Transcription
In the first 6 months of being at a company, the massive advantage you have over everyone else is the fact that you can literally say, "Oh, sorry. I'm just I'm new to the company. Can you explain this thing to me? I don't understand it. I'm new."
Attitude should be the constant. You would be surprised how many people have bad attitude at work. Value at work is a function of three or four things. As someone who has worked in three different industries, investment banking, management consulting, and in Big Tech at Google, uh and now running my own company, I feel uniquely qualified to talk about this topic, which is how to bring value to your job, even if you're considered young and inexperienced.
And so, I want to first start by saying that everyone who starts a new job, whether you're 22 or whether you're 52, is going to experience a period of newness, where during that time you're just new to the job. You're picking up on a new company's culture, you're picking up on their rules and expectations, you're picking up on how they do things, and you're also meeting all of your coworkers and the people at the company. And so, you don't have a lot of pre-existing relationships. Now, this period of newness, though, can last anywhere from, I would say, a few months up to even a year. And that is going to depend on a variety of factors, like whether you have experience working in that industry already, or whether you are going from a large to a big company, or completely switching industries.
Those who are new to the channel, my name is Matt, and I've spent the last 5 years working in industries across investment banking, consulting, and in Big Tech. And today, I run my own business. And I make these videos because I enjoy it, but also because I would have wished that somebody would have made these for me when I was younger. But, let's get back to the video.
So, value. We first have to define value, because when we ask ourselves the question of how do you bring value to work when you're young and inexperienced, I want to be very clear. Value at work is a function of three or four things. The first is subject matter expertise. The second is execution rigor. The third is your attitude, and the fourth is the relationships that you have with other people at your company. Let me break down each.
So, with the first, which is subject matter expertise, this is pretty self-explanatory. If you are someone who has worked in the health care industry for 20 years, then you are going to very likely have a deep knowledge of the space. You're going to understand who the key players are. You're going to understand what the main problems that the industry faces are. You're going to know a lot, and also have a lot of existing relationships with people in the industry, because of the sheer amount of time that you spent in that space.
Second is is execution rigor. So, execution rigor I define broadly as whether you are good at executing on a process in a very methodical and rigorous way, whether you make mistakes that your boss then has to go back and correct, or that you catch later, and how good you are at getting to an end objective, or at finishing a task in the way that your boss, your manager, asked you to.
Third is your attitude. Your attitude is what kind of energy you bring to the table, and what your mindset is when it comes to completing tasks, and more importantly, overcoming challenges or problems that you're inevitably going to run into in any work situation.
And the fourth one, relationships, this I think of as whether you understand how the company works, what the org structure looks like, and if you have the relationships and the goodwill built up with other folks at the company to do good work with them. So, for example, if you work as a product manager at a tech company, do you have good relationships with the engineers who are building your product? Do you have good relationships with marketing who and sales who are going to go out and actually put your product in the hands of users? Do you have good relationships with other product managers, maybe more senior than you? If you have great relationships with all of those parties, then you're more likely than not going to be able to get a lot more done, and therefore bring a lot more value to the table than someone who didn't have those relationships.
Taking a step back, though, so we've got these four key things that contribute to value at work. But, when we think about the context of being new and inexperienced, say you're in your early 20s, and you are completely new to this industry, you just got this job at this dream company of yours, you're very likely not going to bring all four of these to the table. Most likely, you're only going to bring two of these. Now, which two? I'll let you guess. Those two are going to be execution rigor and attitude, because you're very likely not going to bring subject matter expertise. You just haven't spent decades in the industry, and you're not going to have pre-existing relationships with people at the company, because quite frankly, you haven't worked there before. And so, it's very unlikely, like maybe there's one small edge case where you happen to have outside of work relationships with a lot of people on the team that you're working with, which could contribute to you coming in with some pre-existing relationships on day one. But, 99% of people are not going to have those relationships built, and that's totally okay. Where we're going to focus, though, is the attitude and the execution rigor.
But, I want to walk you through three examples now of these four qualities in action over the course of my career, across the three roles that I had before I started my own business. Starting with my first year as an investment banking analyst on Wall Street. At the time, I was fresh out of college, just graduated just graduated from Georgetown, thought that I knew everything about finance. But, very quickly realized that I did not have nearly as much subject matter expertise about what it took to buy and sell a business than I thought I did. And so, it was a very humbling experience, and I realized very quickly that there was a lot I had to learn. So, subject matter expertise, one out of 10. Execution, I also thought I was pretty good at this, but very quickly got humbled, because I realized that the level of rigor that is expected in banking is extremely high. There's a reason why a lot of people at top universities and Ivy Leagues go into investment banking as their first job out of college, because it serves as an excellent training ground, because the standards are so high. Even small things, like whether or not your footnotes have a period at the end of them, or whether everything is standardized, the fonts are properly uh sized, and you're using the right numbers is heavily emphasized. So, very quickly on I realized that my execution rigor was actually not very good. And I also didn't understand what it took to successfully run a process when I was coordinating a deal which involved many different parties. My attitude, though, on the other hand, was a nine out of 10, because I was willing to do whatever it took to learn, and I had a very coachable mentality. I think this is one of the most important things and the easiest thing that you as a young person can do to bring value on day one. Now, with relationships, I'm going to give this a seven out of 10, because even though I was new, I made a conscious effort when I joined to meet a lot of the other bankers of the firm, and also, of course, my own analyst class. There was about 20 or 30 of us, and we all got really close because we were working late into the office every night.
Fast forward a few years, and I when I moved over to the Boston Consulting Group as a consultant, now my subject matter expertise, I would say, was still pretty low. I would say it's probably like a two or three out of 10 at this point, because generally I understand business better now, having spent a a year or two in banking, but I'm still nowhere near what I would consider a subject matter expert in any of the industries that we were consulting in. Execution, though, has improved significantly, because now I've gone from a two out of 10 to an eight out of 10, because banking trained me to really understand how to run a process, and also what good looks like in Excel when you're modeling or building PowerPoint slides. Attitude, still nine out of 10, because I was ready to get things done, and I really wanted to learn, and I was super hungry. And relationships, I would say, is, you know, around a six out of 10, because I was kind of starting over again at a new company where I didn't have as good of of a relationship with the other consultants, but I did make an effort to build those relationships as soon as I could.
Now, one distinction, guys, before I move on, is that there's a big difference between a junior consultant and a senior consultant. And a common misconception about consultants is that some 23-year-old consultant is going and giving advice to uh the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. And that's simply not the case. The person that's actually whispering in the CEO's ear is the partner. And so, the partner often times these people have years of experience either having worked in the industry itself for over a decade, so say they were in the technology industry for a while, working at a tech company, before they became a partner, or they've been a career consultant who has just done 50 projects in the tech space. And so, they've seen a lot, and they are as close as it gets to being an industry insider. And so, from that perspective, the partner is a 10 out of 10 from subject matter expertise. So, what the associate lacks in subject matter expertise is actually delivered by the partner. Now, the associate's job, though, the junior consultant's job, is to bring the execution rigor and the good attitude. Now, relationships here, I would say, if we're talking internal relationships, the partner also probably has better relationships, just because they've been working at the firm for that much longer.
But, now let's fast forward to when I moved from the Boston Consulting Group over to Google. Here, I was around 25 at the time, and what I will say is that at Google, I quickly realized that I understood at a high level the industry that we operated in, which was tech. But there were still a lot of things that I didn't understand, specifically around the nuances of ads and the different B2B products that Google sells to other businesses. So, I'm going to rate this a 6 out of 10. Now, my execution was solid, 8 out of 10. Attitude was still 9 out of 10. But the thing that I struggled with the most at Google was the relationships in the very beginning. Because what you will find, especially if you work at a large company in a not biz ops or strategy role is it is very difficult to get anything done if you do not have great relationships with the right people at the company. It is just impossible to get the information that you oftentimes need without being able to go to someone in finance or without being able to go to someone in product and say, "Hey, can you give me this number that I need? Or can you explain to me how you guys are currently running this process in sales?" If you don't have those relationships, it's very hard to be effective even if you're a beast at execution and you have a great attitude and even if you have subject matter expertise.
Now that we've gone over these examples, I know some of you are thinking, "Matt, all right, you've you've shown me that there's these four things that I need to care about, but how the heck do I even improve on any of these?" Well, I want to explain to you how.
So, with subject matter expertise, let's be real here. It is going to take time. This is the one thing that is going to take time. You can move a little bit faster by studying up on the industry that you're in and asking lots of questions. But it's important to give yourself grace here. On day one, you're not going to be a subject matter expert and that's okay. Nobody expects you to be. However, when it comes to the other three, execution, attitude, and relationships, there are a number of things that you can do. And I'm going to go through them now.
The first thing, which is with attitude, is that you should understand as a young person who's new and inexperienced attitude should be the constant. Having a good attitude and a good energy should be like table stakes for you. And you would be surprised how many people have bad attitude at work. And so just by bringing a can-do attitude and a coachable energy you are already going to stand out. Some of the best advice that I ever got from a manager in consulting was, "You should be the one that brings the energy to the room." Now, what does that mean? It means that you're the one who always wants to move things forward and you are being proactive, pushing things forward, always following up with people asking questions about, "Okay, what do we need to do to actually get this done?" Rather than just waiting passively and expecting other people to tell you what to do. Keep in mind that even if you're the most junior person in the room, you can still suggest things. You don't have to wait for your senior partner or associate or director to tell you what to do.
And this is brings me to the second really important point, which is this concept of push versus pull. So, a lot of high-level executives are very used to pulling things from their team. They're asking this person for this number. They're saying, "Hey, can you do this for me? Can you send this email for me? Can Can we Can you draft up this deck for me?" So, they're pulling things from their team. And over time, that's actually pretty exhausting to do. Now, on the other hand when you push, what that means is you as the employee, you're actually being proactive. You're going to your manager and you're saying, "Hey, I remember that we have to do this next week. By the way, I proactively put this together. Can you please look at it for me in the next couple days?" Even something as small as that, where you're pushing instead of your manager having to pull, makes a massive difference and they're going to notice.
This ties to the next thing, which is ownership. Always try to have as much ownership as possible. Really have an owner's mentality. And this is something that took me a while to develop and took me a while to learn what that actually meant. But fundamentally, at the most basic level having ownership simply means that you just are that person that gives a about what you're working on and actually wants to get stuff done. It's so simple. It's so incredibly simple. I can't believe I'm making this 20-minute video talking about ownership. But if there's anything that you can do to really stand out when you're young and inexperienced is to still take ownership of your work stream even if you make mistakes.
That leads me to the last point though, which is how do you improve your knowledge? How do you improve your execution if you already have a good attitude, which is ask lots of questions. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Don't be afraid to look dumb. Play the I'm the new guy card for as long as you possibly can. Because in the first 6 months of being at a company the massive advantage you have over everyone else is the fact that you can literally say, "Oh, sorry, I'm just I'm new to the company. Like, can I get 15 minutes of your time? Like, do you want to grab coffee? Can you explain this thing to me? I don't understand it. I'm new." After 6 months, it's harder and harder to do that because then the expectations start to build up. And so something I tell everyone is, "When you first start at a new role at a new company, play the new guy card, lean into it, milk it for what it's worth."
So, those are the things that I would say if you focus on those and you really just again bring the energy have a good attitude be proactive and take ownership of your work. Demonstrate a genuine curiosity in what it is that you're working on. People will notice.
Now, I want to close with a story about a journalist who went and interviewed a number of military veterans and talked to them about what the experience was like after coming home. And many of the people that this journalist interviewed said something very surprising. They told him they wanted to go back to the battlefield. Now, why the heck would they say that? That sounds crazy. Why would you want to go back to the place that you should be lucky to have escaped alive. Now, the reality is people want to feel useful and we would rather like to feel like we've done a good job and that we've put our best effort forward than to feel like we're not being useful at all. And so why do I bring this up? Why do I say this? You know, I can't promise you that when you're starting out and you're new and you're inexperienced at your job, that it's going to be easy. My experience in my early career, quite honestly, was very difficult and I was challenged many times. I was pushed to the limit and at many points I also wanted to just give up. But what I will tell you is that if you stick to it and if you focus on that and you never lose that energy and that attitude people will notice. They might not notice today, but they will notice in the future. And if anything, you will slowly become the kind of person that people can't help but notice.