Montreal native Adam Bryant startled his editors at the New York Times when he suggested interviewing CEOs – but not about their companies, the normal subject for business reporters. Instead, writing the paper’s Corner Office column, he ended up interviewing more than 1,000 CEOs and other leaders, amassing huge insights into careers.
A key conclusion was there is no right path for a career. Go to business school? Well, many of the leaders he interviewed started their careers in other pursuits such as elementary teachers, commercial fishermen or studying classical music in university. “Some barely made it through college. But through serendipitous twists and turns, they came across new opportunities and made the most of them,” he writes in his book The Leap to Leader.
Focus your energies on learning the most from what you’re doing. That means, he says, making time for reflection and processing what you’re learning. What worked, what didn’t and why?
But be careful of reading too much into a situation and becoming wed to it. Mr. Bryant, now a leadership consultant based in New Orleans who spends summers in PEI, says probably his favourite career and life advice came from Ruth Simmons, the former president of Brown University, Smith College and Prairie View A&M University. She tells students they should never assume they can predict which experiences will teach them the most about what their life should be. “You have to be open and alert at every turn to the possibility that you’re about to learn the most important lesson of your life,” she said.
Stop worrying about other people. Mr. Bryant notes that “especially early in your career, it’s easy to feel like you’re in close competition with your peers, tracking who’s getting promotions and raises, and always keeping score on who is ahead or falling behind. But in the same way that sprinters are advised to never look to their right or left in a race, you need to focus all your energy on running your own race.”
If there’s a single thread that runs through the leaders he interviewed, he feels it’s the quality of being “drawn to the fire.” They are excited by hard challenges, seeing them more as opportunities than problems. They use the opportunity to define the role and shape it.
Marcus Kennedy, general manager of Intel’s gaming division, told Mr. Bryant that he regrets not always making the more aggressive decision, like taking an overseas assignment when offered: “It scared the hell out of me. And I should have known at that moment that it was the right thing to do. So, take the most risk you possibly can earlier in your career, because you got time to make up for any mistakes you might make.”
Mr. Kennedy also advises younger managers to believe they are not the smartest person in the room when walking into a meeting. At the same time, you have to know why you are there and bring your capabilities to the table. “You are the only person who sees the world through your eyes. More times than not, that perspective has value. Share it,” Mr. Kennedy says.
If you want to make the leap to leader – jumping into the fire, to take on a bigger role in your organization – Mr. Bryant urges you to be honest with yourself and clear about why you want to lead. That “why” will need to sustain you in difficult moments. He has moved in and out of leadership positions in his career and says in different phases of your career that may happen to you. “Leadership is complicated, so you should not be surprised to have a complicated relationship with leadership,” he writes.
Careers are also complicated. Don’t search for some magical right path. Learn, accept challenges and build what’s right for you.
Quick hits
- Intelligence is the ability to understand many ideas while wisdom is the ability to identify the few ideas worth understanding, says author Mark Manson.
- Come to a presentation with a version of the talk that is 50 per cent of the full script you have planned, advises professional speaker Deborah Grayson Riegel. And practise that shorter version, because it is not unusual for a speaker’s time to be cut dramatically. Let your listeners know you’ll provide additional context or content in writing after the meeting.
- When someone says, “Do you want to know what I think?” you don’t have to automatically respond, “Sure.” Entrepreneur Seth Godin argues the answer might be no because the person is not very good at offering useful feedback; if it’s about your product or service the individual is outside the target market; or you don’t intend to revise things soon. Just because criticism is on offer doesn’t mean you have to seek it out or even listen to it.
- Want to make today a great day? Go home on time, suggests executive coach Dan Rockwell.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.