What are your personal success factors?

by Stefan Lindegaard

At work, we often talk about critical success factors. Have you considered developing your personal success factors? What should they be? To become successful as an innovation leader and intrapreneur–and as a partner, family member and friend–you can explore these pathways to success:

•  Know your values. Often success at work is defined by others, which can cause internal conflict with your inherent values. Even if you haven’t taken time to delineate your values, you will feel stress when you take actions that go against them in an effort to please others. I assure you that knowing your values and living by them will eliminate this unfortunate situation.

•  Follow your passion. As you get to know your values you will also discover where your passion is. And you can only become successful in the true meaning of the word if you can live out your passion in the majority of your life. Passion is doing what comes natural to you and with a continued desire to learn and develop within this area. How do you let your passion out? How do you get the kicks that make life great? Why not plan for them?

•  Decide on your personal vision. We all know how important it is for a company to set a vision that makes concrete the results the organization aims to achieve over the long term. Similarly, you can define your own personal vision that combines your values and your passion into a brief but meaningful statement of what you desire to achieve in business, in your personal life and as a member of your community.

•  Set goals. Once you’ve defined your vision, you can determine what short, mid-range and long-term goals will get you there. Share your vision and goals with the people who are important in your life to help build in accountability to your planning for success.  Review your goals on a regular basis, making adjustments as you achieve progress or suffer setbacks. You will learn that working to the goals rather than achieving them is what makes you happy, so be prepared to set new goals when you reach your current ones.

•  Understand and respect your stakeholders. Who will help you achieve your goals and personal vision? It’s important to identify and understand your key influencers and what drives them. These are your stakeholders and you must make sure they understand what you bring to the table and also how they can help you achieve success–and how you can help them become successful.

•  Work on your T-Shape. Go deep in at least one skill area and have breadth and empathy for other areas. Thus you need to accept that you don’t know everything and have the courage to seek help and advice from others. Gain a broader perspective by learning from those whose experience and views differ from yours. If you have team members on whom you are relying to help you achieve your goals, be sure to share credit with them. Recognize the stakeholders in your personal life who make it possible for you to have the time needed to achieve success on your business goals; thank them for their role in your success.

 •  Stay current. While you’re working toward your own set of goals, the outside world will not be standing still. Make sure you keep on top of external developments that could impact your ability to achieve your vision.

•  Communicate yourself. How do you want other people to look upon you? You might not like this, but it does not really matter much what you think of yourself. What really matters is how other people perceive you. Build and nurture your personal brand and work on your personal messages.

•  Manage time. You might think that working hard for 60, 70 or 80 hours each week is what it takes to be successful. You might even think being a workaholic is a badge of honour. I have met many innovation leaders and intrapreneurs who think like this. But in the recent years, some of them got reasons to reconsider how to manage and spent their time. One guy had a heart attack. Several people got divorced. Some realized that they went through life without seeing their kids grow up. They got to the other side where they understood they needed to manage their time rather than letting time manage them.

I hope this list can serve as an inspiration on how you can develop your own personal success factors.

Making change happen

by Stefan Lindegaard

Our current business climate brings a lot of change at the corporate as well as the personal level. They also bring out career development issues that often evolve around what you might call the “professional midlife crisis”. Besides the financial turmoil we currently have, such a crisis can also be caused by situations such as these:

•  Your company is not focused enough on innovation to offer you the types of exciting innovation leadership or intrapreneurial opportunities you desire.
•  You have plateaued in your company with no obvious next step available to you that will move you forward on the career path you desire.
•  Having defined your personal values, you realize they do not match those of your employer.
•   You do not have the flexibility in your current position that will enable you to achieve a greater work-life balance.
•  You would like to like to serve on a board of directors with another company or take a leadership role in an industry organization in order to broaden your impact.

Resolving these situations requires bringing about significant change. Your ability to make the necessary change is usually rooted in two things: perceptions and relationships. Many people think their own perception of who they are matches the way other people see them. It is remarkable how wrong this usually is. And more important, when it comes to making the change you desire happen, it is often the perception by others that matters more than your own perception of yourself. Therefore it is a good exercise to get a better understanding of how other people view you before you lock in on the things you want to change in your life. It might be that it is not you who has to change, but rather the perceptions other people have of you.

That change has much to do with perceptions and relationships can be seen in the cases of two innovation leaders who approached me for help in making change happen for them as they look for new external career development opportunities:

Our first person, let’s call him Peter, is about 50 years old and has spent 17 years in the same company having considerable leadership responsibility. He was seeking new opportunities as the situation with his current company was quite turbulent due to ownership issues. We started a process in which Peter identified his main areas of professional interests (skills, functions and type of companies), his goals for personal development, and his aspirations for a better work/life balance. The next step was to look into his perception balance (own perception versus others perception) and then to look into our combined relationships with regards to a short list of five to ten companies that could be of interest to him.

The other person, let’s call him Simon, is getting close to retirement. He has been with one company for the past 25 years and has seen it grow from a garage to a big business. He has been in charge of business development and is now looking for ways to use his experience by serving as on the boards of growth companies. The main challenge he approached me with was that he did not know how to activate his network. To some extent he hoped people would approach him, which did not happen. Chasing this opportunity required repeated action and persistence from Simon. Unfortunately, we did not get much result as it is difficult to get interesting board of director positions especially in times with financial turmoil.

Neither Peter nor Simon had given much thought to their perception balance–how well their self-perception matches how others view them. Thus, they were unaware of any perceptions by others that might interfere with their ability to achieve their goals. Yet given their ages, they each might well face age discrimination as they try to move toward their new goals despite their personal self-images as men with much to offer. This is just one example of how personal perceptions might differ from those of the people whose help they’re going to need in bringing about change. In addition, neither of them has worked on building and staying connected with his network in a strategic, i.e. goal and action oriented, way. They are not as connected as they thought they were.

You too need to consider your perception balance as well. Take a hard look at yourself and ask yourself whether there are people or incidents that can confirm the image you have of yourself. In my next post, I will give you some ideas on how to bring about change.

Know your values and live by them

by Stefan Lindegaard

I am puzzled that so few people can describe the values that guide their daily actions. Think about it. These are the fundamentals that help you become successful as an innovation leader or intrapreneur as well as in personal life. No doubt some of you have spent time helping your company define its core values, which, if followed, will drive the organization toward success. Doesn’t it make sense to also define the core values that will also impel you to success? I want you to think more about this and start working on developing a better understanding of your values.

We all have values, whether we are consciously aware of them or not. Values are traits, qualities or beliefs that we find valuable. Personal values are also implicitly related to choice; they guide your decisions by allowing you to compare the associated value of each choice.

I find this useful in this world of ours where we often seem to be condemned, rather than blessed, by choices. This is perhaps particularly true for people working in the field of innovation, which can be likened to the candy store of the corporation. With so many exciting and appetizing choices in front of you, how will you know what to choose if you aren’t prepared to make values-based decisions?

Let me share my personal values with you. They are passion, trustworthiness, integrity and the willingness to help others. I need to be passionate about what I am doing as I believe this is the only way to become very good at what I am doing and to continuously enjoy what I do over the years. Passion makes things so much easier as you become more engaged and effective when you do things you really love to do. Hopefully, these things also have a financial potential. I really try to find the passion in whatever I do.

Trustworthiness is important to me as I want to build relationships with people whom I can trust and have them trust me. Of course, this is a two-way function that is often forgotten by some people. In the long run, people who aren’t trustworthy do not achieve success in either their business or personal lives.

Integrity is hard to describe and yet quite simple. The dictionary’s primary definition for integrity is the quality of possessing and steadfastly adhering to high moral principles or professional standards. But two secondary definitions are also informative: Integrity is the state of being complete or undivided and or the state of being sound or undamaged. Taken as a whole, these three definitions indicate that if we act with integrity, we will be whole and sound.

How does one put this into action? This is where I use my stomach and gut. If I really try to feel something, then I know what the right answer is or what the right thing to do is. Does a given thing feel right in my stomach? Can I feel the passion in myself and among the other people involved? Is there a strong element of trust involved? If not, I walk away. Intuition, which is interconnected with integrity, can be trained so try to trust your intuition more often. Integrity comes when you are committed to follow this gut feeling. Not just once in a while and not always (no one is perfect) but very close to always. I believe integrity has become necessary to survive in a world that is becoming so small while presenting more options than ever.

The willingness to help and be there for others is a double-edged sword for me. I live this value out to a very high extent in my business life. I always try to help others without expecting anything in return. I have learned this works well in the long run, and it cannot be separated from my networking mindset. In my personal life this is more complicated. I know I can give more to people in my close circle but sometimes I just don’t. Perhaps I feel more comfortable with my family and friends so I do not have to make the same effort. Perhaps I have used all my mental capacity for this value at work. I sense this is a mistake, and I am working to correct this.

I believe you can only be successful in the long run if you know your values and if you know what really matters to you. Furthermore, you need to live in a way that is consistent with your values. By sharing my values, I hope I can inspire you to start thinking about your own values.

Outliers, the new book by Malcolm Gladwell

by Stefan Lindegaard

Outliers, the new book by Malcolm Gladwell is worth a read if you want to now more about success and what makes people successful.

I did loose some interest in the last chapters as they focused too much on math – not my favourite topic. But still an interesting and quick read in the same page-turner style as his previous best-sellers, The Tipping Point and Blink.

You can read more on this link: www.malcolmgladwell.com