“Everyone has the will to win but only true champions have the will to prepare.”
Author unknown
This quote is on the walls of high school and college locker rooms around the country. It is there to remind and motivate. To remind the athletes that it takes more than just a will to win and to motivate them to be determined, to hard work and to prepare themselves for the challenge ahead. This is a tried and true formula for success.
It is a quote that should be a part of every executive’s career management plan. I have never met an executive who did not want to succeed, to excel in performance and achieve some level of financial success for their efforts. However, not everyone, and this always surprises me, is willing to invest the time and money to prepare themselves to realize the success in their careers. There are some executives, they are actually few and far between, who have the exceptional intellectual bandwidth and skill that they can succeed without too much additional effort.
When you look at someone’s career, there are actually four components that must be addressed to be truly successful: their job, their family, their community service and their career. Consider these as buckets which must be filled and maintained. We hear the term work-life balance all the time. I have certainly written about this in the past. It is an immutable truth that if someone is not happy at work, it is a challenge to realize such happiness at home. I believe that the reverse of this is also true. Career-minded executives allow their work, their status and success to define who they are. This is why it is so important to find happiness with work. Then comes commitment of time necessary to be involved in the community, from United Way to other charitable causes that address the common good. These, too, can be time consuming. And finally there is the career management bucket. Now here is where the executive’s life is not in balance. They may go to the occasional continuing education or professional trade show to maintain cutting edge industry expertise but when it comes time to investing to build a professional network, to burnish their brand, their commitment falls off. This is where the will to prepare takes a hit.
“And finally there is the career management bucket. Now here is where the lives of many executives are not in balance.”
Few corporate executives I know will consider an appointment to run a company if they do not clearly understand the mission or the vision of the company and are precluded from, a developing a business plan that establishes goals and periodic measuring points along the way. They do not want to fly blind.
Yet that is what many executives effectively do with their own careers. They move forward without definite plan.
Interviewing Skills Training Set For ACHE Congress
Join Chrishonda Smith, CCDP, SHRM of OhioHealth and John Self, an executive career transition coach, for a dynamic course on interviewing skills at the American College Healthcare Congress in Chicago, March 23- 26. This is one of the more popular and highly rated sessions of the Congress The session is at 2:15 PM on Wednesday, March 25.