This is one of my favorite topics in the business world, and it can be applied in your personal life as well. I’ve been asked many times in my career to point out one of the most important characteristics that help people get promoted and advance through an organization. Aside from the obvious answers in terms of job knowledge and application and other technical aspects, one of the elements that always comes to mind first is Initiative. In my view this is one of hte most important characteristics of leaders, managers, and anyone who wants to get promoted in an organization. It can also apply to company decisions. I’ll give a couple of examples.
If you are reading this blog, then you probably already read my nine Operating Principles. By my count, Initiative can play a roll in at least seven of the nine principles. I’ll address many of those in my examples that follow. First, in my blog about Turning Complaints into Actions, I gave an example of very early in my career where I participated in a “Tiger Team” that was a volunteer initiative to determine ways to reduce development time of a diagnostic product. Our team was frustrated with the long development cycles that ultimately meant market share erosion, so we took the Initiative to make a difference.
After I left that large diagnostic company and moved to the small company in Georgia, I routinely took the initiative in many areas. My title when I started was Manager of R&D, QA, and Regulatory Affairs – but that did not define everything I did. In the first couple of years there, probably 80% of our revenue came from two customers, one of which was my former employer and the second was one of their largest competitors. We were such a small company that we didn’t have account managers, but rather the operational managers in the company would manage the customer relations. The principle manager for the 2nd customer was our VP of Operations. Over the first year or so I noticed that the relationship between our VP of Operations and our customer’s primary point of contact was getting strained and confrontational. I also had a business relationship with the customer point person. Seeing the conflict, I took the Initiative to expand my working relationship with him and got to know him better and within a short period of time I basically took over the relationship management of the day to day business. I didn’t WAIT for something to happen or for someone to tell me to do it, I just did it because it needed to be done and nobody else was stepping up to solve the problem. Of course after I started the initiative, I told my boss, the CEO of the company what I was doing. He was seeing the results and thanked me for stepping in and up. I found out a few years later that my initiative actually saved the business with that customer, which was at least 35% of our revenue at the time. My contact said he had become so frustrated with our V.P. of Operations that he was gearing up to move the entire book of business to a competitor. He said that my stepping in made the difference and he decided to leave the business with us. We ended up expanding our relationship with that company in the following years. That Initiative may well have saved our company, or at the very least saved a lot of jobs. So this example of Initiative typifies Turn Complaints into Actions, WAIT is a 4-Letter Word, Do the Right Thing, and a few other of the principles. When people ask me how I got promoted so many times early in my career, I point to examples of Initiative and how critical it is to job advancement in my view, and I give this example and more.
I was reminded of another example of Initiative by a friend and former colleague named Rick. He and I worked together for about 20 years at two different companies. He’s one of the best engineers and engineering managers that anyone could have the privilege of working with. He reminded me about a project we had at the same company I just wrote about, but was after I became President. We were contracted by a company in Germany who was a very minor player in the blood glucose monitoring field, but they wanted to invest in a new project that they hoped would catapult them into the market in a big way. They had this concept of a combination glucose meter and a 10 lancet cartridge/lancing device the size of a large watch. It was a bold idea at the time (This was around 2003 or 2004) and they contracted with our team to make the 10 lancet disk and with a very large, well-known Japanese watch maker to make the inner workings of the miniaturized lancing device. We had experience working with teams in Japan and Germany, so the project started well. The Japanese team from the watch company had difficulty miniaturizing the device and also was not making deadlines. It was at about this time when it was suggested (By either Rick or or Director Michael, or both) that we take the Initiative on our own dime to take on the design process that the Japanese company was contracted for – but not delivering. I thought it was a great idea and the team got to work on the concepts. If they hadn’t suggested this, I am sure the project would have died an early death. Instead, because of this Initiative, we formally took over the project and delivered a functional working prototype a short time later. Unfortunately because of corporate priorities of the customer, they decided to discontinue the project before we were able to commercialize it. We ended u purchasing the intellectual property and developed our own product. This was a great example of taking the Initiative and a calculated risk that paid off.
This brings me back to my earlier point about Initiative being a critical performance element for successfully navigating the path to promotion. It is one of the elements that is frequently missed by people who think they should have been promoted but were not – and in many cases don’t understand why someone else was picked ahead of them. They may have the necessary technical skills to support a promotion, but if they are lacking sufficient Initiative, many people will be passed over for promotion – especially in a high performance organization. In my experience, there are always opportunities to take the initiative with something. It could be directly related to your job, or it could be in an area of the company where something needs to be done but it doesn’t fall squarely into someone’s responsibilities. Or it could be in some type of extracurricular activity for employees or some learning or team building activities. Take the initiative – make something happen!
I have a pizza recipe you guys got to try especially if you have kids. I eat it all the time and its soooo good. Buy regular size flour tortillas. Put a little olive oil on the tortilla (you probably dont need it) and put into microwave for a minute and thirty seconds. Flip the tortilla every 30 seconds. When its done it will be crispy or crispy after you wait a minute or so. Then put some pizza sauce on it, you can buy some at the store thats in a squeeze bottle like we have and reuse later. Throw some pepperonis on there which you can also buy packages at store that are reseable. Then throw some shredded cheeze on top. Put back in microwave for a minute. All this is quick and easy to make, great for kids. Its my favorite. I put different things on it sometimes like jalepenos, pork, chick, sausge or anthing else thats easy to grab and throw on real quick. Tonight we are cooking tamales. We crush up a bag of dorritos into a fine powder, put together a bunch of meat and then put the dorrito powder around the meat. Its also so good.
Thats all I got for now!