Ambition vs Experience

Gary Neat, National President of the Australian Institute of Management, discusses ambition.

Ambition is not a dirty word. In reality, it's the opiate of the aspirational for whom ambition reflects dreams and fulfilment. It's that minority of fractious zealots who sully the term.

Most of you shy away from expressing your ambitions for fear of appearing overly competitive or self-absorbed. Don't be embarrassed about your ambition. Ninety-nine per cent of your contemporaries are essentially asking themselves the same question, which is: "How do I inject momentum into my career?". It's not being selfish to want that question answered.

Well, the answer doesn't come with a degree. You start by being brutally honest with yourself and by using others as sounding boards – particularly if their opinions differ from yours.

Ours is an era where knowledge workers' intellectual capital is supplanting the ladder as the measure of an individual's worth to an organisation. Career pathways are becoming more ambiguous. Just as ambition once translated as striving to reach the ladder's top rung, nowadays it's increasingly focused on securing a more personally fulfilling (and lucrative) role.

Recognise firstly that knowledge is an organisation's most vital strategic asset. Knowing how to acquire, scan and apply that knowledge is called experience. Even poor execution of the task, perhaps failure, is experience. That's why it's called the best teacher!

Experience is an odd beast. It can't be bought, it can't be studied and you can't steal it. For many of you between 22–35 years it can represent a great brick wall, albeit one that can be scaled in time.

And yes, most of us have, at one time or another, been junior to someone who didn't pull their weight. It's poor solace, but one day you'll look back and realise you left them behind anyway. Perhaps you saw risk as an opportunity whereas they saw it as a threat. Or just maybe their chronic sycophancy delivered only a short-term advantage – that's usually its fate.

Along the way you'll make mistakes, feel antagonism – even create it yourself. Sometimes you'll be baffled why your tongue and brain didn't align during a crucial meeting. It's funny how it happens less as you get older.

A good tool to create momentum is to see your career as a pyramid. Its building blocks represent essential inputs for your optimum career. Yours – no-one else's. You are the pyramid's apex, and like any pyramid, if you're missing a building block or if there's a structural weakness, the apex – indeed the whole structure – will be compromised. Or to put it more bluntly, your career will be going nowhere.

Using a sheet of paper, construct your own pyramid. Build your career pyramid using the ingredients you consider essential to what you want to achieve. If your blocks lack substance (such as postgraduate studies/overseas experience/networks/relationship skills), then work assiduously to alter your reality. Challenge your own moribund attitudes. Create building blocks that give you added value against the competition. If you can't think of any, then you'd better change jobs.

Put that sheet of paper in a safe place and regularly monitor your progress. Ongoing and objective self-appraisal, of course, can itself be a vital building block.

When I assess someone for a role, I look not only for their technical expertise but equally for what their life experiences have exposed them to in terms of their people skills, willingness to learn, behaviour under pressure, and that quintessential workplace tool – judgement. All of these are garnered from experience, and you only get that from exposure to a diverse array of life's offerings.

In my early 20s I no doubt projected a supercilious air of self-righteousness. What could you expect – I was a journalist. But many years later – after covering international conflicts, managing a score of election campaigns, long periods of overseas study, and then failing and succeeding in business – I emerged far better equipped to lead, innovate and deliver a more meaningful future. Yes, I'd become experienced.

[Article first published in Management Today, May 2006.]