In today’s changing world, one priority is responsibility, equally true for self as for others. It’s time for CEOs and emerging leaders to take responsibility for their own growth, ensuring greater or realigned readiness to cope with change.  Are you, as a leader,  still hoping your organisation will magically deem you to be the one in whom they’ll invest?

With learning and evolution coming in many shapes and forms, what will you be consciously integrating into your life to ensure daily, monthly and annual corporate and personal growth for yourself, in terms other than financial.  Here are three tips to give you a basis for comparison:

• When interviewing for a new job

Do you interview the organisation as doggedly as they do you?  We understand the power of waste – we wouldn’t throw one thousand dollars away into the trash heap, yet what price do you put on wasted time?  Why not ask some questions:  What is the priority for learning in the organisation? What are the learning methods adopted?  Is mentoring available and if so how would it be a part of my work life? Will there be a balance of gain for your investment of time in this new company?

• Continuing Education

How willing are you to pay for your own development from your own pocket?  With the corporate population being ever more mobile with turnover driven in part by the search for meaning, why wait for an external validation for your own growth – if so, it just may never happen!  Who took your first breath in life? Who will take your last breath in life?  So why are we handing other ‘in between’ breaths that are rightfully yours to others, to determine ‘how much’, ‘by when’, ‘with what’. What could an attitude of ‘carpe diem’ bring to your career.

• Get out of that box

Place that box on the usual shelf and let’s call it the known. Subsequently, throw that box into an arena and you are now in the centre of the unknown.  In that arena, there many choices to take – where to place the box, how to place the box, what to join the box to, whether the box should be open or closed, who and when to access the box, willingness to explore the box …and the list goes on!  Yet, being professional ‘caretakers of boxes’ so fixated on the details of boxes, we can  miss the opportunity to take choice ‘beyond boxes’.  What could we find if we looked at our box or ourselves for new ways to grow, considered new timings and approaches, new partners and methodologies, new content and perspectives, such as inner growth rather than that driven from the external?