Management Article Review: “Making Yourself Indispensable, ” by John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, and Scott K. Edinger

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| Management Article Review: “Making Yourself Indispensable,” by John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, and Scott K. Edinger | Principles of Management 3311-001 | Brief Summary “Making Yourself Indispensable” (J. Zenger, J. Folkman, and S. Edinger 2011) is a riveting article that describes the journey Tom, a midlevel executive at a fortune 500 company, goes on to become a more effective leader. At the start of the article, the authors describes the situation Tom is in, and how he was passed up for a job promotion he was sure he was going to get. Though Tom scored well on his last 360-degree assessment, he did not do well enough to receive the promotion. Not understanding what went wrong, he decided to take a closer look at his evaluation. He saw what his strengths and weaknesses were, and at first thought that if he were to improve his strengths even more, that maybe next time he would get the promotion. The authors explain that “doing more of what you already do well yields only incremental improvement. To get appreciably better at it, you have to work on complementary skills.” (p85) In other words, it is more beneficial to focus on a skill or skills that complement the ones that you are already good at. In order to help the reader better understand this idea, the authors give a few examples. The main idea behind the examples given is that just like in sports, cross-training, which is described as “the combination of two activities (which) produces an improvement… substantially greater than either one can produce on its own.” (p86) also known as an interaction effect. Just like cross-training in sports, complementing your strengths with other skills will improve your overall leadership effectiveness. In order to effectively do this you must follow four simple steps: (1) Identify your strengths. (2) Choose a strength to focus (preferably one that is beneficial

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