by Mira Brancu, PhD
This is Part 5 of a 7-part series on leading with knowledge-based power. You can find the links to rest of the series at the bottom of this post.
I want you to take a moment and write down the answers to these two questions:
How did your traditional educational training (e.g., degree) help you succeed at work?
What didn’t you learn in school about how to succeed at work?
When I started my first real professional job, I truly believed that I had learned everything I needed to know to be successful.
I know. It sounds kind of ridiculous looking back on it now – how arrogant and pretentious, right?
I just didn’t know that having the basic foundational knowledge to start a job does not guarantee you will be successful over the long-term as you grow into (or out of) your job.
While a traditional education will teach you how to speak the basic language of your field, and how to do your work in a technically correct way, it will not teach you how to navigate the culture (the “soft skills”).
Successfully navigating the culture requires essential and ongoing learning moments. These include mentorship (see Part 3) and career-defining experiences (see Part 4).
A third one, performing an environmental scan of stakeholder needs and experiences, might be my favorite kind of under-utilized secret superpower for career success and advancement.
It requires you to poke your head up outside of your field, look around, and identify what you might be missing that could help you be even better over time.
For those of you who like researching things, it’s like knowing the right data to gather to improve your assessment and inform your intervention.
Here’s what happened when I DIDN’T use this skill…
In that first career when I became a newly minted counselor, I focused on working directly with my clients: children. That’s the technical skill I learned in school. But I worked in a school system: a system, like many others, in which clients are connected to other important parts of the system (in this case, parents, teachers, administrators, my supervisors, etc.).
Those other important parts are stakeholders. And I didn’t know that I needed to understand the perspectives of my stakeholders, the people who care about the same client/problem/issue, in order to provide the best service.
It meant I had to acknowledge I was working in a system of different interpersonal dynamics and needs and that I had stakeholders who cared just as much about my client as I did, but had a potentially different perspective from mine about those needs.
Needless to say that I really messed up several times in situations that could have been better managed had I included my stakeholders in the process.
So how do you understand the experiences of your stakeholders?
In comes the concept of environmental scanning. As a personal example, while I am now a psychologist who works in a research and healthcare industry, I am also in several leadership roles.
So, I need to understand both internal and external influences that may affect the work I do and how to keep up to date with that information.
I certainly need to keep my technical expertise up to date about healthcare research and psychological innovations in my industry. But I also want to keep up to date about what leaders in other industries might need to know.
That can include reading mainstream business articles, listening to leadership podcasts, watching the news, and talking to experts.
Within my organization, that also includes reading my company’s policies and regulations, reading company emails sent by various levels of leadership, and learning about the strategic goals and priorities of my organization.
Yes, I know. Company emails? Company policies?? Organizational priorities??? I’m dead serious. They’re critical.
The purpose is to keep you up to date with changes, trends, and controversies within your field of work, as well as within your organization. It also helps you learn what your co-workers, clients, employees, trainees, and/or supervisors (i.e., your stakeholders) may be concerned about.
How do you apply what you’ve learned about your stakeholder’s interests from this environmental scan to your work?
Here are just a few examples for how this can play out:
Creative Problem-Solving
In especially large, complex, or bureaucratic organizations, it’s easy to become frustrated when you continually hit the well-known “no, it can’t be done that way” barrier. Or the equally-aggravating “we don’t do it that way” barrier.
If you are willing to do some research and keep up to date with regulations, policies, trends, and company goals, however, you will better position yourself to serve as the “creative problem-solver” - the person who comes up with “simple solutions to complex challenges.”
It becomes a secret special power that people will start seeking you out for.
What’s the secret power? Read stuff that other people don’t want to take the time to read! Pay attention to stuff that other people normally ignore.
When a new challenge comes up, you will be more likely that others to be able to say, “Oh, here’s a policy that says you can do it this way. I saw it done successfully in [this situation]. Let’s call them and learn how we can apply it here.”
Alignment
When you have read through the strategic goals that are important to your leaders, and heard how they communicate it, you can better translate your desired initiative into their language so they can better understand the value.
That’s called alignment. You are aligning your desired goals with the goals of your stakeholders and finding common ground you can speak from.
Business Case
How can you become aligned with the goals of your stakeholders? One option is to understand how to make a business case. In this situation, you are making an environmental scan of how your stakeholders might be considering various options. For example, try in advance of any meeting to know how to speak to these types of concerns:
What is the value of implementing your proposal at this time?
What’s the cost or risk of NOT implementing it?
How much will it cost and where will that money come from?
Why should they consider it now compared to any other time?
What are the alternatives?
Operationalizing Success Factors
When I take on a project, I know how to implement it using my technical expertise. However, it’s the cultural expertise that helps me successfully implement it more smoothly and with less organizational friction.
You can develop the skill by applying an environmental scan by asking questions like these:
a. Who needs to be involved at the earliest stages of the project?
b. Who needs to be kept updated of the progress along the way?
c. What specialty needs to we have and who can help with those needs?
d. Who can serve in an advisory or mentorship capacity on this project?
e. What resources do we need and which do we have available to us?
f. Are there any resources we need that we don’t have that are currently difficult to obtain?
g. Are there any pitfalls or challenges we can expect? If so, how do we plan now for those?
Each of these methods of scanning and learning from your environment is a way you can connect with and understand your stakeholders (and thus the organizational culture) in order to supersede the expectations of your job.
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Part 6 of this series will be about developing your observational skills in order to grow your own leadership skills.
Part 1: 3 Models of Power that Break Through Traditional Barriers
Part 2: The Best Time to Seek More Education to Advance Your Career
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This series was inspired by a talk I did for the local ATHENA Chapter's Emerging Leaders Program about one of their eight leadership principles: Learn Constantly.
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This post was originally published on Psychology Today on April 29, 2020. All rights reserved, Copyright 2020 Mira Brancu/Brancu & Associates, PLLC.