Leadership and Management Success - Making Your Professional Development Count

Written by admin on Saturday, February 6th, 2010

To succeed in leadership management, you need to have a solid professional development action plan. Your continuing education in your business will make the difference in how well your business can succeed, or your team can perform. There are certain things a leader or manager must be aware of when they are implementing a professional development program for their team members. The following article discusses some of these needs.

For people in professions, gaining a professional qualification is often seen as a key step in achieving success. While gaining a professional qualification is quite simply a necessity in most professions to climb the career ladder, it is only the first step.

Over the years I have come across many accountants and professionals who did exceptionally well in the early stages of their career only to hit a glass ceiling all too quickly.

The truth is in my experience a professional qualification or an MBA merely gets you in the door. What determines how far you go in the longer is at least in part to making your professional development count. So how can you make your professional development count?

Get a handle on your strengths and development needs

The first step in making your professional development is to get a clear handle on your strengths and where you need to develop. If we are honest most of never make the time or the investment to get the clarity we need. We tend instead to rely on appraisal systems (where they exist) in the organisation’s we work for. Trouble is the quality of the feedback that we get might be so limited that it has little value. Worse still it might overly focus on the negatives.

Focus on the long term

If you are in a professional field like accounting it is important to get exposure to the key technical stuff like annual accounts, budgets, audit and a bit of tax. Yet few accountants want to be doing this long term. Get clear about what you want from your career bearing in mind that you probably have a limited time frame to achieve it. With this clarity put together a plan of development to increase your chances of success.

Don’t restrict your approaches to professional development

Traditionally people thought that professional development was all about going on training courses. While this is still an important ingredient in your professional development plan, there are so many different options open to you. These include attending a local professional body talk or workshop, listening to podcasts, watching a webinar, hiring a coach, finding a mentor, shadowing a senior level person or even attending a teleseminar.

Remember your needs change

Planning your professional development is not a one time task and finish activity. It requires a periodic review and update. Your needs will be very different at the stage when you are managing a small team for the first time compared to when you take the lead for a whole department function or even organisation.

Bottom Line - If you are serious about achieving leadership and management success you need to make your professional development count. So what’s your next step?

Now I invite you to take action now and sign up for my free audio e-course Leadership Success at http://www.goalsandachievements.co.uk/

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements (G&A) works with professionals, teams and organisations to develop their management and leadership capability.

With 25 years business experience in a range of sectors, he understands first hand the real challenges of managing and leading in the demanding business world.

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Publish Date: 02/05/2010 22:30

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