The Dynamic Path: Access the Secrets of Champions to Achieve Greatness through Mental Toughness, Inspired Leadership, and Personal Transformation by James M. Citrin

Author:James M. Citrin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rodale Press
Published: 2007-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

THE CHALLENGES AND RISKS OF LEAVING YOUR PERCH

For people in business, the challenges and perils of leaving your championship perch are also epic. The individual performer in business has no more difficult a transition in front of him. After working over a period of years to become a highly valued (and potentially highly compensated) individual contributor, it is exceedingly difficult to change and break through to become a leader.

This is perhaps the most important and perilous dynamic moment, when you have to progress from an individual competitor to a leader. What difficulties make this moment so perilous? First, it requires fundamental changes in your mindset as well as your actions. Secondly, there are powerful pressures against this change. And thirdly, there are very real risks associated with it. Confronting the need to make such a change is inevitable. I’ve heard it said many times that “[fill in the blank] is a young person’s business.” Wall Street, advertising, consulting, retail, high tech, and others—each has been described as a young person’s business. You can embrace the need to change, ignore it, or run the other way. But there will come a time when you will no longer be able to stay in the same game and rely on the talents and hard work that got you to where you are.

Whether you are a rainmaking sales executive, a money-minting trader, an award-winning designer, a name-brand architect, a page-one journalist, or a highly sought-after lawyer, it takes years of dedication and hard work to transform your natural talents—your potential value—into the experience, reputation, and expertise—your experiential value—to get to the top of your field. The transition to leader of others is so difficult because the skills that got you to be a champion in the first place are likely to be highly specialized and not necessarily transferable. Making judgments about people, setting performance targets, holding people accountable, developing and managing budgets, running good meetings, establishing efficient management processes—this is the stuff that leading others effectively is all about. Those are not the skills needed by the star individual. In light of that, it is not at all surprising that top individual contributors often don’t make the best managers, and this fact is widely known in management circles.

But if the difficulties are so well known, why do the top individual practitioners so often get the nod? For one thing, there is frequently an assumption that if you are successful at one thing, you will be successful at the next. Others may believe in you and your potential to develop the necessary skills. Credibility is also always a central consideration. It is difficult for other star individuals to accept someone into a leadership position who has not been a successful individual performer himself. Finally, decision makers may calculate that the risk of you not developing the requisite skills is smaller than the risk of bringing in someone with management experience but who lacks the personal-performance track record.

The pressure against making the change from individual to leader is based on the fact that it often goes against the grain of your ego.

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