Stage-3: Commit to a Path

Applying Cause-centred Principles

You can now contemplate achieving things that could benefit any employer. But what? It must surely be something that strongly interests you, and at the same time will shape and forward your career. To this point, expertise and competence have been based on your training, intrinsic to your job, or gained by working on a special task. To move beyond holding down a secure job, you must actively develop yourself.

The needed principles and dangers are described in detail here. However, the Cause-centred story in a nutshell is as follows:

Difficult tasks often need more than dogged efforts, pragmatic fixes, procedural solutions, and banging heads together. Innovative change and persistent problems in specific areas of work often require a mix of:

  • Expert knowledge
  • Clear direction
  • Commitment
  • Enthusiasm.

The time has come for you to stand out from the crowd and provide such qualities: even if it will close off other options and will alter the way that others see you. Any challenge is really a special sort of opportunity and, like all opportunities, it carries risk. The way to minimize the risk of failure is to recall that crucial productivity principle: focus via specialization.

Something is Still Not Right

Developing specialist expertise and rising to challenges lets you stand out safely. As you get used to taking a lead, you increasingly notice and become distressed by time-wasting and failures that are due to:

ClosedBoundary disputes

ClosedUnpleasant &/or unproductive behaviour

ClosedPoor team work

If you hear an inner voice repeatedly asking: “why are we all here if it is not to achieve for the division (or firm)?”, then you know that your career development depends on your being able to provide a solution. Guidance here is naturally provided by principles derived from the community-centred mode.

Originally posted: July 2009