So, let’s talk about some things. I want to share an experience because there is a lot that goes on in these offices, corporate settings, and departments that is the same across the board. A lot of people are dealing with the same core issues, even if those issues show up to different degrees.
Let’s tell a story. Gather around for story time.
There was a time in my career when I was working in a job where I was the youngest person and the least tenured person in the department. When I say least tenured, I mean my colleagues, and shout out to them because they were some amazing people, had seven, ten, fifteen, and even over twenty years of experience in some cases.
They had been at this company, in this department, and had seen so many evolutions, changes, transformations, and reorganizations. They could probably perform every job in that department in their sleep.
And here I was with my thirteen months on the job, working in a role that I really enjoyed.
Then a role came open.
I immediately knew that a lot of my long term colleagues would be applying for this internal job. But guess who also applied?
Me.
I sure did.
The first reason I applied was because I had the fucking audacity to do it, regardless of what my competition was bringing to the table.
The second reason I applied was because I looked at the job description. I looked at what the role entailed. I looked at what I would be doing on a day to day basis. I looked at the requirements in terms of experience, credentials, and all of that.
And I met most of the criteria.
When it came to reading the job description and looking at what my responsibilities would be, I was willing to do those things. The things I did not know how to do, I was willing to learn.
The job was attractive to me because there was an opportunity for me to show what I was already capable of doing, but there were also opportunities for me to learn new things and to be challenged in different ways.
It was not going to be a regurgitation of my current job.
When you stay in a job too long, and you know how to do everything, you start coming in almost robotically. You know which buttons to push, when to push them, what to send, who to send it to, and when to send it. If something goes wrong, you know how to work through the exceptions.
Again, you can probably do the job in your sleep.
That is when it is time to move on.
Really, you should be moving on before you even get to that point. When you feel like, “I have learned some things in this job, I have created and accomplished some things, I have improved some things, and I have automated some things,” then it is time to start looking ahead.
For me, I was looking ahead to that.
Again, I had met most of the requirements, and I was willing to do the job.
The protocol at my company was that when you applied for an internal job, you had to notify your manager that you were applying. I did that.
The hiring manager and I knew each other casually. We would say hi and bye. We would say good morning or compliment each other’s shoes, whatever. I had been in a couple of meetings with her, so she knew of me.
Going into this interview, I knew who I was up against as far as the competition. I did not know exactly who had applied for the role, but I had an idea of who had applied. Some of these people were even currently working for the person who was hiring for the job.
You could say there were some odds stacked against me.
But the bigger takeaway is that I still applied for the job.
I did not care what the odds looked like.
Fast forward. I applied to the job, and I was called for an interview.
As I was preparing for the interview, I went deeper than looking at the job description. I looked at my resume. I looked at how I could align my experience with the role.
I prepared three to five examples of the most impactful things I had done throughout my career because I knew there were going to be some “tell me about a time” questions and some “how do you handle this” questions.
I wanted to have examples ready that would help me articulate my fit for the role.
I started with my current job because this new role was somewhat related to what I was already doing. I wanted to make the correlation between my current role and how that experience would progress into this new role.
Then I went back to some other experiences I had from other jobs.
I had my own interview notes prepared, but I also produced a one pager, almost like a career walkthrough, that I gave to the hiring manager during the interview.
We got into the conference room, sat down, and went through the pleasantries. “Hey, how are you?” All of that.
Then I said, “Before we get started, I would like to share this with you. I know we have known each other and been in some meetings together, but I wanted to give you some deeper context into my experience.”
She appreciated that.
She was highly impressed with it.
The interview went well, and I did not get the job.
I did not get the job.
She told me I did not get the job, but here is what I did get.
After she went through all the interviews and made her decision, she booked time with me. We were probably in the same conference room where we did the interview, if I remember correctly.
She told me she had chosen someone else for the role. Then she said she wanted to talk to me for a minute because I had presented very well in the interview.
She told me I did a fantastic job. She said she was really impressed with the one pager I shared because now she knew more about me and what I did. She told me I was going to go very far in my career.
It was an engaging conversation. It was an enlightening conversation, but it was also a confirmatory conversation of what I had already known about myself.
There are so many things you can take away from that conversation alone.
The first takeaway is to always go for what you want, regardless of how it looks and regardless of the odds and barriers that may be looking you dead in your face.
Go for it anyway.
The second takeaway is to make sure you are standing out and not blending in.
I could have very easily gone into that interview, sat down, and gone through the interview process the same way everybody else did. I am 99.9 percent sure I was the only person who produced a one pager to sell my experience.
The third takeaway is that we do not always have to be so laser focused on the outcome that we miss the learnings, the process, and what we gain from the experience itself.
I took that one pager and was able to use it in other areas.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I applied for another job where I had zero technical experience, and I still got hired. We will come back to that conversation in a minute because it is important to what we are talking about.
But I want you to understand those three things when it comes to your career.
You are the driver.
It is not going to serve you to say, “I want this job, but I might be out of my league,” or “I really want this job, but I know the other people going for this job have more experience.”
So what?
I did not get that job.
But the feedback I got from that hiring manager was gas. It was gasoline poured on a fire that was already burning inside me as far as my ambition.
The other part of this, which is why I said we would get back to the other job I applied for, is that the hiring manager went back to my manager and shared the same feedback.
She told my manager, “Nicole applied for my role. She did very well in the interview. I was really impressed with her. She shared this one pager with me that really blew me away.”
I know this because my manager came back and told me.
She popped into my cube one day. These were the days of the accounting cubicles.
She popped into my cube and said she had gotten some excellent feedback about me. She told me what the hiring manager had said.
Then she said, “She also told me about this one pager you gave her that she was really impressed with.”
I said, “Yeah, I created that just to let her know more about my experience and what I did.”
Her reaction was, “Can you share that with me? I would like to take a look at it.”
My answer to her question was no.
She had a crazy look on her face.
I told her, “This is something I created for me to stand out in the interview. This is essentially my IP, my intellectual property.”
That is what she was asking for.
She was asking for something I created because she was intending to take my one pager and copy it so she could make her own one pager and use it in her interviews.
I do not know if she knew that I knew this, but she had been interviewing internally and externally at the company.
So I said no.
She said, “Girl, I just want to take a look.”
I said, “This is something I created for me as my competitive advantage, and this is outside of my job. I do not want to share it with you.”
She said okay out of her mouth, but her behavior after that told me everything I needed to know.
This was somebody who used to want to walk across the street to Starbucks together. This was somebody who wanted to go to lunch. This was somebody who would spend thirty five minutes in my cube in the morning complaining about her commute, her ex husband, and all these other things.
Sometimes we were talking about the stuff we had to get done for work, but we talked often.
Now, after I told her no, those conversations changed.
Now she did not want to go to lunch.
Now she did not want to go to Starbucks.
Now she was emailing me all the time instead of coming over.
And I was just like, “How small of you.”
You are a people manager, and this is how you react when you are told no about me sharing something with you. This is how you react when I refuse to share something with you that I created for myself, that you now want to impersonate and use for your own benefit.
The change in her behavior did not faze me.
There was nothing she could say about my work, about how I showed up to work, or about my communication. There was nothing she could say about my job performance.
But because I chose not to share my creation with her, now she had an attitude with me.
Now it was becoming personal.
It made me laugh, actually.
It made me laugh, and it also made me triple check things instead of double checking things because I was not about to give her any reason or any satisfaction to say something about my work.
Now, I am happy to share the one pager as a resource if you want to use it and if you want to create something for your own career development to stand out in interviews. I am glad to share it with you in that context.
But back then, when my manager asked me to share the version I created for myself so she could copy it and use it for her own interviews, my answer was no.
I think back to that experience because you go through things at work, and I call that season a season where I was growing up professionally.
Years later, I looked back at that scenario and asked myself, “What, if anything, would I have changed about my role in that situation? Would I have done anything differently?”
My immediate response to myself was no.
I would not have done anything differently.
That is just what it is.
If you want to get ahead in your career, then you figure out what works for you.
I was already looking at this with Papa Pope eyes. We have to be twice as good to get half of what they got.
Here I was, a Black woman working in corporate America, in a predominantly white space that was not even designed for me to be there. I was already operating in that “twice as good” category.
And now you want that too?
No, I am not sharing that.
There is nothing I would change about that.
One more tangent, and then we will move on.
One thing that tickled me a couple of years after that, which confirmed for me that I made the right decision, was when I attended an awards gala and fundraiser for an organization I support.
I ended up at a table with some very nice ladies I did not know, so we sparked up conversations. We talked about what we support, what we do, where we work, and things like that.
I told somebody where I worked, and she asked me if I knew the person who had been my old manager.
This was a couple of years later. I had moved on to a different department, I believe, and this person had moved on outside the company.
Basically, the person who tried to give me hell about not sharing my intellectual property with her had left the company. I was told she was fired, but I do not know how true that is because I do not have credible sources on that. It was more like telephone game communication, so I do not know if that is what really happened.
But she was no longer at the company.
She went to another company, and it just so happened that the person I was sitting at the table with was now her coworker.
When she asked me if I knew her, I almost hit the floor.
Before I said anything, I said, “How do you know her?”
She went into details of how she and I had similar conversations and similar experiences with this person.
She was saying things that tracked with how I had experienced this person.
She said, “Oh my God, she is just a basket,” and started sharing more.
The whole time she was talking, I was laughing.
I told her, “I am laughing because this sounds just like her. I do know her. In fact, she was my manager.”
Then we started trading these war stories.
The takeaway from that is do not forget how small circles really are.
Do not forget how small industries really are.
The world is big. The ocean is vast. But people know people who know people who know people.
Keep that in mind as you go about your career.
I recognize that things happen at work that will make you want to cuss everybody out and get on your Tupac “Hit Em Up” energy. I get it.
But I want you to be mindful of the phrase that says the toes you are stepping on today could be attached to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow.
Do not burn bridges.
Even if you want to go off on somebody and pop off, those fifteen seconds are not worth the potential ramifications to your brand and your career.
I am saying all of that because I know there is somebody who has gone through something similar, where you feel like your manager has a personal vendetta against you.
A lot of times, it can feel that way, but it may not be about you.
Sometimes managers have so much going on that they do not know which way is up. They may be getting pressure from their manager and from senior leadership, and things are not always communicated, delivered, or received in the right context.
That does not take any accountability away from the manager.
If you are a people manager, you need to understand how to manage people.
Companies will put people in roles and still fail to prepare them or groom them to manage people. They will take an individual contributor, put that person in a manager role, and say, “Congratulations.”
Then the next day, you are a manager, and you do not know what to do.
You do not know how to start.
You may not even know how to connect with your team.
That is another thing people have been reaching out to me about in coaching sessions. They say, “I need some guidance on how to be a manager. I am glad to have the job, and I am excited about the promotion, but how am I supposed to do this?”
You are in the role, and yes, we can wave the pom poms. But you still need to know how to perform well in the role, and the company may not have thrown you a bone.
Now you are starting to wonder, “Am I being set up to fail here?”
Instead, take that half empty glass and make it half full.
Go back to your manager and say, “I am excited about this role, and I am looking forward to adding value in this capacity, but I need help. I found a leadership development class that I would like to attend.”
Tell your manager what you need to be successful.
They may not always know. It may not be top of mind for them. They may be expecting you to figure it out.
But do not leave that part to chance.
Go to your manager and tell them, “These are my priorities as a new manager. This is what I want to do, but I also need your support in getting X, Y, and Z.”
I feel like I could talk about this all day, but we are at the twenty five minute mark, and I like to stay under thirty minutes for these conversations because I want you to do what you need to do throughout the day.
I appreciate you pausing to hear me and take something away from this, but I recognize that we all have stuff to do.
I want you to get it done.
And I want you to get it done with all the audacity and all the excellence in the world.
We will certainly keep these conversations going.
I will share the link to download the one pager if that is something you want to use.
If you have a similar situation that you are dealing with, or if you need to talk through where you are in your career relative to where you want to be and how we can close the gap to get there, the coaching calendar is available.
Thank you all for listening to #CareerConvos™️.
Visit #CareerConvos™️ on Substack, where you can get a ton of downloadable resources that you can use right now at work, along with answers to a lot of the questions corporate employees have on their minds but may not know where to ask.
#CareerConvos™️ on Substack is designed to be a go to portal and a hub for people who are saying, “I need career advice. I need an answer to this question. I need to start having conversations with my manager, but I do not know how to do it. I am ready to ask for a raise because I have been doing all this extra work and I am not being compensated for it. I need to know how to deal with these microaggressions. I need to make sure my manager knows what I am doing. And better yet, I need to make time for myself and my wellness without being consumed by my job.”
There are a lot of conversations going on at #CareerConvos™️ on Substack and a ton of resources you can download and use.
Of course, you also have access to the coaching calendar, where you can book a coaching session with me or join one of the programs.
Thank you all for listening.
If you have specific questions you want me to answer, you are welcome to email me at Nikki at NikkWinstonCPA.com.
I will be in touch.
Y’all be good.
