Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep246: Boss is your supervisor (not your career mentor).

Episode Date: February 16, 2025

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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. Your boss is not your career mentor, which then means that your boss is not the person who is responsible to plan and grow your career for you. Hey, welcome, welcome back to Corporate Survival Podcast with me, Mei Ping,

as corporate leader turned career coach and founder of the Corporate Survivor, the ultimate career program for another five professionals just like you. So let's talk about a big misconception and a big mistake that I think many working professionals are making in terms of assuming that, hey, Mei Ping, my boss is the most important person in my career. So therefore, my boss is responsible to help me to learn, to grow, and to basically listen to whatever that I have to say regarding my job. The boss is the person that I trust the most and therefore I'm going to tell my boss

every single thing that has happened to me in my career and then I trust that my boss is going to have my best interests at heart and my boss will always fight for me. My boss will always make sure that I'm deserving of the promotion, salary increments and new opportunities, new projects that I want. Now, if you have this mindset, I am here to give you a very different perspective today because I say that that is only partially true. But if you have that kind of mindset, you may be stuck in a situation whereby you are waiting for your boss to give you that opportunity. But after waiting for months and maybe potentially years, the opportunity is not really coming. So I want to share with you,

what is the reality of a boss in the corporate world? And specifically, what is the job of a boss? Now, when I say boss, I basically mean your manager, right? So if you are someone who's a little bit junior, maybe your manager, your boss would be your manager, your supervisor. But if you're at the managerial level, your boss could be a senior manager, a director, or even head of department as well. So obviously your boss,

think about it as the person who is one rank above you. So your reporting officer, your line manager, your direct manager, that is the boss that I'm talking about now. I want to make sure that you really, really understand what is the job of your boss, what is the job of your manager. I'll categorize that into three categories now. The first job of your boss is to manage the workload and ensuring that every piece of work is delivered on time at the high quality, right? So therefore, your boss's first job as a supervisor

is to manage the deliverables. And therefore, in order to make sure the deliverables are completed on time, your boss will then come and manage you, right? You and the project, you and the deliverable is the same thing. So basically, your boss's main job is to make sure that things are completed on time, right? So which then also means that if you are maybe slow or maybe you're thinking about different opportunities, you want to do something a little bit different, your boss may be quite averse and may not want to help you to move you onto a different project or do something new if that

affects the baseline work that you're hired to do. So you'll notice that sometimes, right, when you have conversations with your boss and you tell your boss that I want to learn something new, I want to do something different, your boss may be quite reluctant to give you or your boss may make some promises and say, yo, yeah, sure, maybe in the future, let me think about it. But nothing actually happens. And the reason why is because if your boss puts you on another project and moves you to do something else, then who is going to do the work that you've been hired to do? That is the thing that is going through your boss's mind. And I'm telling you this as someone who has actually managed teams before. I worked with so many people. And this is something that I always think about whenever my team members

say, hey, maybe, you know, can I go and do something else? Then the first thing I think of is like, okay, but who's going to do your work, right? So you just want to understand this perspective that your boss is thinking of, but it's not telling you. So that if you want to do something different, you need to make sure that you communicate very clearly, but also prove that you can complete your work on time

so that you have extra capacity to do something new. Now, second thing is that your boss's second job, actually, I would say is the broader resource management and therefore the term manager, right? A job title manager, right? The main job is resource management. So that means that your boss is responsible to look at the entire capacity of the team and to manage workload accordingly. So it's not just you, your project or your specific workload, but it's an overall sort of dynamic to make sure that, you know, the machine moves and then everything kind of moves as smoothly as possible. So

you may encounter this situation of maybe telling your boss and say, hey, you know, boss, I would like an internal transfer. I would like a secondment to another team, Or, you know, I don't really want to work in this function anymore. Can I move to a different function? You may find that your boss, again, is quite reluctant to do that. And why is that the case? It's back to what I said at the beginning. It's about this. It's like a disruption in the workflow.

And therefore, it's against, you know, the boss's goal to ensure smooth resource allocation smooth resource management and the work to be completed effectively efficiently on time at high quality so basically anything that is like a disruption normally bosses and managers they don't really like that and no matter what they promise you you'll find that the action that they take may be non-existent or maybe it's just too slow. And then you'll be sitting there wondering like, okay, maybe is it, I'm not good enough. Then, you know, you may start, it may start affecting your self-confidence to say like,

okay, maybe I'm not good enough. Or maybe your boss may give you some other things saying that, oh yeah, I know once you get this done, get that done, maybe I will do this for you. But maybe you've already fulfilled what you think you should have fulfilled, but nothing happened. So regardless of what your boss has told you, I'm just going to tell you right now that the mindset that your boss is having, and this is not just the boss at your current company, every single manager, every single director will have this mindset in which, okay, if Mayping is requesting for a secondment, Mayping is for internal transfer maybe he's requesting to do this and that then you know who's going to be doing her work right then it's going to be a reallocation it's going to be a work disruption so most of the time right it's not going to be

approved in a way and even if your boss makes you promises you know it may not be something that he he or she is going to pursue and this is just really important for you to know that because if it's really really important for you to know that because if it's really, really important for you to want to move to a different function, right, going to do something different is really important for your career.

You need to make sure that you are actively advocating for that. And if this team is unable to give you that, if your boss, you know, despite your good performance, despite the fact

that you've already proven that you could do it and you've already made this request for a very long time, and you've been waiting around and nothing happens, then I think you need to be responsible to advocate for yourself. Like, okay, if this boss can't make this happen for me, if this team can't make this happen for me,

and if this is something that's really important for my career, I see this as part of my future, then I'm going to take things in my own hand. I'm going to start advocating for myself, and maybe I'll go and look for a different role. Maybe I start networking. Maybe I take the next step to get closer to what I want. And this is what I mean by self-advocacy. Now, there's a final part of your boss's job, and that is around team management and specifically maybe your professional growth. So definitely it's part of a manager's role to develop their team,

whereby you have, you know, personal development conversations, performance reviews, performance rating. That is kind of like part of the manager's role. But to be clear, this is item number three in a manager's position, right? In a manager's responsibilities.

So yes, of course, right? You can have a conversation with your boss and the way that even I teach in my career program, we have like progress updates and making sure your boss knows exactly what you're doing so that it better positions you for promotion, salary, increments and new opportunities. That has definitely happened and many students have successfully gotten promotions and pay rises using my strategy.

However, the point I'm trying to make here is that understanding that your professional growth is your boss's number three priority if they can even get to that priority because if the work is not done well it's not not done on time it's not high quality and then you are making requests that will create disruption in the workflow then no matter how friendly you are your boss and no matter what promises your boss tell you, probably nothing's going to happen. And that is the reality, right?

Even though you may feel like, okay, I've had a heart-to-heart with my boss, or maybe to a certain point, you felt really upset, you broke down, you know, you were so stressed. But to be honest, what your boss could give you

may be some encouraging words, but I want you to really be objective and really ask yourself, say, hey, you know, since how many conversations have I had with my boss so far? What has actually happened since those conversations? Am I getting closer to the career goal that I want? Am I getting closer to moving to a different department, moving to a different function, you know, picking up new skills that is really, really important for my career? I think these questions that only you can answer,

but helping you to understand what is your boss's priorities, what is your boss's job in terms of like headcount, right, staffing. This is really what's happening at the high level. This is actually what's happening in management and leadership meetings where we talk about resourcing, we talk about headcount, we talk about management, right? It's always about making sure that the work gets completed first. Then we talk about staff development.

Because guess what? If the work doesn't get completed, it's not just you are going to be in jeopardy in terms of your position. Probably your manager or your boss may have already gotten fired, right? So they are looking out for their own KPI. And I totally understand that. But the message that I want to share with you is to make sure that you understand this too because sometimes we can be

very fixated working on our own projects right working hard and like doing our little tasks and little stuff you know a bunch of activities that you're so busy every single day at work but you may not see this perspective like the the boss's point of view you are not seeing that and I can share this with you because I used to be the manager. I used to be the director. I used to be in leadership and management meeting talking about headcount, resource management and stuff like that. And that's why I can always share the boss's perspective with you because I have been there and I've also managed huge teams across multiple different countries. And I am telling you, this is what every single boss, every single manager and director is thinking of when you make requests around promotions, transfers and all this stuff like that.

So I'll tell you very clearly that it is not because you are not good enough. It is not because you didn't ask enough times. It likely could be a case around resource management. And guess what? If you are such a good talent in my my team i may not want to let you go as well and this is what many bosses think it's like okay you know if let's say mayping is so good and yes she wants an internal transfer but i don't really want to let her go because she is so good at her job right so your manager may be in a way potentially self in a way maybe sabotaging you and

you did not even realize it so So I want you to really be aware that there's this other thing going on. Yes, I know you're very high-working, that's important, but understanding the corporate world, understanding what your boss is thinking about the management and boss's point of view

is so, so, so important. So I'll wrap up this episode today because obviously this is a very dynamic topic and we can spend hours talking about it. And this is actually something that I talk about in my career programs, monthly mentoring calls.

So every single month, right, our corporate sub-members will submit questions and most of the time we're actually discussing about their bosses, right,

how to deal with their boss, what their boss is thinking about. So it can go multiple, multiple ways. But at the end of the day, once you understand how the corporate world works, what is the real job of your boss, then I think it's a lot easier to learn how to navigate that,

to learn how to work very well with your boss and to be able to leverage on your bosses for recommendations, endorsement, to grow your career. But knowing that your boss is not that person who is driving that career growth for you. It's not the person responsible. It's you are the person advocating for your own career growth and then good. You know, your boss, right, if you get along perfect, your boss can be a partner in that, but your boss is not the person who is ultimately responsible to plan and grow your career. So with that, I hope you find some really interesting perspectives in here and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.