Hi, my name is Saadia Zahidi, and I'm currently a Managing Director at the World Economic Forum.
Here are my five biggest career lessons.
The number one thing that I have learned is, it's important to figure out your purpose
early on, and ensure that it is a critical part of what you do.
For me, it's embedded into where I’ve come from. I grew up in Pakistan, you know, belonged to a
middle-class family that really valued education and economic opportunity for girls and women,
and that was certainly not the norm around me. I was very aware of how privileged I was,
and what happens if you don't have that privilege. I was very aware of the fact that this is exactly
how I wanted to create some change in the world, provide more of that educational and economic
opportunity to more people, especially to those people that have traditionally been left out of
that kind of privilege. And so that's been the red thread throughout my career. And here's why
it's important. There are inevitably going to be moments where things will be hard, where you'll be
working with somebody you don't want to work with, where you are burning the midnight oil to get
something done, where you have you're overwhelmed, because there's simply too much work to do, and
that's where it matters. You have to be able to connect it back to that fundamental purpose, that
fundamental mission, those fundamental values, and remind yourself, here's why this matters to me.
It took me a while to figure this out, but I work best in the mornings. So whenever I've got
difficult tasks, strategy documents to write or, you know, long reports to edit, or some kind of
complex problem, I'll often do that thinking and some of that solo work very early in the mornings.
Second is using music for concentration. I play a lot of classical music when I'm doing some of
those long assignments, that long set of work. And third is around exercise. I know that it's always
going to work best if I've taken a bit of time to connect with my body, get some physical exercise,
and then get back to some of the work that many of us do in front of screens for very long hours.
This third lesson is something that I picked up in my second master's degree, and probably one
of the most practical things that I've learned in academics. Getting off the dance floor and
onto the balcony. Now, you'll often find yourself in meetings where things are getting very heated,
where everybody is going down a specific rabbit hole, where a conversation is going very off
track. And you'll have this huge temptation to also get on the dance floor, to also present
your viewpoint, to join that argument, to get into that conversation. And it's incredibly important,
I think, especially as a leader, and not just as a manager and a decision maker, to step back,
to be able to look at the bigger picture, to understand what are the real underlying
dynamics behind this conversation, and to start naming it for people to help others do the same,
to ask the right questions and say, what is it that we're actually trying to solve for here?
My fourth lesson is surrounding yourself with people who've got the right mix of skills and
values. And when I'm saying skills, it's important to have the hard skills, the technical skills,
the right knowledge, the right capacity. It's also important to have the soft skills people who are,
for example, good at relationship management, people who've got good active listening skills.
All of that is incredibly important, but the passion piece, the values piece, matter a lot,
especially for an organization such as the World Economic Forum, where we are working on some of
the most intractable challenges in the world, from education to climate change to technology
governance. People have to be able to connect to some fundamental, personal reason why it is that
what they're working on matters to them, and I think you can never go wrong with that mix.
There is going to be a moment where you're facing some level of imposter syndrome,
where you're wondering, how did you get to this particular role? Are you really the best person
for this role? How should you be responding? How should you be acting? And I certainly had this
moment. I mean, I've always had a lot of faith in my abilities mixed with an appropriate level
of trepidation about if this something I can actually do. But about three years ago, when
I was appointed to the World Economic Forum's managing board at the age of 37, it became
pretty ingrained within me that clearly I was only here for bringing some youth diversity,
some gender diversity, some racial diversity and some religious diversity. And it became
very much ingrained into my thinking at the time. And what it did was I held my voice back,
I spoke up only on the issues that I thought I was supposed to speak about, and not on the
issues where I actually did have opinions, ideas and thoughts, and instead held myself back. There
wasn't necessarily a sort of an 'aha' moment, when I suddenly realized that this is what I'm doing.
I was speaking to a lot of external mentors, and especially some of my female mentors said to me,
I think you're going through a phase of imposter syndrome, and I didn't quite
believe it. And it's only once I understood that fully, embraced it, named the problem,
that I was then able to move forward and say, I'm here for a reason. I've got a seat at the table,
and this is the moment to use your voice to try to move things forward to make a difference, and also
give myself the freedom to make some mistakes.