The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Get Immediate Results, Second Edition

Chapter 1. Position Yourself for a New Leadership Role or Promotion

There are two dimensions to activating your leadership potential. The first is understanding and declaring your own leadership qualities and capacities. The second is interacting effectively with others in such a way that it becomes part of an organization's or a market's perception of you. Know yourself, and then help others know you. We have mapped out concrete steps you can take to position yourself for leadership roles and promotions.

Begin with the first dimension—know and declare yourself a leader. The "declaring" part is important since this is what best enables you to commit to your career path. Start by declaring this to yourself. Commit yourself. Your commitments become more real, however, when you share them with others. Select a listener or buddy or two and declare your intentions and your commitments to them. They are suddenly that much more real.

Next, build a career plan. Great leaders are not made in a day. Leadership is built. We have developed a tool called the Five-Step Career Plan that can help you know yourself professionally, stake out your career path, and set yourself in motion.

The Five-Step Career Plan

This tool provides a quick and effective way to help you understand what makes you tick professionally and design a career trajectory for yourself. Use it to learn your strengths, values, and interests, ...