Investing in your Capacity for Leadership...

In July 2009, I had the opportunity of a life-time in my corporate career. I had just been appointed as Acting Managing Director for a Coca-Cola franchise bottler in Kenya, a role I held for 6 months. The Coca-Cola bottling operation had annual revenues over $100m and a workforce of 1,100 employees. Prior to my appointment I had been leading the finance function for the business for 3 years. In my role as Acting MD, I reported to the Divisional Director for the East African Division.

Shortly after my appointment I had my first meeting with the Divisional Director. In that meeting, reality of the significant task ahead of me quickly dawned. He asked me several questions related to other functions of the business- from sales, manufacturing, and logistics. I came up short on every question! I quickly realized that what had got me there (financial competence), would not be enough. I needed to build and demonstrate my capacity to lead the business in the shortest time possible.

Looking back over the course of my career (18 years), three capacity areas have been critical at different stages of my career- Technical Competence, Business Knowledge, and Leadership Capacity.

Technical Competence

Early in my career, at KPMG and PwC in Boston, USA, I focused on building my technical competence in earning my qualification as a Certified Public Accountant. This was critical for my career growth given that my undergraduate studies at Providence College, were in Finance and Management. For fresh graduates building technical competence is often the key to entry level opportunities but typically diminishes in weighting as you grow in your career. Technical competence includes professional qualifications as a lawyer or accountant. Based on my experience, the weighting of technical competence as you progress in your career evolves as follows:

As a senior manager, you typically would have specialists within your team and do not need to be the technical expert in your field.

Business Knowledge

After 4 years as an auditor, I joined the Gillette Company as an Internal Auditor and later Cost Accountant at the South Boston Manufacturing plant. During this stage of my career, I needed to build my business knowledge capacity. While at the Gillette Company I enrolled for my MBA studies at Babson College which I completed as a part time student. I recognized that while the MBA was not critical for my role at the time the knowledge acquired would be beneficial later in my career. A graphical illustration of the weighting of business knowledge is as follows:

Business knowledge can be gained on the job through exposure to different roles or industries as well as through post graduate qualifications such as the MBA.

Leadership Capacity

Later in my career, I had two critical leadership transitions- first on my appointment as head of finance in 2007 and later on my appointment as Acting Managing Director in 2009. In my first transition I had the Group CFO as a mentor and he challenged me to define who I am as a leader and the qualities of the leader I aspired to be. He made me aware that the best leaders are authentic, live their values and principles, and constantly seek opportunities to build their leadership capacity.

A graphical illustration of the weighting of leadership capacity as one progresses in their career is as follows:

Leadership Capacity becomes the most significant capacity focus area as you progress in your career.

In my experience there are 3 areas in which to invest in your capacity as a leader:

1. Communication Skills – The best leaders are effective communicators. One of the best ways I found to develop effective communication skills was through participating in Toastmasters

2. Leadership Experience- Step up and lead. Create leadership opportunities where there appear to be none.

3. Coaching & Mentorship- The value of mentorship is common knowledge. You have to seek, build and maintain strong mentors who can serve as your own “board of advisors”. To support you in becoming the best leader you can be.. invest in a coach.

Below is a video clip of Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman speaking on the value of coaching to him as a leader.

In previous articles (Show Me The Time; Who is in Your Inner Circle; and Creating Possibilities) I shared the goal of targeting to invest 20% of productive time in a week in the Creative (Self Leadership) quadrant. This is equivalent to a minimum investment of 20 hours per week invested in Relationships (40%); Opportunities (20%), Innovation (20%) and Capacity (20%). Therefore in addition to investing 40% of the allocated productive time (8 hours) in relationships and 40% (8 hours) in Opportunities and Innovation per week, the target should be to invest an additional 20% investing in Capacity for a minimum of 4 hours per week.

Are you investing in your Capacity ahead of demand?

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What other tips can you share? I'd love to hear your ideas in the comments below.

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