Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep09: Do you pay attention to details?

Episode Date: March 3, 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 why we should pay attention to detail and it's not always about the big picture. So let me ask you a few questions.

Is your work always accurate? Is your report always thorough? Does your deliverable always contain all the information that is being asked for? If you can't answer yes to all of these questions, this will likely mean that you have not really mastered the art of paying attention to detail. I know that thinking big, strategic thinking, having big picture thinking, these are the words that you hear thrown out a lot in the corporate world or in business today. Every leader needs to have big thinking, big data, big whatever. But let me tell you today that the small things matter too. The small things are ultimately the ones that make up the big things. So there is no point creating a massive facade

and telling everybody that you have a big vision, you know we need to do this, do that, blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, you didn't do anything. You didn't pay attention to details. You didn't take the little, little steps required to get the thing done correctly. So do you find your work consistently requires checking, double checking, triple checking and you spend a lot of your time doing rework, fixing stuff or fixing errors and mistakes that you should have caught in the past

or when you did the piece of work. Don't you feel that it just wastes a lot of time, makes you very inefficient and worse still, extremely ineffective? This is a training that I've gotten when I spent a couple of years, not a couple of years, quite a number of years actually, as an external auditor as well as an internal auditor.

Attention to detail doesn't come as naturally to me as well. But the good news is, it clearly shows that it is a skill that can be learned if you really put an effort to it and practice it every single day. And for me, it was that many years I spent in audit whereby every single day, this was the biggest skill that I practiced a lot on. So I'm not saying that big picture thinking is not good because if we don't have a vision, we don't know where we're headed to, then that's not great as well. But what I want you to realize is that the little little steps that we take and making sure that we take the right little action ultimately will lead us to the destination in a much smoother

approach and a much smoother way. Imagine if you have a destination that you want to reach to, but because you are not detailed or thorough, you end up making so many detours. You have to do, redo, rethink, and just keep repeating a circular process. That's not fun, isn't it? That's very demotivating frustrating annoying and irritating

so why put yourself in that situation what can what good can you possibly get out of it aside from a few learning opportunities it's okay to make mistakes when we start something, when we start a new habit, try to practice a new skill. You will not master immediately and that's okay, but knowing that progress is still progress. As long as you're making progress, it's good. I think ignoring details is ultimately what kills off big dreams, massive projects and massive goals. So when I was in the corporate world, it's something that's very easy to see.

Yes, we can have checks and balances. We can get a checker to check the maker's work and whatever not. But if the maker had done work well, we would have saved everyone's time and effort in the entire process. It would allow for more efficiency, more effectiveness, and we can even deploy some of these resources to do something that's more productive for the business.

The fact is that we can't because not everybody has attention to detail. And worse still, a lot of people don't realize that this is actually the big thing. The details are the big things. I've also seen very senior executives who are very good at pitching their ideas

to get funding, to get support, to get buy-in. That's amazing for them. I think that's a skill that everybody should learn. But what kills them is when they have to submit detailed documentation, clear justifications, clear business requirements, those documents are normally prepared. The quality is just poor. And I can say this because I used to head the governance team, both for compliance as well as business management. So these are the documents that I review every day, and some of them are pretty appalling.

So if you are a young executive, a young professional who wants to level up, and even if you're a young entrepreneur who is preparing RFPs, client proposals, the advice is the same. Pay attention to all the details. Make sure that your numbers are correct. The data analytics, they are solid. You have clear assumptions, documentation, and it is presented in a way that people can actually understand. So it's back to the first day of this series where I talked about how to communicate well. It's not just talking, but it is sending your message and ensuring that the other side understand what you're trying to convey. And that is the same. And sometimes providing additional context, providing some focus on details can help the other person

or the other party who is looking at whatever your document is to get a better frame of mind around the importance of maybe that project to you, that client to you, or maybe an initiative. So it's all part of negotiation, it's all part of buy-in, and more importantly, it truly supplements the work ethic. I've seen people who work so many hours, but unfortunately, they are not effective. Yes, I know it's tough love, right?

A lot of people, they don't like to be told that their long hours are not worth anything. But ask yourself, what are you actually doing in these long hours if you're just correcting errors that you should have caught you know when you were doing the piece of work and you were just doing a lot of rework redo and re-explaining then my friend the problem is with you the hours are your own doing um you know even though as harsh as that sounds but how can you make yourself how can you become more effective how can you catch those errors in advance so i can share another story with you so when i was working at international bank i used to have a staff who worked with me and we would produce reports every single month and every single month um when she shared the report with me i would end up catching errors from the months before even

though we had long discussions over it i guess ultimately it's about self-awareness because we can only i guess as bosses as managers we only coach, mentor and support and help to a certain extent. It's for you to pick up your slack, recognize it and really put in, I guess, checklists or systems to check if that hasn't come to you naturally yet. But one day it will. But don't see it as a task. If you see it as a task and just waiting for someone to pick up your errors, then you are extremely irresponsible.

And as you rise up in the organization, it's all about ownership and accountability. So if you can't take responsibility and ownership over what you do and you say, oh, you know, it's my boss's job to check, then are you sure that you're ready to become a leader? So as I said earlier in the series, leadership is about self-management. And making decisions is also a critical part. Making decisions, taking ownership, and really moving forward is what matters.

And your ability to pay attention to details will move you forward in addition to your big thinking abilities. So these two come hand in hand. The big and the small stuff come hand in hand. If you think that you can only have your big picture thinking, you know, strategic thinking and someone else is going to pick up the work. Doesn't work like that too because if you end up having to present or review a piece of work, you wouldn't even know where to start because you have no idea what the details are and what you need to look out for. So as a manager and as a boss, your job is not just to supervise. Your job is also to review and provide feedback. And if you have no idea what the details are, then how can you provide feedback?

How would you know if the piece of work is done correctly or not? Right? So I'll end here today. And my challenge to you is, how can you pay more attention to details in your work try it out and yeah see how see how that works out and i promise you that you massively see transformation massive impact in your work or in business till next time