Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep64: Your EGO is hurting your career growth.

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. Hello everyone, this is Mei Ping and welcome back to another episode of my God of Ping podcast, a podcast that you should listen to if you want to grow your corporate career. So in this next 30 days, we will be doing a client success story series

Starting point is 00:00:43 where I'll be sharing with you guys 20 client success stories, be it in improving their work performance or improving their job search success where they have made significant progress either in building their own work confidence, in getting a promotion or good performance rating, or actually landing multiple interviews as well as job offers also. So today I want to share with you a story for one of the first clients who worked with me when I first started career coaching in late 2019 and early 2020. So this is definitely a a client from some time ago but i also think that she is one of those who made significant transformation and i think it's a really good story to illustrate to all of you that mindset is something that is so critical in terms of like actually making progress in your career. So as usual, I hope that this client success story series will inspire you

Starting point is 00:01:50 and empower you to really focus on growing your career in the corporate world and achieve the professional goals that you have set out for yourself. All right, so let's just dive into the story of my client. So my client actually, so for this particular client she is actually a high performer so she spent quite enough she spent quite i think about five years in one of the top global multinational companies in the branding and marketing position so she was a high flyer in that global MNC. She was promoted almost every year. And at a certain point in her career,

Starting point is 00:02:31 she thought that maybe I'm ready to do something else. So she applied for another global multinational company. I can't name the name, but it's definitely a really big one that if I mention it, you will know it. So she joined that company, took on a more senior position, of course, with a more lucrative pay, which is why she actually went for it. But what basically happened when she first came to me, she was four months into her six months probation.

Starting point is 00:03:01 And she was extremely frustrated because initially right she thought that everything was going really well she's like oh okay six months probation no problem right i just went ahead and did what how i used to operate at my previous workplace because i was top performer right but to her surprise four months into the new job her boss actually sat her down and told her that, I don't think things are working. I don't think we will be confirming you at the end of the probation because I don't think you're meeting any of my expectations. So for her, it's really what she used to tell me a fall from grace because for somebody who is such a top performer at one of like the biggest mncs in her country to being told within four months of this

Starting point is 00:03:54 new job that she doesn't deserve to be there they don't they don't value her and she is not adding value or contributing in any way possible and And the team is very unhappy with her. So it actually came as a shock to her. And when she first spoke to me, she was really, really, really upset. And she felt that there was something wrong with her.

Starting point is 00:04:17 And secondly, she was extremely angry at her boss. She was extremely angry at the new company and she was just angry at the whole world. Right. Which to be honest, I can understand because as i told you guys before and if you checked out the previous episode right uh right before this i told you guys that if you work with a top performer you'll understand that top performers do not like to be told that they are wrong they do not like

Starting point is 00:04:40 to be told that they are not productive and they do not like to be told that they are not productive and they do not like to be told that they are not achieving or rather in because in other words they see themselves as being useless which really damages their ego and most top performers probably has a pretty big ego and that was what happened to this client of mine so she came to me and she asked me she said mayping i respect you a lot because i think you have that kind of career that i want right and can you please tell me can you also help me understand what am i doing wrong because i did so well in my previous company and i am extremely shocked that i am now being told that i am not meeting expectation and worse still i am not to get the confirmation after my probation, which to me is something so humiliating. I don't think I can take it.

Starting point is 00:05:29 So those were pretty close to what she told me when she first came to me. So one of the immediate priorities that I focused on with her was because her confirmation was due to get her confirmation results in the next six weeks so one of the first few things i told her is that we need to understand how well you have been communicating with your boss because just based on like some of the challenges that she told me i think it was very very obvious what the main root cause of this problem was. So there are basically two main root causes. The first root cause is that she forgot to align expectations with her boss. So if you can work for four months and not know what your boss cares about, you don't really know what are the main KPIs that defines your performance, that is a very significant problem.

Starting point is 00:06:26 And I think that was something that either she was ignorant about it or she just never thought about it, right? So I always tell my clients, you guys need to know specifically what are your performance goals? What are your real KPIs? Because there's no point putting in effort thinking that you're going in the right direction, but actually you don't even know what the targets are. So that was really like the biggest, biggest root cause that actually caused this entire problem to begin with, because if at the start she had sat down with her boss and understand what are her main performance goals, what are her expectations, then this thing probably wouldn't have happened in the first place, right?

Starting point is 00:07:03 So now she's in a bit of a bad situation because she has waited four months doing what she think was right, but actually it's wrong. Then her second problem actually is the ego. So like I told you before, one of the biggest issues for top performers, particularly those who have been doing well in their career up to that point, is that they consistently think that their approach and their thoughts or their views their opinions is always correct so she basically applied the way that she was working in her previous company to this current company

Starting point is 00:07:38 without understanding the company's culture she didn't really try to understand the team's focus she also didn't try to understand how her boss communicates and how and i guess her boss's working preferences because as you guys know normally when i first start working my clients i really focus on understanding their personality their mindset and how they have been approaching their relationships with other people at the workplace particularly their boss so when i ask her a lot of some a lot of these questions to better understand her situation i realized that she couldn't tell me any of these things which only points to one thing which means that she doesn't know that is not a good thing so because of that um immediate immediate solution that i gave her was that um you know you need to

Starting point is 00:08:26 go and have a conversation with your boss right and i actually gave her a structure of how to approach it she was very hesitant and i remember i think in the second session she cried because she said i'm so frustrated i think this is so humiliating i don't really want to apologize to my boss because you know it's not my fault so i told her that um until you can overcome this mindset that it's you know like everybody's at fault except you then you will never be able to move forward and you she really needed to focus on what was the most important thing rather saying sorry you know protecting her ego was more important or getting that confirmation which would then you know move her career forward

Starting point is 00:09:06 is a much more important thing than you know not wanting to say sorry because she had a very big ego so we had to do a little bit of like practice to make sure that she could actually convey a lot of um this this i guess first real first proper conversation adult to adult boss to staff with her boss and eventually she did manage to do that and over time we we actually did um catch up every two to three weeks just to make sure that she's on track and the other issue that she also had which really created all these problems is that she is a person that is not very structured so one of the things she used to tell me is that oh maybe you know i i think i used to think that operating in chaos so her exact words operating in chaos was my biggest strength but now i learned that this is not a good thing and that's why everything

Starting point is 00:09:59 is in chaos and i can't seem to get control of my stuff because I really had to teach her how to structure her work to manage different countries so at that point she was in charge of 10 countries and everything was in a mess because you know she doesn't have a structure so she just spent a lot of time in meetings but really couldn't really drive a lot of the results so I really had to teach her how to work around her priorities how to navigate and work with different stakeholders what to say how to make sure that they commit to certain things and all those things and these were things that you know i experienced when i was working in the corporate world as well because at one point i was working with people from 43 countries so i told

Starting point is 00:10:39 her that hey your 10 countries is not the biggest problem like if you want to move ahead in your career you want to become senior manager at the next problem. Like if you want to move ahead in your career, you want to become senior manager at the next level, then you need to learn to manage these 10 countries so that eventually you can manage 20 countries, 30 countries, 40 countries and so on, right? So at the end of the day, I'm still, I'm really happy to definitely announce that after the six weeks

Starting point is 00:11:03 from the time that we first started working together she actually did get a full-time confirmation so she was confirmed um as a team member and in fact not her immediate boss but the actual overall business head actually gave her a really good feedback and told her that you know she is a really really good local talent that they intend to groom so rest assured her career with the team is something that they will continue to invest in her development so i think the biggest win for her was really able to turn around that very negative perception okay when somebody tells you that you will not get confirmation means that your performance is really bad right so i think to be

Starting point is 00:11:42 able to really turn around that in six weeks was a massive achievement because i really had to go through it for structurally how to position herself for that performance review because you at that point it was pretty much a do or die for her and she doesn't sort this out then it will it would have been a really really huge issue so so i think that that was really like one of the biggest achievements when working with her and of course since then she was since promoted to a senior manager, given more responsibilities. Eventually, she actually left this company to a much better company as well. So her career is definitely moving upwards and forward.

Starting point is 00:12:15 And it really started off with that personal challenge of her having to absorb her ego and be able to move forward because that was really more you know growing her career and positioning herself for success is much more important than than her ego at that point so that's the story um i hope that this story has inspired you and also empowered you to really think about your career and also ask yourself right how important is your ego versus career opportunities so this is just something for you to really ponder on and think about and if my client can overcome that kind of personal limitations that she has set for yourself for herself i am sure that you can also overcome the same so as usual in this series i hope that you get a lot of inspiration and feel empowered from a lot of my client success stories.

Starting point is 00:13:07 And you can really go out there and take charge of your career. So with that, I will see you guys in the next episode. Until then, bye. See ya.

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep64: Your EGO is hurting your career growth.

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