Podcast Ep 3: Krisha Overcomes a Difficult Workplace to Achieve Career Success

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Grant Williams:

It’s the next installment of Letz Create Your Career story. As always, I’m Grant Williams, and I’m joined by Marina Pitisano, who is our … You know, I hate the word coach. Mentor?

Marina Pitisano:

Well, you can say career consultant.

Grant Williams:

I know. You’re a career mentor. You’re a consultant.

Marina Pitisano:

Career practitioner, a career support guide.

Grant Williams:

I’m going to stick with expert, because for where I’m sitting-

Marina Pitisano:

Oh, thank you.

Grant Williams:

… I’m not the expert voice.

Marina Pitisano:

That’s lovely.

Grant Williams:

Well, that’s why you’re here.

Marina Pitisano:

Well, thank you. Today I’m so excited because you’re now going to meet another one of my key clients, or who was a key client is my dearest friend now, Krisha, who will be able to go through and share with us all her story back a few years ago where life wasn’t as great as it is today, quite a difficult time for her. And we’re just going to go through that journey together. Krisha will explain what happened back then and what we did and what we pursued and what was the outcome of all the hard work that we did together. So I’m very excited today to introduce Krisha.

Grant Williams:

Hi, Krisha.

Krisha:

Hi. It’s lovely to be here today, and thank you, Marina, for that wonderful intro.

Grant Williams:

Now, Krisha, I’m expecting with that introduction that sometime there’s going to be a book come out about the Krisha struggle. But can you start us off at the point where you realized you needed to engage somebody like Marina to help you with the progression of your career? What kind of a hall or dark place or struggle street were you in?

Krisha:

Yeah. Great question. Thank you. So I think now when I look back on my career and how things … the ebbs and flows, I think of it as being a bit like an actor where once you get known as a certain type of actor, it can be really hard to get out of that type casting. It was really fantastic to meet someone like Marina because she broadened my scope on what I could do and what could be achieved.

Krisha:

So I had had a corporate role previously and I had worked as a property valuer, so I knew what it was like to work in that kind of corporate field and then being a woman. So my journey is very much about being a mother. So being a woman, I had made a decision to move away from the corporate role because I wanted to be more present for my children, and I made the mistake of choosing a very basic receptionist role, which at the time I thought it would be a good idea. But what unfortunately I didn’t realize at the time is that when you go backwards in your career, it can be almost impossible to get back to where you were before you took that step back.

Grant Williams:

I was going to ask the, well, I think, obvious question. Why would you think that a receptionist role, which is usually a general dogsbody, you’re the last to leave, you’re the one cleaning everything up, you’re the one doing all the research for people who are too lazy to do it … What made you think that that would be a better option than perhaps taking on a part-time or some other allied role using your valuing skills, which I would’ve thought would have left the whole property market open to you and all those kinds of roles?

Krisha:

Yeah. Again, I think, for people on the outside, they see lots of potential, but actually when you’re in the role itself, it’s not as expansive as you might think. So when I realized that I wasn’t happy working the 60- to 80-hour weeks that were required at the time, it was not really … I then did actively pursue a three-day-a-week option, and after 12 months of looking, it became apparent that those roles simply did not exist. So that was in the early 2000s, so about 15 years ago.

Grant Williams:

It’s a really interesting hoodwinking job that … I don’t know whether it’s the sort of employment or career industry or whether it’s just a general societal con, but the idea that there are lots of flexible jobs out there for people to contract their hours is just a myth. Nearly everyone who takes on a part-time role, unless it’s heavily codified in a big company with strict a HR department, will be lent on to work an extra hour, an extra hour and a half, every day come in a bit earlier, and your 20-hour-a-week job ends up being 35, 38 hours anyway, and a lot of it unpaid. I mean, is that just a view I’ve got that is wrong, Marina? Or do you think that’s quite normal?

Marina Pitisano:

I think you’re right when it comes to organizations that have got the HR department and their very set roles in the sense that they’re part-time or they’re job share, but probably what you’re alluding to is more smaller business or business owners where they’re working on small teams and therefor the requirement is to do that extra. Krisha’s talking about quite a few years ago. Now with all the redundancies and the changes, the people that are left behind are required to pick up a lot more of the requirements, and therefor their hours are being stretched, and it’s getting quite difficult because more and more people expected to do more. There’s more overtime, and if you are working three days or even five, most people are saying they’re working 60 to 80 hours. So yes.

Grant Williams:

Krisha, did you suffer the problem of wages theft, which I think has become a business model for a lot of businesses now? I mean, we’re seeing a lot of them through the courts. I mean, 7-Eleven is about the biggest one that we’ve seen where people are deliberately not paid for hours that they do, they’re forced to roster on. But hospitality operates that as almost a standard business model, and we find every other month there’s another high-profile business that’s being not only sued, but they’re having the judgment made against them to repay the money. Did you suffer that in your receptionist position where you had to work but were not paid for the hours that you were working?

Krisha:

Thankfully I was working for a large government organization and that was not appropriate, so thankfully I was able to work within the set hours. Probably the thing that I would say that I haven’t heard people talk about so much, which I think is an emerging issue within government is what we call the VPS caste system. So the VPS is the Victorian Public Service. You can also sit in the APS, which is the Australian Public Service. Probably it happens across most large organizations, so your IBMs, your Microsofts, those sorts of organizations, where you will be set at a certain pay band and you’ll be allocated certain responsibilities, and people will just see you as only having that ability.

Krisha:

So the workplace is very horizontally structured in that sense that you can only think to a certain pay band, and if you have initiative or if you have ideas or if you see opportunities for growth, you will be hit with a sledgehammer and you will be told that that’s not a great idea for you because you don’t know your place in the food chain. So I wouldn’t say that my concern was so much about exploitation in terms of hours of work, but more just if you did, for example, come up with an idea or you did a whole lot of research or whatever, you would then have to explain that to your director, and then your director would go forth with those ideas as their intellectual property. So there was no way for you to actually demonstrate your capacity in that role, which is in some way a form of keeping someone in their place.

Grant Williams:

That’s pretty common in the corporate world too, where a lot of times your contract says whatever you come up with, any idea, isn’t yours, it’s the business’s. So of course the manager up the chain takes credit for a good idea.

Krisha:

But there’s also another part to that Grant, which … So there’s conceptual theft or IP theft, but there’s something else that’s going on there and that is that it’s almost a form of keeping you in your place. It’s almost a form of workplace bullying where it’s like you couldn’t possibly be able to think of something more, and if you could, you couldn’t possibly have the wherewithal to go into a meeting to talk about it. So you just stay at your little desk and do your little job, and we’ll just go off and talk to your ideas. That is incredibly disenabling for women over time. So if you go through that year upon year upon year, then you will start to contract and you will start to believe it, because that’s what that kind of corrosive work culture does to people.

Grant Williams:

Was the environment you were working in … Did it have a mix of public servants and then ministerial or departmental advisers who were actually outside that pay structure and that responsibility structure where they’re on individual contracts and have different performance bonuses, and really they’re part of your team, but they’re not part of the institution?

Krisha:

Couldn’t comment on that simply because I was so far in my little corner.

Grant Williams:

Was it an actual cubicle in a corner?

Krisha:

It was a pod within a cubicle.

Grant Williams:

Marina, what did you identify when you first met Krisha as being the things that had to be addressed first to help her in … I mean, the way I see it, not only a professional crisis. I’m probably overplaying that, but it’s sounds more like a personal and confidence crisis as much as anything else. So where did you attack the problem first?

Marina Pitisano:

Well, it’s interesting that Krisha’s mentioned some of those concerns that she had when she was working back in that environment, and I think this is what we see a lot of is that restraint and that mindset that, “I have to keep small or my environment keeps me small.” Meeting Krisha, she has amazing skills and amazing mindset and mind. So she’s quite strategic, she has a lot of capability, and to hear her say to me that, “The organization is keeping me in this way of working,” I was quite disappointed, because this is, I think, an example of people working in organizations where they have so much capability, so much ability like Krisha and not being allowed to fly or innovate or really create and being kept in that situation.

Marina Pitisano:

I think I still remember the conversation around checking in with her and saying to her, “You do know that you’re far more capable than that, you do know that you have an amazing mind, and you do know that you are very strong and quite strategic.” I always remember, Krisha’s got beautiful blue eyes, and I could see the dullness in her eyes just start to sparkle by thinking, “Really?” like, “Are you sure?” What a lot of my clients tend to say to me is, “Oh. I didn’t know that,” or, “Oh. I didn’t know that I had that about myself, and thank you for validating that.” So it’s about that validation of you’re far more capable and you have so much more ability. Why are you doing this to yourself?

Grant Williams:

Krisha, what was the timeframe of when you left the valuation industry or role and when you realized you needed to speak to somebody like Marina in that receptionist role?

Marina Pitisano:

No. Krisha came to me when she had already gone into … She had moved from that. I think the history was she had gone into reception and now had gone into a government role. So she was in a government role when she came to see me.

Grant Williams:

So, I guess, the point of the question is finding out did you feel that confidence in your own ability and your own skillset being gradually bashed out of you day after day, week after week? What was that light-bulb moment for you where you thought, “I really have to make a change with where I work and how I’ve placed my life”?

Krisha:

Just bear with me. So I think that, for me, the fact that I had worked as a valuer always gave me that sense of self, that I could go and do things, but it was like sort of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and as that corrosive culture that I was in kept encroaching on me, it was like that light just kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

Krisha:

I was applying for roles, and it was a time when there was a lot of reduction of roles in government. So it meant that there were more and more people applying for less and less roles. Also, there’d been a lot of cut down in Canberra, which meant that a lot of people who would have been happy working for the APS, the Australian Public Service, were also competing for Victorian roles. So-

Grant Williams:

Probably all other states as well.

Krisha:

Potentially, yeah. So it meant that there were people that were applying for the roles that I was applying for that had come from much more senior roles, and because I’d been stuck in that admin role, it was just getting harder and harder to get traction. So I had been applying for roles consistently, I think, for about a year.

Grant Williams:

A long time.

Krisha:

Yeah. It wasn’t that kind of slack once a six weeks. It was diligent commitment, and I just was not getting interviews, and I was like, “What is going on here?” Something that I learnt from valuing, which I really want to talk about today, is that valuing is a predominantly male industry, something like 93 percent male. What I learnt from that industry is that men come together and nut problems out really well. So if they came across a property that they just didn’t know how to nail it, they would talk and share ideas, and I really enjoyed that collegial practice.

Krisha:

Then when I went into the government role, which is predominantly women, I felt that instead of women working to that sort of way that women sometimes work together beautifully, but in this environment they didn’t, and they didn’t share their ideas, and they didn’t work together to look at what the best solution would be. So I felt that that was shutting down for me too, that sense of nutting things out with your colleagues. So I was becoming increasingly isolated within my workplace.

Grant Williams:

Can I ask, just jump in there on the nature of the two different professions, let’s call them? I’m guessing that because valuing was mostly men, and I’m guessing that most of them were not young men, I’m going to make an assumption that it’s quite a static profession in terms of who’s in it over a period of time. Is that mirrored in the admin space in the public service?

Krisha:

I don’t think it was an age issue. I think it was that-

Grant Williams:

It’s the static movement of personnel that I’m interested in, really, that valuing, and I know certainly in regions and whatnot, a lot of professions, the same people are in the local representative bodies and whatnot for 15, 20 up to 30 years because there isn’t that movement of people out. The top layer stays in. I guess what I’m asking is, is the same thing in your experience present in that admin band that you were familiar with in the public service?

Krisha:

Yeah. It can be. You could see women in that same role doing that same job for 20 odd years. Wasn’t unusual.

Grant Williams:

So there’s a bit of territory marking going on.

Krisha:

Could be. Anyway, so then I noticed that my world was getting smaller and smaller, but what was great was, in my personal life, my daughters were going to school and I was meeting a lot of community members, and one of my community members, the woman who lived on the other side of the laneway behind my house, she said, “You know what? I noticed that you’ve been really struggling to get work,” and she recommended Marina, and she said, “I hope you’re not offended. It comes from a good place. I worked with Marina, and Marina was really good for me,” and so it was a recommendation, and I was really grateful for that recommendation.

Krisha:

I have since passed on recommendations for other women who I’ve seen in similar situations to go and meet with Marina, go and have a cup of tea or coffee or whatever, because what men do well, which women for whatever reason are losing our aptitude to doing, is sharing our resources and saying, “Hey. Go and check this out. This is really useful.” So that was the aha moment when the neighbor said to me, “Whatever you’re doing is clearly not taking wind for you. Maybe go and speak to someone.”

Grant Williams:

Can I ask you both this question? Do you have a theory on why it is that educated, professional, experienced women aren’t sharing? Do you have a-

Marina Pitisano:

I do. I believe that that’s more for individuals or for more maybe women in a corporate environment, because in a business environment we are encouraged and supported to share resources and to reach out. So we have a lot of women networks, women community groups and a lot of support as we drive our business.

Marina Pitisano:

It’s interesting, Krisha, thinking back of when I was back in corporate. I think it’s the nature of the environment in the sense that it’s a hierarchy, so we’re moving up. There might not be a lot of trust in the culture, so you have to fend for yourself to some extent because you need to get ahead. I think, in some ways, there could be some political play that goes on because you’re trying to move up the hierarchy, and it’s a difficult space. So therefor it might feel that you’re on your own rather than collaboration.

Marina Pitisano:

I felt, even in my time in corporate, that men were still very supportive. I could turn to a man, and I could turn to him to … I had always senior leaders and I’m … We’re talking about 20 years ago. I left corporate 10 years ago. So the hierarchy was more male back then, and I felt that I could always go to a male to help me promote my career. It was harder. Women were trying to battle. Women were trying to get up into those senior roles. They had to stand their own ground, so therefor it was them trying to lead the path for others. But, I think, sometimes they forget to come back and share their journey or come back and help others. So I think that is where I think it’s more in the corporate space rather than in the business space.

Marina Pitisano:

You have to remember, in the business space for women there is no glass ceiling. We can all be millionaires tomorrow. There’s no reason for us not … We don’t have a boss. We don’t have a structure. We don’t have a hierarchy. We can do whatever we want to do. I think that’s why we can call on others, whereas in corporate it’s very much about how do I play this game for me to get ahead. Sometimes you’re doing it on your own or you need to drive it on your own because that’s how you feel you need to do it, whereas I think men have the collaboration of other men to support them.

Marina Pitisano:

I am still very disappointed that after 10 years I’ve left corporate the same information … I’m still getting the same information about leadership and hierarchies. They’re still echoing the same things, so I don’t think much is changing, but I’m hoping that, as women become more senior and women can path more opportunities, they will turn back and share those journeys and lessons and learnings with other women coming through. I hope we could become more role models for them.

Grant Williams:

Krisha, can I ask you what the organizational place was? That’s the wrong word, but was it hierarchical in the public service? Or was it sort of trying to be flat with everyone in teams and just having a designated team leader reporting to one manager? Or was it far more progressive in terms of who you had to feed an idea to and then where it went? Do you understand that? I mean, we’re talking ’90s, early 2000s. There was a huge move to take away hierarchy in larger businesses and put everyone in flat structures, and I know … Well, I was in local … or involved in local government for a while, and that all happened as part of the competitive tendering processes where it was all about squashing costs. How were you placed in an organizational structure?

Krisha:

You only spoke to your line manager about ideas. You would not go to your line manager’s manager.

Grant Williams:

And was that collaboration of people on your level? Or was that just you just did what you were asked to do and just did your work?

Krisha:

You just did your bit. You did your bit.

Grant Williams:

Okay. So it was a very traditional employment structure? Well, in a public service point of view.

Krisha:

Yeah. I mean, I don’t really know what you mean by traditional, but it was very-

Grant Williams:

Well, I guess that’s always been my view is that here’s your job, here’s your role, here’s your job description, and either each day or each week or each month you’ll be given stuff to work on, you’ll be tasked, and then you did that stuff and you’re handed it up or you put it in the tray and someone else came and collected it.

Krisha:

Yeah. It was that sort of thing. I guess the reason why I was talking about the way that men naturally have their collaboration is because I wanted to make the point that, for women, going and seeing a career practitioner is something that you may have to be willing to go and pay for that service, because chances are you may not naturally have that in your ecology. So sometimes, unfortunately, it’s the people who are disadvantaged that then have to go and pay for those privileges that men often do experience in the workforce. So it’s a bit of a double whammy from a structural perspective that the very people who ideally should have access to career practitioners are in fact the ones that have to go and forsake a meal a week or whatever it is they have to do to go and access those resources.

Krisha:

But unfortunately that was my experience that if I hadn’t have gone and spoken to someone like Marina and if I hadn’t have come up with those funds, whatever it was I had to do to get to them, I don’t know that I would have actually progressed out of where I was. So it’s one of those awful systemic issues that we are dealing with, that if you’re privileged, you have lots of people around you all the time who are giving you career advice without you even knowing it, when you’re out on the golf course or when you’re at the pub or when you’re out for dinner at a barbecue. I simply wasn’t accessing that sort of information, and I had to pay for it.

Krisha:

I think that people feel ashamed of the fact that they have to go and pay for a career practitioner. They feel frustrated that they’re not necessarily knowing how to go and do things, and I think that is really something that in Australia we really need to address that. How do we move into a space whereby we can encourage people to go, “You know what? I don’t give myself a haircut. I’m happy to go and get to the hairdressers for a haircut. So why am I not going to a career practitioner if I don’t know what I need to do to progress my career?”

Marina Pitisano:

That’s a really good point because that is why I have the women that are in the workplace and then seek me out or seek a career practitioner. It’s all those frustrations. It’s the fact that they’re being overlooked or they’re waking up one day and realizing that they’re doing similar things for a long period of time and they want to do more, but they don’t know how to do it and they don’t have that support structure around them or who they can trust. So they then think, “I need to reach out to a professional or someone that can really guide me, because I’m really at a loss on what I have to do.”

Marina Pitisano:

If they’ve been trying for a long time, which is what happened with Krisha, they’re not sure what they’re doing wrong or they’re not sure how they need to promote themselves, because they’ve actually not done it in the workplace. They’ve not had the experience to have these conversations around validation and also being able to stand up and say, “I can break out of this box, I’m more than this box, and I can do more,” and being able to be heard, but also to be able to say that with conviction. They’re really struggling with that because in most cases they’re not being supported or they’re not being given the opportunity, so they don’t believe it.

Marina Pitisano:

So when you have to go out and sell yourself or try to aim for that promotion, you don’t have the belief or the resources to do it because that’s not been part of the environment or culture you’ve worked in. You limit yourself to your box, and you stay in that box until you realize, “I’m really getting frustrated here. I am not happy anymore.” It’s impacting their life. Their stress levels have gone through. They might end up even becoming ill and getting anxiety, and it’s at that point they realize this is becoming very toxic. “My job is toxic, my environment is toxic, and I feel toxic. I need to get out.” That’s why I would encourage people to not get to that point is to always focus, in every part of their career, on their career and start to look at how can I always look forward?

Marina Pitisano:

One of my blogs that I wrote was very much about 14 ingredients to manage your career. The first thing is always think about the future. What is it that you want to do in the future? Think about how you need to set yourself up for success, and really focus on that, because I think a lot of people have their heads down and bums up. They’re just getting through day by day. They know the tidal wave is coming, but they don’t want to see it. They’re just going to wait for it to wipe them out, and once you get wiped out, it’s takes a lot to come back, especially if you’ve worked in that toxic environment. So it’s really critical to always stay ahead of the game and be prepared and think about what you want to do in the future, and that way then you can break out of that toxic environment.

Grant Williams:

So, Krisha, once you’d been encouraged to make contact with Marina and you did that, when did the sunshine start to appear for you?

Marina Pitisano:

I can remember that.

Krisha:

It wasn’t long. Wasn’t long at all, was it, Marina?

Marina Pitisano:

It was one [inaudible 00:00:32:35]. I still remember where I was standing. Krisha rings me and tells me the story, and I’m just sitting there like, “Okay, Krisha. What are we going to do from here?” Do you remember that?

Krisha:

Tell me.

Marina Pitisano:

Shortly after we had the initial conversation, we had a few more conversations, because it’s wonderful talking to Krisha having nice conversations because-

Krisha:

Wonderful talking to Marina too.

Marina Pitisano:

… our conversations would go to many different places, but more so about opportunities. There was an opportunity in government that she wanted to go for. It was a short-term contract. It was something that required her Excel skills-

Krisha:

Oh, yeah. That’s right.

Marina Pitisano:

… and we prepared for it, and she was quite strong and quite …