Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep66: Do you consider your boss as a friend?

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 and welcome back to another episode of my Got A Pain podcast, a podcast that you should listen to if you are serious about your corporate career. So welcome back to another episode of my 30-day series where I'll be sharing with you

Starting point is 00:00:42 client success stories, be it in improving their work performance, growing their career, getting a promotion, or increasing their chances to land multiple job interviews as well as job offers. So these are clients which I have worked with directly in a one-on-one sessions or participants who have joined my training and also seen significant improvement in their careers. So I hope that these stories will inspire you to really think about, you know, taking charge of your career because if my clients can grow their career and really improve on the skills gaps that they have and really manage to fix their problems at the workplace, then I'm sure that you can do the same as well.

Starting point is 00:01:25 All right. So today's story is a client who worked with me very recently. And her situation is that when she joined a new company, she was given a lot of promises in terms of getting a promotion within a certain period of time. However, the moment she joined in less than six months there were multiple reorganizations that happened and eventually the boss that made the promises to her now is no longer her boss so if you have ever been in this situation i'm sure that you can

Starting point is 00:01:57 understand the frustration as well as the anxiety that my client felt at that time because the person who hires you always is the person who believes in you the most, right? And one of the concepts that I always teach my clients is that to be able to build very strong working relationships if you are bosses because that will really create a lot of future career opportunities. So imagine the anxiety that my client felt because the boss that hired her suddenly was not her boss. And basically that the promises that she was given right now, it's all up in the air. It's all a bit of a question mark. And the second complication in the situation is that her friend has since been promoted to be her new boss. So this is a friend that she has known for some time. So the other complication that really happened was the,

Starting point is 00:02:52 I guess, the boundary between friendship versus working relationship. So this is actually a really tricky situation. And for those of you who have encountered this before, I'm sure that you can understand that it's a tricky balance and it can be very complicated because if you take the wrong action, you might either jeopardize the friendship or maybe even lose the friendship altogether, or you could potentially limit your own career progression because there could be some opportunities where you may not be evaluating them objectively because you have this friend who is now your boss or your supervisor or your team leader as well. So definitely a very delicate balance.

Starting point is 00:03:38 And particularly for this client, when she came to me, she told me that I have been escaping this problem for some time initially i thought that things would just get better but it does not look like it's getting better in fact i'm feeling more anxiety and i'm feeling more frustrated as the days go by because i just don't really know what to do and this friend of mine who is now my new boss also looks very stressed out in her new managerial position

Starting point is 00:04:06 and she's consistently asking me what to do but the thing is that like i'm not her boss she is now my boss so it's kind of complicated and for this particular client she's also a top performer so it is a little bit of an awkward situation when um you know when she thinks that you know she may be more competent than her boss right so that's a little bit tricky um yeah so one of the things that i really went through with her in this session was to focus on the dynamic between friendship versus working relationship and really where to draw the line how to really approach conversations from a friend's perspective and when to apply those kind of conversation methods versus seeing this particular

Starting point is 00:04:53 friend as a boss and what are the things that she should focus on talking about and some of the things that you know she should just not talk about because it's just beyond the boundary that is allocated to her so i think the line here it's a gray one but it's still something that we can really focus on carving out because like i said if you play this one wrongly then you will probably lose the friendship as well and that would be something that would be really sad because this is probably a friend that you know um i think she has known for quite some time. And if you're in a similar situation like her, I'm sure that losing a friendship is really not the end goal that we all want to get to. So it definitely is an uncomfortable thing. And the other thing I also noticed is that she wasn't really in touch with her previous boss as well.

Starting point is 00:05:43 Because right now she feels it's a little bit awkward to reach out to her previous boss as well because right now she feels it's a little bit awkward to reach out to her previous boss so i think that is actually a pretty common thing because particularly in many parts of asia we tend to be quite hierarchical so we just tend to listen to the immediate boss but i think one thing is really important to recognize is that different people play a different part in helping you grow your career so it doesn't mean that you know uh just because this person is no longer your boss you would just you know completely cut off the working relationship it um doesn't necessarily have to be so um although maybe the way that you approach this

Starting point is 00:06:21 new person i guess who is not your direct boss, maybe the method and how you go about those kind of conversations can be a little bit more sensitive, but I don't think that should stop you from really catching up with people who could help support your career and potentially could, you know, bring you future career opportunities because they really trust in your skills and expertise and they know that you're somebody who can perform and they will be really happy to recommend you as well. So this is actually something that I advise my client because I know that personally, I've also gotten career opportunities from not my direct bosses,

Starting point is 00:07:03 like my bosses' bosses or my boss's peers who recognize my performance, they were also able to provide me career opportunities and also recommend me to very good roles over the years. So it's really important to be able to carve out that kind of dynamic and also basically build your own reputation in the workplace and not let it get stuck to somebody else's reputation which i know is a little bit tricky to do but it is really definitely possible and lastly so so important to um not get caught in the friendship versus working relationship because if you're not careful it will just all meddle in together and for those of you who have worked with your friends at you know your actual real life friends at the

Starting point is 00:07:50 workplace i'm sure you you guys know that in certain situations it might be a little bit awkward because you sometimes feel like you want to help your friend as a friend but right now you're in a working capacity so like if this person was not your friend you probably wouldn't have volunteered for certain things that you are currently volunteering now so it kind of like further grays the line and makes things even more complicated as well so the main lesson that you know i want you guys to take away from this client story is that you need to carve out friendship versus working relationship it's not so easily done i mean there are some methods to make it a little bit more um sensitive and less

Starting point is 00:08:32 damaging but i think being able to carve out the line even though initially might it might be a slightly more uncomfortable conversation to have with that friend right but in the long term actually it is a much more positive decision for your career because you are not caught in this in this crazy cycle of like should i say yes because this is my friend or should i say no because i disagree with the work and i don't think it actually helps my career so again um uncomfortable decisions doesn't mean that they are bad decisions it just means that they are uncomfortable decisions and sometimes you know as you progress in your career depending on where you are you will need to make some uncomfortable decisions and that is completely okay in fact it's more important to learn how to go through the thought process and ultimately make your own decisions and make your own judgments on what would really help your career to grow.

Starting point is 00:09:33 But at the same time, allows you to maintain the most positive and productive working relationship possible with the people around you and always making sure that you are conducting catch-up sessions as necessary because these catch-up sessions will not just only help you be more focused on your current deliverables it potentially could also open more career opportunities for you down the road so that's just something for you guys to think about as to how you are, you know, yeah, I guess making sure that you're not closing doors of opportunities for yourself and always making sure that doors remain open and just be a little bit careful

Starting point is 00:10:17 when you deal with tricky situations, particularly involving friendship at the workplace. So that's it for today's client success story. And particularly for this particular client, at the end of the session, as usual, I always like to ask my clients, what is your biggest takeaway from this session? And she told me that she really appreciated the perspectives that I gave her because, number one, she has been escaping this situation for some time now and number two she actually has spoken to many people before but she never felt that somebody could really understand

Starting point is 00:10:52 the dynamic and complexity of the situation so she never really felt that she got the kind of advice and perspective that she was looking for so she was really appreciative that i could give her that view and basically i told her that i understand this because i have been a senior corporate leader before so what that meant is that i've worked with many people i've also dealt with many many complex and tricky situations before so the moment she told me the story like within five minutes i could pretty much tell i'm like okay this is like a dynamic problem so I think she was really appreciative of that. And she really walked away from the session feeling energized and feeling like, oh, now at least I have a strategy and I can actually go execute it. Because in the past, she was really trying to escape. But right now, I think armed with the right practical strategies and something that she could really do, I think that empowers her to say, hey, it's not the end of the road.

Starting point is 00:11:44 There's this new strategy and new thing that I could do. And let's just see where we go from there. Okay. So with that, I hope that this story inspires you. I hope that this story also empowers you to really stay focused on your career advancement and really also focus on building very productive working relationships with the people at the workplace. So as usual, I hope that this 30-day client success story series continues to inspire you for you to take charge of your career

Starting point is 00:12:14 and always focus on growing your career. So with that, I'll see you guys in the next episode. Cheers, bye!

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep66: Do you consider your boss as a friend?

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