Be your own career counselor. What aspects of your personality or background do you believe present the greatest obstacles to achieve those career goals? What is your strategy
for overcoming these obstacles?
The greatest obstacles that I will have to overcome to reach my career goals concern the management of personnel and the difficulties of balancing micro-management and the company’s overall strategy. To be a successful business leader, you must be able to manage your employees and coordinate business strategies. Although I have some people management experience from my work with Hewlett-Packard, and I am currently leading a business team of twenty employees with AsiaEC.com, at times I still feel somewhat frustrated when I am confronted with certain difficult decisions concerning people management issues. Here are some specific illustrations of the obstacles that I must overcome to become a successful business leader:
One area of difficulty for me is the issue of how to lead a senior employee who has more professional experience and is well learned within his or her specific product line or business area, especially when his or her opinion is different than mine. I encountered this situation after I joined my current position as business director of AsiaEC.com. As the business director, I am responsible for the business development of Office Automation (OA) equipment, such as copiers, overhead projectors, etc., Information Technology (IT) and machine consumables. Before I joined the company, a senior product manager with a professional background in the OA equipment business had handled this position for almost one year. Quite frankly, I was not familiar with the OA business when I took the position. The distribution channels, purchasing practices and post-sales service models of OA equipment are quite different from the machine consumables and IT products that I was used to dealing with. Now this former manager reports to me. Our ideas of the direction of the business are not the same and this has caused some conflict between us. His experience in the OA business has given him the confidence to question my ideas on the direction of the business, even though the business was not going well and could not meet the target demanded by the company. There was much pressure on me to correct the situation and I realized that we would have to change and come up with a different strategy than we had previously followed. But without the cooperation of my team members, I realize that it will be impossible to implement the business plan smoothly and reach our business goals. The challenge will be for me to gain his confidence and support by listening to his opinions but also persuading him that my decisions are what are best for the company.
Additionally, I need to become better at structuring the overall business strategy while also paying attention to the smaller, day-to-day aspects of micro-management. Of course a business leader must put a high priority on the development of strategy, but handling the smaller details is also critical for success. Without being involved personally in the basic matters that your team or organization is dealing with, it is difficult to attain direct information about the market or customer. Also, if you are not involved in the details of the process, it is difficult to make sure that you have high quality output. A professional manager must spend considerable time learning how your team members work on the different elements of a project, understanding their specific problems, and leading them with your specific knowledge and professional experiences to resolve the key issues together.
In my case, I often find that I am involved too much with micro-management and become frustrated with the lack of an overall business strategy. In our company, the system and process are not mature and many of the employees lack proper training, so I find that I have to spend too much time fine-tuning the process and directing the staff in dealing with some detail problems. The difficulty in balancing my time properly between these two aspects is a challenge for me in my future career.
Obviously, to become the best business leader that I can be, I will need to overcome these challenges. First of all, I believe that a positive attitude is a great step toward overcoming any problems. I have maintained my positive outlook throughout my career and I have found that it has been a valuable asset for overcoming most difficulties. I also believe that taking a proactive approach rather than a reactive approach will not only bring an individual more opportunities, but also prevents small problems from becoming bigger problems. My philosophy towards overcoming these obstacles will be to combine a positive attitude and a proactive approach towards my education in your elite MBA program.
Secondly, I believe that learning from experienced people is better than just studying knowledge of professionals from a textbook. I believe that your MBA program will provide me with the best environment to learn from my professors and classmates with their varied and unique backgrounds. I can learn from them about the different methods that they have used to solve personnel management problems similar to mine. The management of senior and more experienced personnel is a difficult challenge that I am sure many others in the MBA program will have addressed at some time during their careers.
Finally, through extensive study, interaction with my classmates and professors, and contact with other management professionals, I believe that I can learn how to manage my time more efficiently. Time management skills will give me the ability to balance the preparation of an overall business strategy with the management of the small details of running a business.