Moving Up At Work

Are you hoping to rise in the ranks at your place of employment? Do you have ambitions for more? Showing your bosses you are capable is only half the battle to fulfilling your dreams.

In their book “Great Leaders GROW,” Ken Blanchard and Mark Miller wrote about the steps professionals need to take to become great leaders. One of those steps is to open your world at work. They came up with 16 ways to accomplish this:

• Shadow someone from another department or team.
• Work at a client’s facility for a day or longer.
• Listen in on donor calls.
• Travel with senior leaders from the organization.
• Serve on a cross-functional team.
• Begin collecting best practices from top performers.
• Interview recent retirees and seek their counsel on current issues.
• Attend the premier of a new program or the grand opening of a new office.
• Go back in the archives and watch presentations from the past decade.
• Meet with leaders from other departments to understand their issues.
• Have lunch with someone different every day until you run out of people, and then start over again.
• Travel to visit your must successful chapters.
• Find a mentor from another department.
• Ask others who best embody the nonprofit’s core values and spend most of your time with them.
• Attend open enrollment training events that will broaden your perspective.
• Lead anything you can, be it a project team, ad hoc group, work group, fundraising campaign, or any other event. Chances are good you’ll learn more by leading than anything else.