In rock climbing, you need to make effective use all the four points of contact – two hands and two feet.
The basic principle of successful rock climbing is to ensure 3-point contact on the rock – at all times. Your two hands and one foot or two feet and one hand, must always stay with the stable grip while moving the fourth for the ‘next’ grip. Metaphorically, climbing through your career too needs four elements as contact points – Domain Knowledge, Team Management Skills, Stakeholder Management & Attitude. As you climb your career aspirations – you need a combination of these four elements. Let’s see how:
Domain Knowledge: Your basic education, additional skilling you gained over time, experience and staying updated is essential to get a good grip of domain knowledge.
Team Management: Very few of us work isolated in the wild. Our career revolves working around with people – people who we report to, people who report to us and those alongside as peers. How we integrate this people factor to achieve organisational goals is the next grip.
Stake Holder Management: A misnomer here is that stakeholders mean board of management or the shareholders. We need to awaken to the fact that stakeholders mean external & internal customers, our vendors, facilitators, etc and our very own people who work for us and whom we work for.
Attitude: An upbeat and forward-looking attitude is ‘the’ life-line & not just ‘a’ requirement. We are all aware of colleagues with great knowledge and skill having been written-off professionally due to bad attitude.
Thus, at any point of time of your career, you will need to make a firm use of any of the three elements while progressing the fourth to ensure your professional climb is steady and safe. For instance, if you need to take your stake holder management to next level, you need to be firmly entrenched with the strength of your domain knowledge, team behind you and a forward-looking attitude to spur you to take up the challenge.
Have a great climb!
At times of career crises, you will need to be anchored on all four elements to have a firm grip of the situation. This is the time to take a ‘climb pause’ to help you ‘focus’ on the next ‘spot’ to take a grip of and continue your climb.
Comments