During their many years in the executive recruiting business, James Citrin and Richard Smith have noticed a few consistent characteristics among the people they view as truly successful. Their recent book "The 5 patterns of Extraordinary Careers" looks at the careers of successful executives to determine why they prospered, while others equally talented never reached their potential or aspirations.

While researching the book, Citrin and Smith also found that much of what they discovered about successful individuals applied equally well to organizations. By applying the success patterns at the organizational level, companies can find valuable productivity and performance gains within their organizations. A passage from the book explains:

To be extraordinary, a company must seek to fill its ranks with the very best, providing its professionals with the knowledge of success and empowering them to take control over their careers. It must create a culture of success, establishing a strong value system based on empowerment, proactive behavior, and integrity. By rethinking its core approaches to attracting, selecting, developing, assessing, and rewarding its employees, an enterprise can emerge as an extraordinary organization benefiting from the success of its individuals.

So, what makes a person successful? Citrin and Smith uncovered five patterns that they found most influenced the success of the clients they worked with. According to their findings, successful individuals:

Understand their value in the marketplace by translating knowledge and experience into action, building their personal value over each phase of their career.

Practice benevolent leadership by not clawing their way to the top but by being carried there.

Solve the permission paradox, the dilemma of not being able to get a job without experience and not getting the experience without the job

Differentiate using the 20/80 principle of performance by storming past their defined jobs to create breakthrough ideas and deliver unexpected impact

Find the right fit making decisions with the long-term in mind and willfully migrating towards positions that fit their natural strengths and passions and where they can work with people they like and respect.

Are your employees extraordinary? If not, why not? It could be that you have made bad hiring decisions. But before you decide that replacing them is the way to go, take a look at your organization. According to the book, the extraordinary organization is not merely a collection of successful individuals, but a creator of one. The bottom line? Make your employees successful and your company will be too.

According to the book, to make your organization a creator of successful individuals, you should focus on three critical facts of organizational life:

1. Individual career success benefits the entire organization.

2. The strongest performers contribute a disproportionate amount of the value to a company.

3. Performance and productivity are maximized when resources are aligned with the most critical organizational needs.

Are the activities of your organization aligned with these core realities? If not, the book examines these assumptions at a more tactical level revealing actionable insights you can use to help your employees and your company achieve success:

If individual career success benefits the entire organization, then you should create a culture of success, providing each employee with the tools, information and environment to foster his or her own advancement. This implies giving your employees the career knowledge that will improve their chances of success and creating an environment where they are emboldened to take action.

If the strongest performers contribute a disproportionate amount of the value to an organization, then you must implement the most accurate and effective system of assessing performance, and recognize and reward the highest performers in such a way that they will stay and are motivated to perform up to their highest potential.

If performance and productivity are maximized when resources are aligned with the most critical organizational needs, then organizations must continually evaluate existing resources against current and future competitive challenges and aggressively seek to fill any gaps. This requires a thorough understanding of the employee skills and capabilities and management competencies required for competitive success.

The book goes on to examine and illustrate each of these requirements in greater detail, providing concrete advice along with illustrations of companies who have successfully implemented each of these steps.

The existence of extraordinary professionals within your company should not be left to chance, but should be actively developed from existing employees. If you're interested in finding, hiring and keeping extraordinary talent and becoming an extraordinary organization, you might want to take a look at "The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers". Who knows, the career you improve could even be your own.

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