Remote Career Development: Steve McIntosh Of CareerPoint On How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely

An Interview With David Liu

Monitoring workplace productivity. While it may be difficult for many home workers to clock out, employers may worry that it might be equally difficult for others to clock in, or that clocking in doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not spending your day watching TV.

Career development is the ongoing process of choosing, improving, developing, and advancing your career. This involves learning, making decisions, collaboration with others, and knowing yourself well enough to be able to continually assess your strengths and weaknesses. This can be challenging enough when you work in an office, but what if you work remotely? How does remote work affect your career development? How do you nurture and advance your career when you are working from home and away from other colleagues? How can you help your employees do this? To address these questions, we started an interview series called “How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely.” As a part of this interview series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Steve McIntosh.

Steve McIntosh is the founder and CEO of CareerPoint.com, an online coaching platform whose two-part mission is to help a million young people advance in their careers and level the playing field for underrepresented groups. He is a recovering accountant, HR professional, and author of “The Employee Value Curve: the unifying theory of HR and career advancement helping companies and their people succeed together.”

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. What is your “backstory”?

I grew up on the west coast of Scotland but always knew I wanted to live and work overseas. After 26 years in the UK, I had seen enough rain to last a lifetime, and so, three years into my career as an accountant with KPMG, I accepted an internal transfer to the Cayman Islands office.

The next chapter of my career started in 2004 when I founded a specialist financial services recruitment firm named CML. Over my 17 year tenure as CEO, we placed thousands of professionals and executives with many of the world’s best-known professional and financial services firms. I loved recruitment, but the truth is that I had built such a good team that I had worked myself out of a job and felt increasingly redundant. I wanted to give someone else the chance to lead the firm.

In 2019 I began studying for an executive MBA at the University of Oxford. It changed my life. It’s impossible to spend time in Oxford without being inspired, not just by the famous “dreaming spires” but by the incredible, accomplished people from all around the world that share the almost-two-year journey with you.

CareerPoint.com is the culmination of a project that began as a CSR initiative almost ten years ago when I realized that what separates successful people from everyone else is not ability or effort but their understanding of how to play “the game of work.”

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

It’s actually the origin story for CareerPoint. Ten years ago, soon after announcing our plan to open a new office in Bermuda and introducing the manager we’d hired to head it up, a young recruitment consultant named Zach (not his real name) walked into my office and resigned. Zach, who had been with us for three years, felt he’d been passed over for the role.

I was baffled. Zach was someone who left every day at 5 pm. He had never volunteered to lead a project, never came to me with an idea or the solution to a problem, and poo-pooed new initiatives I came up with to move the company forward. Worst of all, he had never, in three years with the company, expressed his ambition to advance, let alone to head up an overseas division. The truth is I hadn’t for one moment considered him as a candidate for the role. And yet, inexplicably, he believed he was the natural choice.

At first, I dismissed him as delusional. But it gnawed at me. Why were our perceptions of his ambition and potential so far apart? Eventually, it dawned on me that the problem wasn’t Zach; it was me.

The reason he had never expressed his ambition to advance was that I had never asked. The reason he’d never done any of “the right things” to be seen as a candidate for advancement was that I had never told him what those things were. If I had found out his ambition to lead an office on his first day instead of his last, and told him what he had to do to make it happen, perhaps he would have been the superstar I wanted for the role.

A panic fell over me. Who else in my firm was harboring a secret ambition to advance, I wondered to myself? Everyone, I thought. Everyone has an ambition. Who else would I lose because we hadn’t done enough to help them reach their potential? No one, I thought. I wasn’t going to let it happen.

The episode was a turning point in my development as a leader. That day I resolved to have regular discussions with every member of my team about their career goals, what they had to do to achieve them, and what had to happen in the business for them to have the opportunity.

Speaking with friends and clients about the experience, I discovered that this “don’t ask, don’t tell” dynamic was not unique to my firm. Executive after business owner after manager told me it played out exactly as it had with Zach in their own companies. Sometimes they were the Zach in their story.

I began to realize the enormity of the discovery: Companies and employees in every industry and every corner of the world held back by flawed assumptions, miscommunications, and misunderstandings. The reality is that for many employees, particularly those without family members willing or able to mentor them, trying to advance in your career is like sitting down to play Monopoly without anyone telling you the rules. By the time you’ve figured it out, the other players have houses and hotels on every property except Mediterranean Avenue.

In the weeks that followed, I wrote the outline for a workshop series aimed at young professionals. It covered everything I wished I’d told Zach on his first day and everything I wish I’d known when I began my own career.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

In my first week with KPMG, I literally burned my lips off drinking a flaming Sambuca and had to take a week out sick. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but looking back, I probably should have just blown out the darned flame!

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

My mom loves a good idiom and, throughout my childhood, quoted them often! My favorite inspiration is a poem called “For want of a nail.” Long story short, the country loses a war because of a missing nail. It has always echoed in my ears any time I was tempted to cut a corner. Everything matters. Everything.

I guess it could also be known as “the perfectionist’s manifesto”!

What advice would you give to other business leaders to help their employees thrive and avoid burnout?

My advice would be to set clear and realistic targets for your team and give people as much autonomy and support as you can. But ultimately, if they can’t do the job you hired them to do well, don’t keep them around to continue to fail. Let them find something else they can become successful in.

Ok, let’s jump to the core of our interview. Working remotely can be very different than working with a team that is in front of you. This provides great opportunities but it can also create unique challenges. To begin, can you articulate for our readers a few of the main benefits and opportunities of working remotely?

Remote working isn’t for everyone, but it certainly has benefits for most people: fewer interruptions, improved focus, more autonomy, not to mention skipping the twice-daily commute! A survey of 40,000 workers by Stanford Economist Nicholas Bloom found that 40% believed they were more efficient working from home than the office. This makes logical sense when you hear that it takes an average of 23 minutes to refocus on a task after a single interruption. For many people, constant interruptions are an enduring mainstay of working life, especially for those in open-plan offices.

Remote work also leads to a more efficient allocation of resources in our society. A company offering remote working can hire someone outside of the city. In fact, they could be literally anywhere. This not only opens up new job opportunities to people in smaller and out-of-town communities, but it also allows people that live in expensive cities to cut their living costs by moving to those areas where housing and other amenities tend to cost much less.

Can you articulate for our readers what the five main challenges are regarding working remotely?

For many people, the biggest challenge in working remotely is the isolation from co-workers. This can be a serious mental health issue. In another fascinating study by Nick Bloom (carried out long before the pandemic), a Chinese company named Ctrip invited volunteers to work from home, but — here’s the twist — selected only half of the volunteers (by lottery) to do so. After nine months, the employees were asked whether they wanted to continue working from home or return to the office. In spite of an average 40-minute commute, half of the remote workers opted to return. The primary reason was the lack of company. They reported feeling “lonely, isolated, and depressed.”

The second would be the blurred boundaries between work and leisure. Ongoing lockdowns made people feel less like they were working from home and more like they were living in their office. It can be hard enough to switch off and relax without having to pass your “workstation” on your way to bed.

Third would be challenges with respect to training and development. Spending time around more experienced peers is very important for professional development. On-boarding new employees is particularly challenging.

Fourth on my list is career advancement. While various studies have shown that between 50 and 90% of people want to continue working from home on some level, a multi-year study by Alan Felstead and Darja Reuschke found that those working from home were 50% less likely to be promoted than their office-based peers. This is a major problem for diversity. Studies show that women and minorities are more likely to prefer working from home by large margins.

The fifth challenge is monitoring workplace productivity. While it may be difficult for many home workers to clock out, employers may worry that it might be equally difficult for others to clock in, or that clocking in doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not spending your day watching TV.

While larger companies are employing increasingly sophisticated, some would say invasive, ways of tracking workplace productivity but, for now at least, those methods will be out of reach for smaller companies and non-profits.

Based on your experience, what can one do to address or redress each of those challenges? Can you give a story or example for each?

For HR departments and bosses, tackling these issues requires proactive measures.

Feelings of isolation can be prevented by requiring workers to come to the office for a portion of their week and organizing extra social events outside of work to help them feel connected to their teams. One company I worked with organized round-robin coffee catch-ups for teams during the early days of the pandemic. This isn’t something many workers would be comfortable initiating, so it’s important that companies take the lead.

Boundaries between work and leisure are tricky. Everyone needs to switch off, but it’s also important for your career to be available when your team needs you. My advice is to let your boss know about any family commitments that you just can’t break (but also to have contingency plans just in case). You can ask flat out whether they will cause a problem for your team or hold you back from advancing. While you may not like the answer, it’s better to know than to not.

Turning off smartphone notifications helps a great deal. You could even uninstall the email app from your phone. You’re already working from your home. Do you really need to check your emails on the toilet? Trying to get work done while you’re doing something else is a false economy. It feels like you’re saving time by checking something off your list, but most of the time, it would be done much faster at your desk. To keep the boundary but avoid missing something genuinely important, consider a “Batphone” system where you let colleagues know how they should contact you only when they’re in a pinch.

Providing good career development opportunities should be a strategic priority for companies and their HR departments, especially for millennials and Gen Y employees. A study by Gallup found that a staggering 87% of millennial employees considered opportunities for career development either very or extremely important to them in a job. This is a statistic that cannot be ignored. Bosses should schedule regular discussions about career advancement with no particular agenda. This should not be a formal performance appraisal but a chance for the employee to talk openly about their ambitions and ask questions.

When it comes to monitoring productivity, my advice is to set realistic goals, targets, KPI’s or OKRs, check in regularly, and offer them all the help and support they need to achieve them. If you’re a manager fretting about how many hours each person works or how quickly they answer Slack messages, you’re focusing on the wrong things.

Let’s talk about Career Development. Can you share a few ideas about how you can nurture and advance your career when you are working from home and away from other colleagues?

I could talk all day on this, but I’ll try and keep it brief! I actually don’t believe my advice to people who work from home is any different from my advice to people who work in an office. The difference is that achieving career advancement as a remote worker requires even more of a proactive approach. In an office, the right things often happen by chance.

The first tip would be that relationships matter. OK, that’s an understatement. Relationships are everything. The most important relationship is the one with your boss. This doesn’t mean you should be a suck-up, just treat them with respect, follow their guidance and do everything you can to help them make the team successful. Many employees believe their boss is an idiot, hide it less well than they think they do and spend too much of their time trying to prove it to others.

Your boss isn’t an idiot; they’re just a human being like you. They can’t be good at everything, and they’re probably doing their best in what may be very difficult circumstances. Don’t hold them to a standard you wouldn’t want to be held to yourself. Help make up for their weaknesses, not by drawing attention to them in the the vain hope they’ll change but by anticipating the problems they may cause and heading them off.

Second, figure out what awesome looks like in your job and strive to achieve it. No company wants to promote someone that settles for mediocre in their own work, and many people do without realising it. Impressing people is important and there are really only three ways to do it. Do it faster, sooner, or more abundantly than they expect. As Mo Gawdat points out “Happiness = Expectation — Reality”. The more you exceed expectations in your role the happier your company will be and the faster you’ll be promoted.

Third, don’t make the same mistake as Zach. Follow my three-step plan for guaranteed career success. Tell your boss that you want to advance, ask them what you need to do to advance, and then do it. It really is that simple.

Can you share a few ideas about how employers or managers can help their team with career development?

The best place to start is by simply having a discussion. This shouldn’t be a formal sit-down, and it should be more often than annually. In a study of CareerPoint coachees as part of our Ambition Lab initiative, which surveys young professionals on topics related to career advancement, 15% of respondents said they’d never had a discussion with their boss about their advancement. Two-thirds reported having the discussion at least annually but said it wasn’t often enough for their liking.

I think many managers shy away from talking about career advancement, fearing they might set up an expectation in the employee’s mind that it is not within the manager’s control to deliver. The remedy is for managers to not only talk about the employee’s performance and development, but also about what needs to happen in the business for the advancement opportunity to arise. Many bosses do a good job on the first part but forget to cover the second part. This leads to employees feeling gypped when they meet the performance goals and still don’t get promoted.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Helping people understand how they create value and how value drives career advancement is a win for employees, a win for their employers, and a win for families and communities. That’s what CareerPoint.com is devoted to doing, and I’m pleased to report that the movement has already begun!

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Connect with me on Linkedin, download my eBook on Amazon, or visit CareerPoint.com.

Thank you for these great insights! We wish you continued success.