Head Honchos Want People Who Can Execute
The way that education is structured seems strange to people at the head of businesses. Hundreds of thousands of people spend a significant amount of their young lives learning about things that have very little to do with the demands of the real world. Sure, teachers might argue, education is valuable for its own sake. But that does little to assuage the concerns of head honchos in business that people don’t have the skills they want.
The bottom line is that they want people who can execute. That means taking a task from inception to completion promptly, and in a way that ultimately makes the company money.
The people who can do this regularly are highly valuable. These are the folk who will see their careers take off and the money they can command explode upwards. So what can you do to maximize your chances of joining them?
Work On Openness
Openness is one of the five big personality traits. People who are more open tend to do better in life in general, but especially in the workplace. This is believed to be because they are more able to change their behavior in response to new circumstances. And that’s exactly what business leaders want from people who they need to deliver.
If you hold a key position in a firm, it’s likely that you’ll also have a leadership capacity. It might be that you’re in charge of a couple of hundred people, or just responsible for two employees. The critical point is that openness makes it much more likely that you’ll use those human resources. That is, you will listen to the helpful and useful things that your colleagues say and put them into action if they are valuable.
Get Educated In Relevant Skills
Being able to execute doesn’t always come naturally (although for some it can). Often it requires one to learn project management as a skill, and then deploy the lessons learned in the workplace. The art of execution lies mainly in organization and planning. These elements are lacking from traditional educations, but they are highly prized in the marketplace. There’s a mismatch of schooling to skills, and this means that people who do step into project management roles can often command very high wages.
Develop Courage
Courage might sound like quite an abstract quality. But this old-fashioned virtue still has a vital role in the world of work. Politics can often get in the way of completing a project. Different departments with competing agendas vie for resources, and the results are delays, poor quality work, and other complications.
As somebody charged with executing a project, this is unacceptable. You let your team know that you won’t accept pettiness for the sake of personal gain. And you constantly introduce new ideas to eliminate conflicts of interest and get people working towards the same goals. It takes courage to turn enemies into allies, but savvy leaders know that their strength lies in their people. And this is what makes them so valuable in their organizations.