What are your biggest aspirations when it comes to your career? If you want to start your own business or run a company, then you might be asking yourself whether or not you have what it takes to become a CEO. The good news is that no successful CEOs are born that way, and anything is possible as long as you believe in yourself, work hard, and are determined to progress. So, what does it take to become a CEO, and have you got that?
Qualifications:
The truth is that the number of degrees, type of qualifications, or where you went to school might not always be the most important factors when it comes to being a successful CEO. Sure, you can definitely help yourself along this career path by getting an advanced business degree like the MBA, but most CEOs are successful due to the experience and skills that they accumulate throughout their career. Since formal education can certainly help with this, it’s no surprise that the majority of CEOs are very well-educated people, even though there are no formal educational requirements for this position.
If you are considering going to college to pursue an undergraduate or postgraduate degree program to help you in your journey to becoming a CEO, consider an open subject that covers a lot of areas and will allow you to be flexible with your goals if needed while staying in line with the industry that you’re interested in.
Skills:
Any good CEO knows that consistently challenging themselves is the only way to get to the top. Most successful CEOs have a lot of skills in common, with some of the most important being:
- Business acumen: You’ll need to build a strong professional network and work on getting links to various factors of the business
- Stress management: You’ll need to learn how to work well under pressure, and develop the ‘poker face’ of a CEO
- Leadership skills: Since your job involves managing people and directing the business, you’ll need skills that encourage others to be inspired by you and look up to you as a leader
- Decision-making: You can’t overthink too much as a CEO; you’ll need to be willing to make effective business decisions, often quickly, and often involving making sacrifices
- Resourcefulness: There will be times where you’ll need to think on your feet and come up with clever, quick solutions to problems and situations
- Self-awareness: The best CEOs are experts in getting to know themselves, understanding their strengths and weaknesses, and improving how they do things
- Communication: As a CEO, you will need to be able to get your ideas across effectively and successfully connect with people from all walks of life
- Strategic planning: To set realistic goals for the company and meet them, you will need to know how to come up with a clear strategy and direction
- Self-confidence: Finally, being confident in yourself and your abilities is necessary to achieving your goals in life and climbing up the career ladder to reach the position of CEO
Make Valuable Business Connections:
Referrals are one of the most popular ways to get to the top. When it comes to almost every aspect of business, knowing the right people and making the right connections can help you get to almost anywhere that you want. But you’ll need to start somewhere and make those connections. Take the time to attend as many networking events as you can and really get to know the other people who are attending. It’s also worth dedicating as much time as possible into online networking; utilize your LinkedIn account by adding people from your industry, joining groups, and getting involved in conversations.
Take Risks:
No good CEO got to where they are today without some risk-taking. In the world of business, it’s difficult to get very far if you are not willing to take some risks. You might be forced to go against the grain in order to succeed, and the good news is that it’s often the people who are willing to do this that end up at the top.
Be Realistic:
If you are right at the start of your business career, then it’s important to understand that it might take a while for you to even get into a managerial position, let alone right to the top. You will need time and experience in the industry to get an idea of what it’s like to work as a CEO. Unless you decide to stop depending on employers and take the huge step of starting your own business and making yourself the CEO, it will usually be several years at least before most people get to this level in their place of work. Because of this, it’s crucial to be realistic about what you’re getting yourself into for your career, and make sure that your expectations are not too high.
Help People:
While most people think of a CEO as somebody who gives the orders, the truth is that to be successful in this position, you need to be all about helping and serving others. The best CEOs always prioritise meeting the needs of other people, whether they are clients, colleagues, or employees. A good leader knows that a service mindset is the best way to lead a team or a company effectively and being self-centred or all about the power is never going to get you to the top. On the other hand, showing that you care about other people and making decisions with others in mind will always earn you the respect that you need to climb to this position.
Motivate Yourself:
Since it can take a long time to get to the position of CEO in any business industry, you will need to be somebody who is able to motivate themselves to keep going, even when reaching their goal seems extremely far away. It’s important to do this by staying up to date with the latest from the industry or market that you are in. The more you know from relevant books, articles, news videos, the more it will help you stay interested and motivated to work towards your ultimate goal.
Plan for the Future:
Becoming a CEO isn’t a pathway that you can just fall into. Successful CEOs have had a plan for the future for as long as they can remember. While things might not always go to plan, mapping out your professional life so that you can keep moving forward, learn from any mistakes that you make, and improve things as you go along is essential to becoming a successful CEO. This is not a position where you can simply see what happens in the future; you need to be ready for it and take your career seriously. One of the main things that good CEOs share is that they all have a clear vision and direction in which they want to take not only their company but their professional career. When you become a CEO, you’ll be expected to own this vision, make decisions that support it and clearly communicate it to the rest of the organisation.
While reaching the top company position can be a very lofty goal to have, it’s certainly possible to achieve it with the right skills, mindset and experience.
