Importance of Solid Career Foundations as a Relentlessly Ambitious Millennial Future Leader
Much like your house, your career requires a set of solid foundations to help you realise your potential as a relentlessly ambitious millennial future leader. Throughout the business world, it is easy to pick-out those whom are on a daily basis demonstrating in-depth expertise, ambition and true change-making abilities even at a young age. Essentially, those who build foundations for their futures.
The purpose of this post is to detail potential career changing experiences, as advised by current leaders, experienced on a first-hand basis and throughout personal networks or suggestions through online communities. These foundations of millennial future leaders are:
Education, Knowledge and/or Subject Matter Expertise: There is a long-standing argument as to whether specialisation of generalisation is the most appropriate platform career development. Clearly, there is no one-size fits all. No two leaders careers have been the same. However, a degree of specialisation is evident throughout all current leaders careers. Specifically, this is often not industry specific, but skill-based. Lets take a look at some examples:
- Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook CEO Zuckerberg, is a specialist in Computing Science. He has often been questioned in terms of his business-nouse but has proved doubters wrong (particularly on the Instagram acquisition).
- Meg Whitman: HPE CEO Whitman, has a broad experience-base yet specialised in Economics and gained substantial experience in Marketing in her early years.
Challenge the Status Quo: Many of the Worlds business leaders emphasise an insatiable curiosity as a driver in their development. However much you think that you may know, you do not know everything. The sooner you admit this and begin to question the norms, the better for your development. Look around the business World and you see leaders who regularly challenge the status quo. They question logic and often as a result, disrupt industries. Lets take a look at some examples:
- Elon Musk: Not content with the World as it is today, Musk has raised the bar in areas including space-travel (Space X), autonomous and electric vehicles (Tesla) and online payments (PayPal) to name a few.
- Tim Ferriss: Many may not know Tim, but check-out his books, videos and challenges on his website. He described himself as an esoteric given his continuous continuous experiments such as ‘The Tim Ferriss Experiment’.
Promote Partnerships, not Individualism: The business World is littered with examples of two minds being better than one. Think of your colleagues as potential partners either now or in the future. Whether you choose you admit it your not, you do not know everything. Complimenting your weaknesses is important in creating a rounded team. Lets take a look at some examples:
- Jobs & Wozniak: One of the most famous partnerships, both Jobs and Wozniak were technical. Jobs though was a true innovator. Complimenting his drive, innovation and leadership with the technical and ‘creator’ abilities of Wozniak created the many of the radical innovations we know today.
- Zuckerberg & Saverin: A great mind with a great idea can struggle without the funding and reputation to scale. This was Facebook upon founding. Saverin was the wealthy popular student whilst Zuckerberg was the brains and expertise behind the start-up.
Learn Something New, Daily: Leaders today experience new leadership challenges every single day. Where would we be as individuals if we did not open ourselves to new learning? Challenging yourself to learn something new creates a habit and general opening up of the mind. Important aspects when considering a future need to listen to and incubate ideas! Lets take a look at some examples:
- Lewis Howes: Lifestyle Coach Howes, outlines this adventure of continual learning and improvement as been critical to become a better person and leader. Specifically, Lewis journals his pathway to success.
- Forbes: Numerous articles have outlined the importance of daily challenges and daily ‘wins’ to keep you on top of the game. This Forbes article by Kelsey Meyer outlines many of the ideas this.
Manage/Build/Develop SOMETHING: So you have the skills, the experience, the curiosity and the partnerships. But where have you been able to demonstrate that you CAN lead? The final element is just as much about demonstrating your capabilities as it is about learning. Leaders today experience new leadership challenges every single day. Think of experiences such as Project and/or Product Management as operating as a small-scale CEO. Lets take a look at some examples:
- Richard Branson: Serial Entrepreneur Branson, is renowned for his ‘fail and fail again’ attitude to business. Rather than speculating, his experience is to simply jump in and get his hands dirty. Virgin Airways, Virgin Money, Virgin Media are all good successes. Virgin Cola, Virgin Cars and Virgin Digital not so successful. All learning experiences though.
Next Up
Covered within Part 2 of this post will be detail on where you can locate resources which will help you to build your own foundations. Also, you will be provided with ways to identify new trends which may benefit your own development.
Please add comments to the discussion on your views and experiences career development, both as millennials and non-millennials.
About Stephen
Stephen Baines is a Senior Management Consultant and MBA currently working for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and pursuing a number of external entrepreneurial ventures. The views within this post are explicitly those of Stephen and have no representation of any organisation Stephen represents. If you wish to contact Stephen, please contact him via LinkedIn or his Twitter handle (@baines1986).
Read more about Stephen at Stephen’s personal website
