Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep06: Leaderships starts with YOU.

Episode Date: February 27, 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. Welcome. We are now in day five of my 10-day series talking about the top 10 soft skills. In today's podcast, I want to talk about leadership,

specifically how leadership really starts with you. And in my view, leadership essentially is self-management. I know that leadership is a very big word. We hear it a lot all the time. Everyone's telling you that you have to become a good leader. We all want to become a leader. We want to become a team lead. We all want to become a leader. We want to become a team lead. We want to have a big team and whatnot. So I want you all to take a pause today

and I'm here to remind you that leadership truly starts with you. If you want to become a leader, guess who you have to lead first? Nope, it's not Tom, Johnny or Francis out there. It's you. Yeah, you, the person listening to this podcast right now. Hi. Why do I say leadership is self-management? Ultimately, leadership is a soft skill that allows you to manage effectively and drive towards a specific vision. So as a leader, it will be your role to define

what that vision is, what are some of your strategies to get there? Before you jump around and try to lead someone else, how about you? How are you with some of the key pieces that would make up this leadership ability of yours? For example, how good are you with time? Are you constantly busy? Can you say no? How about managing emotions?

Do you scream and shout as and when you like? Or are you calm, collected, able to weather the storm? What about your listening abilities? How's that going? How about humility? Are you a proud person? I know it all. I'm the smartest.

I'm the most brilliant. The most brilliant people do get fired too. So it's really important to recognize that. How about authenticity the ability to connect with others but more importantly being authentic to your own style to your own personality so i have helped various senior positions across multiple organizations in the past. And I have worked with all sorts of leaders. The team leaders, I have project leaders, I have managing directors, executive directors, even regulators. And what is always very interesting is for me to observe people.

I'm a people observer. I like to learn by observing. It's quite interesting for me to see how some people are so in control and such a strong leader, even though they don't have a single person reporting to them. They don't have any direct reports. I mean, this would be in a corporate world. But you can truly see a person's potential to lead. And you can tell that by the way they manage their work, right? How structured are they? How do they ensure that they are able to deliver on time? How do they juggle projects around?

How do they deal with people? How do they juggle projects around? How do they deal with people? How do they talk to people? How do they understand what are the fundamentals of leadership in terms of the deliverables that they have to put across? How do they motivate? How do they encourage so that the people who are working with them also see their point of view and know how they can best support. The reason why I'm doing leadership is self-management on day five is

because it is so important we talked about communication, getting along with people, building win-win relationships in the previous days because all these skills essentially roll into leadership. And before you lead someone else, as I say, you need to learn how to lead yourself. Are you clear on your direction? Or is your mind fighting with your heart in terms of the direction that you have to go to? So these are the sum of the stuff that you have to iron out within yourself,

align. What kind of leader do you want to be? What do you want to be known for? How do you best work? Who are you really? Right? What's your personality? Are you a data person? Are you more of a collaborative cooperative person do you like to communicate directly or do you like to be spoken to in terms of like additional context with that you find helpful and how are you dealing with problems? Do you have a method? If you can't resolve the problems or the challenges that you have just on your own portfolio, don't even think about dealing with other people's problems, other people's portfolios, especially when you have a couple of people working for you. So yeah, so I truly believe that leadership starts with you leadership is self-management

what's also quite um quite interesting is when i work with some of my clients in global multinational companies and they are new managers one of the things that they constantly tell me is, how come I've never been given management skills training? I find that quite funny because the ability to manage is something that you apply, even if it's the first day of your job, even if you're a fresh graduate, these are some skills that you have to start practicing. It doesn't mean that when you become a manager, automatically you become a leader. Unfortunately, these are some of the challenges that we are seeing. We are seeing in new managers where they cannot bridge the gap between execution versus strategy and vision.

Because if they are an executor and they've never really practiced how to manage different components and how to drive people towards a certain direction, what's their style? Don't be naive to think that once you get that title manager, everything magically change. It doesn't. All these skills take time to learn. And the faster you start,

the faster you're giving yourself an advantage to be able to leap forward faster. A lot of people also ask me, how did you move up the corporate ladder so quickly, even though you were so young? So for those of you who don't know, when I was 27, I was managing a multi-million dollar project, even though, you know, at the corner, some people felt that I still look like a 12-year-old, but whatever, right? So because of that, I hand to heart say I know 100% from experience that these skills can be learned and they pay off massive rewards. You don't have to wait until you are labeled team leader, manager, director before you start taking action. You don't have to wait

till you're assigned a couple of direct reports before you define what is your leadership style and get clear on your own personality. The punchline is this, right? The fundamental is this. It's all about self-awareness. If you are not self-aware, it's going to be very difficult to really deep dive and dig out what kind of leadership style you have, what are you good at naturally, and what are the development points that you have to work on. Start with self-awareness. And if you are very messy in your thoughts and in the way you organize your desk is in a mess then it's time to really take a step back and then ask yourself what is

going on and if i can't even manage my day-to-day as an executive or maybe a junior or mid-level executive what are my chances when I'm given a bigger project to manage? So be careful what you ask for because when the opportunity comes, you really want to make sure that you're ready for it rather than falling flat to your face because it's not that easy to redeem a professional reputation. Yeah, so like I always say say it's all about practice the main thing is to decide that you want to improve and you want to help have self-mastery and you'll be you'll be happy to know that once you master this leadership skill by leading yourself, it doesn't just translate well professionally or in business, it really transforms your personal life. And I've seen that happen to many people.

Once everything clicks and they start working on it, it's truly awesome. So I would highly encourage all of you to ask yourself, what's your style and who are you? Get to know yourself and wait to see the magic that will happen.