What I wish someone had told a (slightly) less grey haired me......

I really look up to my Dad in many ways, he has been my career hero all my life, and more importantly, the person who is most likely to indicate how my hair will look as I continue to age.  

Luckily for me, looking at my Dad, I think I’ll always have hair, but the grey/white is unavoidable. Being the impatient person I am, I decided to take control of this situation and dyed my entire hair grey this weekend….actually I dyed it orange, then white, then grey…but that’s a different story.

When I want an honest response, I ask my 8 year old…her reaction was “you’ve always been grey”. I’ve always had some grey hair, so people have always thought I was older than I actually am. During my grad scheme a much older and very senior manager once told me that people from “our generation” thought differently about work than others……as a grad I was too scared to actually tell him that I had just graduated and he had been at the company for over 40 years!

During a recent grad interview I was asked what advice I wished I’d had before doing my grad scheme/starting out my career. I loved my grad scheme, I worked with great people , some of whom I mentioned in my IWD post last week, at an incredible company and I learned a lot of what still makes up my core HR values today, but there are some things I wished people had told me when I was ( slightly) less grey!  

1: The word ME is right in the middle of developMEnt. – I had great managers, but I probably initially relied on them too much to tell me what was next vs grabbing it. Part of standing out on a scheme/early career job is finding ways to have more impact and not waiting to be told what to do. This doesn’t mean ignoring your R&R, but in most cases you can get that done pretty quickly, so focus on efficiency in that and then finding the real opportunities for development without having to be asked to do it.

2:  Written down doesn’t always equal better – Lots of grad schemes focus on certain touch points and milestones which is cool  “after 6 months you will get this title etc” but if that’s all you focus on, and your scheme is about ticking boxes, then you could miss the real value and learning of that early career. I wish someone had told me to think more actively about what I wanted to learn and then find ways to manage up to get that.  Again, my managers helped a lot with this, but I could have gone faster if I’d owned it.

3:  Stop being so polite – ok that’s a slightly provocative way to say it…but when you join a business it’s not all about what they can give you. You will bring a different experience than anyone else, and you don’t need to have worked there for X years to have a good opinion. On refelction, I accepted too much as gospel and rules vs challenging whether it was the right thing to do. Case in point, years after I left an ex-colleague once told me that something I was now doing was illegal and they genuinely believed it…it wasn’t illegal, it was just how their business operated. This one is about being constructive not destructive – don’t say “you shouldn’t do this” ask “why do we do this?” or “have we ever considered this approach?” …and start early. You’ll get more by working out why businesses do things and deciding if you agree or not, vs blindly following because you are new, and you’ll be surprised how much of what you see is new or different ( in a good way!)

So in summary…(productively) seek forgiveness, not permission! Most Managers will make great efforts to give you an incredible early career/grad role, but you can play a big role in that too and the more you give the more you will get.