The Introvert Leader
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The Introvert Leader
3 Things Making You Look Junior at Work (And How to Stop)
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Have you ever noticed when someone looks junior at work? They seem like a kid trying to sit at the grown-up table. Acting junior can seriously derail your career. In this episode, I share the 3 things that make you look junior and what to do instead.
Timestamps
2:00 – Why Looking Junior Is Holding You Back: Looking junior keeps you stuck, making less money, and working on less important work.
3:53 – Sharing Too Much Detail: Curate what you share to fit the audience.
6:18 – Not Prepared For On-the-Spot Situations: Every moment counts, so a little prep goes a long way.
9:00 – Overly Emotional: Big reactions don't have a place at work.
11:54 – Challenge: Watch the people around you and label when they look junior.
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A Brutal Coworker Truth
SPEAKER_00I'm at the office talking with one of my buddies about some of our coworkers on the team. He gets quiet out of nowhere. He says, I've been meaning to tell you something, man. I lean in and softly ask, Oh yeah? He says, Our team really doesn't like you. You aren't friendly or close with anyone but me, and people are starting to notice. I could feel my body start to heat up. I was brand new to the company and I desperately wanted to feel connected and accepted. And my buddy had just told me that my coworkers didn't like me. I was about to spiral hard. In the next 10 minutes, I did something that made me look junior and immediately lost credibility. In this episode, I'm going to show you the three things that are making you look junior and what to do instead.
Welcome And A Hot Concert Plan
SPEAKER_00Hello, this is your host, Austin Hopkins, and welcome to the Introvert Leader Podcast. You ever know something is stupid, but you do it anyways. This weekend, I'm taking the wife to an outdoor concert in the middle of summer, and it's going to be 105 degrees. Now, listen, I haven't been to a show in a few years and I'm Jonesing for some live music. We're going to see Mariah the Scientist and Calyuchis. These two ladies have amazing voices, so I know it's going to be good. It's going to be hot. We're prepping. We got some shade. We got some water. But if I don't survive, I just want to say, hey, thanks for a good run. It was fun while it lasted. But seriously, do you ever do stupid stuff you know is stupid, but it kind of makes it more fun? Uh, anyways, do me a solid click the subscribe button. I want to make sure you get notified when new content drops. Settle in, it's time to learn
Why Looking Junior Costs You
SPEAKER_00something. Looking junior is hard for people to forget. It sticks in their brain and they label you as not ready. People are unconsciously making these mistakes that significantly affect their career. As a young leader, I had to find a way to not show my age. So I want to share with you what I did to avoid looking junior. Okay, you may not know this, but looking junior has massive consequences. I have seen people who are insanely talented put themselves into a box because they couldn't figure out how to get out of their own way. Here are the most glaring problems with looking junior. The big one that stands out to me is missed opportunities. When you look junior at work, you miss stuff. You don't get asked to work on projects because the leadership team thinks you can't handle it. New roles are given to those more experienced folks because you aren't showing you're ready for the next level. And when exciting initiatives get rolled out, you are not the person that they want to run point. The senior leadership team believes you are junior and you can't produce the level of quality output that they would expect. Another big problem with looking junior is that it causes you to miss out on exposure. When you are junior, you don't get that exposure to exciting people, to cool work, to important conversations because you're not trusted in those rooms. Forget about getting invited to that senior leadership meeting because the leaders in that room feel like you are a kid sitting at the grown-up's table at Thanksgiving. Another really big issue with looking junior is that it sends a signal about your reputation throughout the whole company. So mature leaders want to spend their time around like-minded people. The more junior you come off, you signal to others you can't be trusted with the higher-level stuff. So you may not be included in those need-to-know conversations. People will hold back, they'll share just enough of the information for you to do your job and not much more. And leaders won't trust you to take on those high-stakes projects. You are signaling you are not ready for what they need. So I think that's hard to fight against that reputation as well. And that happens in rooms you aren't in behind closed doors, so you don't have as much control over that. Now you might just think, I'm being myself at work, and that should be enough. And being yourself is great, but looking junior is avoidable.
Share Less And Say More
SPEAKER_00All right, I want to get into the first thing that makes you look junior sharing too much detail. Senior leaders need all the details to make good decisions, right? Wrong. Senior leaders need some details, but they make the best and fastest decisions when things are in themes, patterns, and stories. So let's get into it. Here's what this looks like at work. The big one is sharing irrelevant info. So a senior leader asks you for something. Instead of doing the work to figure out what the themes were, the patterns, what the core insight was, you decide to go out of scope, give them unnecessary fringe details because you want to be thorough. Well, the issue with this is senior leaders, they don't have time for that. They want the most important information to make the best decisions. So when you send them unnecessary information, when you go out of the scope of what they asked, when you take too long and spend too much time getting irrelevant info that might be helpful, but you don't know will be helpful, that's actually making you look junior. So at the end of the day, senior leaders need the right amount of information condensed down to what's most important. So the next big mistake I see people make is they focus too much on the micro versus the macro. So at the end of the day, do you not understand your audience? Do you not understand the forum or the context? Are you going too deep and maybe the scene wasn't set and so people don't have enough context? Are you sharing your decision-making process and what led you to everything? Or are you sharing what your recommendation is? You need to understand when it's important to go micro and give details and use those sparingly and curate them. But most of the time, you need to be going macro, saving people time, making those connections already, and then presenting your findings, not showing them how you did everything. People don't have time for that. This shows that you're junior and that you haven't figured out how to tell a story. But here's what you can do instead. I want you to ask yourself these three questions when you go into one of these situations. Who's the audience? Who's in the room? Who am I communicating with? What's the least amount of information I can share that still shows a clear story? And what do they have to know in order to make a high quality decision? Not what would they like to know, not what would they maybe be interested in knowing? What do they have to know in order to make that high quality decision? I get rid of everything else but what they have to know. Now, let's be honest. It's hard not to share too much detail. We want to look helpful and we want to look competent. On-the-spot communication is another way that we show our competence.
Answer Tough Questions With Poise
SPEAKER_00All right, the next big thing that makes you look junior is not being prepared for on-the-spot situations. You're in a meeting with some senior leaders, you're the most junior in the room, and they turn to you at some point and ask, hey Austin, is your team on track for a third quarter launch? What do I say? Do I make something up on the spot? Do I fib? Do I exaggerate? Do I share my real concerns and risk coming off negative? So here are a couple things people do. They ramble versus being concise. So when I get nervous, I ramble. I share more than I need to, and I fill in that empty space with word salad. When I do this, it makes me look junior, right? I'm showing the folks I don't care enough to think about what I'm saying before I say it. It reads as junior and it reeks of nervousness. The other way we really look junior in these moments is trying to fake it. So faking it till you make it doesn't work around strong leaders. They can read right through it. They know you're full of shit and you're wasting their time. So it's better to just admit if you don't know the answer to something. It's much stronger to just say you don't know in those moments than trying to fake it. They would much rather hear bad news than the wrong information. So here's what you can do instead. The first thing you can do is to prepare. I always spend 10 minutes preparing two or three bullets that I can add to any conversation I'm going to. Every important meeting, you should prepare a few talking points. It doesn't matter if you're leading the meeting, it doesn't matter if you're attending the meeting, doesn't matter. Always have a couple of bullet points that you can say ready to go in your back pocket. That way, when you do get called on for a question, you don't have to think on the spot. You're prepared. You're ready. The next thing I highly recommend is focusing. Pay attention to what's being said versus worrying about what you're going to say next. Have faith that you're smart enough to answer intelligently when you're put on the spot. This one is tough, my friends. Focusing on what people actually are saying versus preparing what you're going to say next takes a lot of practice. But I'm telling you, it is much better to be caught off guard with a question that you've been listening to than it is to get asked a question when you're not even focusing on it and have nothing to say and no context. Both are embarrassing, but one's much worse than the other. The next thing you got to do is evaluate. So read the room. Are people being negative? Is everyone speaking positively? Are people bringing solutions? Are they brainstorming? Has the decision already been made? Speak like the people in the room. Speak confidently and make sure that what you say shows a cohesive story and sounds polished or put together. Now hopefully you agree that we can prepare for those high-stakes moments, but we can't prepare for when something makes us overly emotional.
Feedback Without Defensiveness
SPEAKER_00So back to the story from earlier. I quickly stand up out of my chair and start pacing back and forth. All the people who I thought liked and respected me actually didn't. I started to defend myself to my friend, but I could feel the embarrassment and anger rising in my heart. I walk out of the room and I go right next door to my boss's office. He sees me at his glass door and he can tell something isn't right with me. I burst into the door and I told him what I just heard. I'm fully flustered at this point. Red face, I tell my boss I need to go home. I cannot be at work anymore. He starts to ask me questions, but I shut him down. I'm too mad at this point. I pack up my stuff and I walk out. A comment from my friend just made me spiral and lose my shit. In that moment, I look junior. So I want to break down the two biggest mistakes I made in this moment. The first one is getting defensive. When someone gives you feedback or gets critical of your work, it's so hard not to get defensive. I struggle with this, especially when I know I'm right and they're wrong, but I'm learning that even if I'm right, being defensive makes me look junior. It shows that I can't listen to constructive feedback and take it in. Being mature means listening to people, then making the decision internally whether what they're saying holds weight. In that moment, my first instinct was to get defensive and tell him why he was wrong. The next big mistake I made was a big reaction. Overly emotional or big reactions instantly show people you can't control your emotions. So when I stood up and left for the day, I showed the people in that office that I couldn't regulate my feelings. What if I had just taken a coffee break or sat in my office and listened to music? These would have been much better choices, but instead I chose to have a massive reaction, make a big scene, and leave. Here's what I'd recommend to do instead. First one is wait then react. Taking an hour, taking the day usually helps us regulate our emotions. So if someone sends you a spicy email, don't respond right away. Wait till the next day. Someone says something rude to you at work, don't react. Just listen and think about how you want to show up. Do I want to match their energy and be rude back? Or do I want to take the high road, listen, act like it didn't even affect me? The next thing you gotta do is hide big reactions. So work is gonna piss you off. We're tempted to let loose and tell the people off or share what we really think. Big reactions aren't needed. Leave the room, take a walk, tell your spouse about it later that night, have your big reactions. Big reactions just don't have a place at work. And the last thing you gotta do is reflect when you screw up. You're gonna screw up. It's impossible to always keep your shit together. It was impossible for me. I messed up. When you do screw up and you react bigger or louder than you want, just label it as a mistake and learn. It's okay to make any mistake once. It's a problem when you make it again and again. After that day, I never had a big reaction like that at work. I was still upset, but I remembered what it looked like and felt like that day to look junior. And so I made a choice to not make that mistake again. Here's the reality though. Work is important, and when stuff is important, we care about it. And when we care about it, sometimes we get emotional. It's okay to feel stuff, and that's being human. It's just not cool to let your feelings show that you're a
Spot Junior Mistakes This Week
SPEAKER_00junior. So here's my challenge for you this week. I want you to watch the people around you and label when someone makes one of these junior mistakes. Once you can spot these mistakes out in the wild, it makes it so much easier to avoid them yourself. All right, before we wrap up, this week me and Kyle, my partner, just launched a new coaching package called the Foundations program. I'm pumped about this one. So it's for the person who's feeling capable of more, but keeps getting in their own way. Maybe you don't trust your own judgment. You know, maybe you're accepting less than you deserve. Maybe you keep choosing the safe path, even when you know you're ready for more. We spend three months completely transforming how you show up at work. You're going to see confidence on a new level, more money, more opportunities. You're finally going to be able to leverage your unique value to get what you want at work. So click the link in the description if you want to learn
Foundations Offer And Final Takeaways
SPEAKER_00more. All right, I don't care if you're in your 20s or in your 50s, any of us can look junior if we don't watch how we carry ourselves. These little moments we don't think matter can stick with us for years. The less junior you look, the more respect and opportunities you're gonna get in your career. I made a career of rarely looking like a junior, and when I did, I learned from my mistakes. As a result, I was paid more and I was promoted more frequently. I know you can do the same. I want to say thank you so much for listening. Make it a great day.
