Eight errors to avoid when honing your leadership capabilities

You might use the less-successful career development strategies below when focused on surviving the day-to-day demands of your current role. We’ve all at one point or another succumbed to these default-mode approaches. Recognize any of these?

1. Not understanding how the talent management system in your company works overall – what it is, who is involved, and who is well regarded
2. Not knowing what factors are considered high potential and not using those to inform your development plan
3. Presuming you know what skills and experiences you’ll want or need later or in what direction your career will go
4. Not continuously and actively working on growing capacity and capabilities
5. Failing to intentionally build a portfolio of leadership skills and experiences early in your career when you have more leeway and less pressure to get it perfect
6. Not letting key leaders know what you’re up to and expecting them to discover it
7. Not investing a little at a time to build long term relationships with important colleagues

And here’s a bonus one. This is a whole other story for another day.

8. Not engaging a sponsor who has the influence to help you gain traction and upward momentum

The good news is that despite all this, by raising your head to look up and over the horizon a bit and having a roadmap to plan with, you can integrate small habits into your routine that will amplify your current efforts and enhance your trajectory in the long term.

First things first. In the talent review process, executives are typically presented with research on the best predictors of high performing leaders. This helps them determine who will receive the lion’s share of their time, attention and development dollars. Korn Ferry’s Seven Signposts Talent Framework is a useful tool for them in this context, and it can be extremely helpful for you too as you plan your development.

While some of the leadership attributes described are innate, you can develop most of them. And, importantly, you can better showcase to the right people the ones you already have. Not every organization uses these particular predictors to identify the leaders they want to invest in. Regardless, since the seven signposts actually do predict high performing leaders, building them can only serve as a valuable investment in your capability portfolio.

You might not think at this point that you want to become a senior leader in your organization. I’ll assert that whether you think you want to lead a big group or not, developing and marketing your leadership skills is worth doing, because it will provide you with many more choices than not doing it. No matter what, having higher level skills and better visibility will help you create the career that’s best suited for you, whatever that turns out to be.

The goal is to continue to pack your bag with the best resources for the career you will wind up wanting, even if you don’t know what that is yet. Even if you think you already know. Even if it changes over time. Even If you love corporate life now but eventually want to become an entrepreneur. Or vice versa. Or if you want to be a mom. Using this map to help you focus your development efforts will help you on all fronts.

To learn more about the seven predictors of high potential leaders, see the video above, which walks you through them - what they are, why they are important and whether they can be developed. Then you can determine where you want to go to work.

For help assessing and prioritizing where to put your attention first, check out the High Potential Leader’s Development Planning Guide. And please let me know where you land up with your thinking on this. I’d love to know what steps you’re taking to move yourself forward.