Page 133 - Just Promoted A 12 Month Road Map for Success in Your New Leadership Role

118 Just Promoted!

6. Plan for monitoring and review of performance. The employee’s develop-
mental progress should be monitored on an ongoing, planned basis, with
frequent and open opportunity for feedback and coaching.
If performed well, coaching should be a positive experience. It should
strengthen the working relationship between the leader and employee and
become a natural part of your repertoire of management and leadership skills
and behaviors.

SEVERAL IMPORTANT POINTS YOU SHOULD
KNOW ABOUT YOUR OWN LEADERSHIP AND
PROFESSIONAL STRENGTHS

Key Principle
You should leverage your strengths while not overusing your strengths.

In the spirit of your own ongoing professional and leadership development,
there several points you should know about your strengths:

1. Every person has his or her own strengths profile. We each have several
top leadership and functional-technical strengths. Some may come natu-
rally to us, and we have probably worked hard to develop them.
2. Strengths serve us in many ways. They are the main source of our pro-
fessional success, and they have helped us get over some of our hardest
times and challenges.
3. In many ways, strengths are like habits. We use them “automatically.” We
are unconsciously competent in these areas. We barely have to think
about accessing these strengths when we need them.
4. Every strength has a potential “shadow side.” For example, strong deci-
sion making taken to excess is autocratic and insular in nature. A results-
oriented person can become overly demanding and abrasive. Concern
for others can become overly “people process oriented” with everything
needing to be decided through consensus. Some with superb functional-
technical skills can become too narrow and see things with a limited per-
spective and may not be effective working in cross-functional teams.