There are a wide variety of careers that appeal to the more driven and ambitious among us: law, medicine, sales, marketing, engineering, entrepreneurship…the list goes on. Regardless of one’s initial vocation, most professionals who work for larger businesses will encounter the opportunity to pursue leadership roles as one potential career path. 

Climbing the corporate ladder is rarely a straightforward path, frequently involving strong soft skills, a willingness to learn and master a variety of domains of work, and a keen understanding of the structure of the company they work for, and where their opportunities in that structure may lie. Regardless of the company or industry, corporate management always demands hard work, strong political instincts, and a good dose of discipline – capabilities that can be learned but are difficult to quantify.

Developing leadership skills

Soft skills are easily the most difficult talent to quantify. Luckily, for many people, they come naturally, and for others, they’re often very teachable. Cultivating a strong aptitude for communication, decision making, and emotional awareness is often the result of deliberate focus on these skills in every-day life.

Communication is arguably the most important skill for any leader. Whether your role primarily involves communicating with the public, customers, superiors, peers, direct reports, or a mix of all of these, ensuring that you can communicate succinctly, effectively, and in a manner that can be understood by your audience is vital.

It’s important to remember that good listening skills are just as important as writing and speaking. Good communication is always a two-way street, and no matter how good you are at ensuring other people understand what you have to say, it will eventually all go to waste if you aren’t capable of receiving constructive feedback and understanding the needs of others.

Communication is just one part of emotional intelligence, a skill that’s invaluable in any leadership role. Emotional intelligence is comprised of one’s capacity for self-awareness, emotional resilience and self-regulation, motivation, capacity for empathy, and general social and communication skills. As a leader, you’ll be responsible for the performance and daily supervision of at least a few employees, and your ability to understand them as individuals, how to relate to them effectively, and how best to leverage their strengths and manage their weaknesses will ultimately be the deciding factor in your success as a leader.

Strong decision-making skills are another must-have for anyone pursuing a leadership position. Leaders are, above all, responsible for making decisions that may have a serious impact on one’s direct reports, peers, and superiors, and ultimately the business as a whole. Being able to analyse and contextualise large amounts of role-specific information, weigh all of the available options, and assess the risks and benefits of each course of action is crucial to making good decisions that achieve desirable business outcomes.

Education and training: Investing in your career trajectory

While soft skills are usually cultivated through experience, other skills are better learned in a more formal venue. Professions involving science, technology, math, law, or large volumes of any form of concrete knowledge are often best learned under the tutelage of an experienced hand. Degrees like a Masters Degree in Management, executive leadership programs, and other certifications and online training programs can provide valuable information, granting you the benefit of others’ experience and hard-won understanding.

It’s important to let your desired position or level of attainment inform your choice of industry-specific education and training, education aimed specifically at leadership, or some mix of the two. Leaders looking to oversee individual contributors in intensely technical disciplines like medicine or engineering normally need to have technical knowledge that either matches or exceeds that of their subordinates, given that they are often responsible for ensuring the quality of work of their entire team. These leaders normally need to focus mostly on their domain-specific technical knowledge, and often obtain tertiary degrees like a Master’s or PhD. 

On the opposite side of the coin, a manager overseeing a large number of employees doing less technical work, like salespeople or marketers, may not require the same level of aptitude as their reports in the core skills that they perform daily, but will need a stronger understanding of the organisation they’re a part of, and how their teams performance or deliverables impact the business as a whole to manage effectively. Leaders overseeing teams mostly employing soft skills or producing less quantifiable outputs may benefit more from dedicated leadership training and enhanced knowledge of the internal workings of the businesses they are a part of.

The power of networking

Soft skills are crucial for engaging stakeholders in your daily activities, but their usefulness doesn’t end there. While maintaining group cohesion and communicating effectively are important, in reality, they’re the bare minimum – you need to build a network. 

The higher up the corporate ladder you climb, the more your ability to accomplish complex tasks and deliver exceptional results will rely on the relationships you build and how well you can leverage them. Mentors, people in similar positions in different parts of your organisation, and peers performing work like yours at other businesses will be invaluable in both exceeding in your current role and opening up new career opportunities. This is a great reason to attend industry events like trade shows and conferences, and to keep up with current trends in your industry to establish yourself as a credible authority on specific subjects within your niche.

The real art of developing strong relationships lies in being able to share and absorb knowledge that allows you to better understand both your role and that of others whose help, resources, or knowledge you may need in the future. Having a strong comprehension of the roles and capabilities of your peers and superiors allows you to not only better leverage their abilities but also to understand when you might be able to use those abilities to go above and beyond your current deliverables.

Demonstrating initiative and problem solving

Taking on additional responsibilities and pursuing ambitious goals outside the scope of your current role is the bread and butter of climbing the corporate ladder. Few people earn promotions simply by excelling in their current role. After all, if you’re an excellent individual contributor and nothing else, your supervisors will likely see little upside in moving you out of your current role. 

People who get promoted aren’t always the best individual contributors. Rather, they’re those who can go beyond the minimum contribution required while also performing tasks that make the lives of their superiors easier. Sometimes that involves relieving them of the burden of day-to-day administrative tasks, although this can occasionally be a self-defeating pursuit, as it incentivises your superior to keep you in your current role. More often, taking on additional responsibilities that improve the performance of other teams, improve the efficiency of your organisation as a whole, or add new capabilities to your business unit are rewarded most profitably.

Securing a leadership position is never easy. It requires hard work, patience, and an intuition for workplace politics. No matter how productive or well-liked you are, your value is no guarantee of recognition or promotion; indeed, these are often regarded as the bare minimum for a leadership role. To work your way up the chain of command, you need to develop a keen understanding of your company, cultivate strong relationships, and figure out how you can stand out amongst the crowd. If you can consistently succeed in all of these, the sky is the limit.

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