Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep225: How to level-up and succeed as a Manager. Jade's Story Part 3.

Episode Date: September 8, 2024

✅ Get FREE GUIDE, newsletter, work with me ⮕ http://www.meiphing.com ✅ Corporate Survivor™ is the ultimate career course for 9-to-5 working professionals, just like *you*, who want to enhance corporate world mindset, skillset and strategy so you can NAVIGATE + GROW your career with clarity, confidence & opportunities... 🚀 ⚡ 📌 ABOUT THIS PODCAST: Welcome to Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing — ex-Corporate Leader turned Career Coach & Founder of The Corporate Survivor™. On this podcast, Mei Phing shares her corporate world insights, experiences and wisdom so you can grow your 9-5 career with clarity, confidence and opportunities. ✅ WEBSITE ⮕ https://www.meiphing.com ✅ FREE GUIDE ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co/freeguide ✅ NEWSLETTER ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co/mondays ✅ CAREER COURSE ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co ⚡

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. If you have ever thought to yourself, am I actually ready to level up in my career? I'm a bit worried on whether I can do it or not. Whether your level up looks like from a junior exec to a senior executive or to a manager,

to a senior manager, vice president, director and so forth, I'm here to tell you that yes, it is 100% possible. You just need to learn how. So welcome or to the corporate podcast with me may ping as corporate leader turned career coach and founder of corporate survivor career course the ultimate career course for 95 professionals just like you so this is the final part part three of the client story of the basically the first ever client that i work with let's call her jade she's not it's not her real name but this is a client that i worked with starting in 2019 when she first came to me she basically got fired had her job due to poor performance and in part one we talked about how she gained the self-awareness to identify her

core performance issues and successfully landed a new job at an mnc and the first year it was 100 focused on upskilling right actually gaining clarity and it's not even like core upskill yet like just basically gaining clarity and learning how to identify her key performance goals and to really keep track of her task that was the first part where we talked about then in the second part of the series in the year 2021-2022 we talked about how I helped her to develop her core corporate skills. So this is the skills around communication, relationship building, critical thinking, as well as productivity. So why this is so important is because you need to have the right fundamentals of understanding

the corporate world and mastering these core corporate skills so that you can be successful at any job to be able to work with anybody and everybody. So that's something that we talked about in the part two of this series. And if want to check it out you can definitely check it out like after this episode part one and part two you can find it at www.mayping.com in the podcast blog itself now in the last episode we ended at the point where there was no space for a promotion at her previous company and therefore she made a career change and successfully transitioned into a new company and not only that it's a new industry at the managerial level as a people manager and reporting to her new boss who

is at the c-suite level so this is a pretty significant change from her being a solo contributor and now actually becoming a manager and having junior staff to deal with so mindset wise there was kind of like a pretty big shift. So now I want to go through with you some of the things that I worked through with her in the year 2023 and then what we are actually looking at in the year 2024, which is this year, right? So it's like the five year mark of me working with her. So I just really wanted to show you the journey, but I also wanted to show you how in terms of like, you know, when you're talking about career development, it's a step-by-step process and there's a lot of like consistency commitment strategizing re-strategizing

and actually putting in the effort to upskill all the time so in 2023 right whenever i start the year whether it's clients working me in private coaching or in my career programs corporate survivors monthly mentoring sessions i always like to to start January talking about what is the career goal that you want to get out of it, get out of the year. Like the worst thing you, you know, you want to get into is more like, okay, you know, I'm just going to do something. And then hopefully at the end of the year, something happens, which it usually does not. So I started the year 2023, having that conversation with Jade. And because it's a new company and it's like the first time for her being a manager and it's a new industry, she lacks the technical knowledge and so

forth, we decided that, okay, this is the year where, again, right, she's going to restart the circle. She's going to go back to the starting point, which is get clear on the corporate world, get clear on the company, structure, culture, and people, and really understanding her job very clearly and actually learning how to manage people and particularly work very well with her team members as well as the other senior stakeholders in the company as well so as you can see there's quite a lot of things to focus on and clarity is not one of those things where you know you snap your finger and then you know tomorrow you you kind of know everything it's not really the case so those were the the core areas that i started

working with jade with and the good thing is that in 2023, I already had the Corporate Survivor career course, as well as the monthly mentoring sessions that is part of the Corporate Survivor program. So Jade is someone who is not just in prior coaching with me, but she's also part of the Corporate Survivor member group, and she also attends the monthly mentoring session. So she got started by starting a new role, looking through the lessons in the Corporate Survivor program, particularly in phase one, step one, get clear on the corporate world. I teach how do you understand the corporate culture, structure, and people, and that's the lessons that she went through. So that actually gave her a very good start in terms of outlining her KPIs, and her boss is pretty happy with that.

She was also able to identify all the technical skills in this new industry that she had no idea about, and a list of all this industry knowledge in which she had no idea about as well and the final thing is she had also identified some key development skills that she needed to focus on for this company and some of the things that in terms of like the skills that she has identified and this is also a lesson for you as well in which a lot of people think that, oh, you know, as a manager, I need to learn some like, you know, magical managerial skills. But actually, that's not the case. The reality is that all the foundation that you have gained in terms of the core corporate skills, right? Like I said, understanding the corporate world, the structure, the culture, you know, communication, relationship building, productivity, critical thinking, all those actually come together at the next level. So what Jade discovered was, okay,

the time I invested to upskill myself in the past two years, now it's going to help me as a manager because she no longer feels stressed out and she's actually able to get started to complete her KPIs and actually list down her key goals, her milestones, and actually able to take the lead to communicate and collaborate with people. That was not really something that she was able to do before. But as a manager right now, it's even more important for her to have the confidence to do that. And that actually allowed her to have a very, very smooth sailing start at this job.

So this job was a role where she would have to report to the C-suite. So basically, she is a new manager, but there is no senior manager in this team. So she's kind of like the team lead in a way, like a department head, without kind of like being a department head. And she reported to her boss, who was already at the C-suite level. So the immediate next thing that Jade identified identified and she was also a bit concerned about is that how do I communicate with like real management and leadership

because she is very used to doing execution and she's very used to talking to people who are working on like the processes and the tasks, which is something she's comfortable with. But now talking to the C-suite and she also has the exposure to the CEO, she became extremely worried.

So she came to me and said that maybe is there any special skills that i need to pick up if i want to you know speak more confidently to c-suite and i need to talk to directors and the ceos and what i told her was not necessarily but you need to continue to practice a lot of the core corporate skills that we have already gone through but now it's actually to the next level. But understanding the priorities and the mindset at every different career level, that will actually help her to understand what each level cares about. So manager, senior manager, director, C-suite, there is a specific focus at every career level. And we will not have time to go through all of it. But if you're a student in my career course, The Corporate Survivor, you can actually just go to phase one step one and there's a bonus lesson called mindset shifts at every career level where i go through with you step by step from fresh graduate executive manager director and c-suite ceo what are the core priorities so

that you can make sure that you are communicating with them at the same level so that was the lesson that jade went through as well. So mastering that communication at the top level will allow you to feel like you're talking at the same wavelength with the senior people. And therefore, it improves collaboration and it continues to increase your credibility as well because at the top level, like the C-suite and management and leadership, they feel that if I talk to you, oh, maybe you get what I'm saying. And that's going to be very important to determine ultimately you will get promoted'm saying. And that's going to be very important to determine ultimately you will get promoted or not, and whether you're going to get the salary

increments or not. So those were some of the core things that I worked with Jade in 2023. And in 2023, she had two very, very junior staff reporting to her. And this was the first time she became a people manager. So the challenge I saw for Jade is that she's very used to doing things on her own. And she had no idea how to delegate. So she was doing almost 100% of the work. And obviously, with only two junior staff, you know, the junior staff was just doing whatever. So it was a little bit disjointed. But in a good way is that it wasn't too chaotic because she was able to master the core corporate skills that we already talked about in the previous episode. So it was not as chaotic, but she was

still busy as well. So it's like, you know, you can take control of the work, but you can still have a lot of work. And what we want to reach to is that middle ground of like, okay, I am able to delegate, I'm able to prioritize, but I need to make sure that my team is moving in the same direction as well. And that was something that she had to pick up also. So what I encourage her to do is to have more communication and more alignment with her team members. And that was something that she started doing also. So instead of like working alone as a manager,

your job is to get the team moving, right? To deliver the priorities together. And like I said, at every career level, at the next level, at the director level, you need to focus on strategy and making sure like you are thinking of the big picture items. And then C-suite will have its own priorities as well.

So those were, I would say, some of like the core things that Jade started focusing on in the year 2023. And that was also the year that she decided that, you know, I'm not going to ask for a promotion because I want to see if I can do well in this role. And the good news is that she did well, although she didn't ask for a promotion, but during the performance review, and as usual, right, she went through the corporate survivor and then she used a template that I

taught her to do her job appraisal. She didn't ask for a promotion, but her boss gave her very, very good feedback and she managed to get a 10% increment without any promotion. So she entered the year 2023 extremely happy because all her whole career, right, to the point of her getting fired, she told me that she never ever imagined one day she would have the confidence to become a manager

and to be able to get good feedback, to be able to get words of appreciation from her boss saying that she did a good job as a manager and her boss is happy in terms of how the team is run. That was something that she felt that was impossible throughout the 10 years of her career and it is now made possible. And I told her that first part is actually her mindset of not believing that that's possible for her. So if you don't believe that something is possible, then you're not going gonna put your 100% because you think that okay you know what's the point right so that's not a good mindset to have but the second thing is coming up with a strategy to make it happen because a lot of people think that oh you know

I need some like fancy leadership tools and I need to like sign up for all these like fancy stuff but it's not really the case, right? Being a manager and being a leader is all about leveraging and leveling up the core corporate skills and core corporate understanding that you would have already learned throughout your career. So the reason why Jade didn't feel as chaotic as a first-year manager is because she has invested the past few years actually strengthening her understanding of the corporate world as well as the corporate skills because if she did not do that then even if she were to get the title of a manager it would have been chaos anyway and she might have given up even though it was a good title and good salary but likely she might not be able to sustain it

so that was something that she kind of came to a realization of that oh okay i can do this and it's okay to dream more right to aim higher for a higher title for a higher salary so she ended the year 2023 extremely well right she got good feedback she didn't ask for a promotion but she got the salary increment and she was able to manage the two junior staff very well now moving on to year 2024 which is basically this year so we started this year again, right? Having that conversation around, you know, what's your career goal, right? What does career growth look like for you? And this year, Jake told me that, okay, I've already been in this company. It's already been like two years, right? I've already invested the time.

And I feel like this year, I want to ask for a promotion from my boss. So we strategize. And the way that I teach like promotion is that, you know, we plant the seed like from months and months and months before and that's something that is actually taught in the program. So if you're currently a corporate surveyor member, you can just go to phase three, get visible personal branding. In module five, there is a specific workshop on how you plant the seed to ask for a promotion. So it will not be go through in detail here, but if you're a student, you can dive into the course and get that information okay so in january february this year right jade had a conversation with her boss and she asked for points in terms of like okay if i were to get promoted you know

some of the things that i could do her boss agreed to give her more opportunities so that was a good start because ultimately, if you want to level up, right, you want to be able to prove that you can do more and you can demonstrate that you can handle the next level. So in the first six months of this year, right, she had the opportunity to present at committee meetings, support work that is provided by the CEO to be able to communicate directly, the CEO, director level and other C-suite. So additional opportunity was given to her this year to level up and to prove herself. And initially that was a little bit scary as well. So again,

right now it's actually a level up as compared to year 2023. Yes, 2023, you know, was the first year manager, you know, she had to like handle more work and stuff like that. But 2024 is a little bit different because the people that she's talking to right now is already at the next career level. And then the expectation is a little bit different as well. So she had the opportunity to present, right, to craft strategy, to be able to run trainings and so forth. So a lot of things were very, very new to her, but she was able to deliver them well. Now, then it came to June. So during June, as usual, usual right the mid-year performance review right she presented the good work that she has done and then now that she has a module

slightly more senior staff she's also able to handle that then to have a conversation with her boss and from the conversation with her boss right she decided and this is something that she told me and which and which i'm very very proud of her because if you remember like from five years ago when she started working with me she was very very timid she was like okay you know just tell me what to do and i don't know you know if someone says do this i'm just gonna do this and she's very very quiet but it's like a full transition in terms of like her clarity her confidence and taking charge of her career and she actually told me that you know maybe after having a conversation with my boss i feel like my chances of promotion is very low because i didn't really get a commitment and i've already asked this a few times you know in the past couple of

months so i don't think that i'm going to be able to get the promotion and i feel like you know based on the work that i'm doing it's equivalent to a senior manager but what they're offering me right now and what i've been doing is only a manager, right? The title is manager, but the work that I'm doing is a senior manager. So we looked at it together and I evaluated that, okay, now let's get into the get opportunities phase. So there's always no harm, always preparing to package your value in your resume, your LinkedIn, and, you know, to be able to practice for interviews as well so I told her that okay you know what we can practice and we can actually start preparing so that's something that

we recently had a conversation of and I think likely in the next couple of months she'll be seeking out new opportunities as a senior manager with better pay right probably a much bigger scope that actually commensurates the hard work and the contributions that she's delivering right now. But the point I wanted to make here is that this is a story, and this is actually coming from this particular client who, five years when I first met her, she was totally zero confidence because she just got fired, and it took two years to upskill, and it also took time for her to feel confident to say that she did a

good job to rate herself a good performance rating to tell her boss that she contributed all these things like it's it's really a step-by-step journey and you know it's not like a standard path for everyone like in terms of like your work confidence your work clarity how fast you gain that inner confidence honestly it is really up to you because your career mindset is something that is very deep but what i normally do with my clients particularly in the corporate my career course is to really give you the tools not just in the step-by-step lessons but also helping you practically implement a lot of the lessons taught in the monthly mentoring sessions right in the q a sessions so that's something that I can help you to speed up your understanding of the corporate world, as well as application to

real-life situations so that you can see, ah, okay, this is actually what's happening. This is actually how it works. And Jade was someone in my world, like I said, because she's someone who has been working with me one-on-one for a long time, but she's also referring to the Corporate Survivor course lessons. She's going through the lessons as a homework. She attends all the monthly mentoring sessions as an additional perspective to make sure that she actually understands what's going on at the workplace and she's not placing the wrong judgment or making the wrong assumption on a situation that maybe is not really as bad and she's stressed out about it, but actually something very simple. Or maybe she's stressed out about it but actually something very simple or maybe she's

misinterpreting certain communication and certain actions by leadership and management just because she is not really as experienced to deal with someone who is c-suite or as a ceo so everything in the corporate survivor career course kind of like ties in together so the course lessons the monthly mentoring monthly mentoring sessions together with the videos of like 100 plus real life scenarios on career, work as well as job search comes together. And then for her, there's some additional one-on-one coaching calls. So that's kind of like how the entire Corporate Survivor course works. So for this particular client, at this point, right, the thing that I'm proudest of her is that she is fully taking charge of her

career right now. Last time, she would have just kept quiet when I asked her, okay, so what do you want to do in your career? She would just keep quiet. But now she's actively telling me, Mei Ping, you know, based on my observation, based on my own evaluation, I don't think there's a chance. And I feel like I want to seek out the new opportunity and this is kind of like the timelines I'm looking at can I get some of your feedback like that transformation in my view is crazy and I think for her is something that she feels the proudest as well because last time she used to tell me that maybe I feel so miserable miserable miserable so it's always in the feeling stage but right now it's like maybe i feel calm and this is like my plan for my career what do you think now it sounds like so simple it sounds like

you know it's not a big deal but in my view it is such a big deal because for someone who has zero confidence and feel like they cannot achieve anything they can't you know progress in their career they can't make the money that they want, they can't make the money that they want, right, they can't get the salary that they want, for that person to actually have a massive turnaround to say that, like, me, Ping, I think this is what I want to do next, and I'm looking at this job title, I think I want to make this amount of money, and I'm going to start applying for jobs, right, can I get your feedback, and is there anything else that I can do to sell my value better, like Like that is, in my view, the huge, huge, huge transformation. So this is the final part of this client's journey. Like I said,

it's a five-year journey. It's continuing on. It's already been five years for this client, so Jade, in my world as a whole, and the way that I like to work with my clients is long-term, right? Because your corporate career, your 9-5 career is long-term. It's not like, you know, you're going to work one, two years and then call it quits, right? It's a journey for another 10 years, 20 years, or maybe even 30 years. So all the clients in my world, all corporate survivor members, they are with me not just one year, but like you're talking about two years, three years, four years, and this particular first client I ever worked with is the fifth year of working together so i hope that if you are in my world right now i look forward to working with you for

the long run because at the end of the day i want you to have strategic as well as sustainable success right long-term career development long-term career success and i think that is super super duper important so with that i'll see you in the next episode and if you want more career resources you can just go to www.maping.com. You should find it somewhere in the description below. And you can get all the resources there, including my five-day career growth guide, as well as more information

on the Corporate Service Career Course. So with that, I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.