What Makes a Successful Corporate Executive

The making of a good corporate executive occurs within an array of successful separations and attachments. Movement within the ranks of the corporate hierarchy necessarily involves the capacity to become emotionally attached to authority figures and corporate goals as found in the particular work situation.

Movement up requires the capacity to detach from previous managerial activities and adapt to new conditions. For an upward aspiring junior executive there is a consistent, inward directing force that guides his upward advances. This inner force allows an easy separation from present activities and productive attachments to new assignments. He welcomes these changes because of the intense desire to achieve. For the upward and mobile, achievement is centered in striving to get closer and closer to the heart of the administrative process.

The central values and goals of the firm are represented by the activities of the executive's group. This group is charged with the responsibility of charting the overall and long range direction of he firm and administering these strategies through organization. Success is measured by steady progress toward the central administrative processes symbolized by line and staff people in the executive group.

Because the mobile executive has a high need to achieve ever larger and larger administrative challenges, arrestment of this upward mobility is interpreted as threat to the opportunity to realize the potentialities of the self. Anxiety or feelings of inadequacy or incapability are cued off by arrestment of mobility. Clinical evidence gathered from counseling mobile executives shows that the dynamic basis of anxiety is the threat of becoming separated from the central administrative tasks of the firm

Junior executives, who incur arrestment of movement toward those central tasks, feel the essential elements of a career crisis. A career crisis is a crisis of self. Invariably, it involves a narrowing of awareness to basic problems of authority, organizational goals and performance, and self. Administrative anxiety is normal to all those who traverse to corporate structures. There are three basic points at which anxiety is most likely to occur.

The first is the anxiety upon entrance into the firm. This essentially ensues from having to make a separation from college life. The second point is movement into the middle ranks and the third point of anxiety is to meet the requirements of administration as opposed to management. The capacity to separate and attach without incurring acute feelings of anxiety is crucial to the making of a corporate executive.