Broadening Your Organizational Perspective

Van Velsor

• Editorial: Center for Creative Leadership Press
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781604916669
• Categoría: Betriebswirtschaft
• Categoría: Leadership

Advancing in an organization is often a top priority for leaders, but a narrow organizational and personal perspective can severely limit your ability to advance. Broadening your organizational perspective-understanding not just your own area of expertise, but how your organization works as a whole-can greatly enhance your ability to move upward. This guidebook will help you understand how to widen your perspective by showing you what obstacles may be holding you back, and what challenges and experiences you can learn from in order to advance.

What Helps You: A Variety of Challenging Experiences

With a solid understanding of and commitment to learning, you can find challenging experiences to broaden your organizational perspective. These experiences can come in the context of new job assignments, activities within your current job, or activities outside of your job, such as volunteer work.

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.

Step 1: Assess where you are and where you want to go. To prioritize which challenges to tackle, first identify which management skills are your strengths and understand how the organization defines a broad organizational perspective. To do this, you should

• reflect on your own assessment of your current strengths and consider what is necessary to reach the next level of what you define as successfully becoming broader in your organizational perspective

• reflect on the feedback that has been provided to you by both superiors and direct reports

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

Worksheet 1: Managerial Abilities Evaluation

Consider the following managerial abilities. If you consider an ability to be one of your strengths, label it S in the second column; if a weakness, label it W. Based on conversations with your boss and others, determine whether each managerial ability is important for developing a broad organizational perspective. Use the third column to label it I for important or U for unimportant.

Managerial Ability	Strength or Weakness?	Important or Unimportant?
1. Acting with flexibility: behaving in ways that are often seen as opposites, such as being both tough and compassionate or...