Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep23: Extroverts are natural leaders.

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 why being a leader comes naturally to extroverts. Hi, welcome to the final day of my five-day, five-part Extroverts Connect series. If you haven't caught the other days do check them out

Starting point is 00:00:46 in my podcast episodes back to my extrovert friends how many of you out there consistently volunteer for new projects for new assignments for for new experiences. If you're an extrovert, I bet quite a number of you do so. And I think that's something that's really amazing because in the current busy and dynamic world that we live in, where a lot of things happen online, doing offline interactions is always very lovely to see people being proactive and really stepping out to share their views, share their opinions, as well as volunteering to try out new things. And that is the beauty of extroverts because extroverts are highly enthusiastic

Starting point is 00:01:47 and people who really want to inspire. So I find a lot of them always very keen to step up to take on leadership positions. And that is really across the board. So from the time when you were young, right, most of the time, it is the extroverts that are volunteering to become a class monitor, to become a team leader, taking lead on projects or even co-curricular activities, which are also really popular in high schools and universities. So these are little behaviors that were ingrained since we were young. So when extroverts, you know, join the workforce, either working as a corporate job or they choose to work at a startup or even run their own business, I think being a leader comes very naturally

Starting point is 00:02:56 because that's what extroverts, that's what you guys have been doing for a really long time, right? Which is taking the lead, taking charge and moving forward, always wanting to move forward. Being a natural leader, I think it really puts you one step forward compared to a lot of other people who dare not put up their hand and say, hey, you know, I can also do this. So I'm a huge believer that in order to get opportunities, you first need to be seen by opportunities.

Starting point is 00:03:30 So if you are really quiet and just hoping that someone will take note of your hard work and reward you, newsflash, it doesn't always happen like this anymore. And the power of an extrovert is always being open to new things. And that is very, very powerful in the current world whereby a lot of things are changing all the time. So being open and always volunteering to try out new things will pay rewards the many years down the road. So as a leader, extroverts are generally very open they they love conversations they would

Starting point is 00:04:09 constantly have team meetings conversations with the team lots of status updates because that's what they are very good at which is communication reaching out to the next person they're always those people who are not afraid to just pick up the phone and call up a client, call up another department and just say, hey, you know, this is what's going on. And they do enjoy that. And it gives them a lot of energy to connect with people. So in terms of opportunities of, you know, taking on leadership positions, the opportunities are abundant. And I would say more abundant for extroverts who are really out there. There is one thing that I do want to remind you fellow extroverts is that, yes, being a leader comes naturally because you are highly confident and a lot of people resonate with

Starting point is 00:05:02 that high energy that you have. What you really want to take note of is the competence and the skills. And why am I saying this? You can get the job by sounding the part, but you can't actually do the job until you know the part, right? And I can share some examples with you because I've seen many extroverts in my corporate job and I've also hired many extroverts myself. The thing is that you guys talk a good talk, which is great because

Starting point is 00:05:35 most people can't even talk, right? So you guys are like really ahead of the game already. You also want to make sure that you actually have the skills and the competence or you're actively working on developing these competences to make sure that you can deliver the job. So it's one thing getting your foot in. It's the other thing of like really staying there and really proving that you can deliver value. You know what you're doing and you really are in it for the long haul. And this is the same in corporate or even in business.

Starting point is 00:06:10 I also have clients who, because of their highly enthusiastic, you know, volunteering nature, very inspiring, good at communication, they have moved up very quickly up the career ladder right and you know as you know i work with a lot of young high performers so these are stories that i hear very commonly from my clients the thing is that when you are in the execution mode it works really well because you are only leading yourself right so like i always say leadership is self-management so to be able to manage yourself right i mean having the level of self-awareness to do that i mean that is a great start the other thing is to become a real you know strategic

Starting point is 00:06:58 leader a leader who can really run massive projects and really engage with everyone, having emotional intelligence and a deepened self-awareness are equally critical. While as a leader, you naturally like to talk to people, you also want to make sure that you're listening at the same time because it can very easily feed into an extrovert's ego that they had a bunch of conversations and they feel like, or you feel like you have achieved an outcome. But like I always say, you know, focus on the other person and make sure that they got where you're coming from. The other thing is also, if you're working in a team environment right the glory is and the glory and hard work is really attributed to every single person who has played a part in a particular

Starting point is 00:07:51 project or an assignment or a client deliverable so as an extrovert you know while you are always at the center stage you might want to be careful know, of coming across too pushy and to claim all the credit yourself as a leader, because that is not a very good way to encourage teamwork and to encourage, you know, lifelong respect and a group of people and a group of team members who really want to support you all the way. So being a leader, you know, while it comes naturally, there are definitely some skills that need to be picked up and the ability to talk can get you so far, the confidence can get you so far, it will reach a point whereby you need to really back it up with like hard and soft skills and really work on developing these skills that will really help

Starting point is 00:08:46 your professional development and professional growth down the road. You don't want to be one of those people that spoke, gave a good presentation, got the job, got the project, got the assignment and then mess it up later on because you had the confidence but you didn't really have the skills to pull it off, right? So reputation is definitely not something that is easily redeemable. So while you definitely have the advantage of being a leader, taking charge, working for a group of people, these are some of the potential pitfalls that you should be aware of. I always believe that the strengths of your character, the strengths of your personality are the exact ones that brings you your weaknesses, right? There is a flip side

Starting point is 00:09:43 to that. So every personality has what I call dark side, right? Every personality also has this kryptonite. And it takes self-awareness to realize that, okay, I have this natural ability. It's great. I should leverage it. But at the same time, how could it potentially impact me in a negative way and really identify

Starting point is 00:10:07 the specific ones for yourself because we're all different even even amongst extroverts there are different kinds of you know extroversion up the spectrum and obviously we are all different due to you know difference in our background experiences and career journey business journey and whatnot so this is a question that you need to ask yourself and developing that self-awareness to identify the little little things that could potentially become your kryptonite so i work with a lot of young people and i always tell the young people whether you're Gen Z or you're millennials there's so many more years to go right life is long so the sooner you identify and really understand your personality type both the good and bad the yin and yang the faster it

Starting point is 00:10:59 helps propel you forward whether you want to climb up the corporate ladder or you ultimately want to own your business and really expand and scale your business so that so this wraps up my five-day five-part extroverts connect series if you have not caught any of the other episodes head on head on over to my podcast and the list of episodes are there. And aside from that, the week before, I also did an Introverts Unite series. And if you're interested to learn how to identify or deal with an introvert friend, feel free to also listen to that series. And yeah, I look forward to speaking to you guys again on other interesting topics and challenges affecting Gen Z and millennials.

Starting point is 00:11:50 So till next time. Bye.

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep23: Extroverts are natural leaders.

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