him, as does the opportunity to “steal market share.”
He further states, “It gets me excited every day to know that my effort has the real potential of helping ITAGroup in the long term.” His multi-disciplinary competencies integrating financial models, planning, marketing, sales and internal communication created an entirely new path for his career.
“Emerging Markets uses my business financial traits as a model while really stretching everything I’ve learned in the past and allowing me to adapt to new experiences and challenges,” Bielski comments. “It also speaks to all of ITAGroup’s keys to success: innovation, relationships and remarkable experiences. I continually learn.”
Dr. Mildred Culp welcomes your questions at culp@workwise.net. © 2011 Passage Media.
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