ExecutiveDevelopmentBlog

Over the last fifteen years I have been interested in developing a better understanding of the things that develop better leaders.  While there are plenty of  insightful perspectives about the characteristics of great leaders, I find there is generally less insight out there regarding how to develop great leaders.  Sure, leadership development programs can teach critical perspectives to up and coming leaders and help them to grasp business concepts that are essential for their further growth. In my role as Assistant Dean of Executive Education, I regularly work with organizations to create these programs, and I see the first hand results that prove they are an important tool for developing leaders.

Yet, when you talk to most business leaders, the general sense is that that is only one small part of the picture. People actually learn much more from experience (e.g., 70-20-10…).  While that is an important starting point, that is not, in itself, very helpful.  Which experiences? How can I recognize them? When should I seek them? What am I supposed to learn from them?  etc., etc., etc… This insight raises far more questions than it answers.

These are the questions that I have spent the last 15 years exploring.  By poring over the literature and conducting several studies myself as a consultant, where I interviewed over a hundred successful leaders, I have explored the question–”what are the most developmental experiences in the career histories of successful executives?”  While that research has yielded some very valuable insights and development resources, I recently revisited my research and had a more significant insight.  I can boil down the 40-50 key work experiences that I uncovered in my research into a much simpler set of experience categories: Delivering, Mastering, Broadening, and Frame-Breaking. 

It turns out that most rhetoric in organizations focuses on the category that I refer to as “Frame-Breaking Career Moves,” while most of what organizations actually do is push “Delivering” experiences.   

What are Frame Breaking Career Moves™?
Simply put, Frame-Breaking Career Moves™ are assignments, roles or jobs that provide an opportunity to dramatically develop or advance your career. They are unique opportunities that allow you to catapult yourself forward by learning new skills and new ways of thinking. At the same time these special opportunities allow you to accomplish something that will cause others to take notice. You can think of Frame-Breaking Career Moves™ as combining two types of on-the-job challenge: Intensity and Stretch.

Intensity describes the extent to which work demands the most of you. When you are put into an assignment that pushes you to develop new skills and think differently, success demands that you be fully engaged and in a high learning mode.

Stretch describes the extent to which work pushes you outside your area of expertise. For example, ask an IT manager to participate in a sales call that would be routine for a sales professional, and he or she is likely to feel outside of their comfort zone.

If we combine these two dimensions together, we create a

Copyright 2011, Mark Kizilos. All rights reserved.

useful framework for looking at our jobs, careers, and personal development. We can use this framework as a tool to explore four broad types of career experiences: Delivering, Mastering, Broadening, and Frame-Breaking.

Frame-Breaking Career Moves™ push on both Intensity and Stretch dimensions simultaneously – they involve high levels of challenge; success requires one to develop new skills and perspectives in areas where prior experience does not apply. As such, Frame-Breaking experiences are rich learning opportunities. But, spotting them in advance isn’t always easy, learning from them isn’t guaranteed, and failure is a distinct possibility.  The inherent riskiness of these moves makes most organizations reluctant to use them.  Which is why I find it interesting that organizations often talk about developing people through “stretch experiences” (by which they mean Frame-Breaking Career Moves) yet they do everything they can to avoid using these experiences, instead preferring to keep people in a Delivering mode.

Frame-Breaking Leadership Development

On September 21, I will be teaching a four-hour seminar at the Carlson School of Management to help people learn from all four types of experience, especially Frame-Breaking opportunities.  The program will focus on understanding the basic dynamics of on-the-job learning opportunities, and developing the ability to learn more effectively from the full spectrum of experiences. The program will also engage participants in thinking about their own experience with a learning lens by providing participants with the tools needed to create their own  Learning Resume™, as well as an experience-based development plan.

If you are interested, you can find additional details and sign up here: http://www.carlsonschool.umn.edu/executive-education/frame-breaking-leadership-development.html

Filed under: Executive Education, Frame-Breaking development