Risen as far as you can?

• How clear are you that you want to rise further?
• Have you reviewed your values, what is most important to you?
• On what basis are you expecting promotion? Past achievements? Loyalty? Experience? Being reliable?
• How much do these factors count in your organization?
• Can you offer something fresh, innovative and exciting, something that others feel will create new opportunities for them? This is leadership.
• Rising to the top is partly political and partly a leadership act.
• How strong is your support network at or near the top?
• Rising further is partly about getting elected.
• Who might vote for you? How could you win more votes?
• What might be in it for them?
• How could you show more leadership to the organization as a whole?
• To show more leadership, can you devise a new vision?
• How clear are you on what your competitors are up to?
• What emerging needs might your customers have?
• Developing a better external understanding is an essential foundation for displaying organization-wide leadership.
• Getting closer to your market will help you think of something new.
• Whose help can you enlist in forging a new vision?
• Can you devise a compelling case for a better way of doing things that could persuade others to let you run a bigger part of the organization?
• Rising further depends on your ability and willingness to develop a strategy for yourself and the organization.
• Self-doubt regarding whether you have risen as far as you can is partly caused by not being very pro-active in promoting yourself.
• Feeling powerless to advance ourselves leads to generalized self-doubt.