AN IDEAS INTO ACTION GUIDEBOOK
Broadening Your Organizational Perspective
IDEAS INTO ACTION GUIDEBOOKS
Aimed at managers and executives who are concerned with their own and others’ development, each guidebook in this series gives specific advice on how to complete a developmental task or solve a leadership problem.
| LEAD CONTRIBUTOR | Ellen Van Velsor |
| CONTRIBUTORS | Jennifer Martineau, Russ |
| McCallian, Bertrand Sereno, | |
| Sandrine Tunezerwe, | |
| Sophia Zhao | |
| DIRECTOR OF ASSESSMENTS, TOOLS, AND PUBLICATIONS | Sylvester Taylor |
| MANAGER, PUBLICATION DEVELOPMENT | Peter Scisco |
| EDITORS | Stephen Rush |
| Karen Lewis | |
| ASSOCIATE EDITOR | Shaun Martin |
| COPY EDITOR | Tammie McLean |
| WRITER | Martin Wilcox |
| DESIGN AND LAYOUT | Joanne Ferguson |
| COVER DESIGN | Laura J. Gibson |
| Chris Wilson, 29 & Company | |
| RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS | Kelly Lombardino |
Copyright © 2013 Center for Creative Leadership.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.
CCL No. 456
ISBN No. 978-1-60491-158-9
CENTER FOR CREATIVE LEADERSHIP
AN IDEAS INTO ACTION GUIDEBOOK
Broadening Your Organizational Perspective
Ellen Van Velsor
THE IDEAS INTO ACTION GUIDEBOOK SERIES
This series of guidebooks draws on the practical knowledge that the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) has generated since its inception in 1970. The purpose of the series is to provide leaders with specific advice on how to complete a developmental task or solve a leadership challenge. In doing that, the series carries out CCL’s mission to advance the understanding, practice, and development of leadership for the benefit of society worldwide.
CCL’s unique position as a research and education organization supports a community of accomplished scholars and educators in a community of shared knowledge. CCL’s knowledge community holds certain principles in common, and its members work together to understand and generate practical responses to the ever-changing circumstances of leadership and organizational challenges.
In its interactions with a richly varied client population, in its research into the effect of leadership on organizational performance and sustainability, and in its deep insight into the workings of organizations, CCL creates new, sound ideas that leaders all over the world put into action every day. We believe you will find the Ideas Into Action Guidebooks an important addition to your leadership toolkit.
Table of Contents
What Helps You: A Variety of Challenging Experiences
IN BRIEF
As a manager, you may seek to advance within your organization, to move upward and to take on additional levels of responsibility in order to gain personal rewards and achieve greater organizational results. However, advancing can be tricky. The most effective way to do it is to gain a broad organizational perspective that allows you to see beyond your own functional area and to understand how other areas interrelate and support the organization.
First, you must seek out the things that are holding you back, such as organizational or personal forces. For instance, an organization can hold individuals back by developing them in a stovepipe and limiting their opportunities for expanding their perspective. Or an individual may have an extremely limited view of career advancement, and only seek to move upward rather than gain experience across the organization.
To combat these negative forces, you should seek out learning opportunities and challenging experiences. By learning about other areas in your organization and participating in challenging experiences that broaden your horizons and push you out of your comfort zone, you can gain a broad perspective that will allow you to successfully advance as a leader.
The Challenges of Advancement
If you’re like most managers, you want to advance: to take on more responsibility at a higher level in your organization. Personal rewards and the opportunity to achieve greater organizational results are strong inducements. But advancing can be tricky, even for very successful managers.
CCL has studied what drives the advancement of executives, and has learned that perhaps the most important element is having a broad organizational perspective—that is, being able to see beyond your own functional area and understanding how other functional areas interrelate and support the organization.
Furthermore, having a narrow functional orientation can lead to derailment. A promotion might take you beyond your current level of competence. You may be unable to manage in a different department, you may not know how to handle management outside of your current function, or you might not understand how other departments function within the organization.
Broadening your organizational perspective is not a quick-fix activity. It requires reflection, judgment, planning, and time. But you can quickly gain an understanding of what is required that will eventually take you where you want to go. This guidebook will help you do that.
Throughout this guidebook you will find assessments and worksheets you can use in the effort to broaden your organizational perspective. The assessments will provide information to assist you in understanding your challenges, and the worksheets will facilitate your choosing and prioritizing actions. As we cover key components of your perspective-broadening work, we will refer you to the appropriate sheet and tell you how to use it.
Before you can begin taking action, however, you must take note of the things that stop you. Not surprisingly, both organizational and personal forces play a role, and your past successes and the strengths that propelled them are factors in both of these types of forces. Broadening your organizational view is thus largely a question of acquiring a