If you cut your finger, reach for a Band-Aid. Wake up with a headache, grab two Aspirins. But quick remedies aren’t a regime for managing overall health. Nor for managing a career. You can power pose like Wonder Woman to boost your self-confidence, or tweak your mornings to be more productive. Helpful stuff, but not the same as a conscious, long-term plan to develop professionally over a lifetime.
OK, how to think about that?
I recently put that question to Kathy Gallo, Founder and Managing Partner of the Goodstone Group. Kathy has developed business professionals for some twenty years, and now oversees a global network of 65 professionals who coach leaders at all levels, in companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 50 corporations. She answered with an eager smile.
Learning From Patterns
“Well, we shouldn’t paint with too broad a brush. Everyone must build their own plan over time. But you can learn from patterns, for example how winning professionals manage their careers through lifetime eras—early, mid, and later career, or roughly speaking, in your 20s, 30s, and then 40s and beyond.”
Gallo began with a few cross-cutting themes. “Throughout a career, three leadership competencies are always a focus: problem-solving, executional capabilities, and people skills, especially “emotional intelligence” (leaders’ ability to read other people and connect it with what’s inside their own head and heart.) Then context—being aware of your organization’s culture; and changing it for the better when you can. Great performers work on all of these in every era.”
Because It’s Different Today
Listening to this prologue, I had a whiff of Mom’s apple pie, and asked: Is professional development really different today? The Goodstone Managing Partner pushed back. “Yeah, it is. The best jobs are much more competitive—twenty top-qualified people are going for every good position. And candidates are already well-coached—it’s how they excelled in college admissions, sports, music lessons. The most successful are now constantly improving themselves in a fiercely intentional way.”
So how does the game change as you move through the three eras?
Kathy described the classic matrix pairing consciousness and competence. “The best competitors co-develop self-knowledge and capabilities. At each step they are working to understand more about themselves and their goals, and the skills and knowledge needed to get there.”
Your 20s: Building Baseline Awareness And Competence
“Imagine a child first learning to walk,” she continued. “Not only does she not know how to tie a shoe, she doesn’t understand that shoes need to be tied. In your early jobs, you’re both learning what success in a would-be career is going to take, and then assessing your assets and gaps against that. The average performer bumbles along, trial-and-error. The top professionals are much more intentional.”
Kathy elaborated. “The rising stars relentlessly clarify expectations for winning. They are metrics-oriented, and constantly seek feedback, from supervisors, other colleagues, even clients. They develop a picture of success, then go after it. They ask, ‘if I want to head a sales division, what do l I need to do?’”
Are You Ready To Hear The Feedback?
But it’s not as simple as it sounds, she added. “Most organizations are not very good at giving feedback— timely, critical, actionable—which is what you need to raise your personal performance. In most cultures you have to work hard to get that kind of feedback. Women and multicultural talent usually have to work even harder for it.”
She offered a further warning. “Younger professionals often don’t want to hear the answer if it’s negative. They aren’t emotionally ready to hear anything less than ‘awesome.’” So success in your early career depends on learning both to seek and take feedback. And then building the discipline to act and improve upon what you learn.”
Gallo then noted the importance of recruiting sponsors, informal or otherwise. “As you start to grow, you need someone with power and credibility in the organization who can advocate for you—to get you staffed on the right projects. As with getting feedback, this is particularly critical and often more difficult for young women and multicultural professionals.”
But even enlisting support has its pitfalls. “Millennials are so social-media-wired, they’re always reaching out for help and suggestions. But they can lack discrimination—they don’t realize that some sources aren’t as reliable as others. Or that friends may not be totally candid. It’s a big issue for young CEOs. They buttress their managerial inexperience with all sorts of advisers. But they aren’t critical enough in choosing or using them. Great professional development in your twenties depends on learning how to judge and leverage the right people.”
Your 30s: Rounding Out Your Skill Set
Kathy continued the metaphor of the newly walking child. “So in the next era you know how to put on your shoes, you can loop the laces and tie them on your own. Now you want to get good at it, so it becomes automatic.”
“In your middle career,” she went on to explain, “you’re now established in at least one of the three leadership competences; and you’re clearer about aspirations and what it will take to get there. You develop plans to better leverage your strengths, and also address your particular short-comings.”
I pressed this coach for the real headline.
“For most people,” Kathy continued, “this middle phase means strengthening EQ. Typically they’re getting their first 360 evaluations. And they’re shocked to learn that maybe they have a reputation for being difficult, uncaring, or communicating poorly. It can be a real wake-up call—but the winners hear it and work on the problems.”
It’s also in this middle era that the best professionals start to look beyond themselves. As Gallo explained, “Even if people work on their EQ, progress can be limited by the culture of the organization. Some companies don’t care if you run over people to get results.”
So what then?
Kathy continued: “Losers are complainers. Winners face reality. You don’t have to be a jerk to succeed, but you do need to understand the cultural context. Sometimes that means getting better at playing the game (authenticity can be over-rated!); or better yet, changing the culture by bringing in more like-minded people. If necessary, they’re willing to leave for another company more suited to their values.”
Your 40s (And Beyond): Impact And Still More Self-Knowledge
Great maturing professionals don’t sit back and smell the roses—they continue the self-improvement that’s by now second nature. They seek out new assignments, different experiences, and look for innovative ways to “sharpen their saws.”
But, Gallo cautioned, they now face a different set of challenges. “Accomplished leaders are under more pressure to create impact; they have to project a certain gravitas, inspire talent, excite and align stakeholders, as never before. It’s a world of maximum transparency and like it or not, leaders today must have some level of charisma. And not just CEOs—everyone on their way to the top too.”
I asked the enduring question—can charisma be learned?
“Yes, up to a point,” she offered. “You can do a lot by working on public speaking, posture and style. But charisma can mean different things. The real strategy comes down to finding and developing the right version that suits who you are. If you’re more introverted or analytical, for example, you can get better in projecting confidence and impressing stakeholders with your expertise; or learning to speak more openly and firmly about yourself. If you’re an internal candidate for a top job, you can seek out a particularly difficult assignment, to show your courage and skill for tackling a big problem. That’s worth more to a board search committee than ‘flashy showmanship.’”
The Potentially Isolated Leader
Kathy continued with a final warning. “Another challenge for senior professionals is difficult and even dangerous. Successful leaders can become isolated without knowing it. People shy away from disagreeing with them, or won’t ‘speak truth to power.’ So suddenly these leaders are back to where they started twenty-five years before: they’re ‘unconsciously incompetent’, they no longer know what they don’t know—and nobody is going to tell them. If the world is changing around them, or they’re creating dysfunction in the organization they lead, they might be totally oblivious. They think everything is fine, when it might be catastrophe. Great leaders force themselves to keep learning, including the hardest of truths about themselves.”
Kathy finished by reflecting on one particularly effective CEO she knows. “He’s at the top of his game, but he won’t let up, even though he realizes more self-knowledge could be pretty painful. I’ll never forget what he confided to me: ‘If I want to be the best possible leader, I have to be willing to travel to the ‘Dark Side’—the part of who I am that I really don’t like. And then commit to improving that too.”
Originally published on Forbes.com