Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep68: Struggling at new job? Work CULTURE issues.

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 The Ping podcast, a podcast that you should listen to if you are serious about growing your corporate career. So welcome back to another episode.

Starting point is 00:00:40 And right now we are in my 30-day client success story series where I'll be sharing a few stories of clients who have worked with me in a one-on-one capacity or attended my training workshop and how they have managed to transform their career, reduce problems, reduce, minimize, eliminate problems at the workplace and in their career to be really able to move forward and advance in their career to be really able to move forward and advance in their corporate career. So if you missed out any of the earlier episodes, remember to check out the playlist on my channel or on my podcast. All right, today I want to share with you a client who has

Starting point is 00:01:18 worked with me last year and we are still working together right now. And to me, this story is quite interesting. Again, this client is also a top performer in his previous role. And as you all know, as part of career advancement, most people will end up applying for maybe a better company or a better position, a more senior leadership position to continue to get more exposure as well as more opportunities and more importantly more pay right that's what we are all focused on in our career or at least most of it most of us i think so this client um on the outside right from the outside right he seems like a fairly confident guy.

Starting point is 00:02:05 He's been quite involved in a lot of leadership activities that's outside of his full time job. But what I found interesting is that when he first came to me, he was actually quite frustrated. And he told me that he has been in this new prestigious company for eight months and it's getting worse day by day. So I asked him, OK, can you tell me a little bit more and what exactly is going on? So when he started telling me the story, I noticed that he consistently talked about his previous job. Why this new company, you know, doesn't operate about his previous job why this new company you know doesn't operate like the previous job why the new team members are this way why his new boss is this way why is the culture this way why why why why why so now i don't want to discount you know critical

Starting point is 00:02:59 thinking and i also don't want to discount you know analytical um thinking as well but i do think it's important to recognize that if you are consistently comparing one company to the other one department to the other right different team members different people then there is one thing that you need to recognize and that is um should you even be comparing in the first place? I think that is really the fundamental issue that you need to think about. And particularly for this client, I noticed that he was stuck in a mindset of the past, because in his previous job, he was actually doing pretty well, one of the high high performers but somehow when he joined this new company he couldn't quite replicate that and as i mentioned to you guys before and even in my

Starting point is 00:03:51 previous client success story series i mentioned that if you work with a top performer or high performer or even somebody who did really well in their university studies some kind of achievement per se when they are suddenly put in a situation where they don't get their way or they're you know not getting the kind of like um i guess results that they had expected it it damages their um mindset it kind of also damages their self-esteem as well as self-confidence so the natural the natural reaction is to complain to blame and complain in fact it's actually quite normal and i do see that in a lot of my clients as well so the first session of this client was really to identify what was the root cause and after all these companies that he has been telling me and

Starting point is 00:04:45 he also told me that in a lot of his previous jobs like for 10 years he has been working he has always done really well right he always felt very valued and that his bosses and teams are very happy with his own his performance so he finds it very difficult to understand why this current company this current team this these current team members were in his words not up to expectation or not up to par with the um the standards that he's expecting so this is actually quite common because most of us go into a job and we have this sort of like expectation versus reality on what needs to happen and i actually did talk about this in some of my other episodes as well and in fact this whole expectation versus reality thing is is so fundamental before you can even do a good job

Starting point is 00:05:37 that's why nowadays in my two-week boost your confidence and soft skills at work training i always start with expectations versus reality as the first module that we talk about because if you don't set your expectations correctly you don't reset that kind of like beginner's mindset when you join a new company then um it is it will it will definitely not work out right and that was really what this particular client experienced because he thought that since he did really well his previous job he should be able to replicate so the keyword here he thought he should be able to replicate without really putting in the effort to learn about the culture right his boss's priorities what are some of his team members background so that he can better lead them and manage them as a director.

Starting point is 00:06:31 So this is really a combination of problems between, you know, of expectation versus reality, you know, as well as I think probably leadership and management skills is something that still needed to be enhanced. And furthermore, he as a person like personality wise he is a little bit introverted and a little bit focused on the feelings part but I think mostly introverted so if you guys know I always talk about personality as the main driver of how you think how you feel how you make decisions how you behave at the workplace and for for this particular client, he also couldn't escape that. So in fact, as introverts, sometimes we have the tendency of making assumptions,

Starting point is 00:07:14 and that's not a good thing. So he also fell into the making assumptions trap and just assuming what his team members or his his manager his boss was supposed to be doing for his sake but never really looking at the other side so understanding dynamics is definitely really important but i think for this particular client definitely had to start with mindset so a lot of these sessions i worked with him was at least for the first few sessions was really like breaking the um the fixed mindset on assuming past equals present past present and future we need to keep growing and keep learning it should not stay stagnant of course we can take some lessons from the past

Starting point is 00:07:58 but we shouldn't necessarily expect that right past success equals future success. It may not necessarily be the case, particularly for this client who moved from the private sector into public sector. He took on a promotion. He joined a very, very niche industry that is filled with experts. So obviously, expectation and even technical soft skill ability is all to the next level.

Starting point is 00:08:25 And I think he was not exactly prepared for that. So the good news is that at least after a couple of sessions, right, he started accepting that this is the current reality. And if he really wants to do well, that's something that he really needs to look forward, which I think is a really positive development. And from there on, we started working more around the soft skills part. So how to manage his portfolio,

Starting point is 00:08:49 how to actually have one-on-one conversations that can motivate his team members, how to understand his team members' personality, how to align expectations with his boss, how to appear as a valuable professional professional valuable director in front of his ceo in which he also has a little bit of face time so um i think him breaking through that kind of like i think mindset block and limitation really allows us to work at the next level so of course right occasionally the the natural part of his personality

Starting point is 00:09:27 does come into play like sometimes after a while if we don't because he's really quite busy so sometimes we don't check in as often and I find that if it's been a long time since the check-in then sometimes they end up clients end up you know moving backwards which is not good so that's why for all my clients i told them that we need to have a check-in every four to six weeks because anything that is a little bit more than that then most of the time they will then backtrack and then we have to actually restart the entire um entire process again which is not very productive so the i think the good news for this client is that over time, he also started to recognize that, okay, actually he could contribute. And instead of being very

Starting point is 00:10:10 bitter and unhappy about it, actually that is not good for his professional reputation. So then he woke up and said that, okay, I'm thinking short-term because expectation versus reality, and I'm reacting to it negatively which is a really a short-term reaction but he was really forgetting about the ultimate long-term goal of what kind of exposure and opportunities that he could really get in this position which is definitely better than the previous company that's why he made the move so so um that's it for this story um i hope that this story um inspires you and actually get you thinking about you know what is an emotional reaction of um directly you know

Starting point is 00:10:54 assuming that past successes must equal future um success on whether you are having also such mindset blocks as my client and more importantly what are you doing to actually overcome those mindset blocks because if you let this perpetuate it could potentially affect your professional reputation and maybe even limit your career opportunities later on because you may be seen as a person who is unable to adapt once you are put into a challenging or maybe slightly different environment. All right, that's it for today's episode of my 30-day client success story series. I hope that this story inspires you and also empowers you to really think about how you are balancing short-term versus long-term and if you are even facing any sort of mindset blocks and more

Starting point is 00:11:46 importantly what actions are you taking to move forward so with that i hope that in the meantime you feel empowered and you are actually taking action towards career growth so with that i'll see you guys in the next episode bye

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep68: Struggling at new job? Work CULTURE issues.

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