The Well-Intentioned Mistakes of College Graduates Entering the Workplace
And how to avoid them
College was an arduous, yet straightforward endeavour in knowledge acquisition, that prepares you for the perfect world — where data is rich, analysis paramount, and fairness ubiquitous.
The workplace isn’t like this.
Open ended, layered in false sincerity and rife with power hungry colleagues— nothing quite prepares you for the realities of it.
College sure doesn’t.
In fact, college subtly undermines your ability to adapt to the workplace by cultivating an inflated sense of confidence and nurturing short sighted strategies.
For over a decade, I’ve worked alongside, hired, and watched young professionals’ transition from college to career. Doing it in a way that sets you up for career success is neither hard nor easy; it’s just different from what you know.
Below are three well intentioned mistakes I see young professionals make, and how to avoid them.
Mistake 1 — Trying too hard to justify your hiring
A manager took you out for a sumptuous lunch, your life story had interviewers captivated and the hiring team seemed thrilled when you accepted your offer of employment. You even got your relocation expenses comped. Four years of college suddenly feels worth it — you’re a Rockstar.
But let’s be clear — you’re not a Rockstar.
That manager, you’ll never see her again. Your interviewers thought you were self-aggrandising. And as for the hiring team, that was real, except it’s not what you think. All the other candidates declined; you were their last option.
During the hiring process, organisations strive to endear themselves to candidates. Knowing the best candidates receive multiple offers of employment, they’re hoping their affable welcome will be enough to tip the scales in their favour.
Don’t expect these pleasantries to last.
Unlike the hiring team, your colleagues won’t try to win you over. They’ve watched young whippersnappers come and go since before they care to admit. Instead, they’re saving their energy, carefully gauging whether you’re worth their time.
How do you show them that you are?
Attitude.
Although they won’t come out and say it, they aren’t exactly expecting a lot from you. They don’t expect you to know everything, or almost anything really, but they do expect you to have the right attitude.
As obvious as that sounds, most high performers from college get it wrong.
Eager to prove their worthiness and justify their hiring, they treat every interaction as an audition. Arguing and debating trivial matters, which under different circumstances, could be grounds for listening and learning.
I wish I could tell you I discovered this advice solely through observation. But that wouldn’t be true — I’ve also lived it.
Flashback to spring 2009, I was raring to get a job and start my career, having just recently graduated from chemical engineering. My timing couldn’t have been worse. A year earlier the world economy had collapsed, and with it my chances of landing a job.
My dad ended up securing me a job at the organisation he worked for. I wasn’t proud of this — embarrassed really. However, after spending a year chasing down every opportunity I could find, without any noteworthy progress, I realised I could either swallow my pride and accept his assistance or wallow in the sorrows of joblessness.
I chose the former, although things didn’t get much easier.
At my new job, my introduction sent my colleagues on an emotional journey, starting at confused and ending with anger. Confusion in response to the riddle I presented, why had we hired this new kid. After all, the organisation had just finished laying-off half its employees in a series of rightsizing initiatives. Anger in response to solving that riddle. It wasn’t hard, it was an open secret that I only got the job because of my dad. But I wasn’t about to let this hold me back. I was going to prove my colleagues wrong; I deserved this opportunity.
Yea, you can guess how that went.
I spent months trying to demonstrate my technical knowledge, decision making, and work ethic — on a good day my efforts were disregarded, on a bad day, they were ridiculed and rebuked. I realise now that I was locked in a game of escalating commitment, me trying ever-harder to impress, them trying ever-harder to signal it would never be enough. I was burning out — something had to change.
I tried a few different approaches; eventually through cultivating an attitude of curiosity, humility and positivity I was able to undo some of the damage that was done and make in-roads with my colleagues
The sooner you drop the act and realise you’re not a Rockstar, and more importantly realise no one expects you to be, the sooner you can become one.
Mistake 2 — Not knowing how performance is actually measured
In college, performance was measured using a two-pronged instrument of examination and assignment; the results of which contributed to your GPA. It was stressful, anxiety provoking and sleep depriving; but, it was also a fair, objective way to systematically rank students. Your performance was quantifiable: the sum of all your actions, a number. This is about to change.
In the workplace, performance is subjective; no longer the sum of all your actions.
Organisations’ deny this, citing elaborate performance management systems and year-end performance reviews to their defence. Under such systems goals are created, tracked and periodically reviewed, with an official sounding result bestowed upon employees at years-end e.g., meets expectations, exceeds expectations etc.
Don’t be fooled.
This is nothing more than an elaborate scheme to legitimise employees already identified for future promotion or dismissal.
Unfortunately, you can’t ignore these systems. Conjuring up meaningful, achievable goals to crush by year-end is necessary — just not sufficient for achieving high performance in your workplace.
Achieving the latter requires understanding what performance really is.
And for that let’s consider a hypothetical.
A critical problem has emerged in your organisation requiring immediate and decisive action. To tackle the issue, your manager sets out to assemble a team of the organisation’s best and brightest.
How will they determine who the best and brightest are?
Scrutinise the year-end review results from the last 5 years?
Nope — not a chance.
Ain’t nobody got time for that. Even if they did, they still wouldn’t.
Why?
Managers already have their own working list; their own personal experience assessing whom is good at what. In fact, monitoring organisational talent is baseline material for any competent manager. Cumulatively spending hundreds of hours observing, interacting and contemplating talent — now at the most critical time is when their deliberate reconnaissance must pay off.
This is how performance is measured in organisations.
Performance is the perception of usefulness from those that matter.
Do powerful members of your organisation trust you to complete important tasks? Do influential colleagues, supervisors and managers know who you are and think you are competent?
What’s that — no one knows who you are?
That’s fine, start with your supervisor; figure out what you need to do to convince them that you are useful. Then repeat for every influential person you come across.
It took me a little while to discovered this titbit of wisdom. By now I was at a new organisation working alongside an engineer named Matt.
In many ways Matt was the prototypical engineer; constantly searching for ways to deconstruct the world into bite-size, calculable pieces. His penchant for analyses had yielded him more technical knowledge than his seven years of experience suggested. To his peers however, it was his willingness to help which they most appreciated, earning him admiration and respect. His office was always a hive of activity: teaching, collaborating, solving problems — it was where progress happened.
Unfortunately, Matt, along with a quarter of the organisation, was laid-off in response to an industry slowdown. Although it was difficult watching so many colleagues depart, Matt’s was by far the hardest, and, gave me reason to pause. After all, Matt and I were the same age, similarly educated and shared roughly the same type and amount of experience. Why had management chosen to get rid of him over me?
Others were also confused by Matt’s removal, so much so they demanded answers from management.
Management’s response: had we know Matt was so well-respected and integral to the operation; we would have kept him. Ironically, management had known, at least on paper, having given Matt nothing but stellar performance reviews the preceding years.
Meanwhile, I worked on the type of projects which management talked about, the flashy ones which promised a better, more optimised version of the future — conferring instant name recognition to all involved.
In a perfect world, management laid me off instead of Matt; having scrutinised the preceding year-end performance reviews and considered the implication of our differing work contexts.
What actually happened; the wrong people thought Matt was useful while the right people thought I was.
Performance lives in the mind of influential people; not on a scorecard.
Mistake 3 — Holding onto simplistic developmental strategies
Did you have an overarching strategy outlining your college progression?
My guess is no. And to be fair you probably didn’t need one.
Get good grades, graduate, get a job — the game is simple and over quickly.
Your career is different. Not only do you need a strategy; you need a good one. One that is flexible enough to adapt over the long term yet specific enough to provide meaningful advantage today.
Allow me to introduce you to team thinking.
There are two teams which employees play for; each featuring their own playbook and recipe for success.
Firstly, there’s the technical minded gurus. Trusting in the adage knowledge is power, they race to acquire the former to achieve the latter. You find these types eagerly taking on difficult tasks; believing knowledge gained is worth the challenge endured.
On the other end of the spectrum there’s the relationship builders.
Why spend time cumulating knowledge when you can cultivate influence; handling tasks by leveraging the skills of others. You find these types out for coffee with a new connection every week, meticulously extending their social network one interaction at a time. Come December they’re the first to send Christmas cards, wishing well and more importantly, strengthening relationships.
Each team offers a unique and simple construct for understanding and advancing your career: your path to success is told by one of two stories.
I just need to study hard and accumulate technical knowledge.
Or
I just need to build relationships and exert influence.
As a young professional, you will gravitate toward whichever teams’ beliefs more closely align with your own. Telling yourself I’m naturally a technical person or I’ve always been a people person; team thinking is practically instinctual.
However, there’s more to developing your career than what can be gleaned by your teams’ way of thinking.
Unfortunately, many young professionals never make this realisation. Preferring the comfort and safety of team thinking, they never consider alternative methods for broadening their career horizon.
I sure didn’t.
It took coming face-to-face with a skilled relationship builder to shake me from my team thinking.
Alex was his name; and to him, a stranger was just a friend he hadn’t met yet. His congeniality, as delightful as it was, offered little in the way of career insights, or so I thought.
One meeting radically updated my thinking.
This was a crucial meeting for me. Having spent months flushing out a business case and triple checking technical details; a stamp of approval was the last hurdle standing between me and the organisation hitting key metrics.
Last minute, one of the meeting attendees extended an invitation to Alex; which I found puzzling given it wasn’t his area of expertise. At the time, I remember brushing it off, thinking it was probably for Alex’s benefit, a learning opportunity of sorts.
The presentation went off without a hitch. At the end, I expectantly awaited on questions, having prepared for all likely ones. Oddly, the questions were directed only half to me, with the other half to Alex. This trend continued for a few minutes more before I finally caught on. The supervisors were using Alex to vet my answers — a high level check if you will. Fortunately, he offered unwavering support for my ideas. But I was left unnerved; had he not, my project would have stalled. Why had the supervisors deferred to his judgement?
I later would come to learn that Alex was friends with all the supervisors, had been for years, and, as best I could piece together, they wanted a trusted second opinion—his.
Still, it surprised me how much power was extended to Alex. It got me thinking. Perhaps the technical minded gurus weren’t the only game in town. Alex appeared to be exerting influence by playing a different game altogether. More importantly, how had I allowed myself to become so fixated on a single strategy for career development. Clearly there were more out there.
Break from the team.
Career development should be crafted by you, for you; who you are and what you can achieve is unique and so should your approach.
It doesn’t have to be complicated either; lots of tactics exist for helping you customise and steepen your career trajectory: settings goals, asking for feedback, habit development, etc.
That said, the tactics aren’t what’s essential; but rather, the overarching strategy of applying open-mindedness to career development. Put differently, don’t limit your development to team thinking.
Bringing it all together
Even with the best of intentions, transitioning from college to the workplace can go awry.
It doesn’t have to be like this though — others have come before and made mistakes you can learn from.
Trying too hard to justify your hiring, not knowing how performance is measured and holding onto simplistic developmental strategies are just a few. Fortunately, the antidote to these mistakes are not complicated. Attitude, perception and open-mindedness enables you to integrate, perform and develop in the workplace and puts you on your way to a meaningful career.
