How to leave your mark at work

While a young employee may not have years of career experience, they have life experiences they can draw on to make their mark at work says Mark Batey, a senior lecturer at Manchester Business School.

Mark Batey, joint chair of the Psychometrics at Work Research Group at Manchester Business School. Satish Kumar / The National

Mark Batey is a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester Business School and the joint chair of the university’s psychometrics at work research group. He has also contributed to various publications ranging from the International Journal of Creativity and Problem Solving to the Financial Times. During a trip to the UAE last month to deliver a seminar on creative problem-solving in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, Mr Batey revealed how young people, starting out in their careers, can make themselves more employable and stand out at work.

What are the key traits of a talented individual, regardless of their background or industry?

The people who rise to the top of organisations – it doesn’t matter whether that’s military, public or private – do tend to be quite smart.

In terms of personal characteristics, they tend to be quite conscientious: yes they have to be big strategic thinkers, but they get the job done, they focus on some of the small details well.

They tend to be mixed in terms of agreeableness. The idea that a good high-talent person is either really aggressive and really tough or they’re a real softie is not true. Talented people know how to flex their style to be soft and yielding, and accommodating of other people’s emotions some of the time, but also prepared to put their foot down, be tough and say the hard things and deliver difficult messages to people.

What is the difference between assertion and aggression, and how can people develop assertiveness?

The biggest mistake is that people tend to equate aggression with assertiveness. Being more assertive in an effective way is about not being aggressive. It’s about very calmly, flatly, reasonably and personably stating your aims and objectives in a very clear way. I think most people, if there’s a face-saving culture, or a tendency to try and avoid conflict rather than saying really what you mean and think, you end up saying it in a sideways way; everyone’s confused and it just leads to more tension. One of the biggest tendencies and problems we find in people with a UK background, for example, is to apologise before you say anything. It’s very difficult to be assertive if you’re starting out with an apology.

What are some of the best things young people entering the job market can do to make their CVs stand out?

The very first sifting of all applications is often done on key words and it doesn’t often involve a human being. In the big multinational corporations with great big HR departments, if you don’t have the right key words on your CV for the job that you’ve applied for, you won’t get the 77.7 per cent match that’s required. Have a carefully tailored CV for each job you’re going for. Go through the corporate website to identify what their mission, vision and values are and what the things they say are important to the business. And do not put your CV up on any job site in a PDF format because PDF formats are not read by the key word searches.

What about when it comes to the interview stage?

What most young people do wrong and find very difficult is to translate all of the experiences they’ve had throughout the whole of their lifetimes and apply those to what the interview is looking for. We call it competency-based interviewing, which is where they’ll say: “so, are you good at teamwork?” and you’ll go: “yes I am” and they’ll cross you off because what they want is for you to say why and how.

For most young people, they can’t say “well, when I was running a global, multinational project for Unilever”, but they can talk about anything they’ve done – like the Duke of Edinburgh. But don’t just say “well, I did Duke of Edinburgh”, that doesn’t help them see how you meet the criteria. Say “we did a project for charity, I had to work with other people”. Talk about your experiences and how they relate and you will be able to give them evidence, even if it isn’t necessarily from the commercial world.

What does it mean to truly take a risk at work?

Most risks tend to be quite small things – from the junior person’s perspective, a risk might be standing up in a meeting and in a politically appropriate way maybe challenging an opinion someone’s made, or putting forward their own opinion, where the cultural expectation might be for them to sit quietly and just listen.

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