by Liisa Pursiheimo-Marcks

When you are setting a long term career vision for yourself, you first need to determine if you really want to manage people. Working through people is exhilarating for some, dreadful for others. You have to love this aspect of your work to be truly successful on the management ladder. Otherwise, you may want to choose an expert ladder, which may be more rewarding for those who aspire for high achievement in their area of expertise.

There are critical milestones of development as you climb the management ladder. The ladder starts from informal team leader position to managing direct reports. The next step is a functional leadership position leading managers of managers, leading to a group or business leader who oversees multiple functions and P&L. Few will reach the level of enterprise leader whose role is to manage investor and shareholder relations in addition to the company direction. In each milestone, the expected competencies and focus of the role change. In small businesses, these boundaries get blurred.

You may not realize that the ladder starts before you even have direct reports. Team leadership without direct authority over the team members is a great primer for future leaders. As an informal team leader, you learn the basics of goal setting, providing direction and holding people accountable without position power. If you can be successful in this role, there is a lot of promise for a formal management role.

Managers of teams tend to earn their credibility based on their technical and functional expertise. You need to understand the overall business, and manage to budget. As you progress to a functional leader level, the focus turns to processes and best practices. Here, interrelations with other functions start weighing more, and deep understanding of how your function can contribute to business results is required. You may even get P&L responsibility, depending on which function you oversee. At group/business leader level, business acumen is critical, and you must develop a good overall understanding of all the functions, as they now all report to you.

The people management side evolves as well. When you manage a team of direct reports, you will be more hands-on. You will be setting goals, communicating expectations, giving frequent informal feedback, coaching and showing how to do new tasks. As a manager of managers, you will still do this with your direct staff, but probably less hands-on. Instead, you will use teachable moments for coaching, and expect your staff to use sound performance management practices with their teams. Your focus shifts to providing direction, securing resources, removing obstacles and celebrating successes. Climbing higher to a business leader position, you now start thinking longer term about the talent in your business. Your focus should be instilling a high performance culture and the core values throughout the company. You must ensure consistent talent management processes to bring in and retain the best talent. With your staff, you start thinking about succession planning and stretch assignments.

As you ascend the ladder, you must also realize that you become an increasingly visible role model for your employees, and eventually to the external community. Everything you say or do will be perceived by the workforce and society as a reflection of the values of your organization. Part of the learning process for the leader is to embrace this responsibility.

The first step is to set the goal; the next is to start planning a way to get there. How will you accumulate experience through assignments and projects, coaching, mentoring and training to achieve the necessary skills that will earn you enough credibility to jump to the next milestone on your ladder?
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Copyright 2010 Liisa Pursiheimo-Marcks, all rights reserved.

With fifteen years of experience in international business, training and organizational development, Liisa Pursiheimo-Marcks, the principal of Forte Consulting www.forteconsulting.biz , is passionate about creating sustainable change in behaviors, skills and performance. Liisa has led numerous organizational change initiatives and was in charge of the succession planning and professional development of a Global Sales and Marketing function of over 1000 employees worldwide.