- There are a couple of mistakes
that I see frequently made by young graduates entering the workforce. Doesn't matter if you work in consulting, in investment banking or another high profile corporate job, these common mistakes of young graduates should just be avoided at all costs. From my experience as a
former McKinsey project lead today I'm going to talk
about the three top mistakes that I have seen young professionals make when entering the workplace,
when entering consulting. I'm going to talk about why
they are so frequently done, why they are so bad and what
you should do to avoid this. Hi guys, my name is Heinrich, and welcome to another video here on my channel, Firm Learning. It's a bit late right
now, here in Germany, which is why I'm not
having a coffee break, but if you want to enjoy a nice coffee watching
this video, then please do. As always, if you're taking any value out of this video at all,
please hit the Like button, follow the YouTube algorithm and also subscribe to my channel to not miss out on my regular content. I upload at least one video
every week on every Saturday. If you want to see even more from me you can also follow me on my Instagram, my handle is @FirmLearning. And I also have a mailing list where I share even more
regular insights with you guys, there's a link to that mailing list below in the video description. But without further ado
let's directly jump into it and I will talk about the
three mistakes that I see, and then for each of these mistakes I'm going to share one true
story that happened to me while working at McKinsey which I already showcase as the mistake that I'm talking about. So the first mistake that
I see many people do, is that young graduates sometimes are not really understanding their task. If they get their task
they're not really making sure that they're a hundred percent aware of what is expected from them. And this is of course pretty bad, because if you do not understand
why you're doing something, if you do not fully
understand what you're doing, it is very difficult for you
to really get that job down in the best way possible. And this of course sounds obvious, but still, many people do not do it. And I believe the main
reason why that's the case is because these young joiners, they don't want to seem stupid, they don't want to be
caught asking something that they perceive might
be a stupid question. Which is why they rather not
fully understand the task than really asking something
two or three times if necessary to really clarify all the questions that they have in their head. But of course this logic is flawed, because while for sure it is better if you directly understand everything that you're asked to do the first time, it is natural that often you won't and your project lead or your team lead for sure will understand. And it is definitely much worse having worked for several hours, maybe several days on a task, only then to in the end find out that you completely
misunderstood the whole thing instead of just asking a couple of extra questions in the beginning but then in the end being able to deliver a great end product. So let me share one little story from my time as a
project lead at McKinsey. I had a young associate on my team who actually was already
an experienced hire from another consulting firm, which is why I kind of expected
that he already kind of knew what he was doing and had already some minimal experience going on. So I gave him some excess spreadsheets and asked him to do some
very specific analysis for some specific numbers that we wanted. And I explained it to
him a couple of times, and I believed that it was
pretty clear what I wanted, and he also gave me the impression that he clearly understood
what he needed to do. So then he was working
on that during the day and indeed it was quite a
complex analysis package and I checked in with
him a couple of times. And he always gave me the impression that yes, everything is
going well and he's on track. And then later that evening, probably around 7 or 8 p.m. on that day, I wanted to sit together with him and really review what he has done so far just to make sure he
was on the right track, because I knew that I needed his work to be sent out later on that day. So when I really dived into his sheets and went into the details
of what he was doing, I realized that he just
didn't understand at all what he was doing, and I had the impression
that he also knew himself. Actually he didn't really understand what he was supposed to do. Because while he did something that clearly was not
answering the questions that we were asking
ourselves in the beginning, and this was far away from anything ready to be sent out to a client, which is what we wanted
to do that evening, and he also knew that this
is what we wanted to do. So this for me was exactly this example of somebody just too afraid, too shy to ask a clarifying question, and rather taking the risk
of doing something wrong instead of just making sure
that you're really understanding what you need to do. And of course this is
bad, not only for you but also for your team, because in that specific case both of us, me and my associate, then ended up working
really late that evening to get the time to fix it and to still be able to send
it out on the same evening. The second mistake is to
not think for yourself, and this is something that I see commonly. Not only for young graduates, but also for other more
seasoned business professionals who just do not take
ownership of their work, who just refuse to think for themselves when they have a certain
task that they need to solve. Somehow many people seem to believe that if they're just exactly
doing what they're told then they are fine and
then there's no more that they need to do and they're already
doing an excellent job. This is completely wrong. While of course it helps
and it is often beneficial to do the things that
you are asked to do well, very frequently, the main value add that you can bring to
the table as an employee is to think critically about these things. Is to really ask whether the way you have been asked to do
something is the best way to get to the result that you know your team lead, your project
lead, is actually looking for. And the truth is that your
supervisor, your team lead, he will often be further
away from what is going on in the day to day business,
from the nitty gritty details of the data that you are working on, from all the interviews, all the conversations that you are having, he will be much further away
from that, than yourself. Of course he will still try to do as best to give you the best guidance that he can, at least if he is a good supervisor, but there is no reason in most cases to believe that he can
actually better decide what know the right thing
is in a specific instance that you have been
working on than yourself. So whenever you work on a task, make sure that you fully understood what it actually is
that you want to achieve and then if you receive some guidance reflect on the guidance and ask yourself, whether from the things that you know, this really is the best way to go about certain things. And there are lots of
examples of this, right? But just something that happens pretty much daily in consulting
is creating presentations, creating slides and
some of you already know that I also have a full
course on creating slides, like top management consultants. If you're interested in that check out the link in
the video description to my course on creating
slide presentations. What frequently happens with presentations is that the project lead or the partner will somehow sketch out how he believes the presentation should look like, and then he gives this to
an associate or to a team and asks them to implement
this presentation. And then what frequently happens, especially with less
experienced associates, is that they then just exactly
create the presentation in the way that they are asked to do, exactly in the order of the slides, exactly with all the text
as they're asked to do it. But in most cases you
realize that actually it would be better to
arrange it a bit differently, that actually it would be better to include the information a
bit differently on the pages. That maybe showing the things exactly that you have been asked to show, it just doesn't make sense. And, probably, the partner
who asked you to do that just wasn't aware of that in the moment because as you can imagine he has lots of projects
going on in parallel, and he's just not that much
into the detail than you are. So then these associates
create, still, the presentation just the way that they've been asked, and then they are so surprised that then when they show and
present this to the partner that the partner isn't happy. Because maybe if he see's
then the final product he realizes himself that
it just doesn't make sense, and then it's kind of
this weird atmosphere where the associate says, well this is what you
asked me to do, right? And then the partner says, well yes, but obviously
it just doesn't make sense and you recognized for yourself
that it doesn't make sense, or didn't you see that the whole story fits together the way it should? So what you should as a good
associate, as a good employee, you should ask yourself critically how exactly this should be framed. And only because you receive something of the first guidance, this, in most cases, doesn't mean that you can't make alterations to that where you know that it is better in the way that you are
proposing it right now. So think critically about
the tasks that you receive and ask yourself what you can change, what you can do better
to really get your team the results that they really need. And of course, if you're doubting whether you're idea is better,
then feel free just to ask, feel free to just
challenge your supervisor just to have a constructive
conversation with him and telling him you
know, you sent me this, actually I think probably this
other option is a bit better, what do you think? Do you agree or not? Then it shouldn't be a
surprise that in most cases if you're having this conversation
in a constructive way, the other party will be super
open for your suggestions and very much appreciate your ownership, your input and your perspective in it. Now last but not least, let's
get to the third mistake, and this is not making
an active effort yourself to search out opportunities
for your personal development. Somehow many young
professionals seem to believe that it is the responsibility of the firm, the responsibility of the
company you are working for to develop yourself. And while of course it's
great if your company offers these opportunities where they really put you on
a development training plan to really get the most of you out there ready to develop your skills, this is not what you should expect. And even in companies like McKinsey that heavily invest in the
training of their employees, in the end it is always
the first responsibility of the employee himself to search out these development opportunities. It is up to you to make sure
that you develop yourself, it's not up to some manager or some company you currently work for. And I believe that opportunities
to develop yourself really are out there for you just to grab pretty much every single day, and I just wanna share one
instance when I was an associate. So when I was a younger consultant, what I did as a young consultant to learn about a specific new topic, about a new skill that I found was somewhat important and relevant to me. So I was working on a project and trying to identify some
cost saving opportunities in a specific area of the company. And now we started a new
work stream on the project, so a new set of tasks that the
client asked us to look into, and this was all about working capital. So the company wanted to
improve it's working capital, and I always thought that this
was a very interesting topic, I wanted to learn more about. Because I knew that when
you are in the position at some point in the future to
lead a company for yourself, it will be just super important to understand these
working capital concepts. So for those of you who have
no idea what I'm talking about, working capital optimization pretty much means to
manage your inventory, your accounts receivables
and your accounts payables, in an optimized and efficient way. So from the perspective
of the project lead who was responsible for this
whole project at the time, he now needed to ask himself, okay, to what associate on my team do I give this new piece of work? And probably from his perspective, I wasn't the first person to think about because there was another
much more senior associate on the team who also had
additional bandwidth at the time. So it would have been an easy choice for him just to ask this more senior guy to take on this additional
piece of work as well. But what I did in that instance, once I heard that this
new thing was out there to do that now we're having this additional topic on our project, I proactively approached my
project lead and I told him, hey this is really a topic
that would interest me, and if that's okay for you I would really love to take that on, on top of the other things
that I'm already working on. And of course he appreciated
that and then in the end I was the one responsible
for this work stream, and I ended up learning
tons of super relevant and super interesting things that I still benefit from now
today working in corporate. So the lesson learned is that you need to reach
out to these opportunities. The truth of it also is that
pursuing these opportunities have some kind of cost,
either monetary or time. For me it would have been the easy path to not ask for getting this
additional piece of work, I had already plenty of other
stuff to do on the project, but I wanted to do it so I pursued it. Ask yourself as well, what are the things, what are the investments
that I can take now in this specific instance
to develop myself personally and professionally
within the opportunities that you have around you? So that's it guys, three
common mistakes that I see. First, make sure that you fully understand the task that you're asked to do, second, think for yourself, think critically about the
things that you're asked to do, and third, actively
pursue the opportunities for personal development that you find opening up around you. I hope you took some
value out of this video, if you did then please
hit the Like button, this really helps me
with my YouTube channel. And of course please also subscribe to get updates on my
content every single week. Again, you can also
follow me on my Instagram, my handle is @FirmLearning, and I also have a mailing list you can find a link to that
below in the video description. If you have any questions on that or want to show your own mistakes that maybe you did as a young graduate, feel free to leave a comment and I will do my very best
to answer every single one. Thank you so much for watching, this was Heinrich from Firm Learning. Have a good day, and
see you next week again.
