The MAP for horizontal transformation at work

Horizontal professional development means acquiring new knowledge and skills (both technical skills and soft skills) that helps us to carry out our activities, perform well in what we do, whether we are employees, freelancers, entrepreneurs, or investors. Based on the professional development experience I have gained over the past 22 years, combined with multiple personal development courses, I have structured below a framework to highlight development areas in the context of a complex business environment - in addition to the team we are part of and the role we play, we also focus on the multiple departments we interact with, multiple clients from different industries and sectors, each with its own complexity, as well as partners who help us promote our services and products. I have named this framework the Horizontal Professional Transformation Map... I named it a "transformation" rather than "development" because if I would have had this map and clarity at the beginning of my journey, I would have developed professionally more rapidly, meaning I would have gone through a transformational process (= accelerated development) and not an evolutive one. In addition, I have defined a framework for vertical transformation at work, more details can be found here: https://lnkd.in/d-3SNyhE .

We will navigate the development map starting from the Center and moving towards NW -> NE -> SE -> SW -> DESTINATION.

In navigating the map, I will start with the destination in mind:

VI. DESTINATION - Cross-Functional Skills Acquired

These are the skills we will develop after years of experience in complex work environments interacting with different situations, roles, and people within and outside the organization.

6.1 Conscious Leadership

Certainly, a lot has been written about leadership in general and it has been a concern of interest for a long time. My focus is on Conscious Leadership, which is a response to the fact that the world is changing and so must the leadership methods - the most effective leaders and those who truly inspire are those who manage to unlock and sustain team energy by connecting with members on a human level, thus ensuring individual well-being. Among the characteristics of leaders in this category, I enumerate: they are the ones who see you, support you, are present, are not afraid of challenges, challenge you (thus helping you develop), have confidence in you, and provide clear direction to the team.

6.2 Influence and Inspiration

In interacting with colleagues, partners, and clients, it is important to have such behavior and to undertake initiatives that serve as a model of inspiration and influence on others. If we desire a certain work environment and a certain organizational culture, we must be the ones to act in that direction first and foremost. If we want to promote a certain initiative in which we believe, there is a possibility that through the power of example, we can succeed in getting others to join us. It is not necessarily necessary to have formal authority over others; through our behavior, we can exert informal authority.

6.3 Consultative Selling

In professional and even personal relationships, we are in a continuous process of selling, whether we are selling our personal brand, our ideas, or the products and services of our department or company. In my role in pre-sales, I have extensive exposure to what is called consultative selling, which represents a collaborative approach with the client where their real needs are at the center, and where we ultimately reach an act of co-creation of value.

6.4 Managing Difficult Situations

Because we work in complex business environments with multiple interactions (clients, colleagues, partners, suppliers, competitors, etc.) and divergent interests, we often encounter conflict situations, especially when there is a significant stake involved (winning a project, securing the largest share of the budget, career advancement, etc.). Some of the commonly encountered behaviors are avoiding conflict with long-term undesirable effects (including personal frustration, stress), while at other times, I have observed aggressive confrontation among competing members, also with undesirable effects in the stress area. The question is how do we adopt an assertive attitude and ultimately reach a win-win situation for the parties involved?

6.5 Coaching

You know we encounter this concept very often; I myself have been trained on what coaching is and how it helps us in the sales activity in which I am involved daily. It helps me in several aspects, for example, in Discovery sessions with clients, it helps me ask good questions so that together with clients we see new perspectives and come closer through moments of awareness to the need elements that are blocking the business's evolution.

Another area where I use coaching skills is during mentoring sessions when beyond guiding the other person based on my previous experience, succeeding in getting the other person to find the answer themselves through guided questions has a much stronger effect in terms of understanding, awareness (compared to telling them the answer directly).

6.6 Facilitation

I offer an example to explain this ability - in my current role as an Account Cloud Engineer (the technical person who is in direct contact with customers to provide them value), I am the one who orchestrates interactions between multiple departments (our own department, other departments, clients, partners). More specifically, in defining a technical solution, I interact with specialists in various areas of expertise, and the final solution is a combination of components that these respective specialists master very well - good facilitation happens when each piece of this puzzle is put in place to obtain the best solution to be forwarded to the client. What I have explained above is a facilitation of interactions at a macro level; at a micro level, we can talk about a brainstorming session at the project level or planning at the beginning of a major initiative or conclusions at the end of a project from which we can derive the learning aspects.

To reach this destination, there is a starting point that refers to our job description or the service/product we offer as an entrepreneur:

I. STARTING Point - Core Job

When we start a new role or a new business, there are certain main activities in the job description or in the entrepreneurial idea that we must carry out (e.g., mechanical engineering, accounting, credit officer, lawyer, software developer, etc.). In successfully performing our role, there are a series of skills that we must acquire:

1.1 Specialized Technical Knowledge

To carry out our basic activity, it is mandatory to have those specialized technical knowledge and skills that emerge from the job description. We acquire these knowledge from university through the specializations we follow and then through daily activities (learning while doing), from colleagues, or from courses in our specialization.

1.2 Problems Solving

As we face increasingly greater challenges in our role, we train to be more performant and to solve bigger and more complex challenges. Over time, we will develop a method to be more performant and to efficiently solve problems. How we position ourselves in the face of challenges that will continue to arise ultimately defines us as character and individuality. My advice is to try to analyze what patterns you have developed over time when faced with a challenge and if these patterns are the ones you want or if there is room for improvement.

1.3 Decisions Making

Even if our role is not one of a leader or manager, decision making for our core activity happens daily, and there is also a structured methodology for this aspect of how to make the best decisions based on the context we face. In broad lines, in the decision-making process, we need to understand the context well, the possible alternatives, the impact of each alternative, the short and long-term benefits for all involved parties, and be prepared for the opportunities and/or risks that arise after making the decision.

1.4 Energy Management and Time Management

Of course, it is important to know how to manage our most important resource, namely time. In addition to an efficiency that we will identify ourselves through trial and error, I recommend participating in Time Management courses to be efficient and performant.

However, I consider that more important than time management and directly related to it is energy management - with attention to two basic directions: physical energy management and mental energy management. To have good mental energy - focus on achieving goals, self-awareness and social awareness, and in reflection self-management and relationship management - it is necessary first of all to have good physical energy - to rest well, to engage in physical activity, to know our periods of the day when we are most efficient.

II. Team or Department

We perform our role within a team or department where we interact with our direct colleagues with the aim of achieving a common goal of the team or department together.

2.1 Teamwork

It becomes important to know how to work in a team - whether physical or increasingly virtual, to share a larger activity among team members, to have collaboration, synchronization, complementarity, synergy. As we master these elements very well, some of us will move towards becoming team leads as a professional development path.

2.2 Project Management

Working on projects is the norm today, we work to achieve the project's goal in teams (physical or virtual), with interdependencies between project activities, limited resources, a well-defined project plan where responsibilities are allocated, with deadlines and milestones. We will learn to use project management tools to monitor the progress of a project, and those who are attracted to this perspective will choose to become project managers as their main role.

III. Interaction with Customers

Clients represent the most important perspective of our profession; if we do not serve external clients, we certainly serve internal clients. That is why the way we interact with them is so important, and that is why the skills we see as necessary around client relationships are so often encountered in soft skills courses: how to promote value, how to ask relevant questions (discovery), how to make a successful presentation or demo, how to speak to an extended audience.

3.1 Needs Identification (Discovery)

In our relationships with our clients, it's about them and their needs, not about us and our solutions. This is a principle as simple to express as it is sometimes difficult to apply. Before rushing to present the solution to the client, our approach, service, or product, it is essential to know how to investigate the client's industry and activity, to investigate about the client, their suppliers, and partners, to know how to listen to them, and to master interview techniques. It is not exaggerated to propose to know the client better than they know themselves.

3.2 Value Selling

Only after we have come to know the client's true needs do we turn to the solution that best suits those needs and highlight the features and benefits of the solution that address what we identified in the Discovery phase. This approach guarantees that the beneficiary will resonate with what we have to offer, and they are now willing to allocate time and energy not only to listen to our solution but also to take the first steps in the proposed direction, as long as it is a valuable one for them.

3.3 Presentations and Demonstrations with Impact

Making presentations and product/service demonstrations is one of the steps in the sales process. What makes the difference is whether these presentations or demonstrations are impactful for the audience, which is why we need to be aware of the structure of a presentation, what to put in the opening to spark interest, what to put in the closing to be memorable, how to tell a story that resonates with the listeners.

3.4 Public Speaking

Sometimes, the role we are in may involve addressing an extended audience. And then some of the skills we need to develop are: knowing how to manage our emotions, feeling the room's energy and knowing how to generate and maintain it, knowing how to deliver impactful messages and how to engage the attendees in discussions. Not by chance, we see so many online offers to learn Public Speaking.

IV. Partnerships

In serving the needs of clients, we often enter into partnerships with other individuals or entities to outsource part of the effort or to complement what we have to offer with what the partner has so that the final service/product has superior quality. There are two perspectives in the relationship with partners:

4.1 Collaboration

Our abilities to collaborate, to identify areas of common interest in a given context, to find win-win solutions when we set out together as partners are defining elements in a partnership relationship. There are methods and techniques of collaboration based on trust so that the relationships between partners are constructive, motivational, with the result that common efforts are directed towards the successful completion of the project to which the parties have committed.

4.2 Negotiation

At the same time, in relation to partners, areas of overlap may arise, areas where interests diverge, and then we will resort to negotiation methods and techniques so that in the end, neither party feels aggrieved, is satisfied with the outcome of the negotiation, and continues the collaboration journey with the certainty that in the long run, a multitude of win-win situations are by far preferable to a single situation where one party takes everything (and this situation is no longer called a partnership).

V. Interaction with Other Departments

In a large organization, apart from interactions with colleagues from the team or our own department, there are also interactions with colleagues from other departments - we may find ourselves with them in collaboration relationships for a certain project or even in competitive relationships when two divisions of the same company target the same budget and the same project from a client.

5.1 Collaboration

That is why the abilities to collaborate become important, and what I mentioned above regarding interaction with partners remains valid.

5.2 Efficient Communication

Even if I considered efficient communication as a skill in the area of interaction with other departments, in reality, knowing how to communicate efficiently helps us in all professional but also personal areas. In interactions with others, we must aim to convey our ideas in a clear form, easily understood by interlocutors, without ambiguities. The clearer we are in communication, the more synergies are created between colleagues and at the team level. You may have experienced from experience that there are communication barriers that lead to misunderstandings which, in turn, can induce a negative spiral leading to undesirable conflict situations, and all this just because of a communication deficiency.

Regarding communication, verbal communication is not only important; even more important is non-verbal communication (body reactions) or paraverbal communication (tone of voice, rhythm, intonation). Also, in communication, an essential role is played by active listening, meaning that total, focused presence of ours in interaction with the interlocutor, with a sincere desire to understand what they communicate.

One last aspect I want to highlight about communication is that language is so powerful (what we say or what we tell ourselves) that it can rewrite the neurological programs we function after - see the field of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and how powerful the practices from NLP are in overcoming blockages, limiting beliefs, and ultimately changing destinies.

Above, I synthesized a list of knowledge and capabilities (with the mention that the list is not exhaustive) that we acquire over time (professional development horizontally) either through exposure to multiple projects, or learning from more experienced colleagues, or participating in professional training courses (technical skills but also soft skills). I intended with this map to bring structure to what I'm sure in one way or another, at one level or another, you have all experienced throughout your professional evolution. I intend in the future to "zoom in" on the elements of the map, especially on those where I appreciate that they bring greater value to the audience.

Thank you for having the patience to go through the entire post/article, and I hope it will be useful to you!