Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep11: Creativity skills for future jobs.

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 creativity and specifically why creativity really goes a long way. Let me ask you this. How often does an issue arise?

Starting point is 00:00:47 Or maybe even issues, problems, circumstances? And if your personal and professional life is pretty much like most of us, I'm sure it happens more than what you like. And that's where creativity comes in. Creativity is a very close soft skill that will help in problem solving. We talk about problem solving a lot and I also spoke about it a little bit in one of my earlier podcast episodes called Making Decisions. The thing about problem solving is this. It's very easy to tell someone that they need to bring you solutions. But how are they actually going to come up with solutions?

Starting point is 00:01:41 Is it just a simple google.com and the magical genie in google will answer every single one of your questions but is it tailored to your actual circumstance your actual issue probably not and i think that is the same with a lot of like training courses and training programs out there where they claim to teach you a bunch of skills, which is great. I think it's a great starting point. The thing is, I find a lot of these courses don't actually teach you creativity. There's not a lot of creative questioning allowing you to dive deep and really think clearly, which is also another part that i'm very very focused on and i spoke about in other episodes as well so the ability to be creative essentially is exploring

Starting point is 00:02:34 options exploring ideas on what may or may not work depending on the context of your challenge or even in your goals, right? So creative thinking is really not just about problem solving and that has a pretty negative connotation to that. But a lot of inventors who have created a lot of awesome stuff for us to use, this handphone, computer, even a car we're driving, electricity, a fan, a refrigerator, whatever, it all started with creative thinking. And how did they get there? It's an idea that formed in the mind and they chose to think about it more broadly, asking why and what they could do and what they would like it to be.

Starting point is 00:03:30 And maybe having a bit of a visual representation of what could happen. Creative thinking is also closely tied to long-range future thinking because essentially what you're trying to do is to possibly figure out what might happen if you choose a certain path or if you choose a certain option and how can you tailor your option solution to address, like I said, a big challenge or a big goal that you have. So I can share a couple of examples with you on how these normally play out in the corporate world in which I was a senior director at that time. I see a lot of people, they bring problems, but they don't have solutions. So after getting frustrated for some time, I started asking myself, why is this happening? The good thing is that they can

Starting point is 00:04:32 identify the problem, which is great, because if they can't, that's a whole different story. But why aren't they coming out with solutions? And then I started having much, much deeper conversation, trying to understand the mindset, the perspectives, and the insights that, you know, led to the specific conversations that I was having with certain team members. And I realized that they are very used to taking instructions. So, and I'm sure you can think about a couple of people who are like that.

Starting point is 00:05:10 They are very comfortable following a specific set of policy, procedure, some sort of rule book, right? Guide book and whatnot. So when a circumstance happens, and especially I was working a lot on designing new innovative ways to either manage financial crime or business management. visualize what they're building and think creatively about how we can make this blank sheet of report or presentation even more meaningful and effective. That doesn't come very naturally to people. So I've also seen a lot of people struggle and it's not a matter of time, for some of these cases, it was a matter of weeks working on something.

Starting point is 00:06:06 But what eventually came out was a copy and paste from existing either documentation or existing information that was presented even in the same form. This is something very interesting. And what is even more interesting is that I find some of these people, and I can't speak for the entire population, but for some of these people, then they start complaining, why can't they move up the corporate ladder?

Starting point is 00:06:39 Why aren't they getting promoted? Why aren't they given a better performance rating? The truth is, and the hard truth is, they have not yet demonstrated that they could operate at the next level. They have yet to demonstrate they could think, function, and essentially be the next level leader that will have that big picture insights, creative thinking and really solving problems effectively and not just a band-aid approach. It is really the same if you are running a business as well. So if you're an entrepreneur and you don't have creative thinking, what will happen is that you end up dumping money to get other people to do work for you because you have not cultivated the skills to be resourceful. Guys, there is this thing called google.com, g-o-o-g-l-e.com if you have not heard

Starting point is 00:07:47 of it, as well as YouTube, as well as so many of these podcasts and all these content that not just myself, where I'm now sharing a lot of my insights on LinkedIn and Facebook, but a lot of other people are sharing very, very helpful content that you can learn to drive your business forward. But what I see is a lot of entrepreneurs, solopreneurs or creative people are just so stuck in their ways of doing things, right? And I also work with high performers a lot. And one of the patterns I see is that they think they know everything already so there is a an ego component as well but like i always say start with a beginner's mind think about how you can become more resourceful and creative if if as an entrepreneur you have a limited cash flow and you want to maybe you know build up your branding and marketing

Starting point is 00:08:48 it doesn't necessarily mean that you need to go and pay someone thousands of dollars to for them to build it up but it's actually a chat a game of the mind i would say a game of strategy rather than a game of taking action. Because you can take a lot of actions, but if it doesn't move you towards a goal, then it's just busy work. And at the end of the day, you'll feel so exhausted, but you have not actually achieved what you've set out to do. So in addition to critical thinking, clear thinking, and deep thinking, I would say be creative as well. How can you achieve the same result, but maybe with less investment, less money, less time,

Starting point is 00:09:32 less effort? It's all about being open to the possibility that something can be done, maybe more efficiently or more effectively? And what are the little strategies and very practical strategies that you can apply to achieve that outcome? What I'm not saying here is that it is going to be like magic, right? If you just decide on this strategy and then automatically it works in 24 hours.

Starting point is 00:10:03 I'm not saying that, but it could happen. What I'm saying is it's all about trial and error. It's all about testing stuff. So until you have tested it, you know it works for you, then speak your truth, right? Then share with other people and like apply consistently and just really watch your career as well as your business boom. So I'm a huge believer of only talking about things that I know.

Starting point is 00:10:32 So these are the skills that I see are highly practical. But unfortunately, people don't pay a lot of attention to this. So to get yourself future ready, creativity is a really, really massive part of it. Because we don't really know what the future looks like. Maybe we get an indicator, we get a sense, but we don't really know. So I always believe that the future is a skills-based economy and the more of these, particularly the soft skills that you can master,

Starting point is 00:11:10 the higher chance you have to actually be successful, not just in the short run, but in the long run. So this concludes my 10-part series on the top 10 soft skills that you should have thank you for joining me and if you have missed out on any of the episodes for from this top 10 top 10 10 day series then please feel free to hop on over to my podcast at anchor.fm slash gotapink and if you have any insights questions connect with me and let me know till next time bye

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep11: Creativity skills for future jobs.

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