Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep02: Communicate and let people know you exist!

Episode Date: February 23, 2020

✅ Get My FREE '5-Day Career Growth' Guide + Training 👉 http://www.meiphing.com ✅ Grow your career in the 9-5 corporate world with clarity, confidence and opportunities! ⚡ 👋 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing — corporate career coach, ex-corporate leader who has led multimillion-dollar projects across 43 countries and creator of the ultimate career course for 9-5 professionals, The Corporate Survivor™. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your career in the corporate world without getting stuck with Mei Phing's 3-step framework to gain career clarity, improve work confidence and attract new job opportunities. ✅ WEBSITE ⮕ https://www.meiphing.com ✅ FREE GUIDE ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co/5days ✅ COURSE & COACHING ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co ⚡ 📌 ABOUT MEI PHING: Mei Phing Lim is a Professional Career Coach and former Corporate Leader in the financial services and consulting industries. Mei Phing went from a shy quiet introvert to leading multimillion-dollar projects with teams from over 43 countries as the Senior Director and Head of Governance at Standard Chartered, and now teaching 9-5 professionals how to navigate the corporate world and grow their careers with her career coaching course, The Corporate Survivor™. Mei Phing has been featured as a LinkedIn Top Voice 2023, sharing expert career advice in guiding young professionals to plan, navigate and grow their careers. Mei Phing is a keynote speaker on corporate culture, work performance and career growth, and sharing perspectives on what truly takes to build a strategic and successful career without getting stuck. ✅ LEARN MORE: https://www.meiphing.com

Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. In today's podcast, I want to talk about communication and go into the detail on the art of communication. Yep, I'm sure you all know by now that everything in your life or in the workplace, they are impacted by your ability or inability to communicate well.

That we all get, right? The thing is, what is this big word called communication? We hear it a lot. It's thrown out a lot. Everyone talks about it. But is communication solely confined to the ability to speak well? So we hear a lot of people equating communication to public speaking. I beg to differ. I think that communication is that 99.9% of conversations that we have in our daily life. And public speaking almost feels like that one-off presentation that you're giving to your team, for your boss, or to clients.

So in my view, communication consists of several different components, all of which are equally important. Number one is listening. The ability to actively and deeply terms of articulating your messy thoughts and convey in a way that someone else can understand what you're trying to say. Thirdly, there is also the art of reading. A lot of people don't see reading as part of communication, but it is. Because we communicate verbally when we speak, but we also communicate in other ways, especially in the current workplace.

There's the rise of emails and texting. So a lot of the communication is done in written form as well. So it's equally important to recognize that writing is also a very important skill for us to convey our intent to the other person. The other part of it is reading. Why do I say reading is part of communication? Reading allows you to understand meaning better. So when you read a piece of document, a piece of maybe marketing material and whatnot, it kind of develops that level of understanding that also builds up into your communication arsenal. And the fifth and I guess last one is the non-verbal communication.

So I'm sure you guys are all aware, we talk a lot about what is being said is a much smaller percentage of how something is being said, right? So our body language, our expression, the tone of our voice, this and that, they play a much important part in whether the other person is ready and accepting of what we're trying to say. So other parts of communication, of course, also covers like the clarity of your message, completeness, accuracy, relevance. And I think we don't have to go into a lot of detail in today's podcast

but what I want to really talk about is what will happen if you don't really look into all these areas of communication that I've just shared yes we are all very hard working we do our job really well. Great. But that's just one part of it. The other part is making sure that whatever that you have done in terms of your deliverables, you are able to share it and explain it to your boss, your colleagues, your peers, your managers, your clients? If not, then what is the point? So we can do a lot of things on our own and tell ourselves that, you know what, I've done it. I'm just going to wait for someone to take notice. Newsflash, it really doesn't happen. As Gary Vee says, if you you're not communicating then you don't exist as harsh as that sounds it is something that is very very common it's a common challenge in the

workplace especially for people who feel a lot more shy they they feel like it's very awkward to speak up and to share a little bit more about what they do. It could be a self-belief thing, self-esteem, self-confidence, up to the individual for sure, but there are massive repercussions of not communicating whether it's a good thing or a bad thing so i'll give you an example if you've done your job well or you finish a piece of quality work that can really add value to your team or to the client then what are you waiting for why wouldn't you communicate and let everybody know what an amazing job that you've done and how this piece of work can really help someone else? At the same time, on the flip side, if you have done something incorrectly or something has happened and

that piece of news needs to be communicated. If you can't communicate and explain the issue well, you might end up creating more misunderstanding and that may have its own repercussions down the road. So let that sink in slowly, but really think about the past few times where you delivered some sort of bad news, maybe to your boss or to your colleague or to a client and ask yourself, did they really get you? And how much did they get you? Maybe in terms of percentage. And how much did you find yourself having to explain and express yourself and talk about the problem just because someone didn't actually get what you were saying? It's very frustrating, right? And I totally get you. The good news is these skills can be learned it's all about practice and taking the first step sometimes it feels scary because we are just so not used to it we all speak a certain way

we all write a certain way and whatnot but recognize the environment that you're in if you're in the corporate world the ability to write and speak these are highly valued attributes because there are just lots of um there are just lots of meetings and projects and emails with maybe colleagues from all over the world and the fact that you can't do that or you you find difficult to do so, it might limit, not it might, it will. It will limit your ability to level up, maybe get a promotion, maybe latch on better projects, for example. So there are definitely repercussions, right? Maybe not very positive ones at that.

Yeah. So yeah, communication starts with listening. And the thing that I also see a lot is people talk, but they don't listen well. Or they try to listen, but they don't listen to understand. They are listening with an intent to reply. So if that has ever happened to listen, but they don't listen to understand. They are listening with an intent to reply. So if that has ever happened to you, I'm sure that you know how annoying that is. And that is extremely annoying.

So I'll share one example with you. I was in a conversation with a lady a couple of weeks ago. So we were kind of talking about each other's businesses and what do we do and i spoke for about five minutes explaining what i'm you know the kind of coaching that i do and so forth and in that five minutes she interrupted every single time i ended a sentence. Every single one. So, well, self-awareness, right? The other thing is, then, after five minutes, and interrupting every single thing I said,

she went on to speak for 35 minutes straight. And I am not kidding you. She went on and on and on from the time that she was a child up to where she was and every single year in absolute detail. So my question to you is this, do you have the self-awareness to realize that people are not interested to listen to all the long stories? So at the end of the day, communication is a two-way street, right? And if you find yourself only talking and not doing a lot of listening,

food for thought. Or if you find yourself listening with the constant intention of wanting to jump in, wanting to respond and interrupt someone, stop it. It's not cool. And no matter what the other person says you it does it doesn't allow you to have a long-lasting relationship because it's not a two-way street and i also want to end with this

communication challenges are not generational specific when i was in when I was leading teams in an international bank, I worked with people from their early 20s up to 40s and 50s and I can tell you that it is across generations. I also work, I also mentor Generation Z, a couple of undergraduate students and I can tell that it is the same. So my parting word is this, recognize your communication gaps and actively work on them because you will reap the amazing rewards down the road. If you don't start, then you'll never improve. So, see you guys next time.