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- Significant numbers of high potential executives' successful career paths seems to suddenly take a wrong turn.
- There is a common pattern - typically concerning people who have been very successful in their early career through a combination of drive, intellect and functional expertise.
- Then they get to a position where that is not enough - usually at the career point where they move from managing a function to managing a business.
- If the individual concerned lacks people skills, it can occur earlier, i.e. at the change-over from managing individual specialists to managing managers.
- Above a certain level, managers need intellectual breadth more than technical brilliance.
- They need to demonstrate political acumen, people skills and motivational leadership more than the abilities to do things themselves or drive others to do them.
- Derailment happens to executives who do not make the mental transition and continue to rely on relatively narrow functional skills combined with a self-confident assumption that their intelligence and energy will enable them to resolve new issues more quickly and effectively than their less able colleagues.
- Instead of learning to adapt to the very different requirements of a new role, they try to adapt the new reality to their way.
- At worst, such people appear arrogant, taking any challenges to their way of managing things as stupidity or insubordination.
- Instead of them "Letting Go" of the past, the present lets go of them.
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