I walked down the path, wondering what I had done wrongly. For those 3 months, I had worked so hard to give ideas. Sure, the starting pay in social services was low, but I was doing my best with what I had.
I had helped the charity to grow the participation numbers by 3x over COVID’s lockdown. I had gotten the charity an article mentioning their service on Singapore’s largest bank by assets – DBS Bank.
I had even upgraded their digital services and made things more efficient so that we were using Microsoft Teams to track our rosters.
But now, I found myself issued with a Performance Improvement Plan. What had gone wrong?
Maybe that’s you. Despite your best efforts, you find yourself not appreciated. You don’t get the promotion or pay rise you’re looking for.
Instead, you find your efforts stymied. Your colleagues don’t seem to cooperate easily, and your boss doesn’t like you that much.
What can you do?
Whilst much of this advice is going to be context-specific, I hope some of it will be helpful to what you’re doing in your career.
This is the advice I wish someone told me when I just graduated.
Know your strengths
If you’ve read what I’ve written, you would realise that I keep harping on the fact that you need to know your strengths.
Not without good reason.
In 2015, I was lost and wondered where I would go for university. I thought I was passionate about being a doctor. I read all the medical textbooks.
But I failed to realise that I had never been great at science. I had nightmares about my chemistry exam, and had to work harder than most to memorize biology concepts.
I then thought I would be better at law. After all, I seemed to enjoy a sense of justice.
But when I read those law books, I realised it wasn’t about justice. It was about one’s ability to trawl through large amounts of information to find the right case.
I eventually stumbled onto social work, simply because I had enjoyed serving those with intellectual disabilities at MINDS, and thought that this would be a natural progression.
I was lucky. I didn’t realise it at that time, but social work was the study of sociology, and alot of it involved reading and arguing.
I was better at it than I first thought.
Know what your basic job scope is
During my Performance Improvement Plan, I told my boss that I didn’t understand why I was being treated this way despite introducing so many new initiatives.
He gently told me,
maybe sometimes its better to know your job description first
before going outside of it.
At that time, I was angry. What did he mean?
Wasn’t I already doing more than what he asked? Why wasn’t he happy?
But looking back, that was great advice to understand what to focus on.
When we can keep doing more and more new things, the tendency can sometimes to chase the shiny new object, and risk losing focus of our core job.
Which is whatever your boss hired you to do.
Simply ask your boss:
- What are your priorities for me?
- What are the actions that will best express those priorities?
This will help you to grow in how you’re able to align what you want, with what your boss wants.
When I eventually ran my own company, I’ve come to see that those I value are those who know what their job is. Before they go above and beyond, they do what’s present in front of them.
When they don’t think what they are doing will best serve the company’s interests, they tell the boss. And then they work with the boss on that.
Find the right boss
I’ve worked in Peru, Singapore, U.K., China, over the past 9 years. But in all those instances, I’ve only found one boss that I respect and followed wholeheartedly.
Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to be arrogant and proud, and to say that I’m all so great to deserve a phenomenal boss.
But hear this story.
During the 1980s and 1990s, five coaches dominated the NFL: Bill Walsh, Joe Gibbs, Bill Parcells, Jimmy Johnson, and Marv Levy. But the one coach of these five who spawned the largest “tree” of talent was Bill Walsh.
Between 1979 and 2015, Walsh or coaches in his lineage appeared in thirty- two Super Bowls, winning seventeen of them. Johnson and his protégés appeared in only six Super Bowls; Levy, Gibbs, and Parcells and their protégés did better, appearing in twenty-three, twenty-one, and twenty-four Super Bowls, respectively.
Of the ten head-coaching changes in the NFL in 2005, six were filled with members of Walsh’s tree.
Sydney Finkelstein, “Superbosses”
One boss ended up spawning a large tree of talent.
Finkelstein goes on to argue,
If you looked at the top fifty people in these industries, you would find that perhaps fifteen or twenty had once worked for or had been mentored by one or a few talent spawners—or “superbosses,” as I came to call them.
If you find a great boss to work under, you will find yourself growing very fast.
Great bosses push you to your limits, helping you to work on projects that help you see the range of what you’re capable of.
How do you know you’ve the right boss?
One way is to ask yourself whether you’re getting better, exponentially. Look at yourself 6 months ago. If the quality of your work is getting better with good feedback from your bosses, then make sure you’re actively sticking tight to that boss.
It’s not the big organisation, but the one that fits you best
But where do you find these great bosses? Sometimes, it’s not necessarily within the big organisations.
There may be some that lie just round the corner, in the small business. Those bosses you find in small businesses may not be the most impressive, but don’t underestimate them.
There’s beauty there.
Because they are so hands-on in the business, you can learn direct from them. You can see how they make decisions, how they make it wrongly, and most importantly, you can make decisions with them.
This allows you to learn much quicker than larger organisations where you’re far devolved from the decision-making process, and fail to really see the effect of your work.
But I don’t think this works for everyone. It only works for those who’re very intent on becoming the best in their industry.
If you just want a 9 to 5, that’s okay. But internally, you have to reconcile yourself to the fact that a job is just a job, and it pays the bills, and it won’t do anything much more than that.
You’re not always going to save the world in every job
In my first job as a social worker, the biggest thing that helped me get through those two torturous years was what a well-meaning colleague told me.
John, the problem is not that you take this as more than a job.
It’s that others take this as just a job.
That one statement changed how I saw jobs. Not every job had to be you going in, guns blazing, and wanting to do the absolute best to save the world. You’re not going to always be doing that.
But at the end of the day, you need to internally accept that as reality, and move on from it.
Recognizing that a job is a job, and being professional isn’t being dispassionate.
It’s about being mature.
It’s okay to fail
I’ve come been rejected at 413 job applications, 41 interviews, and been asked to leave at 2 of my 3 jobs. That’s ‘failure’ in conventional terms.
But as you grow up, you realise that this is part of many people’s experiences. Not everyone will succeed at every job they go to, and that’s just part of the normal career experience.
It’s how you recover, rather than how you start that matters.