At the start of the new year, you could be thinking what 2017 might bring for your professional growth. If your career path has already led you to head a department position, the next career step is to move into a general management or managing director role.
The ultimate question is how to get yourself selected for the position rather than an external hire or someone shipped in from the global headquarters. You may wish to consider the following if your dream and career goal is the boss’s job.
Apart from technical excellence in your core areas, the position of managing director and overall decision-maker requires an above-average grasp of a whole range of skill sets including people management, communication and business acumen. Change management, business leadership and decision making will be required when the time comes to deliver an aspirational yet viable vision.
Moving to a broader, managing director role will mean surrendering control at a micro level. Learning to let go is part of the transition. While learning to understand priorities and challenges of various business units is part of the job, it is important to remember that you cannot be all things to all people.
The first order of business when assuming this managing director role is identifying and grooming your superstar leadership team. With every business, you will need to assess and, ideally, rely on the respective department heads to get their jobs done with your support.
You will need to educate yourself enough to be outstanding in one or two core areas of the business and still be very good at understanding the basics of everything else.
Making this high-level transition is often easier internally than externally. In your current organisation, you have “internal currency” based on your years of experience and successful company track record. More importantly, you have established working relations and earned the trust of various departments you’ll be managing.
Career signs that point you in the direction of a managing director role will include your personal aspirations, career ambitions and family commitments. You must be ready to accept the responsibility of overseeing an entire organisation as well as the careers of all its employees. Also consider both positive and negative feedback from your superiors or mentors. They will be able to provide sound third-party opinion for this critical step in your career.
Even if you have everything on that checklist in the bag, are you managing director material? Remember that the all-encompassing position of country head or regional lead in an organisation is also a magnet for scrutiny from all directions, and the global or regional leaders will now be your immediate superiors.
Finally, employees often look to their business head to make executive decisions. Most times, the best business leaders are the ones who can make difficult decisions and stick to them.
This article appeared in the Classified Post print edition as Moving on up.
