So, the other day, my brother asked me what the three most important lessons from my career were
I found it surprisingly easy to pick three, and as anyone who’s been to a restaurant with me will tell you, making a quick choice isn’t something I’m always capable of doing.
My three are – developing empathy skills, finding good mentors, and being really good at ‘getting stuff done’.
1) Developing Empathy Skills
I remember moving internally once, it was with someone I’d worked for before, so I asked them why they wanted me back in their team and one of the things they said was because of empathy. I hadn’t ever thought of it before as a skill and I have to admit, though I found it interesting it didn’t really hit me then either.
It wasn’t till a few years later that I realised just what a difference it makes. I was working with enterprise leaders, trying to get them around to my way of thinking, unsuccessfully much to my frustration. One of them pulled me into a rather candid conversation one day, they were vulnerable and shared how they felt, not just what they thought.
I realised then that though I’d put a lot of thought into what I wanted them to know and what I wanted them to do, I hadn’t thought at all about how I wanted them to feel. My empathy skills that I’d been valued for previously by others, but clearly not valued myself enough, were non-existent here.
That realisation of the value of them was a game changer for me. Like any skill, empathy needs to be practiced. I also find that times where it’s hardest to use these skills is often where it’s proved the most beneficial to do so.
To really force yourself to step into someone’s shoes, actively listen to what they are saying (even when it may be critical of what you are doing) and truly understand where they are coming from (especially when you don’t agree), is very hard. However, you cannot make an impact on your business, real and sustained, and have influence with people, without it.
2) Mentoring
Mentoring is something I came very late as a formal concept, though I think I’d always done in subconsciously. My dad said to me many a time, not that I listened to him then, how it was important to learn from experience but not all of the experience had to be mine.
Clearly that had sunk in somewhere as I was always seeking out people who did things really well, in a way that I thought I could too, and then tried to learn from them – often through just observation and imitation, but sometimes by asking them for a little time to have a conversation about it. I came to discover just how generous people are with their time.
I genuinely believe I owe my career to the people who have mentored me along the way, often without me realising that’s what they were doing during the early years of my career. I have been so very lucky on this front, I remember going for an interview once that I really wasn’t sure about.
The person doing the interview kind of realised early on that I wasn’t convinced by the role, and instead just turned it into, what I look back to and think was a mentoring conversation. I went away from this interview with crystal clear clarity on not just that the role wasn’t for me, but more importantly, on why I had applied for it anyway, and what it was that I really needed to think about. It was extremely kind of them to do that, and I will forever be grateful.
The reason I pick this example is because for me mentoring comes in many guises, and ones like in this example, a complete one-off conversation, are massively underutilised. I am a big fan of more long term mentoring relationships when you can forge them, however, just because you haven’t found that yet doesn’t mean you can’t have smaller mentoring conversations along the way. The important thing is to make a start.
I also personally think, if you did want a long term mentoring relationship with someone, this is a low-commitment, low-pressure way of starting out for both people.
3) Getting Stuff Done
Getting stuff done, think a few people form my life will recognise that phrase. It’s one I stole from my manager, but I love it.
This was the same person who valued me for my empathy. This is the other skill he mentioned on that day. A skill that he is exceptionally good at himself, and has a mug that says as much so must be true. So, I like to think I learnt form the best. However, I do believe it’s one that served me very well in my career.
Having a reputation for ‘getting stuff done’ opens up all sorts of opportunities – the most important areas of the business, the new areas of the business, the ones with most senior stakeholder interest, the hardest problems to solve, the most valuable problems to solve etc.
It also often buys you the ability to choose between these, which is luxury not to be sniffed at. Also, and perhaps most importantly for me, it buys you flexibility and independence on how you do things. If people truly trust that you will ‘get stuff done’ they often just leave you to it.
I’ve always said that I followed my curiosity in my career, and that’s where I get my job satisfaction from. I really think the reason I was able to do so, follow my curiosity, was because people truly believed that I would ‘get stuff done’ no matter what it was.
There is no secret to ‘getting stuff done’ though, it’s just developing a single minded focus on well, ‘getting stuff done’. So if that means using a mix of google translate, finding a Spanish speaker in the graduate cohort, and using Spanish versions of websites you are familiar with in English, to decipher fifty thousand product lines with descriptions in Spanish (that you don’t speak a word of), to then understand and populate supplier information for said fifty thousand products, then so be it. It’s worth doing if it unlocks a piece of supplier analysis work that saves millions in costs.
So there you have it, my three lessons from my career, that were game changers for me.