Conversation with a newly graduated young man

I would like to share with you the important impacts of two good behaviours within the professional sphere; such as to be fair to others and to use self-motivation, hoping that you will find it useful for your future.

At this stage of your life, you should focus more on your behaviours rather than on your knowledge.

Look around you. The important companies, the Human Resources experts, don't hire or fire management teams regarding only on their knowledge;

Of course, the knowledge is important. But in many cases, you already have it or when you chose your sector, it improves easily and quickly, especially if you work hard.

The Behavior in our professional and personal life is much more important. It is your differentiation with your peers. Examples of behaviours: how you approach people and the kind of impression you give them? Are you too much arrogant or too passive?

Are you too eager to success and show it too much? Most importantly, are you fair with your subordinates, with your peers, with your bosses or team members? Are you ethical in your business and personal life?…

These qualities are difficult to detect immediately by your company but fundamental to design your career even in short term. Most importantly, your happiness will depend on them.

What I can advise you is to try to know well yourself objectively and try to work on your habits, your grey areas of your character. The objective is not to hide your grey areas or change them completely, but to constantly improve them and compensate them with your strengths.

To make this general advice more concrete, I will mention 2 behaviours, as I noticed their importance many times in my life:

Be fair to others:

The idea is the same in professional life and in personal life. Because of the nature of the occasion, I will speak about the professional part.

It is extremely inefficient and destructive to treat people in your team with different standards of accountability and performance.

On contrary, when you treat your employees fairly, they focus on navigating the challenges in front of them. And two things happen: Your employees notice it and respect you for that. Your reputation for fair play reinforces their belief in you. Second, the people who you treat fairly will respond in kind. You would teach through your actions and modeling the Behavior of "fairness" in the workplace. And this is very important.

Use self-motivation:

My last advice is to practice self-motivation, especially in your first years. In the beginning, you will have a lot of questions on your professional future. You will have many professional connections. You will be influenced with their remarks. Most importantly, you will be successful with some of your skills, but you will not do well with others.

It is possible that you will have excellent bosses or experienced people around you, who can show you the correct direction. They can motivate you efficiently. But if you don't have this opportunity, don´t worry. In most of cases, your bosses will not have time to do it properly. So, try to do it yourself. Firstly, be objective and honest with yourself. Don´t forget that when you made a mistake, “if it has not a catastrophic result”, you will not get a very negative impact. In fact, you should tell yourself, that, when you act, you either win or learn, but never lose.

And in your senior years, you will learn that leaders are sometimes alone. For example, there is usually nobody to motivate them. At this stage, you will need again to think about self-motivation.

The main idea of this last point is: Try to discover in your deep interior your improvable behaviours for your professional and for your personal life. Work on them as early as possible.

You will see that success in professional and personal life is not difficult; you should only be aware of it, feel it, catch it.