How to Get Noticed, Impress Your Boss, and Become A Top Leader
Jun 21, 2018Book #8: The High Potential’s Advantage by Jay A. Conger & Allan H. Church
❤ Book #8 review from my 50 Books 2018 Challenge!
❤ You can read about my initial challenge progress, and check out all the books I’m reading this year here. I got off track, but I’m back at it now!
The High Potential’s Advantage
Get Noticed, Impress Your Bosses, and Become A Top Leader, by Jay A. Conger & Allan H. Church
This book made my career loving heart skip a beat.
If you want to kick ass at work, make more money, and accelerate your career, then this is your book.
Conger and Church’s goal in this book is to help you become an influential icon in your organization and ultimately to build a great career.
No matter your career path or industry, you will find this book a priceless tool and reference!
As a mentor, I often get asked how one can become a rock star at work, make their boss love them, and accelerate their career and salary. The High Potential’s Advantage covers every secret you need to know to do accomplish these things.
This book answers what it means to be a High Potential, how it could benefit you, and the steps to how you can become one.
Consistency is key. I had the opportunity to interview one of the authors, Jay Conger, asked him what is one thing a high potential should be doing every single day to transform into a top leader.
Jay’s advice to you is:
“If there is one thing to focus on doing every single day, it would be showing extraordinary initiative… in terms of tackling pressing problems or important emerging opportunities.
Ideally these would be high on your boss’s and your organization’s agenda but ones to which no one is fully dedicated… in other words, they are no one’s existing job.
You will learn deeply from these experiences while at the same time receiving great visibility.”
I found the book easy to read and I liked how they broke things down within the chapters so it was easy to comprehend and apply it to my life.
Conger and Church interviewed over a hundred leaders, along with dozens of senior HR officers and share the five critical skills that differentiate high potentials from everyone else:
- Situation sensing
- Talent accelerating
- Career piloting
- Complexity translating
- Catalytic learning
You will examine in great depth each of the five X factors and how you can develop that skill and succeed.
Knowing what you need to know in itself can help put you ahead of the game, and this is definitely insider management knowledge you can use to your advantage!
I asked Jay Conger about the the five X factors, and which one he thought was the most overlooked in career building today:
“Of the five, I would have to say that complexity translating is the most under appreciated and overlooked.
In part, this is because in your early career you impress people because of your command of an expertise… ’how much you know’.
By mid-management, you impress people by how well you can start to translate all that complexity… to simplify it in meaning ways for different audiences.
There are few executives who are world class at this skill, and so it is a skill where good mentors are rare.”
The case studies and real life examples they have highlighted through the entire book really help to drive each point home. They also include summary lessons at the end of each chapter to ensure you have complete understanding to succeed.
I also enjoyed The High Potential’s Advantage from a manager’s perspective in assessing my organization, reviewing and promoting talent, and how to best work with super star employees and those who want to get there.
I recommend this book to anyone looking to kick ass and accelerate their career. If you can read this in college or while you’re entry level — you’ll be way ahead of the game. (Great graduation present idea!)
For those just starting out in their careers, I asked Conger his thoughts on the pros/cons of job hopping every year or so, versus staying at one company for three+ years:
“I am generally against job hopping every year.
It takes several years to build up a network of relationships at work as well as building your own credibility as a leader.
If you are moving from job to job, organization to organization, you lose out on these assets.
You have the added dilemma of navigating new cultures with each job hop… as you enter a new organization, you have to learn and master the cultural rules of leading.
So rather than job hop, it is wiser and more effective to really do your homework in finding both the job and the organization that will allow you to really flourish.”
Regardless of where you’re at in your career, if you want to get to the next next level, The High Potential’s Advantage has all the strategies and secrets you need to know.
Disclosure: This book link is an affiliate link, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase.
I received this book from Harvard Business Review Press. The opinions I have expressed are unfiltered and my own.
