Building a Career in Stage-4
The full combination of abilities, attitudes and values that you will have developed from principles acquired in the , power-, and community-centred Stages, combined with your hands-on experience, puts you in a strong position to manage and lead effectively.
You may choose to settle at this Stage and advance your career to the limit of your ambition and capability. It depends in part on what you discover about your own . If you are not sure, review them (again) now
If Primarily & Secondarily Community-centred
If you enjoy putting your stamp on a group, while finding it natural to relate to the range of disparate capable experts who constitute it, then by all means stop at this Stage.
You will find yourself striving for a positive productive culture in which morale is high and people are treated well. Good people will be attracted to your company/business and, all other things being equal, solid achievement for the organization is likely.
By looking across disciplines and departments, you will find yourself developing a : one built around the organization as a whole. Read more.
Possible Career ProgressionChairing and coordinating project teams
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Heading a big function with sub-specialities (e.g. marketing),
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Entering general management
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Chief executive role.
Management Approach and Roles
To work effectively with diverse groups, you must become comfortable with tendentious issues and factionalization. Handling matters requires dialectical decision skills like:
● Clarifying sectional assumptions
● Structuring debates
● Reconciling differences
● Arbitrating disputes
● Working out compromises or pay-offs
If you found staff roles and coordinating authority more gratifying than main line-managerial authority, it may be because there are inherent contradictions between power-centred and community-centred values. (More on authority & power.) However, general management absolutely requires you to delegate, appraise, confront sub-standard performance and exert pressure for results.
Alternative Mentality Combinations
There are many factors that can affect choice of work. Here we focus on the interactional element in choice: a factor that is often dominant, but not necessarily so.
If you are primarily community-centred and secondarily :
If you are primarily community-centred and :
If you are primarily and secondarily community-centred:
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This Stage is a watershed in career development because it generates a more sophisticated way to be market-centred, and sets the scene for the 2nd Cycle of maturation.
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All second cycle transitions focus on this Stage.
Originally posted: July 2009