Empower Your Inner Manager

Preface

Why You Need to Read This Book

Many books on the market teach specific management training skills. This book is not intended to teach you how to gain or develop those skills. And be aware that some of those skills can be taught, some can be gained experientially, and some are simply innate. Regardless of the state of your skill set, this book will show you how to assess your skills and formulate an effective plan for your career development.

Now that you know what this book will and will not do, let’s examine how it will fulfill its promised intentions. In a nutshell, it will show you how to target management positions, assess the skills you need in order to optimize your candidacy, target only the skills needed to improve, and develop a personalized plan to effect the necessary improvements. End result: getting the job you seek!

Similarly, you can also apply these principles to self-employment, entrepreneurship, and/or personal development, if you wish. This book will primarily focus on career development, but feel free to extend the principles presented to assist you in any area of personal development that resonates for you. Only you know what your current goals and objectives are, and so you are the best person to perform your assessment and plan. Whatever your goals and objectives might be, above all, remember that good management always leads to lasting success, so assessing your management skills and designing your plan to best utilize them can only improve your effectiveness in both your career and your personal life.

Throughout, I will emphasize and reemphasize key points. Please indulge me in this, as my intention is not to be repetitive or redundant, but rather to ensure that you remain mindful of those principles that I have seen lead to success, time and time again. With that said, let me reemphasize the personalized plan. This book offers a unique process suited to your needs. Once you honestly complete the skills assessment, you can customize this book’s advice to help you effectively attain your goals. Best of all, you can use the book multiple times throughout your career, whenever you feel the need to further develop your skills in order to seek a more attractive position. Indeed, even if you only use this book to expand your awareness of and insight into skills possessed by well-developed managers, you can benefit significantly. By choosing to invest in your development and awareness at any level, you improve your marketability and value.

How to Stand Out in Today’s Ultracompetitive Job Market

Competition for management jobs continues to intensify with each passing year. If you are betting your financial welfare on your next management position and subsequent promotions, you will now need to be much better prepared to capture those increasingly scarce opportunities than you might previously have realized.

In a global economy, not only are professional jobs dispersed domestically and around the world, but, inevitably, so is the management of those positions. This does not bode well for us as managers seeking enhanced opportunities within our own communities. We already see job compression at the lowest levels, where increasingly competitive situations in many industries mean that even very competent graduates sometimes now struggle to find initial footings in their chosen fields. The swelling ranks of globally accessible well-qualified professionals mean that this compression feeds up through to the highest levels of the management chain. Those coveted top positions that were always difficult to secure have become both fewer and harder to capture.

In all likelihood, you are already aware of these dynamics. How, then, can you best prepare yourself for career opportunities? In the past, it might have been enough in an expanding industry to just show up and do your job well. You would be “ patted on the back” for your achievements and could then expect reasonable promotions throughout your career as your company grew. This is really no longer the case. Industries are more mature now, which results in their oft en experiencing slowed growth and associated reduced expansion opportunities. And that means greater job competition. Compounding this, equally qualified coworkers abound. As a result, previously available management positions are lost because they are also oft en geographically dispersed in order to take advantage of other local markets and labor, as well as off shoring. You clearly cannot rely on such a random process for your own advancement in such a competitive environment. How, then, do you beat the system so that you can maximize your opportunities and excel in your field? The answer must be by maximizing the value you offer.