In some cases you have flexibility in choosing job assignments. If so, you can develop a broad organizational perspective by choosing assignments that offer the greatest opportunity to learn. Without such flexibility, you may have to find creative ways to develop a broad organizational perspective. This may include finding short-term job-related assignments, making sure you get as much feedback as possible on the work you are doing now, finding role models and coaches who can share what they’ve learned, training and reading, and taking on assignments outside of work, such as community service or other kinds of volunteer activities.

Whatever the situation, the key component to learning from an experience is that the experience is challenging. What is a challenging experience? CCL has identified five challenging, developmental situations that can help you in gaining a broad organizational perspective: experiencing a job transition, creating change, managing at high levels of responsibility, managing boundaries, and dealing with diversity.

How can you use these components so that they contribute to broadening your organizational perspective? Keeping in mind that an experience in any of these categories must be challenging to be valuable, let’s walk through the steps to create a plan for developing a broader organizational perspective.

Use Worksheet 1: Managerial Abilities Evaluation to explore your organization’s and your concepts of what a broad organizational perspective means.