Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep86: A bad attitude gets you NOWHERE in your career.

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 the Grow Your Career Online and Offline podcast. This is Mei Ping.

Starting point is 00:00:35 Hi and welcome back to another episode. Alright, so today I have a very interesting topic and let's talk about rude people online. Rude people, but they actually want your help. They want something for you, but at the same time, they feel like they are entitled to your opinion, your help, your advice, your whatever, whatever. Because that was exactly what I encountered pretty much two days ago. So I was in a bit of a situation. If you have been following me on LinkedIn very closely, you would have realized that there was a bit of a drama

Starting point is 00:01:13 around a post that I shared. So just a quick background. I receive a lot of requests for help on direct messaging on LinkedIn every single day from corporate professionals and job seekers to improve their careers and that's quite normal. Most of the time, I mean, occasionally I do receive, you know, pushier sort of like messages but most of the time they were never rude per se, right? But two days ago, I received a message from a fresh graduate in my connection list. So this person is a high achiever, right?

Starting point is 00:01:50 Good exam results, some sort of student ambassador, whatever, sent me a message asking for help. So initially, the message started pretty okay. Like, you know, I'm having struggles finding a job. Can you help me? Then the second message was the one that like caught me a little bit off guard so this person pretty much said like okay i'm just actually gonna read it from the post itself so this person said that um and don't give me any cliche advice either i don't want something that's I want something that's actually useful I'm like what does that

Starting point is 00:02:26 mean so I actually felt that the tone was quite condescending because it was it was as if like oh I'm gonna ask you but like don't give me rubbish like don't tell me stuff that like doesn't work but the thing is like how do you know it doesn't work and it's it is so rude coming to a person that uh guess what like you've never ever spoken to um and start making demands and like start basically like judging the other not not just the other person but the professional expert that you've pretty much reached out to for professional advice and insight on what to do with your career job search and pretty much making that sort of like um statement and yeah judging the other person so i felt it was unacceptable and i pretty much replied saying that um hi i'm not sure what you mean by cliche

Starting point is 00:03:19 advice but i don't think i can help you with anything with this kind of demanding attitude all the best so now after that right I've actually seen a lot of this sort of bad behavior on LinkedIn particularly but I think this is one of like the worst cases of I guess entitlement that I noticed so I decided to share it with my network I redacted the name the name was totally, you can't actually tell who's that person. And to be honest, if you ask me who is that person, I don't really know either. I can't remember. Then I redacted it and I shared it with the main message of like, yeah, keep your attitude in check. Because if you're a young professional, I mean, let's be honest, how much working experience do you have? You know, yes, you may be highly educated, but education is not everything. Your enthusiasm, your attitude weighs a lot more. And I can tell you this as a former hiring manager,

Starting point is 00:04:17 when we hire for junior professionals, like junior staff, attitude is everything. And if you are a fresh graduate who basically have like zero working experience you go around being extremely rude zero humility zero politeness like feeling so entitled i cannot imagine what kind of like professional you are going to be when you eventually get hired that i just i don't even want to imagine that because I would never hire somebody like that. So anyway, I shared it. Surprisingly, a lot of people resonated with that. And everybody was actually quite upset, I guess, with the rudeness,

Starting point is 00:05:01 for lack of a better word. Then, interestingly, a few hours ago um this person um like i said i don't really remember exactly this person's name um but this person somebody dropped me an email claiming that he was that person and that I should remove the post. Okay, so I thought about it and basically I have two options, right? Option one is I delete the post. But if I delete the post, basically the message that I'm sending out there is that, hey, as long as you throw a tantrum, yeah, you scream and shout and throw your toys out of your pram,

Starting point is 00:05:52 you get what you want. So I'm not sure if this is the kind of message that we should be teaching our younger professionals that, you know, everything is hunky-dory in the working world and, you know, everybody's gonna tolerate you because, you know, you can scream the loudest or you can like threaten me pretty much, like sending me a threatening email thing, like blah, blah, blah, blah. That's option one. Option two is that I could choose to keep the post, but just make it very clear that, hey, this is a reminder for anybody, like everybody, not just a fresh graduate, anybody. Whether you're a job seeker, you're working one year, five years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years.

Starting point is 00:06:35 At the end of the day, you are responsible for the consequences of your actions. So think before you do something. Think before you say something. And think before you do something think before you say something and think before you post something online because i find that a lot of people don't take the online world seriously most people think that you know being a keyboard warrior allows you to get away with stuff i'm sorry it doesn't work like that i mean right now we are pretty much living online anyway and um if you haven't watched one of my earlier episodes, I think it was episode 51,

Starting point is 00:07:07 where I talked about how impressions matter and how online impression nowadays could be the first ever impression somebody gets of you, then make sure that you check out that episode, episode 51. But the point I'm trying to make here is this. You should take the online world as seriously as the offline world because um i find it very hard to believe that if you are a rude person online i find it

Starting point is 00:07:32 very hard to believe that like in real life face to face you are a very polite person like it just doesn't work like that you are that one personality you are that one character so the way that you behave towards other people particularly strangers and particularly people that you don't think can actually help you can actually help you get your way and that says a lot about your character it says a lot about your character and i'm not just saying like to i'm not just saying this to discourage a lot of younger professionals or discourage a lot of fresh graduates. And I hope that you all understand that this episode is not exactly intended to diminish the Gen Z.

Starting point is 00:08:16 In fact, I work with a lot of younger professionals, and I see that a lot of them that I've met have amazing attitudes. So don't let such bad apples skew your view on the really enthusiastic young people out there. And honestly, there are really, really many of them. And with that, let me actually share with you another message that I received today within the span of 24 hours of receiving that self-entitled message. So this was actually a message that I received from my undergraduate. So he said, Hello, Mei Ping.

Starting point is 00:08:49 My name is X and I just saw your post and I got interested. I'm studying at X and will be going for an internship in 2022. I would like to ask you for some advice and for CV help. Could you please help me? By the way, if you're providing

Starting point is 00:09:06 detailed assistance with some sort of like service or payment i would also be interested in that oh by the way i'm studying this course okay now um just compare and contrast this message that i've just read versus the one that i have the drama earlier. To me, both messages are asking for help but the attitude, the character and the personality are completely different. And to me, that says a lot about the person that I'm talking to and also the way that this person presents themselves and i think my biggest concern is that um if younger people are behaving like this i guess this sort of like negative behaviors um for lack of better word then how are you going to survive in the corporate world i really have very big worries about that how are you going to survive in the corporate world i really have very big worries about that

Starting point is 00:10:05 how are you really going to survive in the working world out there basically it's a jungle out there it's like the it's like the wild west like even people have been working for many years finds it can find it difficult to navigate the corporate world so to me with this kind of like attitude with this kind of like hey i know everything and like you need to do this for me like you owe me something even though honestly i don't even know who you are um yeah i mean that kind of like self-entitled mindset i i'm i'm just so speechless i don't even know what to say um so anyway um just a bit of a conclusion right now in terms of the option one and two a and b um i've actually asked it in a very quick poll to my community so i'm gonna give everybody like a bit of a 24 hours to

Starting point is 00:10:51 tell me maybe advise me like what should i do should i delete the post and just let this um teach this young professional oh it's okay to scream and shout it's gonna get your you know he or she's gonna get he or he is going to get his or her way. Or I should keep the pose and let this be a lesson to every single person who is trying to push somebody else to get their way around. Because like that is not how the working world works.

Starting point is 00:11:19 If you really want to be successful, you need to learn how to develop win-win relationships. You need to learn how to work with otherwin relationships you need to learn how to work with other people you need to learn how to communicate and most importantly present yourself well i am sorry but these manners i cannot teach you like you you need to go to somebody else like i can't teach you any of these things but it says a lot about your character. And for that particular fresh graduate that sent me that condescending message on LinkedIn initially and then sending me a crazy,

Starting point is 00:11:53 a crazy, threatening email, self-reflection is what you need. And my last message is that the world does not revolve around you. So food for thought and i hope that this episode is something that could probably invoke something in each and every one of you listening even though you are not exactly caught up in this situation i hope that you have found some important lessons from this particular incident that I encountered.

Starting point is 00:12:26 And if you want to share any of those lessons with me, you can always drop me a message on LinkedIn at Mei Ping Lim. So with that, I'll end this episode and I'll see you in the next.

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep86: A bad attitude gets you NOWHERE in your career.

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