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Looking Beyond the Car in Front

A Guide to Making the Right Career Choices at the Right Time

By Grant Duncan

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How do you plot the best career path?

How do you know you’re heading in the right direction professionally?

How do you effectively make a shift into a new industry about which you have little knowledge or experience?

About the Book

Looking Beyond the Car in Front, written by leading recruitment expert Grant Duncan, guides both senior and mid-career business executives in taking a more assertive and strategic longer-term approach to career choices. No other careers book includes insights from so many people who have steered their careers to the top of their professions.

Description

The professional journey we’re on is typically the result of a mixture of hard work, good luck, and brainpower, but not always proactive choices and decisions. Drawing on 40 years’ experience of working with, talking to, and assessing executives with many different career journeys, the book offers an approach to set a longer-term mindset and a toolkit to help those who are thinking about their future career plans and, particularly, a career change. Grant has worked alongside some of the most successful business leaders, and the book offers unique insights from interviews with CEOs, successful entrepreneurs, and public and not-for-profit leaders from multiple sectors, including Roger Davis, Chairman of BUPA, Stevie Spring, Chairman of the British Council, Mind and Co-op NED, Stephen Carter, Informa plc Group Chief Executive, Tim Davie, BBC Director General, and Alan Jope, Unilever plc CEO.

When following the car in front may seem the easiest, safest and most rational course of action, it will not necessarily take you in the right direction. This book provides the perfect “front-seat navigator” in steering your next career move, and for those supporting career development, including HR Directors, coaches, and career management consultants.

ISBN 9781032134635
Published December 17, 2021 by Routledge
130 Pages 19 B/W Illustrations

Chapters

1. Introduction

The introduction sets the scene for the book as a whole. It introduces, via an anecdote from early on in the author’s own career, the origins behind the underlying concept of avoiding following the car in front and, instead, looking further ahead when plotting an executive career. It explains what to expect from the book: practical and practicable advice on how to be more proactive with career decisions to avoid getting stuck behind the car in front. And finally, it explains that the source of this advice is both the author’s own personal experience as well as in-depth interviews undertaken with other successful executives.

2. The Three Ages of Man

This chapter outlines the ways in which executives typically find themselves following the car in front. It includes a discussion of Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck’s work on fixed versus growth mindsets, and how a fixed mindset can often lead people to stay behind the car in front because to not do so would be to step out of their comfort zone. The chapter also warns against the danger of “midlife caution”: the tendency to avoid any risk when marriage, mortgages, and children come into the frame. To conclude, the chapter addresses the fact that it is easy to get stuck behind the car in front without even realising, but that the book’s intention is to help resolve that.

3. And the Ages of Woman?

This chapter addresses the fact that, for female executives, there are significantly more barriers to constructive career advancement than simply a fixed mindset or a tendency towards risk-aversion. It outlines various statistics that illustrate the gender imbalance at the top of the world’s biggest companies and subsequently draws on the input of 15 top female executives to provide advice on how women specifically can make better career decisions. The advice given is to always be yourself, consistently be learning, find allies and build a network of support, and put on a confident face even in scenarios where you may not be.

4. Gen X, Y, Z…Whatever

As with the previous one, this chapter addresses a large section of the workforce who may be sceptical about the first chapter’s characterisation of a typical executive career. In this case, the target audience is those who have entered the workforce since the 2008 global financial crash, an event so seismic it has changed the way many people work. The chapter acknowledges that today’s work environment is indeed historic as there are five generations working alongside each other. However, in contrast perhaps to widespread prevailing beliefs, the author concludes that younger executives want much the same from their careers as their forebears did, even if most are aware they will change jobs more regularly and likely work for longer. The chapter concludes that, as a result of this, the book is equally relevant for those early on in their careers as it is for those further along. For both young and old, the danger of following the car in front is apparent.

5. On Entrepreneurs

This chapter focuses on entrepreneurs and addresses how different they are/need to be from a “normal” executive. Drawing on input from successful entrepreneurs interviewed by the author—including Brent Hoberman, Julietta Dexter, and Sir Peter Bazalgette—the chapter briefly outlines the key characteristics required for maintaining a successful career as an entrepreneur. The key conclusions drawn are that entrepreneurs need to have a spirit of adventure—including a tendency to seize opportunities when they emerge and take risks—and the ability to be all things to all people. The author notes at the end of the chapter that there is much traditional executives can learn from entrepreneurs which may prevent them from getting stuck behind the car in front.

6. The Context for Success

If the opening chapters have been laying the groundwork for the book as a whole, this chapter is when the truly practical advice begins to flow. It discusses the need to build a varied career rather than a linear one but acknowledges the fact that to build this kind of career, risks will need to be taken. As such, the author offers solutions for how to get more comfortable with taking risks, and how to cope better with failure if a risk doesn’t appear to pay off. (For the latter the authors draws on advice from Tchiki Davis, Ph.D., psychologist, author, and founder of The Berkeley Well-Being Institute.) The chapter then addresses the fact that, in order to succeed in any career, working effectively with others will be required. A discussion duly follows on how to navigate workplace politics effectively. Addressing the other side of the coin, the chapter concludes with how to be outstanding at interacting with colleagues and provides specific advice on asking good questions.

7. Looking in the Mirror

Having finished the previous chapter with advice on how to ask good questions of others, this one focuses on how to ask them of yourself. It opens with a discussion of the Dunning-Kruger Effect and how universally poor people are at estimating their own abilities. This is the reason, the author says, why it is so important to regularly receive feedback if an executive is to advance effectively in their career. What follows is a discussion of the various ways in which an executive aiming not to follow the car in front should go about getting feedback. These include being actively engaged in intermittent 360 reviews and finding a mentor (or mentors) who can offer less formal, but more regular, advice.

8. Where the Rubber Hits the Road

This chapter moves from the practical advice to the practicable tools and strategies readers can use to either avoid getting stuck behind the car in front altogether or manoeuvre themselves out from behind it if they happen to have been drawn into its slipstream. It introduces a framework—based on the Japanese concept of ikigai—for making more effective career decisions that simply involves asking yourself three questions: “what do I need?”, “what do I enjoy?”, and “what am I good at?”. The chapter also includes advice on when best to leave a job and move onto a new one, how to get out of a dead-end career, how to properly present your qualifications and competencies on a CV, and how to identify areas outside your current sector where your abilities may be equally valuable.

9. Defining Your Archetype

This chapter provides advice on how to identify and pithily explain your own personal brand; the strengths that make you stand out as an executive. By drawing on the work of both Carl Jung and brand consultancy Haines McGregor, the author provides a method for identifying your key strengths and translating that into an engaging, and crucially multi-faceted, brand or short-form. While acknowledging that it could seem facile to reduce a human being down to its bare minimum competencies, the author explains that we now live in a world of soundbites and video clips. So there is huge value in being able to present yourself succinctly. Being able to do that effectively and imaginatively will make progress easier.

10. Get Out More

Having discussed in the previous chapter how to effectively present your short form to others, this chapter focuses on the environments in which you may need to. Which is to say, it’s about networking. Networking, the author says, remains an unavoidable necessity for executives looking to get ahead, but it is perhaps not exactly the nightmare people imagine it to be. Drawing on advice from David Burkus, author of a bestselling book on networking, the reader is presented with a strategy for how to make networking less uncomfortable and more effective. The chapter then moves on from merely getting used to networking to how to do it better than most. Strategies focus on how to get known, how to widen your circle, and how to become respectable. The chapter concludes with a recommendation to return to education throughout your career, because it will introduce you to new people, but most importantly, new thinking.

11. Going Social

Allied to the content of the previous chapter, this one specifically offers advice on how best to use social media to advance an executive career. For those who may be sceptical, the chapter opens with a discussion of the value of social media for an executive before drawing on the insights of Brunswick’s Craig Mullaney for a how-to on the best approaches. These include Mullaney’s five key pieces of advice on how best to go about using social media in a professional capacity (start small, brand yourself, create a habit, interact, be authentic). The chapter then deals specifically with the key platforms, most prominently LinkedIn, and how to navigate their specific intricacies for the best results.

12. The Endgame Game

The final chapter of the book asks the reader the question: what does my life look like in 10 years’ time? It highlights that, for the executive that does not want to simply follow the car in front, this is an essential exercise. Because it can often be the lack of a plan, the going-with-the-flow attitude, that results in people being led down a cul-de-sac. By focussing on four possible answers to the question (which include making it to CEO or giving it all up to open a cheese shop), the author explains how asking yourself where you want to be in 10 years can reveal what you need to do to get there, and then how to ensure you do.

13. Conclusion

The conclusion initially reiterates what was said right at the start: that the book is not a panacea for any career-related ills. What it is, says the author, is an attempt to bring together personal and external experience to provide a toolkit that will help people make more proactive career decisions and more effective changes. A book that will prevent executives from getting stuck or going stale. In a bid to align with the practical and practicable aims of the book, the conclusion is brief and finishes with 10 lessons to take away that encapsulate the key points from the chapters that have come before.

14. Twelve Journeys

This supplementary chapter includes case studies of 12 successful executives to illustrate through real-life examples how the truly exceptional go about navigating their careers. Based on extensive interviews with each of the subjects, the case studies are presented in the same format but are all remarkably varied in their content, providing a final flourish that well and truly proves the point that following the car in front is not the way to go if you want to have a successful executive career. The subjects of the case studies are Alan Jope, Gavin Patterson, John Smith, Jonathan Lewis, Roger Davis, Stephen Carter, Stevie Spring, Zillah Byng-Thorne, Guy Laurence, June Felix, William Eccleshare, and Melanie Smith.

Biography

Grant Duncan is Managing Director, Media, Entertainment, and Digital at global leadership advisory consultancy, Korn Ferry. He has 40 years of business experience gained in two professions. Grant’s first career saw him rise to leadership roles in a number of UK advertising agencies, latterly as CEO of Publicis. His second career has been in executive recruitment, initially at global executive search firm, Spencer Stuart, before joining Korn Ferry.

Get in touch at [email protected]

Reviews

“A well-written and highly useable take on how to take control of a career and maximise potential, illustrated by fascinating interviews with leading executives which bring this vividly to life.”

William Eccleshare, Worldwide CEO of Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Inc

“A practical and thoughtful career progression manual, rich in analysis, action-oriented advice and sound common sense.”

Dame Cilla Snowball, Governor at Wellcome Trust, Director at Genome Research Ltd (Wellcome Sanger Institute), Non Executive Director Derwent London plc

“A genuinely insightful guide to help people approach their career choices in a more proactive way, combining a playbook of techniques with the real-world journeys of senior executives.”

Gavin Patterson, President and Chief Revenue Officer, Salesforce

“A very practical and highly readable guide to career planning by a recognised leadership practitioner and thought-leader.”

Stevie Spring CBE, Chairman of The British Council
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