Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep55: What young corporate leaders MUST know.

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. Hi, hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of my Got a Ping podcast, a podcast that you should listen to if you want to grow your career in the corporate world. So today I want to talk about a topic that is really close to my heart, and that is how to gain respect as a young leader.

Starting point is 00:00:48 So whether you are a young leader or a young professional, basically somebody who is really ambitious and want to reach the next level in your career, at some point you will become a leader or a manager in your capacity as a trustworthy professional or maybe in positions where you will be leading other people. So, you know, the impact of age in corporate is something that I talk about a lot because I do have firsthand experience in that. For those of you who may not have been that aware of my career story, I graduated really young at 20 years old as a chartered accountant. I pretty much started working at 20 years old and I quickly moved up the corporate ladder quite quickly.

Starting point is 00:01:37 And I became a manager and gradually a director and senior director. And I would say that at the peak of my career, I was leading teams in 43 countries, working from junior all the way to director level. I was also working with a lot of CEOs and all these sound great and happy, but there was one thing that came up a lot in my career. And that was the age-old question of,

Starting point is 00:02:09 oh, actually, Mei-Ping, how old are you? You look really young. So how old are you? And how many years of experience do you have? So even though you may be really good at your job and you may be really competent, there's one thing that you need to recognize, and that is the fact that other people at work can have a different perception of you.

Starting point is 00:02:31 And sometimes rightfully or wrongfully in the context of social or cultural and depending on different countries, we do give respect to maybe older and more senior people, not just in our society, but in the workplace as well. So when I first started working, I faced the constant challenge of people questioning whether I knew what I was talking about, people would automatically label me as maybe inexperienced, maybe lack of maturity, the moment they see my face, or the moment they look at the X number of years of experience that I have. But not everybody really had the time or rather took the time to really deep dive into the achievements that I had.

Starting point is 00:03:27 So the point I'm really trying to make here is that people can have judgments of you. And sometimes, you know, it's unintentional. It could be unintentionally biased because that was just the way that they are brought up or it's just the way that the society or cultural elements right just happens so even though right as a young professional right maybe you're a fresh graduate or somebody who is a bit early on in your career journey or maybe somebody who is really ambitious and have moved up the corporate ladder very quickly i'm sure some of these things that I've just shared with you, you may have experienced it at some point in your career also. And yes, I can understand that it can be really frustrating having to feel like you need to justify why you deserve the spot at the table and that sometimes it's really uncomfortable, unfortunately. But I think what I want to suggest here is how can you rise above that

Starting point is 00:04:29 and actually take some tangible actions to actively gain respect? While it might be easier to complain, it's not a viable long-term strategy. So the question I want to really ask you all is, what are you doing to gain respect? what are you doing to gain respect what are you doing to gain respect so let me share with you some of the things that i have personally done to gain respect as a young leader and at some point i also had team members who worked for me and they were also older than me. At one point, I had a team member who was in her mid-40s. And at the time, I was only a 30-year-old senior director. So position-wise, I was more senior.

Starting point is 00:05:13 But age-wise, I was younger. So probably three key tips that I can share with you all. Number one, if you want to be respected and to be taken seriously, you need to make sure that you know your stuff. So the first step is really to make sure that you gain as much industry knowledge as possible in the areas that you're working in. So what industry are you currently working in right now? Do you have gaps in the industry, in terms of the industry knowledge and the industry know-how? Because this will be one of the methods where you can overcome the years

Starting point is 00:05:51 of experience by really pretty much doing a crash course to learn as much about the industry and maybe the frameworks and maybe the best practices as well. So put in the effort, put in the effort to make sure that you upskill yourself from an industry and knowledge standpoint. Step number two that you can do is to make sure that you are actively conducting a self-reflection and self-assessment process on how you are presenting yourself as a trustworthy professional and as well as a strong young leader. So this is really down to skill set because sometimes what I notice is that when a younger person is promoted to a manager, sometimes you tend to feel very lost. And when you feel very lost, there's a lot of anxiety, there's a lot of overwhelm, and

Starting point is 00:06:42 sometimes you don't even know where to start. So step two, what I would recommend to you is to start by understanding yourself, understanding your personality and potentially what kind of skills gap that you may have, right? Because by identifying the skills gap, it will allow you to better focus on the specific learning and upskilling that you need to be able to be more effective in your job. And how that will translate is in your ability to communicate better with your team members, communicate better with your colleagues, better understand different personalities, increase your ability to deal with people, deal with problems, deal with situations that that may or may not be maybe expected. So step two is really about the inner self-reflection

Starting point is 00:07:30 and assessment process, because without that, you may continue to be unfocused, and that is an added pressure as a young manager. So again, if you want to gain respect as a young manager, you need to make sure that you know what your strengths are, actively polish on them, polish them up. And for the things that you're not so good at, then what are you doing to upskill

Starting point is 00:07:54 so that it will not be a liability for you down the road? And actually that gives you a lot of brownie points with your colleagues who may be older than you as well. So step number three, and this one might be a little bit more, I guess, controversial. And this is really around your, you can call it personal branding,

Starting point is 00:08:14 executive presence, if you will, because like it or not, right? We are, you know, as people, we are very visual people. We see the person before we hear the person, like that is the reality of things. And one of the most frustrating things I've ever, I consistently encountered in the corporate world

Starting point is 00:08:32 was the fact that when people finally meet me in person, one of the things that they always say is, oh, are you Mei Ping? But you look really young. We didn't expect that you are Mei Ping because you used to give us a lot of like advice and guidance and you are so knowledgeable on email and on the phone but we didn't know that oh you're only this young so it made it may sound harmless but i think there is a certain connotation

Starting point is 00:08:59 beneath that message and i've heard it so so so many times that i can actually conclude that oh this is the general perception that i may be seen as slightly less competent just because i look really young because these problems never happen until they have met me in person which is like you know not exactly the best thing ever um but like i said at the start people do make certain judgments whether rightly or wrongly and that sometimes can also lead to certain discrimination so um third step is this if you want to be seen as a strong leader particularly if you're a young leader i would suggest paying some attention to the way that you are grooming yourself i know it sounds really simple but i really recommend that you pay a bit of attention to the way that you are grooming yourself. I know it sounds really simple, but I really recommend that you pay a bit of attention to the way that you

Starting point is 00:09:49 present yourself. Maybe the way that you talk, the way that you dress, the way that your, your body language is to, to make it, make sure that it comes across as somebody who, yeah, what a manager would look like, if you will. So I can give you a quick, quick idea. So when I became a manager and I was managing a very big multimillion dollar portfolio, one of the things that I actively worked on

Starting point is 00:10:16 was to make sure that I spoke a lot clearer, a lot slower, and making sure that even the way I dressed, right, I also made an effort to, yeah, I mean, make sure that, you know, I don't dress like a kid because if I don't want to be seen as a kid, then I should, you know, stop dressing up like a kid. So some of these things like me may sound so simple and some of the things that we don't really think about, but actually it does have quite a bit of an impact if you are really working in the corporate world and i'm just sharing this based on the things that i have personally experienced myself so so just just a

Starting point is 00:10:50 really really quick um episode where i just really wanted to share with you the fact is that the fact is this the fact that you became um you you got into management or leadership positions while you're still fairly young it's's a positive thing, right? Never beat yourself down because you have achieved something that maybe most of your peers have not. It's a good thing. But what I'm trying to say here is this. If you want to do better, then there are some things that you could do.

Starting point is 00:11:19 And you could start with the three tips that I've shared with you. I wouldn't say that, you know, to overhaul somebody's perception of you or to change yourself. That's not what I'm saying, but it is to better manage perceptions because at the workplace, you are judged all the time. So rather than having somebody judge you,

Starting point is 00:11:37 why not actually take control of that perception, take control of that branding and take control of your own executive presence and actively manage that. Because if you leave it to somebody else, then if it doesn't work out, then I guess there's nothing you can do about it. But the main takeaway for this episode this week is ask yourself, what are you doing to gain respect as a young leader? So don't wait for somebody else to give you a certain label.

Starting point is 00:12:12 Choose your preferred labels right now and choose to take charge. So with that, I will see you guys in the next episode. And I hope that you found this episode super duper insightful. I'll see you guys next time. Bye.

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep55: What young corporate leaders MUST know.

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