Career – What have you got

Thanks to the session I have attended!.

For the obvious facts lets just say I was lucky to spend time with some of the great leaders who had their successions in the quickest possible times. So whatever is  here, needless to say, came from them!

Well, this is not gonna be a 100 page management career development book, but just what you need to keep one step ahead of the rest of the crowd.

Surprisingly, those leaders had different answers for most of the common questions. What was common among them were the fire and hunger and the perseverance quality.

Rest of the article gonna be in bullet points. So read slowly, very slowly to get the best out of it.

• First and foremost is, have regular (very regular) 1-on-1 with your manager to learn what you doing best and where you need to develop something. I used to pester them in my previous work place to tell one thing I could do better! It helped.
• Networking, networking and more networking. Almost all the leaders agreed on this point. Am comfortable if I need to talk to new faces, but if I don’t have to, I tend to look at my mobile in the lift. One of the things am trying to change!
•  If you are not busy in the current job, know its time to seek challenge!. I heard more refined words earlier from another lovely leader, “If you are comfortable at your current job, know that, that’s the warning sign to move on“.
• Know the values of the company, and try to put it in to your work – bit broad, but good advise.
•  Spend at least 10 mins a day for your personal growth. Am planning to use youtube as my mentor!
•  Know what you are, what you want, what you wanna become and most importantly, learn your weakness and work wholeheartedly. Oh yeah..
•  Always have a backup plan. Some call it contingency, and I call it, continuity.
•  Follow your dreams! – God, help me to have very few please.
•  Aim as much as possible. 
•  To survive this bad times, 1) Have specialized skills, 2) Influence people, 3) Always get someone to watch your back!
•  Be respectful to the people, in your career, someday you will go to heights and so do your colleagues!
•  Create reputation and brand (self)
•  Always have succession planning! 
• Development is possible through many things, mentoring, leadership development programmes, networking opportunities. Be open minded and believe in yourself first. Try to get executive coaching.
• Do your job well, make an effort to reach beyond the people with whom you need to talk (even across industry), stay open and positive for new challenges and opportunities and ideas in the broadest sense, whether that be trends in society (Sustainability, climate change and its translation into our business), geography and variety in knowledge and skill set by doing different things in time. Mentoring is not a one way street, you need to find a way yourself and the mentor can help you to recognize and find some of the signs to give direction. This requires a fair amount of self reflection and thought and time needs to be invested.
• Open mind for career mobility and willingness to jump into the situations that seemed difficult or needed restructuring! 
• Trust your line managers as they really know what are you strengths!
• Finally, not from them, but this is from me!. Most of the leaders had an MBA.