Be your own career counselor. What aspects of your personality or background do you believe present the greatest obstacles to achieve those career goals? What is your strategy
for overcoming these obstacles?
The greatest obstacles that I will have to overcome to reach my career goals concern the management of personnel and the difficulties of balancing micro-management and the company’s overall strategy. To be a successful business leader, you must be able to manage your employees and coordinate business strategies. Although I have some people management experience from my work with Hewlett-Packard, and I am currently leading a business team of twenty employees with AsiaEC.com, at times I still feel somewhat frustrated when I am confronted with certain difficult decisions concerning people management issues. Here are some specific illustrations of the obstacles that I must overcome to become a successful business leader:
One area of difficulty for me is the issue of how to lead a senior employee who has more professional experience and is well learned within his or her specific product line or business area, especially when his or her opinion is different than mine. I encountered this situation after I joined my current position as business director of AsiaEC.com. As the business director, I am responsible for the business development of Office Automation (OA) equipment, such as copiers, overhead projectors, etc., Information Technology (IT) and machine consumables. Before I joined the company, a senior product manager with a professional background in the OA equipment business had handled this position for almost one year. Quite frankly, I was not familiar with the OA business when I took the position. The distribution channels, purchasing practices and post-sales service models of OA equipment are quite different from the machine consumables and IT products that I was used to dealing with. Now this former manager reports to me. Our ideas of the direction of the business are not the same and this has caused some conflict between us. His experience in the OA business has given him the confidence to question my ideas on the direction of the business, even though the business was not going well and could not meet the target demanded by the company. There was much pressure on me to correct the situation and I realized that we would have to change and come up with a different strategy than we had previously followed. But without the cooperation of my team members, I realize that it will be impossible to implement the business plan smoothly and reach our business goals. The challenge will be for me to gain his confidence and support by listening to his opinions but also persuading him that my decisions are what are best for the company.
