Toby Beaglehole, CEO of the Royal NZ College of GPs

Photo credit - Phil Greig

My first career job was as a policy analyst for ACC, where I got to do lots of writing and critical thinking. At the very least, it made me a more polished writer and very careful with distinctions. And spelling.

Be open about things that really interest you - I wanted to join the Fraud Unit so I just told everyone I'd like to do that and they created a role for me.

It took me until 39 to realize that other people DIDN'T all want to keep moving up the chain. Until then, I'd just always taken it for granted that everyone wanted to get to the top.

I went through twelve different roles before I became CEO, in organizations/sectors that ranged from State Owned Enterprises, management consulting, government departments and merchant bank. The overarching theme through a good twenty years was in risk management.

I got the first CEO role I tried for. Which was probably very lucky or my supreme overconfidence would have been heavily dented.

Day one, you can't get too much wrong. Show up, meet people, show an interest, offer no opinion, just absorb.

Month one, be more structured with meeting the leaders and managers. Just ask them a) about themselves and b) about the organization and what it had right and wrong.

There was less support than I expected in my first CEO role. It was a smaller organisation so resources were more stretched than at my previous role at an SOE.

I rapidly realized we'd lost visibility of the cause, and unless I worked it out, we would remain massively on the backfoot with our shareholders.

I'm a specialist generalist—I love coming to a new business, new sector, getting up to speed fast, fixing whatever's broken, being curious, supporting the business to be strong, then generally start sniffing around for the next thing.

Being a CEO is nothing like the movies - if you want to be an Elon Musk style dictator, move to the US.

Don't become a CEO because you love power. You're not there to wield power; you're there to lead people and culture and purpose; and make the engine hum.