3 Mistakes I Made at my Corporate Job
I think it’s time to write this post. It’s been on my mind for a while, but I wasn’t sure how it was going to come across. Now that I have been at my job for four years I feel that I have had time to redeem some of these mistakes and have built up some credibility with the people I report to. Not only that, but I’ve learned from my mistakes, which means it’s time to share with you the three corporate job mistakes I made my first year of working.
Let me start by saying that the reason it’s important to avoid mistakes like this is because there are some people that will always see you as whoever you were for those first 6 months. No matter how much you grow, learn, or change the ways you do things you will always be that girl or that guy. While I wish that wasn’t the case, it unfortunately is the way things go.
With that note, lets’ begin.
I didn’t get enough sleep.
This was by far my biggest mistake. If there is one thing I can tell you as a new employee to do it is to get enough sleep. When you have enough sleep you can see the world more clearly, have a better understanding of the big picture, and have a higher tolerance for things going on around you. Sleeping more would have eliminated many a debate because in general I would have been more pleasant.
I noticed recently that I tend to talk to the people I sit next to on airplanes when I am well-rested and put on my resting bitch face when I am not super well-rested. This is probably exactly how it came off in the office as well. Now that I force myself to get at least 7 hours of sleep a night I have found that I am much more patient and able to talk through things than I was before when I was getting 5-6 hours of sleep a night (which is not nearly enough).
I spoke too quickly.
When I had an opinion, I would say it. It’s good to have opinions and ideas, but it’s not good to say them without putting any thought behind them. When somebody at a higher level than you says something try to consider what they’re saying, why they’re saying it, and what it is they’re trying to avoid. Even though you may not share the same point of view as them, you may have a similar process of thought, which is a better starting point for a conversation than telling somebody you disagree with them.
I recently have worked with a few people that even though they disagreed with what someone else was saying they were able to find a common point of interest between them and their superior that allowed the conversation to continue seamlessly as opposed to cutting the conversation off from the beginning. My plan is to continue with this method of communication going forward.
I didn’t ask enough questions.
There were a few tasks I was given that while I understand the steps I was supposed to follow (A, B, C) I didn’t fully understand the outcome of the assignment. It is much better to understand the outcome of the assignment before you begin rather than after you have gotten 50% of the way through.
This is something that as I have been at the company longer I have grown to understand what questions I should start asking from the beginning, for example:
Who is the person who will be using this information?
Have we done something like this before?
When do you need this done by?
Do you know what format you want the final product to be in?
What are you trying to get out of this exercise?
By asking all of these questions up front by the time you actually dive into the actions, you will have a better understanding of what data and metrics are most useful and can therefore focus on those instead of everything else. It’s the Pareto rule, right? 20% of the work will give you 80% of the value. Spend as little time as possible focusing on the 80% of the work that only gives you the 20% of the value.
Here’s the other thing. Something that could have been a mistake, but even to this day I don’t believe was. Some people keep their personal life personal. I’m not that person. I understand there’s a time and place for it, but sharing details of my personal life with people is a way to keep myself sane at the office. Talking about how people handle relationships while traveling, the struggles that I’m having with my online business, or how I’m feeling about a particular activity I’m involved in have actually resulted in a lot of positive results. There is nobody else that better understands your day-to-day than the people you spend your entire day with, and for me it was important for those people to understand me better than “just on the surface”. These friendships that I have developed by discussing the real things are some of my favorite moments from my past four years of working and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
How about you, is there anything you learned in your first few years of working in the corporate world? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
