FLEXING YOUR RISK MUSCLES

Volume #1 - August 1999

Risk-taking is a critical element of leadership and essential for creating a successful career. In the latest study of women's leadership styles conducted by The Radcliffe Public Policy Institute and The Boston Club, 86 percent of the women said that comfort with taking risks was very important in determining a leader's effectiveness.

How comfortable are you with risk taking? Is there a tiny voice nagging you about setting more challenging goals? Have you been criticized for not taking bolder moves? Have you ever turned down an assignment or a position because you were afraid of the responsibility? Are you holding yourself back from pursuing a career change or a higher paying position? If you answered "Yes" to any of these questions, you need to exercise your risk muscles.

We all know that the more we exercise, the stronger we get. And the stronger we get, the more comfortable we become exercising. As you build your risk muscles, you'll find yourself getting into a cycle in which your sense of self-confidence and power will be continually expanding.

But in order to get more comfortable with risk, you'll have to learn how to handle your fears. The problem at the core of risk taking is fear – fear of failure, fear of success, fear of looking like a fool, fear of seeming ignorant, fear of seeming too aggressive. You get the picture – each one of us has some kind of fear shaped by our own personal experiences. Fear can make us tentative; it can even freeze us into inaction. But if we wait until we get rid of fear before we take action, if we put off exercising our risk muscles, we'll never move anywhere. Taking risk means confronting challenges and having the courage to move forward through fear.

Calculate Your Risk

Taking risks, however, doesn't mean plowing ahead without thinking about consequences. Taking calculated risks and risky behavior are two different animals.

Generally each of us operates within a comfort zone that provides us with a sense of security and safety. However, in order to move forward in your career and develop your leadership skills, you need to move out of that comfort zone and into a learning zone. Paradoxically, this means you must learn to be comfortable operating outside of your comfort zone.

However, you will also need to understand how far you can stretch yourself without pulling a muscle, without setting yourself up to fail. As one Fortune 500 female executive told me "The trick is to stretch, but not to the point that the difficulties to adjustment and learning become demotivating."

Early in her career as a general manager for a major division of a Fortune 500 company, Cathy Spotts, who was featured in my book Success on Our Own Terms: Tales of Extraordinary, Ordinary Business Women, developed a job-rating ratio that helped her to select positions that offered the degree of stretch. Before she accepted a position, she assessed both the risks and the job's potential by calculating how it would leverage her strengths. Sixty to 70 percent of the job had to call for expertise she already possessed, while the remaining 30 to 40 percent had to require her to learn new skills and assume new responsibilities. By thoughtfully and continually stretching herself, she achieved a goal she had set for herself and became a vice president by the time she was 35.

If you work out a similar ratio for yourself or create guidelines for creatively stretching yourself on a continual basis, you will be able to increase your skill sets, build your self-confidence, and develop your leadership abilities.

COACHING QUESTIONS ON RISK TAKING

Here are a dozen coaching questions to help you assess risks and increase your level of self-awareness:

1. What are you afraid of? If you peel back all the layers of excuses you give yourself for not taking a particular risk, what is the underlying fear that's keeping you from moving forward?
2. What is the worst case scenario that can occur as a result of taking a particular risk?
3. What are the possible lost opportunities? What opportunity might you miss that will be very hard for you to recapture if you don't take a particular risk?
4. What do you discover when you compare the worst case scenario with the most significant lost opportunity?
5. What are the first small steps can you begin to take that will move you forward through your fear?
6. What kind of information will help you to make educated assessments about the risk you are considering?
7. Who are the knowledgeable people you can call on for advice?
8. Who are the people who might try to hinder you because of their own needs or fears? What can you do in order to protect yourself from being influenced by them?
9. What is your intuition telling you about this particular risk?
10. What other viewpoints can you apply to assess the risk from a variety of perspectives? What attitudes and beliefs might be blocking you from adopting any of these different perspectives?
11. If you take the risk and fail, what can you learn?
12. When you succeed, how will you reward yourself?

Copy © 2000 Virginia O'Brien All s Reserved