Making the Most of EMBA Deep Expertise as a Capability Date:   Friday , July 02, 2010 In the last issue, we learnt about the missing link why just acquiring an EMBA degree without significant change in capabilities will not help accomplish the desired career change. We recognized that organizations are eager to hire leaders who deliver results and not carried away by the degree certificates. If the reason for pursuing an EMBA is to make a beneficial change in career and grow faster up the hierarchy, the following factors are worth keeping in mind: * Leadership has to be understood & recognized not just as an art, but more importantly as performing art! Leadership is therefore about delivering results that matter for organizations. * Most leadership theories and published literature on leadership seem to focus disproportionately on attributes leaders should demonstrate and their styles to suit the situations. In reality, leadership is as much about results as about attributes. * Attributes are necessary to ensure consistent results. Results relate to growth and revenues, customer delight and loyalty, people delight and engagement and future stability and competitiveness of the organization. * EMBAs are not automatic ladder to becoming a leader. They ought to deliver a ladder to becoming result-oriented leader. The difference is vast and deep. It demands significant overhaul of what I would like to call as “executable capabilities” on the part of the aspirants First in the series of these capabilities, we are addressing in the current issue what may be described as “deep domain expertise.” Domain is used here in a larger context. It is as much about knowing more and more about the industry you want to build a managerial career in as about knowing the organization you would like to build your career. This is true of even those aspirants who are keen to grow in their existing organizations. Key dimensions of deep domain expertise: Take the following 5-questions quiz to understand your knowledge of the industry in which you wish to make a career. It could be information technology or retail or healthcare, education or financial services and the like. Please rate yourself on a five-point scale where 1 represents least/lowest and 5 represents most/highest: 1. I am well aware of the trends & challenges in my industry and can articulate the same with clarity and confidence to an audience of very knowledgeable people from the industry. 2. I follow the top 5 leaders (corporations) in my industry and I know their size, strengths, market share and their brand promises. 3. I have a good understanding of the levers of excellence for my industry as evidenced by the market leaders in the industry. 4. I have a deep understanding of the value disciplines on which organizations across industry compete in the market place. I can discuss with confidence examples of organizations in my industry that compete based on the discipline of customer intimacy , operational excellence or product leadership. 5. I have a fairly good understanding of the talent market that my industry is playing in and challenges associated with it. If you have scored a perfect 5 for all 5 questions above, you are well on your way to leveraging your industry knowledge. And this can be further expanded to industry domain knowledge within a larger field. For example, if you are keen to build a career in IT industry and within the IT industry in financial services or retail or supply-chain or such other specialization, you will do well to understand the nuances of both IT and the specialization within it to a deep extent. What they don’t teach you at your B-School: Understandably, deep domain expertise does not come over night; nor does it come bestowed with an EMBA. One of the refreshingly different and welcome developments in management education over the last 5 years has been a clear focus on industry-specific management programs. We have, today, management programs specializing in retail, healthcare, banking, tourism, family-owned enterprise management, public systems management, infrastructure and the like. Hopefully, these MBA programs bring in the necessary deep domain expertise for the graduates pursuing those courses. EMBA courses are often oriented to general management and hence there is an additional onus on the candidates to exert extra efforts to acquire the domain expertise outside of the curriculum. Reading up industry journals on a regular basis besides research reports published by specialized consulting firms would have to become a habit particularly since the business landscape is changing rather fast and without notice! Leading strategy and business consulting firms, search firms that headhunt senior level people, HR consulting firms and the like do publish at regular intervals high quality white papers, working papers, monographs and industry reports and more often than not also make these reports available for free access on their websites as part of their commitment to spreading their thought leadership. Spending a few hours a week going through these reports should become a habit in order to be able to build a solid understanding of the industry. Attending conferences and seminars is yet another way to keep oneself updated on the industry trends as many thought leaders and highly successful and celebrated CEO are invited to share their perspectives in such conferences and summits. Last word on deep domain expertise: Let me close this column with a famous quote by Michael Goldhaber: “If you have nothing special to offer, you won’t get noticed and you won’t get paid much either.” As we are living in the knowledge era and competing for knowledge intensive job opportunities, it is a no brainer that continuous learning about the industry and its intricate nuances become a passport to entry, leave alone a thriving career. The author is the Executive Vice President & Chief People Officer, Symphony Services.