November 16, 2017 – International business leader and technology professional, Lucy Quist, spent time at Ashesi, engaging with a cross-section of students about how to build credibility in their careers.
Interacting with the group, Ms. Quist shared her perspectives on building credibility, touching on her experience as a leading business executive in Ghana. Here are quotes from the chat:
Earn Trust
You earn trust as a pillar in building your credibility in doing what is expected. In your credibility story, you have to be willing to step in there, get your job done, and earn the trust of everybody around you.
Build your expertise
To build expertise, you need to be able to focus on an area or on a few areas that you can manage. Building expertise as the second pillar in building our credibility is about taking things up a notch. It’s not about being the basic requirement or just doing what is expected of you. Building expertise requires that you go beyond the basic duties and stay absolutely focused on what you want to achieve.
Lead ethically
If you want to be a credible leader, lead ethically. If we are ethical ourselves, the people in positional leadership ahead of us have no choice but to be ethical as well. They’re unethical not because of the positions they have, but that, they grew up in a system where being unethical is normalised. In order to be credible, you have to understand the big picture of Africa, and boldly create a new normal. We need a system that creates success for our people; that they have good healthcare, they have education, they have jobs and that they have the opportunity to prosper. In so doing we can aim towards credibilty.
Lucy Quist is an international business leader and a technology professional. She believes that innovation through STEM is a requirement for developing countries to accelerate development and also advocates for greater participation of young people in STEM as the foundation for accelerated development.