#12 Growing from Good to Great

Growing from Good to Great - A Roadmap for Professional Development

Last weekend I was clearing up my work desk and cupboard, and I came across one of my favourite books "Good to Great" by Jim Collins. This inspired me to write this article to provide a high-level roadmap for professional development from graduating school leavers, young working professionals to seasoned business executives.

Each stage of working professionals presents its unique challenges and opportunities, and the goal is to navigate them effectively to grow from good to great.

This involves developing a combination of hard skills, soft skills, and business acumen that will equip individuals to excel in their professional journey.

In fact, I found that effective communications and collaboration skills are vital to the success of the individuals as well as to the teams and organisations.

Let's start with Graduating School Leavers:

Soft Skills

• Communication Skills: School leavers should begin to work on their oral and written communication skills. From participating in class discussions to writing essays, these activities serve as practice for workplace communication. Do be reminded to refrain and separate your social language from business communications.
• Teamwork: Participating in group projects and extracurricular activities helps develop teamwork skills. The ability to work effectively in a team is highly valued in the professional world. Often not, you may not have the opportunity to choose your teammates and would need to build relationships with strangers from varying backgrounds.
• Time Management: Balancing academic responsibilities with personal life is an excellent way to start learning time management skills, which are critical in managing workloads in a professional setting. The ability to prioritize your work schedule, personal and social life is a challenge that successful people have mastered and achieved greatness.

Hard Skills

• Technical Proficiency: Depending on their field of interest, school leavers should start learning relevant technical skills. This could be programming for tech-related fields, or tools like Excel for business-related roles. Look into the future of work and be curious about what you want to become, discover the trends and start learning and practicing.
• Data Literacy: In the information age, the ability to interpret and analyze data is a valuable skill. School leavers can start by learning basic statistical analysis, practice understanding how the data is related to business, as well as interpreting the meaning of data to different audiences.

Business Acumen

• Basic Business Knowledge: School leavers can start learning about basic business concepts such as supply and demand, marketing, and finance. Networking with seniors, fresh graduates, mentors can help you gain insights into the business world, how business decisions are made, and how businesses made them.

For Young Working Professionals:

Soft Skills

• Leadership Skills: Young working professionals should start developing leadership skills by taking up responsibility in projects. Do not be afraid of accepting more responsibilities, this is the way to learn to lead and make decisions. Your coworkers would be more willing to help you when they know you are willing to learn.
• Networking Skills: Building a network is essential for career advancement. Attend industry events, join professional associations, and leverage social platforms like LinkedIn. Making professional connections with industry peers, vendors, partners, as well as communities will provide help and guidance in your career.
• Conflict Resolution: The ability to handle conflict professionally is crucial. Work on diplomacy, active listening, and problem-solving. Acquire new business and communication skills like negotiation, making tough conversations, leadership, etc and they can proof useful when the time comes.

Hard Skills

• Industry-Specific Skills: Each industry has specific skills that professionals need to develop. This could be proficiency in a particular software for tech professionals, or understanding financial modeling for finance professionals. You have a choice of going deep or wide in your industry - going deep acquires deep technical expertise in a field that could make you the subject matter expert (SME) or going wide could give you a broader perspective of how the technology or solution can apply to different customer segments or use cases.
• Project Management: The ability to manage projects effectively is an essential skill in many roles. Treat all business activities as projects and manage them as effectively and efficiently as possible just like a professional project manager would do. This would hone your thought process to become more precise, spontaneous, and lethal.

Business Acumen

• Understanding of Company and Industry: Professionals should understand how their company operates, its competitors, and the overall industry landscape. This can be achieved through reading industry publications, attending conferences, and keeping abreast with news. Learning from industry mentors is a proven and quick way to beef up this experience so that you can harness its value in your daily work activities and customer engagements.

Finally for Mature Business Executives

Soft Skills

• Strategic Thinking: Executives need to see the bigger picture and think strategically to make business decisions. With a broad working experience on your belt, you should have no reasons?not to be able to think strategically for yourself as well as for your business. If you are lacking this skill, then my recommendation is to have more conversations with senior mentors and your peers to fill in the blanks.
• Influence and Persuasion: The ability to persuade and influence others is crucial at the executive level. This could be to drive change, secure buy-in for an initiative, or motivate employees. The effective way is to be able to quickly understand the business and political dynamics in any scenario, build connections with executives and have great conversations on how to achieve win-win outcomes with various stakeholders. Successful leaders have a multitude of strong attributes such as people connections, influence, charisma, empathy, persuasion and communications skills that in a right mix produced miraculous results.

Hard Skills

• Financial Acumen: Executives should have a strong understanding of finance, as their decisions often have significant financial implications. Executives also need to know effective ways to manage sales, business development, marketing and advertising in order to manage and reduce its operating costs and maximize profitability.
• Risk Management: At this level, executives need to understand and manage business risks. Executives also need to be creative problem solvers and may require working within the organisation as well as with strategic partners and alliances to minimize risks to a minimum.

Business Acumen

• Strategic Business Understanding: Executives should have a deep understanding of business strategy. This includes understanding how different parts of the business interact, how the business fits into the industry, and how to create a competitive advantage. As senior leaders of a corporation, executives require sound judgement, business finance understanding, sales and marketing know-how, partnerships and strategic alliances experience together with strong people skills in order to muster their teams to work together as one team to battle the competition and emerge victorious.

Conclusion

Professional development is a continuous journey, and each stage in your career brings its unique challenges and learning opportunities. By focusing on the right skills and competencies, individuals can effectively navigate their professional journey and grow from good to great. The ultimate aim should be to develop a holistic understanding of business, foster effective collaboration, and make strategic decisions that drive growth.

Having great mentors and coaches can guide you in navigating the complex business and people puzzle blocks, and reduce time and effort wasted unnecessarily.

One final mention is it takes practice, practice and practice to evolve from Good to Great! Hardwork and continuous learning are essential to your success and good luck on your journey!