One Small Step, One Giant Leap: Exiting Your Comfort Zone
After graduating, I started my career as a researcher in a London based business consultancy, a role in which I continued for about 6 years. Since then, I have made three major career transitions:
- I switched continents, immersing myself in an entirely new culture, while at the same time transitioned to the corporate world, working in two American multinational companies in the television media business in Hong Kong and then Singapore. This lasted about 16 years.
- I then switched from the world of offline business to online e-commerce and at the same time from the television business to the travel business. This lasted about 9 years.
- Most recently I left the corporate world in order to become a writer, thereby switching from using my brain to sell stuff created by other people to selling stuff that I have created myself.
The idea of transition, therefore, goes beyond moving from one industry sector to another. In addition to this already big leap of faith is the idea of career transition encompassing: firstly, the adjustment to a different cultural context required when one makes a major geographic shift in a work location; secondly, the mental leap from working in a business that was traditionally offline, to a business that is native to online; and lastly making the journey from what a disgruntled salesperson once described to me as being a “foot soldier,” to being a leader, and then to taking control of your own career destiny. The other type of transition involves none of these and entails taking on a different kind of role but can be within the same company, at the same level and in the same country. Each of these types of transition involves reinventing yourself as well as stepping out of a comfort zone, intentionally placing yourself in an unfamiliar, perhaps even alien, situation.
As a hiring manager in my various corporate roles, where possible I would try to hire from outside the industry sector in which I was working. It may perhaps sound counterintuitive, and indeed, even a casual perusal of the job advertisements will more often than not reveal companies seeking experience in the same sector in which they operate. For some roles, such as those where very specific technical qualifications are needed this is understandable. However, in many other roles knowledge on how a business works can be learned reasonably quickly by an intelligent person. My reason for looking outside the industry was part of my competitive strategy: if all I am going to do is hire people from my competitors, which is what you’re doing if you want direct industry experience, then you are only going to be as good as they are, at best. However, if you bring people in from outside your industry you acquire new experience, new ways of doing things and new ideas: this is how you get ahead of your competitors.
This approach has served me very well in my career to date. However, it means weighting the emphasis in the hiring process towards candidates’ personal qualities and transferable skills compared to certificates, qualifications, and direct industry experience and knowledge.
The personal qualities that I would look for in a person when hiring are those that I believe to be important in being able to adjust to new situations and fresh challenges. An exhaustive list is impossible to compile but I would say the basics are as follows:
Curiosity. This covers a wide range of attributes including a hankering for life-long learning, reading, open mindedness and relentless questioning. On this latter point on the first day of my very first job after graduating I asked my new boss what his expectations were of me in the first few months and his reply was that I should ask him three questions about the job, the company, and the business every day. It is something I have tried to since replicate with colleagues, or indeed to ask those questions to myself in every new role I have taken on. Of course, the outcome is the accumulation of the knowledge required to perform successfully in a role. However, it goes further than this. It also shows humility and takes ego out of the equation. No one likes the smart ass who thinks he knows everything, doesn’t listen or wants to be thought of as the “smartest kid in the class.” Conversely, I have never once in my career encountered a situation where a colleague has not tried to help by explaining something when asked to do so. It sends a very powerful message when you show respect for someone’s knowledge and experience and is one of those things that in corporate-speak they call an “easy win” that they encourage you to look for when in a new role or in the early stages of your career.
Patience. In nearly all cases, any new boss will give his new hire a grace period while he gets up to speed. It is, of course, important to determine early on, preferably before accepting a new role, if the boss has already decided what he wants and your role is to simply implement what he has already decided. In my experience, fortunately, I was hired with the expectation to grow the business, but how I did it was up to me. A boss’s patience is important, is to be expected and is usually forthcoming. Lack of patience is a sure sign of micromanagement, a big red flag in my opinion and something to be avoided. Of at least equal importance, however, is having patience with yourself and with others. Learning something new can be tough; achieving success can be a long and difficult journey; working with people who, outside of work, you would never have within your circle of friends is stressful. Remaining patient and focused is key. As is self-belief. My first role as a manager in Hong Kong was in business development and my boss was a Vice President who had recently arrived in Hong Kong from the company’s US headquarters. I recall after my first day I went into his office and said, a little despondently perhaps, that I wasn’t sure I could do the job because there was so much that was new to me. He replied that in every role he had ever taken on he had experience self-doubt, asking himself if he could really do what he had been hired to do, and in every case, he had overcome his doubts and became successful. He said it was his job to ensure I did the same. Patience and self-belief are inseparable qualities in facing new situations and challenges.
Authenticity. Authenticity is an often misused and misunderstood concept. It often gets mixed up with ideas of honesty and transparency. It is also often seen as something that is bestowed upon others. I see it as something quite different. To me it is about being reliable, consistent and level-headed. It requires honest self-appraisal, reflection and a good deal of emotional intelligence. Fundamentally, it is about understanding yourself and being true to yourself. I believe that the “Big Quit” or “The Great Resignation” phenomenon we are witnessing in the corporate world, especially in the United States, is partly because of disillusionment with companies perceived as being dishonest and overbearing. People talk about hypocrisy when they perceive a lack of authenticity, when what they really mean is a lack of transparency and out-of-control control. But that is because they think of authenticity as something they should receive rather than something that they themselves should seek to nurture. Authenticity is something to seek for yourself, not to be received, nor bestowed by others.
So much for qualities—the list is potentially never ending but I do think these three are ones that anybody at any stage in their career should be thinking about continually and as they move from one situation to another. They are relevant to any kind of endeavour, occupational or otherwise, and will stand anyone in good stead when it comes to trying out something completely new and different. But what about skills? In my most recent reinvention as a writer, I have found that there were several key skill sets developed over the years working in large corporations, and as a researcher before that, which were transferable. Interestingly, however, that “act” of transferring them was not something I was really conscious of—you just get on with it and apply yourself to the task at hand. It was only when asked what skills I thought were most transferable that I started to think about what the top few actually were:
Structure, project management and time management. In a whimsical, romanticised world, many from outside literary circles think that gifted creative or inspirational writers simply become motivated to the extent that words start to flow from their fingers and onto the page until the story/theory/poetry is complete. In reality, at least in my experience, writing a book is a much more structured process, one that requires careful planning and project management. There are multiple components to manage: the development and testing of the basic idea or concept; the creation of the story arc and the structure underlying it; the chapter structure; the research plan; the writing plan; numerous feedback loops; the review process; the editing process. These are just a few considerations, but making a plan, managing the plan and working towards milestones and goals is vital to getting the project completed. This kind of approach to any sort of corporate initiative is a given for anyone in a management or leadership position, one that necessarily synchs up to the top-level corporate processes of finance, human resource management and strategy cycles. It is probably the most obviously transferable skill when applying oneself to something completely different and that requires a task to be completed, in my case, now, a published book.
Research, critical thinking and information management. One thing the sales teams I have managed probably got tired of hearing me say was to not so easily believe everything they are told by clients or prospects, or any other market participants for that matter. Question and substantiate everything, as far as this is possible. The same goes for the research involved in writing a book such as Palace of Ghosts. There is an innate tendency to accept information just because it is in print. Just like when you are qualifying a sales lead, when researching you have to challenge yourself: analyze the context and seek alternative viewpoints to really understand a situation or event properly. Evaluating information objectively, considering different perspectives, and making informed judgements are key. And to do this managing the research process and the information that comes out of it—carefully documenting sources, places and dates of where and when the research took place, making meaningful notes, keeping track of leads and ideas, and so on—is essential.
Communication. Communicating within a corporate environment is hard. Making oneself clearly understood by any of the many internal audiences with careful use of language, including composition and grammar, is only part of the challenge. In addition to the various values and guiding principles that companies publish in order to push employees to communicate in their way, you also have to consider the various overt and hidden agendas of the many individuals who may see or hear your words, plus the inevitable politics and cultural considerations governing the way people interact with each other. And if that was not enough, high turnover of staff, especially these days, means that the communication goalposts are constantly moving about as different people come and go. In a corporation, writing and speaking internally is a dangerous minefield. Some people, in my experience, become so intimidated that they just opt to talk and write as little as possible. Conversely, others never get tired of the sound of their own voice, perfecting the blunt art of interruption in an attempt to tip the balance of two-way communication into a one-way flow (by the way, this approach tends to go hand in hand with tendencies to micromanage). I would venture to say that anyone with years of running the internal communications gauntlet of corporate life, and who has survived in such an environment for a couple of decades or so, has some pretty good transferable experience in the areas of communication for wherever destiny may take them in their future career moves, even if in a completely different walk of life. Writing a book to a relatively distant audience is, of course, a unique type of communication, but the point is that having the awareness of the broad dynamics of how communication works—and from an often intense, ever-changing corporate environment—will stand you in good stead if you decide to try communicating for a living by writing.
Adaptability. The corporate world is dynamic and constantly changing. Being able to adapt to new situations, technologies, and ways of working is essential to progress and success. It requires all the qualities of curiosity, patience and authenticity. Underlying all these is the ability to embrace change, but importantly it is not just yourself you have to consider. Anybody who has been in a senior leadership position in a corporation knows that they have a support network that extends well beyond fellow employees. This includes, among others, family and friends, especially your spouse or partner. Adaptability is critical to a major career change, but it’s not just about you: make sure your closest support network is also ready and able to adapt.
I have set out my thoughts on the various qualities an individual can work on that may help in working through a career transition, as well as certain skills that are very much transferable regardless of from which business sector or career path they may have been picked up in the past. Both are useful for making a success out of stepping out of your comfort zone. However, despite all the qualities and skills to ease any major transition, I do believe there is a certain art to stepping out of your comfort zone. This starts with a clear understanding of how you got into it in the first place. For most people the major changes in life’s long song transpire without much prior deliberation: people just get on with it when a change comes along that is beyond their control. But it is when a person elects to make the change themselves that anxiety appears on the scene. My approach to stepping out of my comfort zone is to treat it as if it were going to happen anyway. Yes, prepare; yes, think it through; but if you are thinking of stepping out of your comfort zone then there are already currents of thought within yourself that are capturing your attention. Curiosity, patience and authenticity, among other things, are about listening to yourself. As with all changes, instigated or resulting from going with the flow, there is always the option to make another change later on if things don’t work out. Getting on with it, trying out something new, is the key.
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