What do you do if you're aiming for leadership in banking through strategic career planning?

To enhance self-awareness, leverage teamwork and third-party assessments. This approach helps you understand who you are, how others perceive your leadership, and identify your talents. Next, collaborate with your manager to create a personal development plan, fostering mutual accountability for your goals. Ensure your abilities align with the company’s needs. By reflecting on yourself and your career, you can identify the most suitable area in banking—whether it's risk, operations, cybersecurity, finance, credit, or HR—where you’re naturally inclined to succeed. Be intentional, reflect often, learn from failure, never stop learning, and communicate your aspirations and growth desires with your manager and executive team.

Self awareness of both your interpersonal skills and your analytical skills will go a long way. You need both the knowledge and the skills to share that knowledge with members of your team and with clients.

To attain leadership in banking, establish strategic goals and a career trajectory that align with your vision. Focus on acquiring high-impact skills that drive value and actively seek leadership opportunities to showcase your capabilities. Then, continuously reassess and refine your goals to remain agile in an evolving industry. True leadership is about consistently delivering value and achieving meaningful outcomes, not merely holding a title.

Set goals that are realistic. There is a huge temptation to set ‘blue sky revenue goals’ which for the most part are unrealistic. You can bring value to an organisation by using SMART techniques and crucially utilise the strengths around you. Too many managers think they have the skills to plan, implement and deliver. Think like the conductor of an orchestra!

Early in my career, I achieved and moved up and saw upward trajectory as a straight line. As I’ve navigated my career, I’ve been fortunate enough to be pulled into different departments and my career trajectory resembles more of a zigzag at this point. I have countless examples of how my experience in other departments has led to collaboration and efficiency improvements. If I had to start over, I would have sought out more diverse opportunities early on. The diversity of experience in banking is invaluable.

Experience is a currency but it needs to be articulated in a situationally relevant manner. Use hindsight in a constructive (not destructive) manner. Re-assess events, analyse what the team did well, where we lacked structure or decision making and crucially what you can learn about your own decision making in the future. Every mistake is a positive as long as we can learn from it.Experience should be evolutionary NOT revolutionary.

One effective approach is to treat each role as a limited opportunity - imagine you only have 12-18 months to learn as much as possible. This mindset drives you to be proactive in gaining new knowledge through certifications, attending conferences, and on-the-job learning. If you stay in the role longer, great, but maintaining the same intensity ensures you never become complacent. As banking increasingly relies on technology (AI, Open banking, Fintech collaboration and CBDCs, etc.), leaders must stay abreast of digital trends and the opportunities or threats these present to their business, while continuously enhancing their technical skills.

We live in a highly technical world. Today’s tech is tomorrow’s ancient history. Keep learning be it going back to school, attending seminars or work trying programs to widen your knowledge so you are ready to teach others the new technologies that is just around the corner. In your alone time, always pray for wisdom to guide you and help others. It is never too late. ?

A boss tells you what to do. A leader directs you on what to do and is in there with you. A good leader is constantly aware of his/her strengths and weaknesses and should reflect on them constantly. When I took martial arts when I was younger, we were taught those techniques that complimented your strengths. When you move up in ranking, you later work on not just your strengths but also your weaknesses in order to strengthen yourself for the future. A good leader does the same.