The first chapter

As many of you know, I recently released my self-published book 'The Graduate Manifesto' on Amazon as a response to the lack of resource I felt I had whilst I was going through the graduate experience. The point of this project was never to draw unnecessary attention to myself nor for financial gain, rather I wanted to crystallise all the information that had helped me, and put in into a book to provide some sort of guidance from someone who had recently been there themselves.

So it is in that spirit that I want to share the first chapter of this book with you, 'Serve'. The principles in here underpin the entire book and is also the inspiration for the book cover. So grab a cup of coffee or tea, sit back and enjoy the first chapter of 'The Graduate Manifesto'.

Serve

Not a word that is used a lot when starting out your career. I generally heard things like networking, prioritise, under promise & over deliver, future leader, mentor, and diversify. Society tends to see the word “serve” as a disempowered state, something that the lowest in the hierarchy do for those higher up in the food chain. Allow me to challenge that and show you that this is one of the most powerful weapons you possess as a graduate.

 When I was studying, like many other students, I had a part-time job in a tea retailer in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. The company prided itself on customer service and we were told clearly that no matter how wrong they were, the customer was always right. For the five years I was there, this included providing discounts on items that never existed, giving more than the three maximum samples, returns on non-returnable items, and much more. I would be lying if I told you that I understood this concept. The customers were clearly misunderstanding the signs and were too lazy to take note of prices. Why was this our problem?

A few years into the job, it was quiet and I was alone one Monday morning after opening up the shop. A lady came in who didn’t look like she was in a hurry and was happily browsing. I was in a great mood, so I offered her some freshly brewed tea that I had made for myself that morning. With a surprised and excited look, she accepted. I gave it to her in a beautiful ceramic tumbler, which she instantly cupped in her hands and continued to walk around the store.

Shortly after, she returned to the counter and bought the largest size of the tea I had offered her. We spoke more about it as we drank it together, about the floral notes, the lightness, and of course, the most important one, with or without milk? I threw in three more samples of teas I thought she would like.

 A week later, she came back for the three I’d given her, plus any others I recommended. Over the following years, she became my customer, someone who valued my opinion and trusted that I had her interest at heart. This happened many times during my time there, which led me to notice the following:

1.    When I served her, I enjoyed it, which attracted more customers

2.    I received loyalty as a result of my service

3.    The company received revenue as a result of her loyalty

 Serve someone by solving their problem and you will create value. Create value and you will create profit. Service is a crucial part of the success of both you and your company.

 When I left retail and entered the graduate program, I took for granted how much I learnt being on the sales floor for five years. Having worked out how to create consistent sales and a solid customer base, I disregarded these skills in the corporate workplace. After all, who cares about retail experience? It wasn’t part of my “career” but was just a way to make enough cash to send me to Europe once a semester. The truth was, these skills translated beautifully into my job and enabled me to be successful with both people and my work. Let’s break it down further.

During my time as a graduate, I noticed many conversations during the Friday afternoon beer o’clock that revolved around “I don’t know why I’m the one who has to sit on Excel all day”, “I should have been in that meeting”, “my team is useless”, “I haven’t had a 1:1 with my manager in weeks”, and on and on and on. After all, aren’t we the top 1% of the 1% in the country and the future leaders of this company? How could I be spending the last four months taking minutes or documenting processes? Don’t they know how much more I can give?

In my admittedly short career, I have seen cohorts of graduates come through with similar outlooks on their rotations. Whether this stems from unrealistic expectations that make us frustrated with the work, I don’t know. What I do know is that many waste opportunities that they may never see again as their heads are down in the weeds of “boring work”. We have come into programs all over the world by being the best, only to find a less fulfilling environment than we had hoped for. By the way, this is not the case with everyone all the time. If you haven’t felt this yet, keep these principles in your pocket for when that day arrives.

I do believe there is a solution which can be found in this concept. Anteambulo: the one who clears the path. Originating in Roman culture, this role belonged to the person who would go before their patron (swap out for boss or client) and do whatever was necessary to ensure that they had a smooth journey.

If you can master this concept, the world will become your oyster, full of opportunities to learn skills and figure out your leadership style. The strategy boils down to this:

find and make canvases for others to paint on

This is not simply making others look good but taking on the grunt work they would normally do so that they can focus on their strengths and shine. By doing so, you can achieve a couple of things.

 First, if you have a god-complex, this will teach you that you are not above any work or anyone. The sooner this is learnt, the sooner you can graduate from this phase and become a leader that inspires and extracts the best out of everyone around you.

 To illustrate this, I only need to take you back a couple of months. There was an event that I was asked to moderate that had senior executives from various companies on the panel. As I walked in, I noticed they were all just sitting by themselves, far apart and on their phones. It was an awkward environment.

 One of the panelists got up and walked over to the event coordinator, asking where the chairs were, and joked that they were going to have to stand up all night. Overhearing this, I jumped up to find five chairs and brought them in one by one, as they were quite heavy. The coordinator followed suit and helped me, but not one of the panelists asked nor attempted to help, even as they saw us doing multiple trips. They must have assumed I was part of the event set-up team and figured this was my mistake in the first place.

When the room filled up and the night kicked off, each panelist was introduced to the audience. Finally, my name was called, along with a very flattering introduction as moderator. When I sat down in one of the chairs I had brought in myself, some of the panel members looked at me with disbelief. The assumption that I must just be a helper because I had done the “grunt” work (literally—I had been grunting, they were so heavy) was blown out of the water as they realised that I was actually hosting the event. Their reaction taught me something important: Behaving like you are above something because you are overqualified or you think there is someone else whose job it is to do it is not the sign of a leader. I felt a great amount of ownership that night, and satisfaction knowing that I had shown people what it means to serve. This is such a small example and by no means is it me trying to imply all executives are like this, because they’re not. I wanted to add this story here to show you that you can quickly develop a reputation of leadership by turning the “norm” on its head. It is so easy to shine in a world where people wait for someone else to take action or believe it’s not their job to do something. With just a few acts of initiative that serve, you can inspire people at every level by demonstrating true leadership.

Second, you don’t know what you don’t know, so don’t assume you know. By allowing those around you to shine, you can watch and learn how they operate without making the mistakes yourself. This could be one of the greatest shortcuts to success in this book.

We all know that the more information you can gather around something, the better you will understand it, and therefore the better decisions you will make around it. I don’t see leadership as being any different. Aside from throwing yourself into books and articles on how to be a great leader, watching people go about it daily was what actually encouraged me to write this book. I had observed many styles of leadership and decision making by offering myself up to do the grunt work they didn’t want to do. Napoleon Hill put it perfectly:

“Most great leaders begin in the capacity of followers.”

This means that there is a way to follow intelligently, and in fact, the ones that do find themselves in positions of leadership rapidly through observation of those around them.

I believe people are inherently good, but in a culture where he who is on stage or presenting is the one who gets all the credit, it’s easy to fall into the same patterns and fight for the recognition. If you master this strategy and continuously ask yourself, “What can I do for this person to make their life easier?” you will fast-track your learning curve and set yourself up for success by playing the long game.

If you will allow me, I would like to take this one step further. Dr. John Demartini is a world-renowned expert in human behaviour, and has spent decades observing and writing about how we can achieve success and fulfil our purpose on earth. He writes about two parts of our brain: the executive mind and the animalistic mind. While the animalistic mind is concerned with survival and short-term outcomes, the executive mind has far-sighted vision and well-defined strategies to execute that vision. If you take a moment to think about the people in your team or management chain, I’m sure you can see both of these qualities playing out in different ways, as well as within yourself.

The greatest leaders on earth have harnessed their “executive mind” and made decisions that transcend the here and now. That is why someone like Warren Buffet can watch multiple stock market crashes yet be confident in his investments over the long term and continue to make profit regardless of the economic climate.

Doing the grunt work and taking on extra things that clear the way for your boss or team is harnessing your executive mind. You have the capacity to do this, unlike many other people, because you know that this is an investment towards your future. You are happy to go beyond your “job description” because you see that you are increasing your skill set and observing how those around you operate. You take note of what you see working and what you see not working. You listen to how people react to rude emails and you note that you will never write an email in that tone when you lead a team.

Another way to fast-track your learning is to take responsibility for everything. Earlier in this chapter, I spoke of how I used to hear graduates complaining about the lack of work or not having enough face time with their manager. Some saw their development going only as far as their manager would be inclined to. For example, if they had a nurturing one who took them under their wing and brought them along to everything, only then could they develop and learn. What this tells me is that they (and myself, at the time) didn’t take responsibility for things being the way they are. I’m not saying that everything that you are unhappy with is your fault, but by becoming a victim, you give that power over to someone else. The minute you take responsibility for your part to play in everything by default, you immediately give yourself the power to change it.

Every 6-12 months, we interview graduates to come into our team as their first role coming off the program. There have been times where we’ve had more than 10 and of course had to let most of them know that they were not successful. Many times, when this happened, I was approached for a follow-up chat about what they could have done better and any advice for the future. I thought this was a fantastic initiative, and I was looking forward to helping them in anyway possible. There were two types in this scenario: the first would begin to listen to my feedback but then would get defensive and explain why they failed. Perhaps it was that they did not really want the role, or that they felt the questions were too hard. The second whipped out their notebooks and wrote down everything I said, nodded and asked me to explain further. Their ability to receive feedback well and take responsibility of the outcome, I believe, is what will make this group become leaders much quicker than the first. Taking ownership over career outcomes and making the most of every opportunity to learn, grow, and fine-tune your strategy is the key to success. I see so many graduates, past and present, go in circles making the same mistakes and getting the same outcomes because they never took the time to evaluate where they went wrong or sought out someone to guide them.

Tim Ferriss has an incredible interview with Jocko Willink, a Special Forces operative who led the most decorated SEAL unit from the Iraq war. His bestseller can be found in the booklist at the back of this book. Something he said stood out to me and changed how I looked at my current state at work:

"You can’t blame your boss for not giving you the support you need. Plenty of people will say, ‘It’s my boss’s fault.’ No, it’s actually your fault because you haven’t educated him, you haven’t influenced him, you haven’t explained to him in a manner he understands why you need this support that you need.

That’s extreme ownership. Own it all."

So how does this relate back to us? If your goal is to become a leader, creating positive outcomes for your company and enabling those around you to work at their full potential, it starts now. It starts by you embracing the canvas strategy and doing the grunt work to prop up those around you and clear the way for them. Once you recognise the power of doing the things no one wants to do, you become grateful for it, and that is when it will stop becoming grunt work and instead become a clear pathway to success. Because, ultimately, the one who clears the way controls the direction.

Going back to my personal story at the beginning of this chapter, with the canvas strategy in mind, can you see how powerful putting people first can be?

 Serving is a weapon, not an act of low self-worth.

Learn the above principles, read about those who mastered it and those who wrote about it, apply it in your day to day, and see how your results become transformed.

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask yourself

• What gaps or inefficiencies are present within my team that I can recommend or build fixes for?
• Do I understand the broader strategy and my role within it?
• Does my ego get in the way of contributing to the vision of my team?
• What are the pain points of my manager and how can I ease them?
• What skills or techniques am I observing from people that I can apply later on? Are they effective or not?
• Have I blamed someone or something for my dissatisfaction or rejection? What was my role in it and how can I make sure I learn from it?