How to develop yourself and your organisation
by Harvard Business Review,
2016-01-28 16:55:46.0
MOST of us know that success in today’s work world requires continuous growth and learning. But how do you identify the areas in which development efforts will yield the best return on your investment?
1. Drive the economic engine. How can you grow in a way that will help the organisation succeed? If you are in operations, you might identify several business-critical areas for improvement. By learning to better manage large custom client projects, you could significantly reduce cycle and delivery times. By becoming more knowledgeable about sourcing materials, you could reduce expenses.
2. Find what you are best at. Once you have surfaced the useful capabilities that you might develop, think about whether you could become really excellent at them. One way to do that is to consider whether you’re good at doing similar things. For instance, if you are already quite organised and sequential when you approach your tasks, that bodes well for being able to learn complex project management.
3. Find what you are passionate about. As soon as you have gotten a sense of where your potential strengths match up with useful areas for development, assess how interested you are in those areas. Let us say, for example, that of the two skills you believe you could get quite good at — project management and providing clearer direction — you are much more interested in and excited about the former. As an operations person, the idea of taking a formal course on process architecture really appeals to you; working on your "soft skills" does not. So go ahead and sign up for the process seminar.
Given all the ways in which organisations and jobs are changing, figuring out which new skills to develop and when to develop them can be hard. The key is to focus on skills that will propel your organisation forward, that play to your strengths and that you feel passionate about learning.
Adapted from How to Know What Skill to Work on Next at HBR.org.
© 2015 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp
Picture: iSTOCK
MOST of us know that success in today’s work world requires continuous growth and learning. But how do you identify the areas in which development efforts will yield the best return on your investment?
1. Drive the economic engine. How can you grow in a way that will help the organisation succeed? If you are in operations, you might identify several business-critical areas for improvement. By learning to better manage large custom client projects, you could significantly reduce cycle and delivery times. By becoming more knowledgeable about sourcing materials, you could reduce expenses.
2. Find what you are best at. Once you have surfaced the useful capabilities that you might develop, think about whether you could become really excellent at them. One way to do that is to consider whether you’re good at doing similar things. For instance, if you are already quite organised and sequential when you approach your tasks, that bodes well for being able to learn complex project management.
3. Find what you are passionate about. As soon as you have gotten a sense of where your potential strengths match up with useful areas for development, assess how interested you are in those areas. Let us say, for example, that of the two skills you believe you could get quite good at — project management and providing clearer direction — you are much more interested in and excited about the former. As an operations person, the idea of taking a formal course on process architecture really appeals to you; working on your "soft skills" does not. So go ahead and sign up for the process seminar.
Given all the ways in which organisations and jobs are changing, figuring out which new skills to develop and when to develop them can be hard. The key is to focus on skills that will propel your organisation forward, that play to your strengths and that you feel passionate about learning.
Adapted from How to Know What Skill to Work on Next at HBR.org.
© 2015 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp
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