Best career advice for future leaders

CoreNet Global Singapore recently organized a speed mentoring session for its young corporate real estate (CRE) leaders to receive career advice and best practice sharing on 14th August 2018. I was joined by an esteemed team of five seasoned senior CRE executives who acted as Mentors:

• Gemma Keogh Peters, Director, Project 68 Asia.
• James Foo, Vice-President, Global Real Estate & Workplace Enablement, American Express.
• Sajit Sankar, Vice President, Regional Head of Real Estate Services, Asia Pacific, Mastercard.
• Sheridan Perkins, Global Head, Workplace Standard Chartered Bank.
• AJ Anderson, Senior Recruiter, WeWork.

Although this mentoring session was aimed at CRE young professionals, the invaluable career advice provided by the Mentors is widely applicable to all. I like to share with you five best pieces of career advice:

1. Learn how to manage your boss well. The ability to manage upwards is an essential skill you need to have as you advance further up the ranks. This is because you need your boss’s endorsement, support and commitment in doing your job effectively. Invest in knowing your boss in how she relates to people, handles stress/pressure and manages her team.

It pays to foster a great relationship, even in a high-power distance culture like Asia, with your boss as she could potentially become your greatest enabler to achieving your future career success in the firm.     

2. Treat feedback as a gift to understand your brand. You need to be open to all feedback, good and bad, to increase your self-awareness in discovering your personal branding. Seek regular feedback from your boss, peers, direct reports and customers informally throughout the year to supplement the formal annual/bi-annual performance evaluation.

Because branding is based on authenticity, it’s important that you understand what really makes you truly stand out to your target employers by constantly seeking feedback to these questions:

(a) What unique value can I offer that makes me an invaluable talent?

(b) What are the positive or negative characteristics that people usually associated me with?

(c) What is so special about me that makes people want me in their teams or to do business with or be connected to?

3. Be personally accountable for your career. Companies are finding it increasingly challenging to design career roadmaps for individual talent in this ever-changing and volatile environment. Therefore, you need to act like an entrepreneur to personally create, grow and own your career like a business. What this means is that you need to be proactive in:

(a) Seeking key influencers in your industry to gain insight on the future trends.

(b) Speaking to your human resource (HR) and seasoned executives to understand what the desired traits, experience, competencies and motivators are for senior roles.

(c) Stepping up your learning for continuous skills renewal to future-proof your career.

4. Acquire learning agility as the single most important soft skill. Extensive research conducted by Korn Ferry on global executives reveals that being agile in managing change, especially when it is relentless, sudden and unexpected, is one soft skill that is needed the most as you rise further up the corporate ladder. So, it’s important for you to acquire learning agility, which is the ability to learn from your past experience and adapt quickly to navigate unfamiliar situations.

You can determine your level of learning agility by answering the following questions:

(a) How well am I in examining problems in unique and unusual ways?

(b) How comfortable am I in working with people who are very different to me?

(c) How resilient am I in pushing for change under difficult circumstances?

(d) How often do I experiment with change or seek new experiences?

5. Manage internal transition like onboarding. Consider achieving your career success internally rather than taking it elsewhere as the grass is not always greener on the other side. Generally, organisations tend to do a far better job in onboarding their new hires than transiting their existing employees when starting a new role.

A study by CEB found that 40% of internal moves involving high-potential employees often end in failure. So, prepare your groundwork to increase your career success before making an internal move by:

(a) Working with an executive sponsor to help you navigate the internal politics of internal mobility and increase your visibility.

(b) Getting support from your boss to undertake job-shadowing of the new role 1-2 days a week for a brief period to test-drive before taking the plunge.

(c) Co-designing with HR a formal onboarding, training and mentoring program to ensure you succeed in this new role. 

I like to thank you for reading this post and you can read my other posts on this link.