Contact us: 0775 605 3412

Are you fitting the puzzle?

Our MBA Winner newsletter for this quarter examines one of the more fascinating issues that you are going to consider as an MBA student and this is whether you actually fit the puzzle!

Organizations constitute complex social systems whose effective or ineffective performance is dependent on the individual contribution their members make.

What the organization can do is ultimately depended on what the individual members can do!

Economic austerity measures have exerted considerable effect onto how organizations take more time to identify those individuals that demonstrate a positive contribution towards their goals. Why is this? Simply, because the clock is ticking against them! By having a greater exposure to financial risks through previously made investments it is now questionable whether such investments can generate even marginal profits. Moreover, there is considerable discussion about a new credit crunch which is looming in 2016 and for which there is no much publicity. Yet if you read carefully between the lines you will see that the storm is gradually coming closer.

Austerity has helped generate a new level of refinement in organizations because old routines are now challenged.

Managers are looking for a new level of resilience in people. Employees are also looking for managers that do not longer use a ‘command and control’ approach to their management style. Instead, employees are looking for those managers who are truly able to inspire others about how to think differently and how to become self-motivated without demanding EVERYTHING!
Trust is becoming scarcer as a resource and people become more reserved in themselves and more protective of their own achievements.

The development of a culture that favoured a causal ‘effort-reward’ relationship has also started to backfire, yes, badly!

People have been accustomed to think only in terms of what return they can get from being committed to the organization.

Extra attention on resource utilisation is clearly driven not only by the need to make smarter use of resources, but also, by the need to foster a greater level of innovation in the firm. However, instilling a spirit of innovation remains equally challenging because of the already existing emotional pressures that people are already having.

Making improvements on how things can get done better really matters but it is difficult to find the people that can actually deliver it!

Demonstrating that YOU have the capacity to bring an innovative course of change can make the different to your career progression in the long term.

What is the ‘puzzle’ after all?

The ‘puzzle’ is the deep recognition that organizations become more and more of complex as social systems. People have similar skills and competencies and similar access to information resources. Demonstrating the capacity to generate a greater level of output, than your immediate colleagues, becomes harder. Unless you understand this idea early enough you will spend a long time hovering over the organization without actually progressing in your own career.

Demonstrating your individual contribution to what your team, department, and ultimately organization does, is about crafting your input in a way that is easily recognisable by others. Of course this is easier said than done. Why? Because of the already existing and powerful internal politics in the organization!

People might recognise that you are better than them but they will not make it easy for you to go all the way.

Peoples’ behaviours are governed by powerful personal interests and the creation of close alliances becomes a coping mechanism for regulating the satisfaction of their own interests.

Is there a way out of all this havoc?!!

The only way ‘out’ of this uncomfortable impasse is by adding two magical words to your MBA diary and your career development alphabet… these are, (a) Capacity and (b) Impact.

 

Capacity

Your capacity is your reservoir of capabilities which can be either sleeping in you or actioned by you. The development of capacity is not about achieving results but it is first about understanding yourself. In other words, our capacity is our aptitude to achieve a potential outcome provided that certain conditions (about ourselves and others) are in place.

The greatest enemy is uncertainty and how unforeseen obstacles can challenge the direction you have taken. You might not believe in yourself in the same way after you encountered an incident that caused you severe disappointment. Hence, developing your capacity begins by becoming explicit about your own strengths and weaknesses and spending painstaking time refining how these could be interpreted by others and in different situations.

Ultimately, the development of capacity depends on your motivation for developing those key aspects within yourself which you have not earnestly visited, self-reflected, stressed out, and eventually developed through step-to-step resolution strategy.

Impact

Creating impact is making a contribution to a social setting which can be recognised by others. If other people cannot see your impact then you are running the risk of being perceived as if you have not made one. The development of an effective impact strategy begins by understanding how outcomes matter to people and how actions will be interpreted differently by people that have different interests.

Your goal should be to document your impact as a series of events/outcomes that can be recognisable by others. You need to develop some type of narrative about the organizational setting in which you were able to demonstrate your impact to others. Such exercise requires you to view a situation from different angles. You need to try and visualise how specific incidents could be interpreted differently. This will help you immensely with developing the appropriate language skills by which to communicate your incidents to others. However, in order to do this you first need to distance yourself from what you have done so that you can concentrate on developing a repertoire of who you are and what you can do. This is your own ‘story’ which is now part of your own intellectual property and which you need to carefully safeguard, nurture and communicate to others.

MBA Winner

Our MBA Winner consultants are experts on Human Resource Management and collectively contributed to the development of this newsletter by giving succinct and personalised advice to you.
We consider our daily MBA student communicative interaction as an important opportunity for understanding the various stressors that often prevent MBA students from realising their career potential.

If you are worrying about your MBA studies or looking for better developing yourself through your MBA programme then talk to us and we will help you develop a strategy that will allow you to best utilise your own learning opportunities.

 

Comments are closed.