Anders Nordström has some advice for budding development professionals: Don’t think about your career, think about the good you can do. This philosophy sure has worked for the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency’s director general.

Nordström first witnessed “how poverty is affecting people, how actually children are dying” in foreign lands, when he worked in a Cambodia children’s hospital for the Swedish Red Cross.

Trained as a medical doctor at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Nordström could have gone for a career as a private physician, but he ended up taking a different path - “more by chance than a very deliberate decision,” as he noted.

“I was very engaged in working internationally and to see what I can possibly contribute,” he said. “I quite liked it.”

Nordström’s first international experience was with the Swedish Red Cross in Cambodia, as well as the International Committee of the Red Cross in Iran. He also worked as Sida’s regional advisor in Zambia, and chief of the health division in Sida’s Stockholm headquarters over a 12-year period.

“I saw a lot of the reality on the ground,” he said.

But Nordström also saw the possibility for change.

“If there is an engagement from the local political leaders (and) good managers … one can actually make a difference,” he said. “One can actually save lives.”

Working in the field equipped Nordström with the necessary tools and skills to pursue a management track in the international development arena.

“I’ve always enjoyed working with people [and] I’ve always been very interested in management - to lead, to drive the results, to engage, to evaluate results and see whether one can improve,” he said.

After a stint as Sida program officer, Nordström worked his way up the development ladder. In 2002, he became the interim executive director for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. A year later, he assumed the post of assistant director-general for general management at the World Health Organization and subsequently became the U.N. agency’s acting director-general following the sudden death of Lee Jong-wook.

One of the secrets to a successful career in international development is, according to Nordström, not to think about one’s career.

“If you’re going to go for a career and you’re very conscious of exactly what you’re going to get out of what you do, that might not be the most successful way of having good opportunities for the future,” Nordström said.

Engagement, drive and altruism are key qualities for a successful career in the development field, according to Nordström.

“By giving, by engaging, you will be rewarded later on and you will have bigger opportunities,” Nordström said.

Today, as Sida’s director general, Nordström is tasked with representing the donor and laying out its priorities and long-term strategies. He also oversees some 900 staff, 155 of whom work in the field. Nordström surely stays busy: Earlier this year, for instance, he attended meetings on climate change in Bangkok and Paris as well as on global health in Geneva within less than two weeks.

Given such duties, Nordström noted that the main challenge is to ensure that Sida is moving in the right direction while delivering the best possible results.

The current Sida chief also needs to guide the Swedish bilateral organization in weathering a tough global economic environment, which will prompt a decrease - though not a dramatic one - in the agency’s funding starting next year.

“We won’t be able to continue to increase in the way that we have done during the last two, three years but we will be able to maintain” our operations, Nordström said, adding that Sweden’s support of development cooperation remains strong.

Creating the conditions for managers and staff to achieve the best possible results from Afghanistan to Zambia, and to see people appreciate the agency’s work are what gratifies Nordström. To see that “there is good value for money, that there is some sort of cost-effectiveness” in resource spending also presents a rewarding aspect in his line of work.

Asked what’s next for him as a professional in the international development field, Nordström once again resorted to inadvertence.

“I don’t have any specific goals,” he said. “I will continue to engage in different global development issues. It could be as a manager. It could be as something else. Where I can contribute that is what’s most important.”