How to Use the First Decade of Your Career as a Launchpad
5 Lessons from My Experience with Start-Ups, Coaches, Teams and Transitions
We often look at our school years as a time for learning, then see joining the workforce as a time for building our careers. Yet the transition from school to work does not necessarily mean that the time for learning has ended. The first full decade in the workforce (and beyond) is an opportunity to set oneself up for a long, fulfilling career as a contributor and leader. This is a time not only to bolster a CV, but also an opportunity for continued learning and growth.
While I didn’t intentionally approach my first years after college in this way, I pursued a series of opportunities that ended up giving me more than just a line on my CV; they helped provide clarity and a strong foundation, which has allowed me to approach new goals and challenges with confidence.
If you approach your early career with certain intentions, this can set you up for long-term success:
#1: Jump On a Rocket Ship to Learn What Makes You Tick
The first decade of your career can be the perfect time for high-risk, high-reward roles. This can mean going for a ride with a hyper-growth company. While there’s a good chance at some point you’ll either burn out, lose your way, or the company will fizzle — there will be incredible learning opportunities to try on many hats. If you go with this route, don’t forget to take time to notice what parts you really like and dislike.
Less than two years out of college, I was given the opportunity to help a rapidly-scaling social enterprise enter a strategic new market. Arriving in a new country, I was given the mandate to launch operations from scratch and adjust the business model to find product-market fit in one of the world’s poorest countries. What I previously understood as challenging — juggling school and extracurriculars, applying for jobs, etc. — suddenly seemed trivial compared to this new challenge, particularly so early in my career.
During the first few years, I felt supercharged. I put everything I had into understanding our customer needs, running product trials, growing the team and setting up bare-minimum systems. I was running fast, learning along the way, and given significant autonomy to shape the program given the small size of our operations relative to the larger global organization. I felt a strong sense of ownership of my work.
Five years on, I had built a team of 250 staff. I felt pride in the large team and customer base that we had assembled so quickly, and the growing impact which comes from scale. There is a powerful allure of running something that produces impact well beyond your individual capacity.
But I also no longer felt the spark and motivation I had in the early years of launching the program. I had jumped on a rocketship, and felt the thrill of acceleration provided by the notion of building something from scratch with huge potential. I made a mental note. I knew I would eventually want to go for another such ride later in my career.
While I no longer felt the same excitement at a later stage company, it was invaluable learning that early-stage start-ups made me tick.
#2 Use Coaches to Reflect on Challenges and Navigate Transitions
If you’re moving fast during your early career (or if you’re having trouble hitting your stride), you’ll want to have a coach to help you interpret what’s happening and how to move forward when you reach an impasse. Coaches fill a crucial gap — since it’s nearly impossible to find someone that you already know from among your friends, family or colleagues who can ask the tough questions from an unbiased perspective.
Executive or leadership coaching, if done correctly, is not about a more experienced executive telling you what to do differently. In fact, a great coach mostly listens and asks well-timed questions to help you better reflect on your management tactics and career goals.
If you can get your employer to cover the cost of a coach, all the better. But I’d argue that if you can find an affordable professional coach, it’s still worth paying for yourself, given the time and energy it will save you by giving you the tools to make more solid decisions early in your career. It’s also important to recognize that coaches should be used not just when facing difficult crossroads, but also when pursuing fast career growth or preparing for a promotion to the next level.
Starting in the third year of my first major professional leadership role, serious product concerns began arising as we started to scale across the country. Some of our early metrics weren’t holding steady. Instead of being able to dive into those challenges head-on myself as I had done in the early years, my role as the country lead had seemingly shifted under my feet. I was no longer the young front-line manager getting it done in the field. I now had to spend half of my time managing the company itself, rather then drilling into the meat of customers, products and sales.
During those several years, I struggled to navigate this transition. I hadn’t been able to adjust my leadership style fast enough. The systems I had set up hadn’t been strong enough. I didn’t sharpen my skills in time to effectively drive these course-correcting processes through my network of key deputies and their department teams.
I used two different executive coaches over 18 months, reflecting on these challenges. We thought through my leadership style, team dynamics and business decisions. I practiced new strategies and worked closely with my team in an attempt to improve.
Eventually, after some initial successes at applying new leadership strategies, such as building better rapport at certain team meetings, I was able to put my finger on a bigger, core issue. I no longer felt like an entrepreneur. I wasn’t as motivated to reinvent myself in a role that didn’t seem to represent my authentic self. It was time for me to look for another early-stage adventure, to try again with what I had learned in hand.
#3: Know When to Make Changes, and See Them Out All the Way
There are often times when young professionals gain important insights about career preferences, but we don’t act on them fast enough or at all. Or we do try to pursue them, but then get distracted or forget why our original insight was so critical to our personal sustainability or long-term career goals. Being able to not only learn from our experiences, but also make the necessary adjustments early on in our career will unlock a much longer horizon to pursue our calling.
Soon after realizing that I was no longer in my type of entrepreneurial role, I made the difficult decision to pass the baton to another capable leader to move the country program forward.
I quickly joined another smaller start-up in the same region, only needing to manage five staff, figuring it would take me back to my comfort zone.
To my dismay, after just one month in this new position, our expansion strategy shifted and I was tasked to build another 200+ person team across two countries for a 6-month field sales campaign. Not wanting to burn bridges, I agreed to execute these plans, and did so, hitting our sales target of signing up 130,000 farmers across 700 shop locations for an innovative crop insurance product — but not without a lot of stress.
But I also realized that the only way to really get back to a place I felt truly motivated would be to do what I’ve always dreamt of. It was time for me to explore the solo entrepreneur route. I put in 3 months’ notice at the new start-up, letting them know that I’d be leaving to try to launch my own company, for which they were very supportive.
They understood that I needed to finish the transition that had made me leave my first leadership role to begin with.
#4: Embrace That There Are Some Things You Can’t Escape If You Want to be a Leader
We should look to pursue ideal work conditions and structure roles to set ourselves up for success. But this process shouldn’t turn into a never-ending game of running away from every type of work that we dislike. The truth is that there’s no such thing as a perfect job, and that there will always be some unpleasant challenges that you must face head to head. Otherwise these dynamics will continue to haunt you in every new position you seek, resurfacing through new, unexpected avenues. Especially if you want to be a leader.
My quest to become a solo startup founder was driven by my experience that when leading a larger company, only about half of my time was spent addressing customers, products and sales — because of the time required to handle internal team and admin issues. During coaching, I had realized that I preferred working in small, nimble teams where I could play a more hands-on role translating an idea to a workable prototype or pilot. So I figured that in switching to complete solo mode, this split would dramatically shift to 90% of my time focused on what I loved. This has not always been the case.
The past three months have taught me that some realities of running a business will always hold true, whether you have 100 staff under you or none at all. That the underlying challenges of managing large teams will emerge in new unexpected ways, even as a solo entrepreneur.
Despite being a one-person team, I still found myself spending considerable time managing aspects I thought would be minimized. I’m still spending energy on tasks such as maintaining communication channels (now between key stakeholders, rather than department teams), vetting key hires (now service providers, rather than new staff) and building consensus (now among investors and board members, rather than employees). I’m now digging in and facing these challenges head-on.
#5: Build and Pursue a Long-Term Game Plan and Narrative for Yourself, But Also Pay Attention to Patterns that Emerge
Early in our careers, we begin to craft a vision for what we want to accomplish in our personal and professional lives. Then, each time you make a transition — whether its to a new school, job, or city — you inevitably meet and speak with a set of new faces. Each of them want to hear your story. It’s during these conversations, or preparing for them, that we can often realize the subtle shifts in one’s self-narrative over time. Each time we convince ourselves how the next opportunity is the obvious next logical step in the grander scheme. Selling yourself on this progression is much more important than having others believe you are acting out your exact game plan. In fact, I’d argue it’s a crucial re-calibration tool to continually adapt our game plan for our constantly evolving personal and professional situation.
For example, I recently spoke on a career panel at the African Leadership University campus in Mauritius. One question from a student made me realize that my early career has been marked by a steady decrease in team size.
I shared my own experience, briefly outlining the approximate sizes of my first four employers when I joined them: first a solid 10,000-strong global agribusiness, then on to a 1,000-member team at a global social enterprise, then down again to a 100-person pan-African social enterprise — and now finally to just a 1-person early-stage start-up.
I remarked to the room that I had taken this path to gain a range of experiences from different workplaces to see what size and styles worked best for me. But in reality, I knew I hadn’t engineered this progression intentionally, at least not consciously.
Yes, my plan was to eventually launch my own business. But the path I’ve taken, how I actually got here, was a result of learning and adjusting along the way. And noticing the pattern has been important in revealing my preferences and building my next 10-year roadmap.
Sharing this anecdote with a room of college students may have given a handful of them something to think about as they chose from their internship and job options. But the real beneficiary of this insight was myself. I walked away from the event having connected the dots of why I have ended up working alone at this stage in my career. I’m now looking forward to launching the next stage of my career using what I have learned from the first stage.
