We get the opportunity to interview many impressive leaders running large, successful companies.
What makes them impressive isn’t their résumé. They’re working to become better people, the kind of leaders who build some of the best workplaces in the world. (We have the data to prove it.)
How do you become one of these leaders? We asked guests from our recent season of the Better Podcast from Great Place To Work® what advice they’d give their younger selves.
The answers are reassuring for anyone in their career who feels they’re still figuring it all out. Failure isn’t the end of the road; it’s part of the process.
Here’s what they shared:
1. “Don’t be so afraid or embarrassed to fail.”
For Shane Jackson, president of Jackson Healthcare, a fear of failure limited the life and career he wanted to build.
“I viewed any failure as a … negative statement about my self-worth,” he says. “So, I would hide failure, or I would do things to avoid failure. And I think what that did was slowed down my ability to learn.”
2. “Focus on understanding yourself.”
David Paja, Group CEO of Coats, shared his advice for leaders trying to grow their careers: Don’t just focus on what you are trying to accomplish. Be curious about how you work, and how you motivate others.
“It's very good to reflect on early on,” he shares. “Building self-awareness, understanding areas that you need to further develop or use more often, understanding what makes people tick as well.”
As you move into more senior roles, being an expert on human behavior is increasingly important. “When you try to get things done through people, you really need to understand: How do you touch a key point that is going to get them going? How do you handle difficult situations with empathy?”
3. “The learning engine that we all have needs to adapt over time.”
For Mark Joslyn, vice president of human resources and IT at Trek Bicycle, the need to keep learning wasn’t something he appreciated at the beginning of his career.
“When I was finished with college, I thought, ‘That's it. I'm done with the classroom,’” he says. “And a few years later I realized I need to go back.”
The breakthrough for Joslyn was figuring out his “learning engine.”
“It's figuring out how do you adapt that learning engine and how do you take advantage of the people that are available to you?” he says. One way he finds people who can help him learn is to develop a personal board of directors.
“As I enter something new or I take out a different responsibility, I think about people who've already done that and who could guide me or could help me,” he says. Asking for that help is a skill he recommends for anyone, no matter where they are in their career.
4. “Cherish every moment and life experience.”
DJ Casto, chief human resources officer for Synchrony, encourages early career professionals to look beyond the next step on their career ladder.
“I think oftentimes we're so caught up in what's next … that as you do a look back, it's interesting the things that you really cherish,” he says. “It's those special moments. It's a family celebration. It's the birth of a child.”
It’s hard to have that vision early on, but these experiences are an important part of your development, Casto says. “They really inform who you become.”
5. “Take more risk.”
Allison Ausband, chief people officer at Delta Air Lines wishes that she had been better at taking risks early in her career.
“I'm a little bit of a perfectionist, which is not good,” she shares with the Better podcast. “So taking risk… it's a little bit harder for me, but the more I've progressed through my career, I just look back and I think, ‘Gosh, I could have raised my hand a little more.’”
Her advice is simple: “Raise your hand and take more risk.”
6. “[You’ll] figure it out.”
For Jayney Howson, SVP, global learning and development at ServiceNow, there’s nothing she would change about the bumps and bruises that accompanied her early career.
Her message to young professionals: You’ll figure it out.
“I had somebody showed me this image once,” she shares with the Better Podcast. “They had an image of themselves as a child in their pocket, and when something went well, they went, ‘You did it, girl, you did it.’”
And that’s what she would tell her younger self, too. “I just think she's going to be fine,” she says. “She'll figure it out.”
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