Chances are you’ve asked for career advice from a friend or mentor – but what if you could get career advice from a Chief Executive Officer of a Fortune 500 company? It turns out you can. Kevin Lobo, Chair and CEO of Stryker, shares what he wishes he would have known early in his career, skills every employee should have, and how to overcome professional obstacles.
Here are five career tips from Kevin Lobo:
1. Finding your culture match is important
Company cultures can be so different, even within the same industry. Joining a company whose culture was a match for me was not something that I thought about early on. I would encourage those seeking job opportunities to screen for that.
2. Be curious
All employees need to be curious. Curiosity requires listening, helps to engage others, and leads to better solutions.
3. Successful leaders need to be:
Humble
Driven (high energy)
Passionate about their job
Able to set clear direction and motivate their teams
Open to diversity of thought and experience
4. Learn from your professional challenges
The most challenging career lesson I had to learn was how to motivate people during challenging times, including having to make hard choices that impact people’s livelihoods, which I had to do earlier in my career. I learned the importance of being transparent, empathetic and that you can still motivate people by setting goals and aligning people to achieve them.
5. Focus on learning and developing your skills
Everyone will experience a set-back in their career, and I am not an exception. Certain jobs did not materialize that I had wanted at stages of my career. Still, I did not dwell on it and focused instead on continuing to do my job well and shifted to inquiring about other possibilities over time. I was not in a hurry to jump to new jobs and was more concerned with learning and developing. Most of the time, I was tapped on the shoulder for new opportunities versus having to raise my hand.
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