Developing Yourself as a Leader - A Case Study

Author: Rudi Plettinx, Managing Director, Centre for Creative Leadership Europe

First Published:  August 2007

Jan is an old friend of mine who has been in sales management jobs for many years. When it comes to closing a sale, there are few people better than Jan for coming home with the contract signed and sealed.  His bosses seemed knew that. Basically they left him alone to pursue his sales targets in his own way. As long as he beat the plan every six months, no one worried. They were happy and so was he.

Recently, his organisation experienced some major upheaval because a significant number of long-serving senior management retired or were on their way out. Whether through oversight or bad luck, the firm found itself having to promote quite a few people who had not had the benefit of much personal development to get them ready for new responsibilities.

One of the people being promoted was my friend Jan. He had been fingered for the tough job of Central European marketing director – something he neither really wanted nor felt ready for. Listening to him outline his concerns, I was reminded of that old business adage: “Many a great salesman has been ruined by making them a marketing director.” Too true! I’ve seen it many, many times. And here we were again, with an experienced, able employee, happy and productive in his job, terrified of the next big leap AND equally terrified to say “no,” for fear that would send the wrong signals to the board of directors.

I thought long and hard about how I help Jan face up to this sudden – and despite a major hike in salary and bonus -- unwanted and unwelcome promotion. Jan felt woefully unprepared -- he hadn’t envisaged this career leap and so had never pushed for training or an executive education course. Worse still, it didn’t look like his bosses were going to invest any time or money (at least not for a while) in getting him some leadership development. Quite simply, they needed and expected Jan to do the job from day one.

“Come on Rudi,” Jan pleaded, “what can I do? I want this to work out, but I’ve virtually been my own boss for the last three years. Now I’ve got work at this really challenging job while having the eyes of the organisation on me.”

I thought about Jan’s dilemma for some time. I remembered that not all development has to come from a classroom or coach. What Jan needed was confidence, the sort of confidence that can come with experience. And he could get experience using the very talents he had honed as one of his firm’s best salespeople.

I recalled that one of my Center for Creative Leadership colleagues had done a good deal of work on creating assignments that can help those facing up to leadership for the first time. Part of that work had looked at creating “competency-driven assignments”; that individuals could carry out and practice as they worked.

So it seemed to me that if we could get Jan to manage himself, using his own successes as a start point, we could quickly – and painlessly – give him some of the tools he would need as a leader. Manage yourself, I reasoned, and you should get a whole lot better at managing others.

I suggested to Jan that he try this out, and he accepted with enthusiasm. Using CCL’s advice, I established several areas where Jan could manage himself and see the results. To do this, we worked around five criteria:

• Setting personal goals
• Managing time
• Proactive career management
• Handling stress with energy and resilience
• Balancing professional and personal priorities

To those we linked a professional, on-the-job challenge. The idea was to give Jan confidence and establish his reputation as a leader within his business community.

The challenges we established were:

• Take on your region’s most dissatisfied customer
• Serve as a team member of a task-force to solve a major organizational issue
• Champion a change your group has been resisting
• Manage an annual organizational event with high visibility

The dissatisfied customer: What a great place to begin! In his sales role, Jan had been used to dealing with some difficult, irate and down-right horrid customers for years. Using all his professional skills, he was able to not only placate the customer, but get him to sign an exclusive agreement. This quickly established Jan as a key member of the management team. More importantly, it made Jan realize that he had skills that translated easily into his new role.

Task-force team member: Always viewed as a bit of a “I work alone” maverick, Jan was not looking forward to his debut as a team member. But by focusing on what he was naturally good at, he got the rest of the team to appreciate his contribution. A seemingly intractable problem, changing age-old working practices at a newly acquired business, was quickly solved thanks to Jan’s ability to persuade and negotiate.

Champion of change: Again, Jan’s ability to see the other side of the picture and put himself in another employee’s shoes made all the difference. By now Jan was unconsciously assuming the role of the leader.

Event management: Jan took the firm’s annual sales conference to a Central European location and successfully chaired the meeting as well. Again, he called on his market knowledge to make it work and also learned some valuable lessons about delegating and leading from the front.

So, what happened next? I caught up with Jan a few days ago and he told me that he is really enjoying the challenges. The reason for that is easy to see. He used his knowledge and success in one job to make an impact on another. His natural abilities as a salesperson could be transformed into those of a leader who, in fact, makes it look easy. While it may not be that easy for everyone, the lessons here are to build on what you have – all of us have skills that we can add to any organization – but also stretch to do something that you’ve resisted. By learning to manage yourself you can also learn to lead others.

 plettinxr@leaders.ccl.org

1 – Developmental Assignments: Creating Learning Experiences without Changing Jobs, by Cynthia D. McCauley, Center for Creative Leadership Publications, 2006