Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep43: How your personality helps you find suitable 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 talk about how your personality can affect your job or career success. So a lot of people ask me, what is really the secret to doing well in your career? While there may be a lot of answers to this, some may be fancier than others, I'd say the reality is this, self-awareness. It

Starting point is 00:00:55 always starts with self-awareness. And when I talk about self-awareness, a lot of people don't get it either. It sounds like a big woo-woo word that is being used around, but very few people know what that actually means. So let me give you a hint. It starts with understanding your personality because ultimately, you know, we are all different. So we all have a distinct personality with very different characteristics, right? So that's really important to understand how you are wired because it does affect how you think, how you feel and all the actions that you take. So here I'm not saying that you can't continue to develop the skills or the characteristics that may not be very natural to your personality absolutely you can do that i've personally done that myself and nowadays i

Starting point is 00:01:52 help a lot of clients to develop that however it is really important to recognize what is your default personality because when you're stressed you face a lot of anxiety and when things don't quite go that well, it's very easy for you to kind of like jump back to what's your default, just like all of us would, right? So how do you identify your personality? So one of the personality tests that I would highly recommend is the Myers-Briggs personality test. You can actually take a free test on this website called 16personalities.com. So this is the one website that I found personally very helpful in giving you an indicator and a sense of what your personality is like, what are your strengths, weaknesses and how that would affect your, not just your career, but maybe in your relationships and other things as well.

Starting point is 00:02:49 However, one thing you want to also take note is that a personality is just an indicator, right? So of course, with dedication, hard work, and a growth strategy, you can definitely venture into any area that you want to so 100% that's true so in order to understand your personality you need to identify what you are naturally good at and what are the things it's just so painful to do it to do it so I'll share an example for myself right so I am I'm an introvert so that means where possible, I like to work alone and kind of like delve in my own thoughts. I'm also a big picture thinker, so that means that naturally I am not a very detailed person. So it takes a lot of mental energy for me to remain focused on the nitty-gritty and I'm also a thinker so that means that in my mind I'm already a very

Starting point is 00:03:46 logical person per se when I think about decision making when I'm tasked with big items to really think deep and think broad and lastly I am a fairly structured person but in this part I am actually an in-between between structured as well as kind of go with the flow sort of person so just understanding at a very very high level what my personality is actually helped a lot when I was rising up in my career so if you guys have listened to previous episodes of my podcast you would have known that I am a trained accountant so that means that I am a trained accountant. So that means that I am from a technical professional background. So when I studied accountancy, it was also very challenging. Like I said, I am not a very detailed person. So at the beginning of an accountancy course, there's obviously need to

Starting point is 00:04:37 get comfortable with numbers and all the checks and balances and all that i was not great at that however as i progressed in the course i realized that okay you know what there's this other part that is also required which is big picture thinking a being able to conceptualize standards ideas and actually communicate that in writing at least in a professional qualification so when i started work as an auditor in a small company in Malaysia and subsequently with Ernst & Young Singapore, that was exactly what I continued to leverage on. So I knew that as I continued to work, I needed to be very, very precise. So my attention to detail, this piece of skill was something that I had to pay a lot of attention to. Like I said, it wasn't really natural to me, so it was really difficult. I really had to practice the concentration and come up with my own strategies to cross-check just to make sure that I've covered all the bases,

Starting point is 00:05:36 like a keen sense of eye on that. So I'll say that the years spent in audit were absolutely invaluable because I got to master a skill that was completely unnatural to my personality type. And let me share with you where that brought me. So later on, I moved from an auditor. I joined Visa in a regional role dealing with internal controls and some internal audit as well. And as a requirement of that, the attention to detail helps. However, coupled with my natural ability to think of the big picture allowed me to really manage stakeholders and manage cross projects in a very efficient basis because I always knew what was the biggest goal that we were trying to achieve. So even though, like I said, it wasn't very natural to me, it was a massive skill set that once I picked that up, once I mastered, helped me later on in my career.

Starting point is 00:06:36 And after visa, I joined Standard Chartered in a global role, running business portfolios in a rich management capacity and later on in a risk management capacity and later on in the business management capacity. So the attention to detail was something that my ex-bosses, executive directors, managing directors really really appreciated and in fact it was quite funny over the years when they told me that they could always trust in the quality of my work because I'm a very detailed person, which I always found really amusing because only if they knew that this was not natural to me. But to me, it was a really big honor to get such a compliment because I knew how hard I worked

Starting point is 00:07:16 to make sure that and to make this unnatural skill set is eventually something that people really appreciated and really gave me recognition for. And the attention to detail in those senior leadership roles, really critical because you can have a lot of big picture ideas, you can talk about business strategy and direction, but the devil is really in the details. So we can all talk a big talk, but if you are not meticulous enough and you don't question enough on the details and really get to the groundwork, nothing works, right? Nothing works. So that's nowadays how I feel about branding because you can portray a certain image of yourself, but the nitty gritty, if you don't know anything, it's really going to blow up

Starting point is 00:08:03 eventually. So the best thing is to develop self-awareness and start with your own personality. Because it's not going to be very easy to see that in other people. But the best way to first learn is to see that in yourself. And I think to me, the biggest opportunity is really marrying your natural personality skills and characteristics with something that you have learned because it really allows you to have a balance and go way further, go way further in your career. ability to think of the big picture, I probably wouldn't have survived or kept moving up the ladder like I did because there was still something missing in my arsenal of skill set. Because you can talk a big talk and give big ideas as a big picture thinker, but if you can't get to the nitty-gritty, you can't justify, you can't document specifically and precisely, that's not going be i mean that piece

Starting point is 00:09:06 of work or deliverable is not going to be something that is of quality that people would take you seriously as well so every single thing is really down to substance and the entire the entirety of the skill set that you can master so don't just cherry pick the ones that you like to work on and then ignore the rest and hoping that with some branding and storytelling, you can cover it. No, really think about where do you see yourself in three to five years? Is there a specific role that you want, right? And then assess your current personality or natural skills and talents against the requirements of that role. If you have it, great, continue to sharpen that skill. If you don't have a skill but you're still passionate about that role, the industry, the department or whatever that is, the time to start developing

Starting point is 00:09:57 those skills is now. Because don't wait until you get to that point and be disappointed because you were not given the opportunity because you're not ready. So always, you know, make sure that you are as ready as possible, because I always tell a lot of my clients and even when I do keynote speeches or workshops that every single thing can be learned. But I can teach you all of that. But what I can't teach you is the dedication, the drive and the perseverance, because at the end of the day, you are responsible for your career. Because if you don't care, I can't care either. Neither can any other trainer and any other expert out there help you. So hopefully today's podcast have been really, really interesting. If you have never ever thought about your personality or how it can affect your job or your career, I highly encourage you to start thinking right now. And if you need more resources,

Starting point is 00:10:51 feel free to listen to other episodes in this podcast. Follow me on YouTube, Spotify, and definitely on LinkedIn because I'm way most active there. And if you feel like you need very specific support that I can help you or a group of your friends, a group of students, feel free to reach out. Always available to chat further on how I can best help.

Starting point is 00:11:15 In the meantime, all the best. Cheers.

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep43: How your personality helps you find suitable jobs.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.