Accelerating Your Development as a Leader: A Guide for Leaders and Their Managers

Keep the Big Picture in Mind

In coaching high-performing leaders on selecting career targets, one of the most common mistakes that I encounter is the tendency for clients to become obsessively concerned with short-term and relatively trivial concerns, such as position title or how much of a compensation increase would accompany a given move. If you are serious about your career and feel that you have the ability to go far in your organization, then you need to be thinking in terms of where you'd ideally like to be five to ten years down the path. Only after you have this long-term target in mind should you consider moving backward to identify short-term moves that support this long-term goal.

To an outsider these moves may, at first, seem counterintuitive ...