Recently, I read an article by Mr. Ou Validity, pointing out a truth that many people ignore.
Napoleon famously said, "A soldier who doesn't want to be a marshal is not a good soldier." But the question is, who among us has ever seen a soldier who is a marshal?
Mr o Li Chuang gave an example. Prior to this, there was a subject called "Frogman Division" in the professional subject list of the Nanjing Military Region, which was dedicated to training soldiers for "underwater special operations". These soldiers should be able to lurk underwater for a long time, swim long distances and perform complex combat tasks.
Suppose you are an enthusiastic and enterprising young man in the frogman family, bent on getting ahead. Others train for 8 hours, and you train for 10 hours or more. In the end, you became the best soldier in the team.
What will your future be like?
The answer is that you will become a frogman squad leader, squadron leader or even captain, and the corresponding positions are platoon leader, company commander and battalion commander.
However, when you become captain of the frogman, your career is basically over. Because the Nanjing Military Region is dominated by army, artillery and mechanized infantry. Therefore, the general promotion of teachers and commanders is usually only produced in these two arms. Captain Frogman needs a special opportunity if he wants to be a teacher.
So you see, the best soldier is not necessarily a marshal.
This truth is not quite the same as our traditional world view.
The traditional world outlook is very similar to the game, which thinks that life is a route of "fighting monsters and upgrading".
For example, when you start, your experience value is 50 points. If it rises to 10000, you can find a section chief to do it; When you are born to 654.38+ million points, you can work for the director; When it rises to 654.38+0 million, I can give you a job as a director. This understanding is not a big mistake when the social division of labor is not so fine.
But in modern society, the division of labor is not only horizontal, but also vertical. If you don't practice in the right way and reserve the ascending ability for your class in advance, you may encounter the so-called "glass ceiling"-blocking your ascending passage, but you still can't see it-and it is difficult for you to take another step up.
In other words, you need different talents at different stages. A person's career, not a job, is likely to play four jobs, or even more. At each stage, you must completely transform and adapt to a completely different ecological environment. Others have lived all their lives, and you may have lived for several lifetimes.
There is a famous "Peter principle" in management science, which says that in an organization, everyone tends to be promoted to a position that he is not qualified for. The logical reasoning of this principle is simple: employees will be promoted after a period of time if they do well; But if he is not fully competent and his performance is no longer outstanding, he will stay in this position.
There is actually another reason behind this phenomenon. Although the "Tao" of management is the same, the "technique" to be adopted at each management level is quite different.
When a manager is promoted to a new management position, he should adopt different methods, such as how to allocate time and so on. But everyone is lazy. The manager was promoted because he did a good job in his previous position and his methods were correct. But it is difficult for him to change his previous habits immediately after his promotion.
In his subscription column The Road to Wealth and Freedom, Mr. Li Xiaolai recommended the book Leadership Echelon. The author of this book is Ram Charan, who is the most respected management consultant of CEO Jack Welch of General Electric Group. Some people even say that he is the number one management consultant in the world.
The characteristic of this book is that "leadership" has changed from an abstract concept to a concrete concept. The author divides the development of leadership from employee to CEO into six levels, and each level needs corresponding work concept, leadership skills and time management ability. This framework. Known as the "leadership echelon model."
It sounds complicated, but in fact it can be simplified as "triple jump", which means three kinds of ability changes when a person rises in the hierarchy.
The first level is from self-management to others.
When you are the lowest-level employee, as long as you have strong execution, you can try your best to complete the task. To put it bluntly, as long as you are a tool of leadership, it is already a very outstanding performance. But once you start leading a team, you need completely different abilities.
This is a change from finishing the work by yourself to finishing the work by others. According to my observation, many talented people in the workplace are blocked in this step and it is difficult to make a breakthrough. Why?
Because when he became the team leader, he still showed off everything and always said, "You can't, get out of the way." He can't achieve others from the heart.
This change includes many aspects. For example, your time allocation should be changed: you must start to reduce the time spent on personal work and spend it on helping and encouraging subordinates; Design posts and assign tasks; Learn to let subordinates complete tasks and assess them regularly; It is also necessary to establish social relations, including vertical relations between superiors and subordinates, horizontal relations with people in other departments and so on.
Well, even if you succeed in this transformation, the next level of difficulty is waiting for you-from a "manager" to an "organizer".
The task of managers is still limited to the work itself, but organizers must have strategic thinking. In other words, what is in front of you is not that important. You should broaden your horizons and pay attention to a wider range of things.
To open your eyes is to open two dimensions.
The first is the time dimension. The present work may be smooth and difficult, but what is more important is the future trend.
Are there any potential opponents in the distance that haven't appeared yet? Smooth development, will it be an accumulation crisis? Will there be a bright future ahead when you are struggling? With these judgments, the organizer's task is to make current decisions in turn.
The second is the spatial dimension. The resources within the organization are visible, but the resources outside the organization are the Wang Yang Sea.
Who are you working with and who are you bringing in? What kind of resources are stored in vitro and what kind of possibilities are reserved? What enemies and friends do you make? What kind of information was released? Wait, wait, wait.
After you have such strategic thinking, the third step comes again, which also makes many people stop-that is, from "organizer" to "decision maker"
The organizer's focus is still on action, while the decision-maker has only one focus, that is, judgment. This level of thinking mode and cognitive level is completely different from before. Your focus should be on trying to figure out people's minds, trying to figure out the situation and trying to figure out the trend.
Doing one thing is right in theory, but is the timing right? Should we do it at once or wait? The effect of doing an action is good, but what is the indirect effect? Can the negative effects be controlled? We should do both of these things, which is the real point? Both views make sense. How can I express my position to convince all parties?
Policymakers and judges have a natural fate, that is, extreme loneliness. Everyone else is acting, giving advice. Do what you have to do. Policymakers should bear the consequences and responsibilities of decision-making alone. This kind of pressure cannot be shared, and there is nowhere to resolve it. You have to carry it down alone.
These are the three steps of the "leadership echelon model".
Let's go back to the first sentence. A soldier who wants to be a marshal cannot be just a good soldier. Others are taking a job, you have to take four jobs, or even more; Others live for a lifetime, and you have to live for four lifetimes. Otherwise, in your opinion, this is called talent failure; Outside, you actually meet your own "glass ceiling".