Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep70: Start-up to global MNC. What's the difference?

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 my Got a Ping podcast, a podcast that you should listen to if you want to grow your career. So welcome back to my 30-day client success story series

Starting point is 00:00:39 where I'll be sharing with you guys some of the top client achievements and transformations from really overcoming their challenges and problems at the workplace or even in their job search process and to be able to move forward and focus on career advancement. So I'll be sharing stories along challenges and problems faced by my clients in their day-to-day working environment, or for those of them who are looking for a certain promotion, or something that allows them to level up in their career. And lastly, of course, I'll also be sharing stories of challenges that my clients face with getting new career and job opportunities,

Starting point is 00:01:20 and some of the things that we focus on in our coaching sessions to allow them to capture the opportunities and capture those career opportunities that I think they really deserve because they really have the core competencies already. All right, so in today's story, I want to share with you a story of one of my clients who managed to transition from a small company so a small locally owned family orientated sort of company to a global multinational company so for this particular client actually i worked with her from the interview stage but that one i'll leave it to another episode but in today's episode i just want to really focus on the transition from a small company to a big company what are some of the things that she didn't quite

Starting point is 00:02:11 expect and turned out to be a little bit of a culture shock and more importantly right some of the things that we work together to make sure that she could transition seamlessly and what are really the core skills that you will need if you are making such a transition in your career. So again this is a transition from a small company to a global multinational company that is a really really huge brand and really is the dream job for a lot of people. So just a bit of background my client, my client is in the branding and marketing space and she has been doing pretty well in her existing job at that time but of course right for people who are ambitious professionals who are very ambitious um moving up to the next level and you know wanting to join a

Starting point is 00:03:01 bigger brand a bigger company definitely is on their ambition list. And this is really the same with my client as well. So she successfully transitioned. But after the first one or two weeks of excitement of joining the new company died down, she is then faced with this problem of, how do I make sure that I operate or rather I work in a way that fits the MNC because I am so used to the ad hoc,

Starting point is 00:03:35 last-minute habits, haphazard habits that tend to happen in a small company or a kind of a family-oriented sort of company where processes, frameworks, and guidelines may not necessarily be the most important focus. But most of the times in a small company, it's just like, as long as you get the job done, nobody really questions you. Nobody really thinks about the long-term sustainability of things.

Starting point is 00:04:02 They just want work done. So that was actually a habit that she developed over the two years of working with this small company and the moment she joined the big company she realized that oh i cannot operate like this because it actually creates a lot of confusion and could create misunderstanding with her bosses and the other thing she also realized is that, oh, in a big company, you need a lot of planning and a lot of expectation and alignment are really done at the front. And that was something that she was just not really familiar with

Starting point is 00:04:35 because it was never really the focus in the small company. So when she came to me, I think frustration is one thing, but I'd say that the bigger issue that she told me was confusion. So she is confused as to how she's supposed to behave because she was definitely the top performer in her previous company. She had really strong communication skills, problem-solving skills. So actually, her core competencies were really great. But right right now she is starting to doubt herself and starting to feel confused because she then asked me oh maybe like do what make me do well in my previous job i'm not sure if like

Starting point is 00:05:16 i can still do the same thing here because in this new company um everything's a lot more structured and i find that sometimes things may not be so direct because it's it's um there are more hierarchy there are more people involved and she's starting to sense a little bit of politics but not too much because she's still in a fairly junior position so um so for this client the way i approach um our coaching sessions is really sharing about my own corporate insights and experiences and how things are actually done in the real corporate world so these are probably the kind of things that if you have been working in the corporate world for some time or you have been in management or leadership positions then i think you can really experience that perspective otherwise you probably get a bunch of theories from youtube videos or your friends which

Starting point is 00:06:07 sounds idealistic but actually doesn't these things don't exactly happen in the corporate world so really had to work around for her i really had to focus on how to communicate in a way that generates win-win relationship and more importantly also focus on actually planning her work up front and communicating with her boss aligning expectations those were really like the most important things that need to be sorted out because these are really really the foundation so she was already a really good communicator to begin with and that made my work a little bit easier but even though already a really good communicator to begin with and that made my work a little bit easier but even though she was a good communicator she wasn't used to communicating about

Starting point is 00:06:51 you know the end to end of like how how a project or a campaign is supposed to work out because that was not something that she was doing at the work in her previous job and so what needed to go in was really a lot of structure and phases in her communication method so I really had to bring her back and really go back the umbrella view of understanding okay actually what you're trying to achieve the other thing also is that because if you guys have worked in corporate for some time and depending on how senior your boss is sometimes you find that your bosses may not be very direct and you need to really learn some skills to to be able to identify the intention of what they're saying and also to be able to identify concerns that may or may not come across

Starting point is 00:07:37 very clearly so that was definitely something that i had to teach her as well because she did tell me that her boss consistently came to her and asked if she needed help. And she basically took that session as just a complaint session where she ended up complaining about all these things that she hasn't learned or she couldn't do well and yada, yada, yada. So what I told her is that I think you just need to be very careful because yes your boss is offering support but uh guess what most bosses actually want to see that you have put in effort and you have actually taken action so the way that you know of constantly complaining while your boss may listen to you but the impression that you are setting up to your boss may not necessarily be a positive thing. And I say this for sure, because I used to be in that boss's position. I used to be in the head of department, right, senior director management position. And I can tell you that most leaders and managers at that level probably operate pretty similarly and we probably think and our viewpoints of you know what works

Starting point is 00:08:47 for portfolio management or team management standpoint a lot of these concepts are fairly similar because that was how we managed to rise up as well and these are things that we have already gone through so those were some of the insights that I was really able to give her some perspective on because definitely it's not something that she was able to pick up in her previous job even though she was top performer even though she was a high performer it's just not in the nature of the culture of her previous job to do things in a certain way so with that I think the the biggest change that I'm seeing if this client and we're still working together i think is the is the mindset shift of really embracing the new working methods and this sometimes for a lot of people may not be very easy particularly if you have done well in your

Starting point is 00:09:37 previous job or you have spent some time quite a long time in your previous job that you're just so used to the the culture you're so used to the way that things are done right rightly or wrongly um where you will not really focus so much on efficiency and or effectiveness anymore you're just so used to yeah status quo because things were just done that way so the the main i think breakthrough right or rather um mindset shift for my for my clients that she was able to recognize that, okay, even though for the past two years, I did really well in that small company, but if I want to do well in this kind of skill, not in a company of this size, not in this kind of scope of responsibility that is actually way bigger than my previous job. So I'm really proud of her because, you know, that kind of like mindset shift and especially for those who have done well,

Starting point is 00:10:37 it's not easy for them to say that, oh, okay, I'm going to start from the beginning because there's just a lot of things that I don't know. So sometimes, you know, the humility of recognizing what you don't know is really the secret formula or like the magic sauce, the secret sauce that allows you to learn more and advance because the moment you say that you know everything, especially at the beginning part of your career, right, you've only worked for two years, how much do you really, really, really know? I mean, let's be honest here. So with that that i think i'm just really proud of her that she's really able to overcome that kind of mindset and also she's been telling me that okay you know i'm just learning and absorbing as much as possible if i don't know i try to ask as many questions as possible so i think with her right and my main my main role as a coach for her is to help her navigate through

Starting point is 00:11:27 the the differences right in culture and expectations and also providing her with insights on what the real corporate world looks like and i think that's so so so valuable because it's very easy to to give a bunch of theories on what happens in the corporate world but i think until you reach a certain level in your career and you have been in the leadership and management position before then a lot of it makes better sense otherwise right if otherwise it's just going to be a bunch of theories that actually you know nowadays that there are more people talking about what should happen in corporate and they're just giving their opinions without actually being in this leadership position so um yeah i mean so definitely really really proud of her and um that's it for the story and i do hope that the main takeaway that you you learn from this story and you know get inspired

Starting point is 00:12:16 and empowered from this my client success story is to it's all it's okay to begin again so i'm not saying discounting what you have done and what you've achieved in the past, but I'm just saying that it is okay to always start again because it is the kind of beginner's mindset that really allows you to grow more because you are now opening your mind to learn more and more and more things

Starting point is 00:12:39 that can help you in your future career. And I think that is really, really important. Okay, so I hope today's client success story really inspires you and also empowers you to also begin with a beginner's mindset, a fresh mindset to look at your problems, look at your goals, look at your challenges in a completely new way.

Starting point is 00:12:58 And of course, finding innovative solutions that really work for you. So with that, I wish you all the best in your career and I'll see you in another episode. Cheers. Bye.

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep70: Start-up to global MNC. What's the difference?

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