3 Life Lessons I Learned At My Corporate Job
Remember, all problems are human problems.
As someone who started in the corporate world over a decade ago, I can tell you it’s not always easy to see if you are adding value, especially if you change geographies and add the cultural conundrum to the mix. Having faced a burnout, I know this. (Here’s the story of that).
I have worked on 3 different continents. I can tell you that you need to work through many layers.
- The systems to follow.
- The environment inadvertently brings up fear in people, which is labeled as office politics. This becomes more complicated to understand or solve if you are in a new culture.
- You get engulfed in seeking external validation. Your insecurities shout from rooftops in new environments.
However, when you see the value you bring, you know you have positively affected people’s lives. People who were going through challenges but still putting on a brave front for the sake of their families or loved ones.
Besides the value I delivered, the personal learning has been incredible. Sharing some of the key life lessons I learned.
Lesson 1: Communicate understanding to earn trust
In a corporate environment, genuine success is about what will make the team successful rather than an individual.
As a procurement professional, I usually get to be a spider on the web.
I need to understand internal business needs and link them to external solutions. In one situation, I took over a project midway and was discussing our recruitment needs with our HR team. It seemed like the team wasn’t happy about working with procurement.
I asked them why.
They mentioned it seemed like we were trying to push the Procurement agenda of reducing the number of suppliers without understanding the business gap of not having adequate suppliers to cover all potential needs.
This happens often.
Each department has its own priorities and is trying to meet those, not being able to find the connection between intersecting objectives across other departments.
With a minor shift in my communication style, I assured them I would help them get what they wanted, and that comes first. But, transparently, let them know that with what we were doing, I would meet my goals.
That’s true, whether it’s for work or life. If you want to win others’ trust, communicate in a way that you understand their goals.
If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself — Henry Ford
Lesson 2: Consider making other people successful
If you are a people manager, you are leading a team. You need to deliver business objectives, but you also signed up to be responsible for the team.
At a crucial point in my early career, when I was yearning to prove myself, I was in the middle of leading an important transition of a large services provider in a manufacturing plant.
I had a direct report in that plant helping with the transition, whereas I was in the corporate office in another location 500 miles away.
My direct report was going through a tense personal situation.
His mom had cancer, and he was the only earning member of a family of 6. He wanted to support his mom’s treatment while being able to continue his job and support his family.
For anyone in his situation, financial stability would be the top fear.
I asked him what support he wanted and prepared accordingly, with or without him, as he took planned and unplanned leaves over 6 months. His situation lasted over a year instead of 6 months, so it became tougher for him to support the transition on-ground with everything going.
The work involved understanding and resolving conflicts amidst difficult stakeholders and unhappy suppliers, which is not a simple task for anyone. I ramped up my support by being available for a daily check-in to discuss issues and the way forward.
The transition went well as he got well motivated to support on-ground.
The life lesson here was to take care of people around you and make them successful in order to be successful.
None of us, including me, ever do great things. But we can all do small things, with great love, and together we can do something wonderful. — Mother Teresa
Lesson 3: Manage Big Egos With A Calm Mind
Often, when you work on large global projects, you need to learn to deal with big global egos. ;)
While working on the largest-ever capital project for a multi-billion dollar FMCG company, I was constantly on the radar of some senior executives.
I sourced packing equipment required to start production worth millions of dollars. For that, I needed to incorporate the input of engineering executive leaders three levels above me from another team.
One of those leaders, close to his retirement age, usually appeared stressed out. I couldn’t figure out how to engage him.
It’s normal to find people who are stretching themselves for a cause but blind to everything else, such as others’ emotions.
Whatever I tried didn’t work. So I started becoming more nervous and dreaded those meetings. The other leader was thoughtful but couldn’t help me engage his counterpart.
I asked for help from my one-level up manager.
He got the first executive’s support because of his past relationship with him, so we got what we needed from him business-wise. However, this was a personal failure for me as I didn’t learn how to manage someone with a large ego then.
It was much later that I realized what I could have done differently, whether at work or outside. I couldn’t break my thought pattern and stay calm. When you learn to stay calm, you can diffuse such situations by asking the right questions.
Rule number one is, don’t sweat the small stuff. Rule number two is it’s all small stuff. — Robert Elliot
Takeaways
These are the 3 hard-hitting life lessons I learned from my corporate experience.
- Communicate understanding of others’ goals to win their trust.
- Consider making other people successful in being successful.
- Manage big egos by staying calm.
What About You?
What have been some of the precious lessons you learned in your corporate life because of the barriers you faced? How did that change you?
I went about facing these situations with a hit-and-trial method at first, but eventually, building up my knowledge and remembering to be a human.
It’s most important to remain human and keep shining bright.
As you go about your journeys, I hope you remember these words from the movie Coach Carter, which have deeply inspired me over the years.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were all meant to shine as children do.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And, as we let our own light shine, we consciously give other people’s permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.