The article in CFO is titled: “The Next Stage.” It gets a little bit right and a lot wrong. Here’s the teaser quote.

“Want to ascend to a true leadership role? Be prepared to let go of what you’re good at.”

The part that’s right is that personal growth demands leaving your comfort zone. It demands that you move to positions and try things that you’ve never tried before. It demands that you master new knowledge and new skills.

While that’s all good, it’s not the whole story. Here are some more things to think about.

Leadership isn’t the only career path. Last week I blogged here about “The Boss Trap.” The fact is that leadership is a bad choice for a lot of people. And the fact also is that many people who could be leaders choose something else.

We’ve learned that there isn’t just one way to have a successful career. The path that CFO calls leadership, we call “Manager.” Other career paths are the Specialist, the Entrepreneur, and the Generalist/Project Manager.

Successful career development is about building on your strengths and doing work that you enjoy. And it isn’t one long development cycle in the same place either.

Careers are a series of stages. You will feel like you’ve mastered your work at several points in your career. That will be OK for a while, but then you’ll start seeking something new. When you find it, there will be a period of learning.

Most 21st Century careers are going to be made up of several jobs, and perhaps even several career changes. Most of us will have more than one employer before we’re done, too.

Leadership isn’t the only path to success. You need to select the path that’s best for you. Then plan on having several stops along the way.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 6:46 am and is filed under Career Paths, Career Stages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.