Your 20 years of experience will only resonate for a minute unless…

Career management in brave new world

Keeping an eye on the future, ensuring you were keeping up with the latest developments in tech and leadership, all of that used to be enough. Enough to keep you on track to hit some career goals, progress up the line, burst into the C-suite or maintain your place there. It used to be enough. Just as it used to be enough to have 20 years of endeavour and achievement in a related field to propel you to the next milestone along your career progression journey.

However, in the same way that you asked progressively more of your teams over your two-decade vista of past achievements, exponentially more is and will continue to be asked of those that lead. Exponentially more. The emphasis has shifted dramatically over recent times from a record of excellence in achieving set goals to the ability to navigate, at speed, through inky blackness towards goals that have not yet been set. And those that are afraid of the dark have probably already conceded that they are not ready for a future that has already arrived.

So, what’s missing?

It’s often said that scrutinising your resume takes up less than 5% of successful job interviews and there’s good reason for that. Ultimately, the person sitting across the desk from you is far more interested in what you can do to help future proof their endeavours. It’s likely that they want to propel the company towards sustainable commercial outputs despite an uncertain commercial environment. In acknowledging that the only constant is change, we as leaders need to be able to see and therefore act on changes occurring beyond this and probably the next two horizons. It makes sense but the missing element is the “how”.

How will you capture a glimpse of what lies beyond the horizon let alone understand it? How will you identify, acquire and utilise the skills required to thrive in the new norms? The obvious answers lay in developing and feeding an appetite for upskilling and broadening horizons through wider awareness of your own field of endeavour. This is necessary in a world where collaboration, cross-skilling and multidisciplinary work groups and business sectors have already become the norm. But there’s more to it than that.

Question everything… about yourself

Self-audits have always been one of the keys to personal development. Honest reflection will always be a prerequisite for establishing ways forward through the gloom but unless your honest responses accurately identify your current position and mindset in relation to your goals, they will be of little use. The skill required to effectively assess your readiness to excel in future paradigms is identifying the right questions to ask and then asking them. 

To update your capabilities and ensure you are pouring effort into the most fruitful developmental endeavours, ask:

• Am I making myself and my potential contributions more valuable to the future job market and/or current company imperatives?
• Do I have a strategy against my team’s and my own obsolescence? Is it effective?
• Does this thinking transcend my own ends and positively influence the culture of my team/ does it extend beyond my own sphere of influence?
• Do I have, or could I cultivate the courage and resilience needed to be successful?

This last question is an interesting one. Why would courage and resilience even come into career planning, especially if you are already established/ensconced in a role that represents a planned milestone along your planned career path? Surely, from here it remains only for you to perform admirably and meet, if not exceed, expectations for the next 24-36months before the next exciting step in your career progression is taken. This is the sort of thinking that has led people confused, disillusioned and frustrated to the offices of executive career coaches or the end of their career, the (corporate) world over.

Courage and resilience are required as part of an approach that will increase your value to an organisation.

A brave new approach to career progression

Success, and potentially your 20+year record of success, can be a double-edged sword. While decades of experience in a particular field or area(s) of expertise are important, the “balanced beginner’s mindset” is also a coveted and sought-after attribute at the next level. There are those “beginners” who dazzle in interviews because their enthusiasm for the role, or the brand, or the company is matched only by their conviction that they have, and will continue to accrue, the “how to’s”. Applicants will often claim that if they don’t know how to do something, they will go and find out. Great… but how?

Those that claim to be able to find the answer fall into two groups. People who will search (often fruitlessly) and return either exhausted or beaten or both and those that have invested time and effort into preparing for moments such as these. While they may not be naturally gifted in the nuances and technicalities behind tech advancement, industry-specific ideation or the shifting sands of people or enterprise leadership, you will feel that they have a planned approach. An approach that speaks to a confidence that may well inspire confidence in other individuals, teams and/or business units.

It’s a rare thing to be gifted this “balanced beginner’s mindset”. Rarer still, to find people that are prepared to develop it, work on it ceaselessly and be coached on its most effective applications.  But those that do, tend to distinguish themselves from their cohorts who only excel within a box of their own making – a career coffin if you will.

“Can I see this person leading this company, department or team through the next several phases of changes, seizing on the next wave(s) of commercial opportunity?” That’s the question to which you need to convince people, the answer is an emphatic and unequivocal yes! Let people experience that and your 20 years will absolutely resonate with those steering organisations towards sustainable success in the coming decade.

If you would like to have a confidential discussion about taking a front step in your own career or would like to explore ways to improve your people strategy, team culture or positive influence, please give me a call at Fisher Management Consulting on (02) 9089 8877.