Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep35: My job as a corporate business leader in banking.

Episode Date: May 22, 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 talk about the last corporate position I held, which was the Senior Director and Head of Governance at Standard Chartered Bank. So this was a very interesting role for me because I joined this team, the business team, right after a personal sabbatical to resolve some family matters. networking and focus on keeping in touch with people who understand your value and they very

gladly want to work with you. So this business team that I joined was actually the business team I supported in my financial crime compliance role and they were my business partners at that time. So I got the offer to rejoin the bank, which was definitely a very exciting one. Managing the risk management portion as well as the business portfolio ended up to be about $1.5 billion in terms of the banks, broker-dealers, as well as fintech portfolio. Again, exciting times. And I think that for someone like me who has an accounting background, as well as someone who has started in all that, sometimes it's difficult to really envision yourself being outside of the second or third line of defense

just because it's not that natural to do so. However, I'm here to tell you that it's totally possible, but it's really beyond that certification. So this was a role that I also faced a lot of challenges because from managing a regional portfolio and basically managing multifunctional projects, I found myself managing stakeholders from 43 countries. So that's 43 markets, even way more than the countries I've ever visited in my life. And that's where really understanding people, that massive, massive skill comes in, right? Communication, getting along with people, being able to create win-win relationships and really understanding what people are seeing at the deeper level allows you to be,

to answer them more precisely and really understand the challenges that they are facing, the guidance that people are looking for. So again, you know, managing that massive portfolio and a lot of the things that I do, it's really about change management, transition, pioneer teams, working on new things, that things that the bank has really never seen before. At the same time, really driven by regulatory deliverables, initiatives. So there's a lot of room for creativity, of course, but at the same time, what's more important is the other skills, right? Like leadership.

I mean, I was leading people from so many, many countries. Aside from that, being very productive, really focusing on what needs to be done. Time management, making sure that you are focusing your energy and time on what truly matters and making sure that you are focusing your energy and time on what truly matters and making sure that managing expectations very clearly not just within senior management team but also being able to run very clean meetings and making sure that people understood what they needed to deliver um some of the other challenges i faced which as the team expanded was the people issues because

when you hire people come in with a certain expectation of what they need to do but not everybody is flexible or adaptable to new pieces of work especially work that required pivoting which obviously happens this business in business a lot and even more nowadays. So it's about managing people's mindset also to see change as good and not change as something that is very difficult or impossible and I think these are some of the key skills that I emphasize when I coach my client nowadays because it's not something that's very well understood in terms of its importance and personally as a young leader what I faced was obviously you know the key stakeholders that I work with are from different countries so they don't see me as often because I was based in Singapore at that time. But on an annual basis, probably once or twice a year,

they would all gather in Singapore for an off-site. And that's when some of them will actually have the chance to meet me. And the common comments I get is that, oh, you are meeting? I say, yes. Why? And they say, oh, yeah, you know, you look so young. And, you know, we didn't expect you to look like that. So I said, like, what does that mean, right? Then they said, oh yeah, you know, we just thought that with the guidance that you've given us and all the advice and how,

you know, you are sort of on top of everything, you know, we expected you to be a lot older. And this is a very common recurring theme that happens a lot in my career but i have of course devised some methods to deal with that by saying that okay you know asian faces we look really young and um you know it doesn't um it doesn't really matter at the end of the day it's about deliverables and making sure that we can work together and deliver value and support one another so there are some ways to kind of get around that but of course it's not the best thing that you want to hear where you are judged because you look young sound young and whatever else right like physical appearances and whatnot but the is, people are judgmental, and there's really nothing that you can do about it. You just need to know what your worth is, right? And continue putting in the effort

and continue just kind of driving changes, driving value, making sure the deliverables are completed, right? Managing expectations, and more importantly, being adaptable to change. Because as cliche as that sounds, change is really the only constant. And I remember that, you know, halfway into the role, Standard Chartered Bank decided that they now want to get into the fintech business, right? Working with like little, with this, not little, but small fintech companies, providing services to those, to those companies. So my managing director at that time was given the portfolio and me as the head of governance was the person who set up the entire governance structure and facilitated and chaired management meetings that required approvals of all these entities into Standard Chartered's portfolio.

So it was it was quite crazy but again at the same time the opportunity to try something new because for you guys in banking or you have not you're not fully aware of how banking works is that obviously you know it's a it's a massive massive organization so a lot of times when people go into banking, they end up, they find themselves working in a specific area for years and they learn on a very limited basis. They find it very difficult to transition into anything else and over time, very difficult to get promoted as well because, you know, if you're not picking up new skills, you're not being exposed to new portfolios or projects, then like how are you actually going to get promoted because your skills your competence your confidence is really not there yet so i'll say that

i was very fortunate to be open to opportunities that led me into different roles but i could learn a lot of things notwithstanding the effort that i had to put in, of course. Well, you know, I get a lot of questions or people asking me, what does it take? What does it really take to take on like roles that are way more senior than you deserve, right? So I don't know what this deserve means, but if you think you can do it, you can do it, right? But it's not just this whole positive confidence thing right which is great but confidence comes from competence right if you don't have the skills it doesn't matter what kind of rah-rah motivation you need like that is going

to die off because right now i work with a lot of high performing clients. So they get promoted at a very young age, right? They have a lot of potential. But once they are there, it becomes very challenging because they've never been in that environment. And if you are in a leadership position, you will know that it is, I would say, probably 20% execution. And the other 80% is actually managing people, managing problems, chairing meetings, and just dealing with stuff.

And that's a very different dynamic compared to other people. When you are starting in your career, you are a junior, or you're doing a very specific role where your job is basically 80% execution. So you can sit at your desk in the corner and just do what you want to do and hope for the best. And that's fine because there are some KPIs around that. But that is execution. That is not leadership. That is not leadership.

Of course, you can still lead in a very limited manner but in the leadership role in a senior management role when like for example the expectation for for banks and even other organizations the biggest transition actually is the transition from manager into director because i have seen many people who could not transition because they could not move from execution into strategy. And that is really the biggest test. So if you are very, very ambitious, I want you to ask yourself, how much are you in the execution mode?

And how much are you actually thinking strategic, right? Big picture thinking, critical thinking. How much of that? And how much of a decision do you dare to take because the hallmark of a leader is to be able to make decisions even with limited information right

so this is what I leave you with and thank you for listening to my 5 day 5 part corporate career lesson that pretty much round up my past decade journey in the corporate world from an audit assistant all the way to senior director at Standard Chartered.

And if you have missed any of the episodes, then feel free to check them out and I'll speak to you soon. Bye.