How to Advance Your Career When You Hate Office Politics

Jamie Lee:
Welcome to Negotiate your Career Growth. I'm Jamie Lee, and I teach you how to blend the best of negotiation strategies with feminist coaching so you get promoted and better paid without burning bridges or burning out in the process. Let's get started.

Jamie Lee:
How do you advance your career when you hate office politics? How do you change industries or pivot into a new exciting role when people don't seem to understand what you do now so they end up pigeonholing you into a narrower role or a technical role that you don't really want to do? And most importantly, who the heck am I to be dishing out career advice to you? I had the honor of answering these and other great questions in an interview that recently got published as an article on the Actuary magazine. The U R L is the actuary magazine.org. This was a really fun and in-depth interview, and I shared specific concrete insights and tips that I routinely share with my paying coaching clients who work in science, technology, engineering, math, higher ed outfits, not necessarily actuaries, <laugh>. And so I've decided to share my answers as well as additional insights here with you on this podcast.

And before I do that, first I want to give a quick shout out to my newsletter subscriber and collaborator Emily Shu for inviting me to do this interview article with her. And if you're not on my newsletter list, what are you waiting for? Come on over for free career advice, tips, scripts, and invites. Come to Jamie Lee coach.com, J A M I E L E E C O A C h.com and get signed up. And if you have other fun collaboration ideas for articles or workshops centered around women's self-advocacy, self-confidence, and career advancement, reach out to me directly at jamie jamie lee coach.com. Okay, here's the interview. Enjoy. First question is what's your background and how did you become an executive coach? I was born in Seoul, South Korea, and I immigrated to the United States when I was seven years old. I grew up as a latchkey kid in New Jersey and my mom, who to this day speaks broken English, raised three daughters by herself while working as a nail technician.

Growing up, my mom used to tell me, Jamie, you've gotta speak up. Be brave, ask for what you want. I'd roll my eyes at her because I didn't wanna be disliked for making waves as the weird Asian kid in a predominantly white neighborhood. After college, I negotiated as a buyer, worked as an analyst at a hedge fund, and managed operations for tech startups. Despite my mom's early advice in my life as a professional, I didn't know how to build confidence in myself. I was often prioritizing being liked over being respected, second, guessing myself as a manager and hesitating to use my voice in the workplace. When I read the book, women Don't Ask and realized that many women face the same problem in the workplace. Due to socialization, I wanted to be part of the solution. Plus, when I saw the more assertive folks at work speak up and get ahead, I realized my mom was 100% right. You don't get what you deserve, you get what you ask for. When I encountered coaching, I found the exact tools I needed to generate the courage to speak up, advocate for myself, get promoted, and be better paid. Now in my coaching practice, I blend the best of life coaching tools with the best of mutual negotiation strategies and practical neuroscience tools to help female professionals achieve satisfying career growth through effective self-advocacy.

Now, I help smart women who hate office politics get promoted and better paid without throwing anyone under the bus. I chose this particular niche because I hated office politics myself. As I started to coach smart women who were competent but nervous to speak up and take the lead, I noticed I was far from being alone and hating office politics. My clients told me they felt anxious about pursuing the growth they wanted because they associated getting ahead with throwing people under the bus as they saw some managers too. I heard this repeatedly from folks who, like me, didn't see themselves reflected in the dominant in-group of organizations, whether that was due to their gender, race, sexual orientation, or neuro divergence. And here's why. When you experience marginalization, it's easy to associate power with the misuse of power. When you internalize this association, you end up unconsciously rejecting the evidence of your own power or your capacity to make positive change.

You end up mistaking self-advocacy for self aggrandizement, not seeing it as a level-headed conversation focused on alignment that leads to clarity, collaboration, and therefore service. The women who seek me out have big brains, big hearts and big intentions to be of service. All the crucial ingredients for the exact kind of leadership, the professional world deeply needs. As a coach, I consider it my calling to help women and minorities build this new paradigm of leadership from the inside out. One of my core philosophies is that self-advocacy is an act of service. And here's what I mean by that. When you advocate for yourself, you do four key things. Number one, acknowledge your contributions. Number two, decide on the direction you want to grow. Number three, think through how the growth you want, whether that means being assigned to a different team or becoming the team lead will help the organization grow even faster or better.

And number four, communicate the above early and often with your manager and other decision makers. When you do these four things well, your manager, your decision makers will thank you for helping them do their jobs better. And here are three reasons why. Number one, you're managing up in a smart way and sharing the facts of your contributions. Not that this is not arrogance, because you're not putting anyone down to make yourself look better. Managers and executives are busy people. They are preoccupied with their own worries and agendas. When you remind them why what you are getting done matters to the bigger picture, it helps them make better decisions. Secondly, your manager is not a mind reader. They don't know what you want until you tell them what they don't know they can't act on. Help them help you by initiating the conversation about the direction you want your career to take.

And thirdly, because you've already thought through how your growth supports the organization's growth, you make it easier for the manager to make a case for your promotion with their manager or the promotion committee behind closed doors. And if you're curious, what the secret to getting promoted and better paid when you hate office politics is here it is. First, we have to address the context in which women have been set up to fail and hate themselves, which makes achieving growth harder than it needs to be. Let's think about that from a young age. Girls are socialized to be accommodating and self-sacrificing than years of schooling conditions. Women to keep their heads down, do good work, and humbly wait for the quote unquote A from an authority figure. This mindset sets them up for failure in a competitive work environment where as people say, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, I've been using the third person plural.

But really this is my story too. This is our story. When our A level efforts at work aren't met with the recognition that we've been conditioned to expect, we often end up blaming and beating ourselves up. This is a form of self-rejection that leads to imposter syndrome and burnout. I know I've been there. That's why I think the secret to getting promoted and better paid is turning this habit of self-rejection around by cultivating a loving connection with yourself. Don't get me wrong, this isn't about being soft, being passive or letting yourself binge. Watch Netflix when things get hard. What I'm talking about requires grit and a commitment to not turning your back on yourself, not saying mean things to yourself. When you encounter setbacks and disappointments, whether due to office politics or not, self-acceptance is the root of true self-confidence. It helps you separate self-worth, which is non-negotiable, which is sacrosanct from your work value.

Your self-worth is not your work value, and your self-worth is not anyone else's opinion of you at work. This leads to taking steps that cement your career growth. Now, have you ever been in love? If you have, you know how when you love someone, you do these three things obsessively. Number one, you celebrate their win. You're like, yay, you got outta bed today when it was rainy, cold, and dark. I'm so happy for you. I'm so proud of you, <laugh>. It can be something so small and you're like, I'm so proud. You're amazing. And then number two, you have faith. You just believe in their future potential. Just thinking about the next date with this person, just thinking about what can happen then in the future is so exciting, so enthralling for you. You just have this faith, it's blind, and it just feels so good.

And number three, you enthusiastically talk about your beloveds future promise with other people. You're like, oh, this person, this person is gonna take me to this restaurant and this person is gonna be, you know, my my person for the rest of my life. Or however you like to think about your beloveds future with you. You love to talk about that with as many people who is willing to listen to you, likewise, for you to get promoted and better paid. You wanna bring some of that self-love, some of that self-appreciation, some of that blind faith for yourself. So when you do this in action, it looks like three things. Number one, you keep a win log, you celebrate your wins, okay? It's not, of course going to feel as rosy and as exciting as when your beloved, you know, does something and you're so proud of them, of course, because this is a skill you have yet to master for yourself.

You know how to do it for other people, but for yourself, it just feels a little foreign. But remember, if it feels awkward, you're doing it right. So you start a win log, you start jogging, you start logging every time you do something that you didn't wanna do, but it created a result that was positive. You did something out of discipline, right? Not because it was exciting, and not because it created more dopamine in your brain. And you, you keep a log, you, you keep a record of every time people praise and give you accolades. Every time you win an award, right? You work really hard for it and got done. You keep a win log and you practice. You build this muscle on purpose of feeling proud of yourself so that you can talk about the growth that you have achieved and feel genuinely good about it.

And you can talk about the growth you will achieve, right? This is having faith in your future potential. You can have blind faith in the future, potential of somebody you love, and you can also learn to have some faith in your own future potential. This is so important. And the second thing you do, you cultivate trust in yourself. This is another way of saying that you have faith in yourself. You cultivate trust in yourself, in your capacity to generate new ideas, in your capacity to figure things out. You look back and you're like, wow, I figured some really difficult things out. Some things that felt like they were going to be impossible, but I figured them out. And I got to the other side of that, whether that was signing up to the marathon and completing it, whether that was going to grad school and completing that, whether that was pivoting in your career, getting a new job, you know, whether that was something that is personal in nature.

You look back and you see, wow, I'm actually more resilient. I'm actually more resourceful. I'm actually more capable than I like to give myself credit for. Yeah, you raise that awareness and you intentionally grow your self trusts. And that leads to number three, being willing to talk to as many stakeholders, as many decision makers as possible. Often not just in formal conversations, but reaching out and setting up some informal one-on-ones. And you tell them about your intention to grow, and you tell them how your growth will benefit the organization. And you have this conversation months ahead of formal performance evaluation so that by the time decisions are made, you've already strategically laid the groundwork for your promotion and race. So if you're listening to this, and if you're one of those folks, smart, ambitious women, non-binary professionals who wanna get promo promoted and you wanna get, um, get your career advanced into senior and executive roles, what do you do?
Then? 

Here are some things that I wanna reiterate, some things that I have said in several episodes of this podcast, and I'm gonna say it one more time because the more often you hear it, the more it will finally sink in. The more finally you'll be like, oh, I get it now. Okay, so here are the three things. Number one, if it feels awkward, you're doing it right. If advocating for yourself feels unth, excuse me. If advocating for yourself feels unfamiliar, and if it feels uncomfortable, it's a sign you just haven't had much practice speaking up on your own behalf, you, you probably have had a lot of practice speaking up for the person you love, whether that is your child, your significant other, whether that is your pet ferret. But you know, if you just don't have as much practice doing it for you, of course it's going to feel awkward.

And that's not a sign that anything is wrong with you. That's not a sign that you shouldn't be speaking of for you. It's just the sign that you are practicing a new skill. Remember, real confidence is not achieved by doing things that already or always feel comfortable. If we did things that already and always feel comfortable, we would never leave the cave. We would never venture out beyond our comfort zone. And I hear outside that comfort zone. That's where the magic is. Yeah. Real confidence is created by letting a new unfamiliar practice feel less awkward as you do more of it. And secondly, think about your promotion as an offer. You're offering more value, not necessarily more work, more value, okay? And your promotion is an offer of value rather than an ask for recognition. If you do the three things that we talked about, right?

Celebrating your wins, having faith in your future potential and enthusiastically talk about your own potential with stakeholders and decision makers. If you've done that really well, what you will have is a practice of self-validation. What you will have is a great reserve of self recognition, self-appreciation. So you're not always going to be hanging your confidence on external validation that gives so much of your power back to you. And of course, you will ask for support. You will ask for, yes, from decision makers in the process of negotiating for and securing your promotion. And again, if you want more strategic tips on that, just check out all of the previous episodes in this podcast. But asking for things, including your promotion, often has people feeling indebted to others. And we as people tend to avoid feeling indebted to others. And therefore, when you make a case for your promotion, shift your attention to the bigger value.

Think about the bigger picture. Think about, you know, the goals that you will help the organization achieve. Think about how you will make your supervisor or your superior's life easier or better. That's the bigger value. And you are offering them the advantage of this higher level thinking, the higher level decision making that you will do as a leader, as an executive. And that is going to bring much greater, much bigger benefits to the organization. And that's why you're going to think about your promotion as an offer, not an ask. And thirdly, don't rely on feedback as a promotion strategy. You wanna cultivate the habit of self-evaluation, thinking for yourself, building that leadership mentality due to socialization. We, and when, when I say we, I mean all of us, we sometimes bring a student mindset to our workplace, and that looks like thinking or assuming that our managers should be able to precisely articulate the gaps in our performance.

Like, it's like we should be getting a report card <laugh>, and when we know exactly how to go B to A, in other words, when we know exactly how to address that specific gap that was addressed by the manager, that's how we gonna get the promotion. But that's a student mindset. That's, that's assuming so many things. That's assuming that the manager is all knowing and they know exactly what's needed. And if you, there's again, just so many assumptions made in that student mindset, because in reality, we all know this managers, they are not great at providing constructive feedback. Nope. Most of them are not trained in this. Most of them don't do this well. And even when they do this well, addressing their feedback is hardly sufficient for the promotion. No, you have to be thinking beyond just this one-on-one exchange beyond this, uh, professional performance evaluation from one person's perspective, you wanna be thinking about the perspective of what's gonna serve the organization as a whole. You wanna be thinking like an executive ahead of the time and asking yourself, what are the organization's biggest challenges? What are the opportunities here for me and for the organization? And how might my strengths help achieve and pursue those opportunities? Right? You wanna be thinking for yourself.

With that said, I was also asked about my personal career, uh, trajectory. I have changed industries, I have changed roles. I, you know, you could call me a job hopper. And I was asked, what advice do I have for professionals who want to do the same? They want to change industries, they want to pivot, but perhaps they struggle because they've been quote unquote pigeonholed into, let's say, a technical role to, to the perceived lack of communication or social skills, or people just perceive or assume that you don't have relevant experience. So here's why pigeonholing happens when people encounter an unknown entity, their minds unconsciously sort the unknown person or the unknown profession into unknown bucket or what we call stereotypes. So let's say you meet someone who works in marketing and you work as an actuary and you introduce yourself by saying, hello, I'm an actuary.

If the marketing person is unfamiliar with actuarial work, their brain will immediately put you into one of their known mental buckets. They might think to themselves, I don't really know what an actuary does, and I don't want to seem like I don't know what I'm doing. So let me think about this. I do know that I, I have a sense, I have a sense that actuaries are technical. I have a sense that actuaries are math oriented because every math person I've encountered in the past, they lack communication and social, social skills. I'm just going to assume, I think it's, it's easy. I think it's safe for me to assume this person probably lacks communication and social skills as well. So here's what you want to do. Tell stories using plain language. Interrupt this unconscious pattern by using familiar language to tell a story that the other person can grasp.

You can think of this as a branding exercise, or you can think of it as trying to explain what you do to a third grader or the brain of a third grader. Now, the now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that you're gonna look down on the person as if they're third grader. You just wanna assume that human brains resist complex things and when they don't know, they, they jump to conclusions. And this isn't personal, so you just wanna make it easy. You just wanna assume that the brain inside the person's head is, there's a part of it that's like a third grader <laugh>. So for example, you can introduce yourself to somebody who is not familiar with what you do. Let's say actuarial work by saying something like, here's what I do. I ensure that a company makes enough money through the hard times and good times, right?

It's very plain language. And what you're doing is instead of using industry jargon, instead of using technical words, you're using plain language and plain language packs, bigger punch in terms of helping people see that you have relevant skills and that you are effective at communicating them. Also, remember, your career doesn't always have to go up and up. I have pivoted many times early in my career when I pivoted from working at a hedge fund to working with tech entrepreneurs. I took an unpaid internship, <laugh>, I was not a student. I was well into my late twenties, and I took an unpaid internship with a group of angel investors. Um, this group is called Golden, uh, golden Seeds. Uh, they're still operating and they invest only in women founded startups. Even though at that time my income growth lagged for about three months. This internship helped me become a known entity to decision makers, to accredited investors, one of whom became my employer in this new field of entrepreneurship.

So if making a career pivot is what you want, remember, it's okay. It's really okay to take a temporary step back or even a step sideways or even to take an intentional pause. Your career journey is not linear. There's gonna be ups and downs. This is natural. This happens to everyone. It doesn't always have to go up and up. So here's a great question. How does one build genuine confidence to advocate for the growth they want? We've all been taught the illusion that achieving certain milestones, like getting promoted or having the approval of others will be the answer to feeling confident. But milestones are fleeting, and people's opinions change like the wind. Tying your confidence to external circumstances and external validation is a losing game for me. Two key practices have helped me build a confidence I needed to change my habit of underselling myself and to start advocating for myself.

Number one, choose to validate yourself for the small daily actions that move your career forward even before the milestones are achieved. Did you show up to work today even though a part of you wanted to stay in bed? Yes, <laugh>? Did you speak up at the meeting even though it felt awkward? Yes. Did you deserve your own validation? Absolutely. Showing up, engaging in one conversation at a time is what makes your growth inevitable. And as an aside, here's another thing that I do, especially when I don't feel great, when I feel sluggish, when I feel kind of sick and I don't feel like doing things beyond my comfort zone, is I do something that is even more uncomfortable, which is I look myself in the eye, in the mirror, I look myself in the mirror, in the eye, and I say, I approve of you. Here's the second thing that I have done.

The second key practice, choose your opinion of yourself and prioritize that ahead of others' opinion of you. If you find yourself worrying that having too high an opinion of yourself will get you disliked by others, notice how exhausting it is to keep yourself small, to be in the good graces of people you don't even like to be in the good graces of people who won't go to bad for you. So free that energy up by choosing to see yourself as a person of great potential, bigger than anyone's underestimation of you. And also know that everything that has happened in the past, if these things are still sort of eating away at your self-confidence, here's a super, super simple hack. You get to reframe it. You get to tell the story that serves you. You get to tell the story of what had happened in a way that helps support your self-esteem in your self-confidence.

Did you not feel great the other day? Did you not feel great when you made a certain decision in your career? And you have some, you know, lingering thoughts and feelings about it, okay? You can write them all down and just notice that these are all narratives. Narratives are stories. You get to tell a new story. What if, you know, you get to retell the story of that as if it was the challenging part of a movie. Every movie has a challenging part for the hero and the story, right? Every movie has a part where people are feeling discouraged, right? Before things pick up, right before they, they, um, what's the word? Vanquish the villain and win and become the hero of the story, right? What if that part that you didn't like was just a part of the story that you needed to get through to get to the really good parts, right?

What if that part was just the part that was going to make the win even better, even sweeter when you get to it? So practice feeling this relaxed self-assurance of the person that you are in the process of becoming practice, feeling the calm confidence of the person, the hero that you are in the process of becoming practice, feeling this self-assurance of the leader you are in the process of becoming. And soon you'll be cultivating allies and sponsors and inspiring them into action with your self-advocacy. And of course, if you want support to fast track this process, if you want support doing exactly this kind of work, this is what I do in my one-on-one coaching practice. And I was also asked, what tips do I have for those who are considering coaching? Before I encountered coaching, I was convinced I would continue to struggle with chronic self-doubt in my career and in my life.

It appeared that confidently using my voice and honoring my desires would always remain out of reach. And in coaching, I learned tools to help me and help other people leverage the neuroplasticity of the human brain, meaning that the human brain can continue to grow, adapt, create new neural pathways and new patterns of thinking, new patterns of feeling, new patterns of behaving, which of course create new results. And this is the work that I do for myself and for my clients. So with that said, when you are considering hiring a coach, here are some dos and don'ts that might seem a little out of left field. Do not hire a coach to get advice. Mentors, YouTube, industry magazines, podcasts, like these are great sources and there's so much advice available for free. You can just go to google.com. But do get a coach if you want to go beyond the cookie cutter advice. If you want to start listening to your own wisdom, if you want to become the source of your own advice, and you wanna start acting towards the career and the life that would make your heart sing with joy because it is aligned with who you are inside and out.

Second, don't, don't get a coach to keep you quote unquote, in line or to hold you accountable. I know there are people out there who work as accountability coaches, and you can get an accountability partner. You can, you can get your, I don't know, you could probably set up an alarm on your watch or your phone, like you could get somebody to do that with you. Sure. But if you really want to cultivate the skill of holding yourself accountable, right? Because you're not just pretending to be a leader, but you are an effective self leader whose first advisee is yourself, right? If you wanna create that change in who you are and how you hold yourself accountable, and therefore the new results that you create, that's when you get a coach. So in summary, the final don't is don't get a coach. If you want to color inside the lines, don't get a coach.

If you wanna just follow a steady and path, you can do that. Anyone can do that. It's not very exciting, but it's not very hard. But do get a coach if you wanna astonish yourself with how you exceed your own expectations, how you blow your own mind, and you will do that when you're no longer stymied by your own blind spots, by your irrational fears and your self-defeating habits. If that's what you want, that's when you go get a coach. I hope you enjoyed this interview, this podcast, and I will talk to you very soon.

Jamie Lee:
If you enjoy this podcast, come to jamie lee coach.com, j A M I e L E E C O A c h.com to get your free ebook. How to ask for Big Pay Raise and get it. And if you want expert guidance in your corner to help you achieve greater self-confidence and greater career satisfaction as you grow your skills in negotiating, leading, and influencing as a woman professional, I invite you to book your free one-on-one sales call with me to find out how executive coaching can help you do exactly that. The link is in the show notes. Talk soon.