Competencies required to be successful as you move up the ladder

• Comfort around Top Management

You need the support of the Top Management and your peers to be successful. You need to work as a team to build a successful enterprise. If you are not comfortable working with the Top Management team (superiors, peers), you are unlikely to succeed. Hence its very important that you maintain a very good working relationship & understanding with the Top Management to succeed. If you aren’t, you are most likely to fail.

• Managing Boss

It is a reality that “you cant choose your boss, your boss can choose you”. We have no other choice and hence we need to find a way out to manage with the Boss. Cribbing about the boss is not going to take us anywhere. We need to understand his style, his expectations, his behaviours and also his idiosyncrasies and adapt ourselves, failing which there will always be strains in our relationship and gaps between expectations & delivery.

• Business Acumen

No organization is built for charity and no one works for charity. There are tremendous pressures to deliver profits and maximize return on investment. Hence it is important that we understand our business, the competition, the market, the future, our products, our customers, our strengths, challenges, our people to be able to relate to their dynamic needs and build business strategies. Otherwise we would be operating in a vacuum akin to the “frog in the well” and likely to be consumed by the looming disaster.

• Managing ambiguity & change

In todays world, the only thing constant is Change. The world is dynamic and is changing at a rapid pace day by day. Hence we need to learn to manage in a dynamic environment, live with ambiguities and cope up with change. We need to be flexible and adaptive and be able to drive business through these changing environment.

• Decision Making

It is often said that Executives are hired to make decisions. Hence it is very important that Top Executives take decisions as quickly as possible rather than procrastinate for that perfect decision. The competition is fast changing and we need to be in a position to take quick decisions and move faster than our competitors.