Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep94: Why I fired my intern. Mistakes you should avoid.

Episode Date: December 1, 2021

✅ Get My FREE '5-Day Career Growth' Guide + Training 👉 http://www.meiphing.com ✅ Grow your career in the 9-5 corporate world with clarity, confidence and opportunities! ⚡ 👋 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing — corporate career coach, ex-corporate leader who has led multimillion-dollar projects across 43 countries and creator of the ultimate career course for 9-5 professionals, The Corporate Survivor™. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your career in the corporate world without getting stuck with Mei Phing's 3-step framework to gain career clarity, improve work confidence and attract new job opportunities. ✅ WEBSITE ⮕ https://www.meiphing.com ✅ FREE GUIDE ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co/5days ✅ COURSE & COACHING ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co ⚡ 📌 ABOUT MEI PHING: Mei Phing Lim is a Professional Career Coach and former Corporate Leader in the financial services and consulting industries. Mei Phing went from a shy quiet introvert to leading multimillion-dollar projects with teams from over 43 countries as the Senior Director and Head of Governance at Standard Chartered, and now teaching 9-5 professionals how to navigate the corporate world and grow their careers with her career coaching course, The Corporate Survivor™. Mei Phing has been featured as a LinkedIn Top Voice 2023, sharing expert career advice in guiding young professionals to plan, navigate and grow their careers. Mei Phing is a keynote speaker on corporate culture, work performance and career growth, and sharing perspectives on what truly takes to build a strategic and successful career without getting stuck. ✅ LEARN MORE: https://www.meiphing.com

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 and welcome back to the Grow Your Career Online Offline Podcast, the podcast for corporate professionals looking to grow their careers in the corporate world. So welcome back. And today I have a story for you.

So if you are a people leader, you're a hiring manager, or you're just somebody who is looking forward to your first ever job, then this episode is for you. Because in today's episode, I will be sharing the behind the scenes story on how I hired and fired my intern of one month who worked with me in May this year. So now, I just want to make a very clear point here to say that this is a one-time story that does not serve to conclude that every single person that you'll ever work with have this sort of attitude or

will behave in a similar way but this is just my experience of working with my first ever intern that I hired from my business you know as a career coach and my personal experiences dealing with the particular intern so now let's rewind back a couple of months and probably around sometime in April this year, I felt that I could probably get an intern just to share a little bit of perspectives and also really help me out with some of the social media engagement and really sharing like some fresh ideas and particularly for our video, which is obviously not my strong suit.

And I'm a huge believer of bringing somebody in who can offer perspectives and potentially expertise that I don't have because I'm not perfect. I know that there are a lot of things that I don't know. So I thought, you know what, why not just get an intern right so there'll be a process where we can learn from each other so I I did a few interviews um

and eventually I came to a point to hire this one intern who whom actually was not from any marketing or similar degrees, but actually was from a very different area of study, but was really interested in marketing and really interested in social media. So now I am a huge believer of giving people a chance if they are very passionate and that's what they want to do. And they can commit 100% when they take on a new piece of responsibility or a new job or a new role, right? So all for that. So I knew that the intern didn't specifically come from an area of study, but I thought,

you know what, that's fine. give the intern a chance right so I hired this particular intern and the other point I want to make here is um it doesn't really matter how good you do during your interviews and so forth because that is just a very, very, very small portion of your working experience. Then interestingly, when this intern joined me, then I noticed that this intern had two very, very big problems. Well, I think three big problems that was a bit of an issue. Number one, this intern is not punctual at all. And when I say late, I mean like really late

and in certain instances, actually forgot about the standing meeting that we have set together because obviously we are working remotely, completely forgot about the standing meeting because he overslept. Okay, that is not okay, right? So when you're in a in a job and

you're obviously taking um a salary even if it's an intern salary the commitment it's so important so for for an intern who says hey you know i'm so passionate in this space maybe give me a chance blah blah and to like not not appear for certain meetings and completely disappear, like totally cannot be found, that is not okay, right? So whether you're an intern, you're in a full-time job, junior, senior, mid-level in your career, this attitude is like completely not okay. So that's the first one. The second one, I also noticed that this intern had a bit of a communication issue

or you can call it a communication issue, or rather the lack of ability to follow instructions. So what that means is, obviously, when you're working remotely, communication is something that is so important. And particularly after certain work is being done, there are certain things that I have instilled in terms of like, okay, we are going to expect updates around this timing and this timing so that we are both aligned and so forth.

But this particular intern literally just goes MIA every single time after we had our weekly catch-up. And that is also not okay as well because there are probably a lot of things that are um to-dos or like further updates that's required post the the meeting together so this intern completely went MIA totally zero updates even when requested right even if their certain follow-up sent completely disappeared so literally no updates and that made the every weekly meeting or rather twice a week meeting extremely unproductive because there was just no communication in between even though I specifically

requested, hey, you need to get back to me on this or like, hey, can you check on this and get back to me? So that was actually a really bad thing as well. And there was a third bad thing which is the very poor attention to detail. Now, attention to detail is something that a lot of people don't really care about because everybody is so fixated on big picture thinking, big picture thinking, big picture thinking. Let me tell you that the big picture, the big goal, the big vision will never ever materialize if you don't have the ability to pay attention to the small details because it is the small details

that makes up the big picture. It is the small details that makes up the entire jigsaw puzzle that will make whatever your goal or whatever your piece of work extremely efficient, extremely effective and eventually getting the results

that it is actually designed to do, right? So that is something that the intern completely didn't get. And there's something, maybe I can give an example as well. So one of the things the intern helped me to do was really to look through some of the old videos and just do some really, really short cuts and put in some captions in there, right? So some subtitles and captions. So out of the 40 videos that the intern helped me to put the subtitles on, 30 of them had errors. And 30 of them had errors even after the

second and third round of review. Now, that is not a very good statistic, isn't it? So if you are a manager at McDonald's and your staff serve the customer, you know, eight out of 10 times serve the customer the wrong order or collected the wrong amount of money or like punching the wrong order, I'm sure the person would be fired immediately, right? Eight out of 10, 80% error rate is unacceptable, right? I completely understand if, you know, we make mistakes, right? It's completely fine. But 80% of an error rate to me, right?

That shows that there is zero effort being put in. There is zero effort. There's no effort at all. It's just, I do what I want to do. I'm an intern. I work remotely. You can't find me. And if I don't reply to you, then, well, wait for it.

This entire experience taught me that, yeah, as much as we want to give people a chance, but at the end of the day, as a hiring manager, as a people leader, or maybe a business owner, you need to be very fair to yourself as well, right? So you also need to be sure that the person that you have brought onto the team, they are really contributing. And they are not just there and they feel that they did a good job by like passing the interview and like getting job offer or whatever. And then the moment they join the team, all the bad habits come out.

So if the person shows bad habits, right, and particularly cannot take guidance as well. So meaning that every time you try to give this person some instructions or guidance and actually teach them how to do things, they are not improving. So I put in a lot of time, but i don't see any improvement in the quality of work from this person from your staff then that is a problem and that is a problem that needs to be fixed so that was my experience um and the last point i also didn't share earlier was obviously you know when you're in like a full-time internship position, that is 40 hours a week, right? If you're in the office, definitely it's going to be very clear.

You can see the intern, you can see your staff and so forth. But when you're working remotely, personally for me, I don't think that, you know, 40 hours means 40 hours. I feel like if you can complete the task that is assigned, then, then you know efficiency and effectiveness over everything else but this was a situation where um the person the intern took way more time that is required and also produced pieces of work that had 80 percent errors so this is completely unacceptable. And right at the end, when I asked the intern, okay, this week, it's a 40-hour commitment, right? Internship time. How many hours did you spend on this piece of work

that I've given to you for the entire week? And he told me that, oh, four hours. I'm like, okay, but there's something wrong here, right? You produce a piece of work that is extremely poor quality, but you also didn't commit 90% of the time learning how to do it rather basically um winging it and hoping that the errors will just be accepted or somebody else is going to fix your problem now here's a message to all of you working in the corporate world, working in general.

This is not the kind of attitude you have. This is not the kind of learning mentality you have because it doesn't matter where you are in your career. If you always feel like, yeah, these things, somebody's going to clean up my mess. I'm going to get away with this. I can just disappear. It's fine.

Then you, my friend, are going to get into trouble sooner or later. So just to wrap up the story, my main point is not a good experience for me, honestly. But I am a huge believer that not every single person is the same. And with that, I'm super duper excited to share that I will be joined by a new intern in early next year and super, super duper excited to work with her. And I also made sure that during the interview itself, I let her know about this particular story that I'm sharing with you right now. And she's well aware of the expectations, which I think is really important. And I think another thing that

is a super important message that I also mentioned to her is that honesty over everything. If you don't know anything, please tell me. Don't make promises that you cannot fulfill because that is actually not good for your reputation. So I hope that this episode

serves as a reminder to every single one of you that your reputation matters and your reputation, once it is tarnished, there is no going back. I will never hire that intern again, ever. So once the reputation is tarnished,

there's no going back and always, always focus on improving and learning. Because if that's something that you don't care about, then it's just better not to apply for the internship or not to apply for the role if you're just going to wing it and hoping that other people is going to fix your mess. I think that is extremely irresponsible.

And yeah, if you're going to behave like that, I don't even know what to say. So with that, I hope this story serves as a reminder or maybe a refresher, depending on your current situation. And I wish you all the best in your career. Cheers.