The Wisdom Council

Some career lessons are considerably cheaper to borrow.

“Smart people learn through their mistakes, but the smartest people learn from others.”

There are two ways to acquire career wisdom.

You can learn everything yourself.

Take the wrong job. Trust the wrong person. Stay too long. Leave too soon. Spend several years believing you need to have every answer before opening your mouth.

Eventually, you become very wise.

It is just a rather expensive educational model.

Or you can occasionally ask someone further down the road:

What do you know now that you wish you’d known then?

At The Female Forum, we spend a lot of time in rooms with accomplished women. Different jobs. Different industries. Different personalities.

Interestingly, when we ask about the lessons that have mattered most, the answers are rarely:

Work harder.

They are usually much more useful.

You do not need to know everything

Susie Daykin, Partner at Pinsent Masons, gave us one of our favourites:

“You don’t need to have all the answers yourself; knowing the right questions to ask can be just as important.”

This is a lesson careers seem to teach backwards.

At the beginning, knowing the answer gets rewarded.

You learn.

You become the expert.

People come to you because you know the thing.

Then you become more senior and the questions get bigger.

There may be no obvious answer.

Now your job is increasingly to work out:

• What are we missing?

• Who knows more about this than I do?

• What happens if we're wrong?

• Whose perspective isn't in the room?

  
  

Knowing things is useful.

Knowing how to find out what you don't know is even more useful.

And considerably more scalable.

Your career is partly made of people

Rosamund Wood, Counsel at Debevoise & Plimpton, puts it simply:

“Build a network of people you really trust and enjoy working with.”

Notice she doesn't say:

Collect as many LinkedIn connections as humanly possible.

A career lasts a long time.

People move companies. Clients become colleagues. Colleagues become clients. Someone you worked with eight years ago suddenly knows exactly the person you need to meet.

Which brings us to a rather useful career fact.

Career Fact

A large 2022 experiment involving more than 20 million LinkedIn users found causal evidence that weaker professional connections can help people find new jobs — with moderately weak ties particularly useful in creating job mobility.

In plain English:

The people just outside your immediate circle matter too. And sometimes even more so.

The former colleague.

The person you met at dinner.

The client you genuinely liked.

The woman from another industry you occasionally have coffee with.

Often loose ties are the best connectors.

Your network isn't a database.

The best connections are bridges that connect and serve both directions.

Remember, you don't necessarily know which one you'll eventually need to cross.

Invest in your connections, every bridge matters eventually.

Curiosity, relationships — and using your voice

When Gayatre Burman, Head of UK Pensions at Shell, was asked what advice she would give the next generation, she chose three things:

Be curious. Build strong relationships. Never underestimate the value of your voice.

There is a rather good career strategy hiding in those three sentences.

• Curiosity helps you understand more.

• Relationships expose you to more.

• Your voice allows other people to discover what you understand.

Miss any one of them and something gets lost.

You can have brilliant ideas that nobody ever hears.

A huge network with nothing particularly interesting to contribute.

Or deep expertise but a world that never expands much beyond your existing professional circle.

The combination is powerful.

Learn.

Know people.

Contribute.

Not particularly complicated.

Also not always easy.

Stop waiting until you feel completely ready

There is another lesson you start noticing when you speak to people with long careers behind them.

Very few important opportunities arrived at the exact moment they felt perfectly prepared.

The new job looked slightly too big.

The speaking invitation was terrifying.

The board opportunity came before they considered themselves “board material”.

The introduction didn't make immediate sense.

The career move looked sideways before it looked clever.

Careers are rarely constructed from a sequence of perfectly timed, completely obvious decisions.

A better question than:

“Am I ready?”

is often:

“Could I grow into this?”

There is a big difference.

Seek out 'pathleaders': Borrow ten years

Think of one person roughly ten years ahead of you whose career contains something you want.

Not necessarily their title.

Maybe you admire their judgement.

Their freedom.

Their reputation.

Their relationships.

Their ability to move between different worlds.

Their confidence without theatre.

Ask them one question:

“What's something about careers you understand now that you didn't understand ten years ago?”

Listen deeply. You might save yourself a few years.

The One Thing to Remember

You can learn every career lesson yourself.

You just don't have to.

Find people further down the road.

Ask better questions.

Borrow what they know.

Then make your own move. ______________________

Read further

'The Long Game' — Dorie Clark

A useful antidote to the idea that every career decision has to produce an immediate result.

Careers compound through reputation, relationships, expertise and opportunities built over time.

Which is reassuring when this particular Tuesday doesn't appear to be transforming your life.