The Career Coven, with Bec & Annie

In the final episode of season 3, Annie and Bec discuss how to approach your first 30 days in a new role. This obviously differs from place to place, and organisation to organisation. Bec gives great tips from the perspective of starting in a larger organisation, whilst Annie gives her best advice having more recently started a new role.

Tune into this episode if you want to hear about;

• Getting the basics of an organisation down - org chart, financials, strategy decks
• Ideas on how to introduce yourself
• Different ways to get to know new colleagues, and build trust
• Mapping relationships within an organisation, and the different stakeholders
• How to go about understanding your initial priorities, and setting your first goals

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Recommendations from this episode:

• McKinsey Report on Onboarding
• Michael Watkins: “The First 90 Days”
• Joanna Lipman and Erika Andersen: Highlight learning agility and asking great questions

In this episode Annie interview’s Tina Kennedy, a former colleague and general all around legend to anyone who has had the true pleasure of working alongside her. Tina has recently started a new role as the Chief Customer Officer at the Ordnance Survey. Prior to that, she led the product and commercial teams at SimplyHealth which is one of the UK’s leading health insurers. She’s held quite the number of senior corporate roles, giving her a lot of wisdom to share.

Tina has an incredible perspective on work, life and balance and this episode touches upon all of that. Annie and Tina also discuss how:

• Tina has approached building her career
• Lessons on progression in different environments
• How Tina prepared to start her new role
• What lessons Tina has to share on working with a family (note, be present).

We’re so grateful to have had Tina as a guest on the podcast, and we hope you find this chat as inspiring as we did.

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Follow Tina here.

This week's episode of the Career Coven is on the non-fiction books that changed our lives. Bec and Annie have a really fun time discussing the books which have had the most impact on them, particularly professionally, as well as going through some incredible listener recommendations. If you’re looking for a reading list to get you through the year, this episode will give it to you.

Our top 5 recommendations:

• Al Ramadan & Dave Peterson - Play Bigger
• Edith Eger - The Gift
• Eric Jorgenson, Jack Butcher - The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness
• Lucy Jones - Matrescence
• Glennon Doyle - Untamed

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The long list of listener recommendations, and our other recommendations:

• Emily Wapnick - How to be Everything
• Bill Gates - How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
• Jack London - White Fang
• John Steinbeck - East of Eden
• Lucy Maud Montgomery - Anne of Green Gables
• Amir Levine & Rachel Heller - Attached
• Sharon Blackie - If Women Rose Rooted
• Herminia Ibarra - Working identity
• Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott - The 100 Year Life
• Margaret Heffernan - Wilful Blindness
• Julia Samuel - This Too Shall Pass
• Brene Brown - The Gifts Of Imperfection
• Viktor Frankl - Man’s Search For Meaning
• Malcolm Gladwell - Outliers
• Ekhart Tolle - The Power of Now
• Michelle Obama - Becoming
• Jia Tolentino - Trick Mirror
• Matt Mochary - The Great CEO Within
• Mary Ann Sieghart - The Authority Gap
• Naomi Alderman - The Power
• Reni Eddo-Lodge - Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race
• Emma Reed Turrell - Please Yourself

Interested in that weird thing where you read at speaking speed we were talking about? It's called subvocalisation and you can read more about it here

Get a notepad and pen as this week's episode is a little different again - as Bec talks us through what’s covered in an MBA. This is in response to a lot of listener questions that Bec gets, about whether an MBA was really worth it. Well, Bec gives it to us in a single episode so buckle up. She covers:

• SWOT analysis
• PESTLE analysis
• Porter’s five forces framework
• Business Model Canvas
• Value Chain analysis
• Profit or issue tree analysis
• BCG growth matrix
• RACI - responsible, accountable, consulted, informed

Bec shares her view on whether an MBA is worth the considerable investment, and candidly talks through which parts have been the most useful and applicable in her career. We hope you enjoy this insightful overview from Bec.

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This week's episode is all about something that many people fear - networking. Bec and Annie reveal how they both feel about networking, and you’ll hear them discuss:

• Is networking essential to success?
• How to plan for networking
• Linkedin…
• Small talk - and whether that’s good networking
• The importance of asking good and open questions
• Active listening as part of networking

Networking and maintaining your professional relationships does not always have to be going to big events - you can tailor it to your own specific relationships. In some cases, it can even be fun activities like cold water swimming. You can make it work for you, so it’s not so daunting.

Fun little extras you’ll get in this week's episode include our tops on how to use Linkedin, as well as learn what gives Annie the ‘professional ick’.

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Recommendations from this episode:

• Kelly Hoey’s “Build Your Dream Network”
• Herminia Ibarra’s “Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader”
• Viv Groskop. How to Own the Room: Women and the Art of Brilliant Speaking
• LinkedIn Global Trends Report

This week’s episode of the Career Coven is an incredible interview episode. We speak to Jas Chambers, who is the President Elect of Science and Technology Australia. Jas is also the chair and co-founder of Ocean Decade Australia. In addition to her formidable professional achievements, Jas is also a mother of three and matriarch of her family unit. In this interview, we discuss what motivates Jas to manage such an impressive personal and professional life.

Listen into this episode if you want to hear more about:

• How Bec and Jas met. and their shared experience in of preventative breast surgery
• The ocean advocacy work Jas does, and why she founded Ocean Decade Australia
• The importance of governance in protecting the Ocean
• The importance of writing things down, and being curious
• How Jas balances her busy work and professional lives
• Jas’s approach to parenthood, with her partner
• Jas’s experience of a legal battle with her former employer

Annie and Bec were both so grateful to have this time with Jas - an incredibly inspiring leader. She is truly formidable, and we learned a lot from this chat. We recommend that you follow Jas’s work via her linkedin.

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In this week's episode we cover values in the workplace, what they are, and why they matter. Bec this week goes completely off the cuff on this as she’s a values pro, and Annie did a bit of soul searching to reflect on what her values in the workplace are.

We cover:

• How values and ethics are related
• How your values can be supported in work, or not
• Our own personal values and how we live them
• How values are different in different aspects of life e.g. work, self, friendships
• How values change over time, including in life transition stages like pregnancy
• Navigating values misalignment
• What we think of workplace values and how they are used

We also cover important topics such as to “wed-shred” or to “wed-dread”, and Bec ponders a potential correlation between how much you get paid, and how harmful the work you do it.

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Recommendations from this episode:

• Brene Brown - Daring Greatly
• Simon Sinek - Start with Why
• Rutger Bregman - Moral Ambition, Utopia for Realists

This week's episode is on the “Let Them” theory. A controversial theory, which can be summarised as a mindset and boundary-setting approach that encourages emotional freedom and letting go of control over how others behave.

At the core of this idea is that you can’t control other people's emotions, so you shouldn’t worry about it. In this episode, Annie and Bec give their hot take on:

• What are the positives of this theory? When is it helpful
• Is this just giving up, and giving up influence?
• What would happen if we stopped engaging with complex issues at work
• How “doing hard things” is part of work, and this theory does encourages being passive
• The benefits of productive rage
• Is “caring a little less” better advice for women than men?
• How this helps people pleasers

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Recommendations from this episode:

• Shameless Media - Mel Robbins and the church of “Let Them”
• Mel Robbins, The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can’t Stop Talking About

In episode 2 of season 3, we cover the long awaited topic of burnout. This is potentially Annie’s favourite thing to talk about, as she considers herself often close to a burnout episode (and this is not a point of pride).

This episode covers:

• The 3 dimensions of burnout
• The “double shift” that women do at work, and at home
• Annie’s personal experience of burnout
• How burnout changes your brain, and how your brain recovers
• The importance of social connections in the recovery from burnout
• How to prevent burnout
• When burnout means you should leave your job

Also learn about Annie’s hen-do, Bec’s view on sound baths and whether she will step into a renovation project or not.

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Recommendations from this episode:

• Christina Maslach, The Maslach Burnout Inventory – emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment.
• Arianna Huffington, Advocates for microsteps in her work at Thrive Global to counter burnout.
• McKinsey & LeanIn.Org, Women in the Workplace 2023

We’re starting season 3 of the Career Coven strong, with an episode on having a personal career advisory board. Get the expert take on the value of career advisory boards and learn about how we’ve both approached having career advisors around us.

This episode covers:

• Why women need a personal advisory board
• How important advisory boards can be in periods of transition (e.g. return to work, navigating maternity leave, changing roles or organisations)
• How to choose your board members, and how to balance them
• How to ask someone to be on your board
• How to maintain relationships with advisors
• Who is on our own advisory boards (beyond just each other).

Also get the massive life updates from Annie and Bec after a bit of a break in the pod...

Enjoying this content? Please rate and subscribe on your preferred platform, and let us know what you think!

Recommendations from this episode:

• Jan Torrisi-Mokwa, Building Career Equity
• Herminia Ibarra, How to do sposorship right (2022)
• Tara Mohr, Playing Big:  For Women Who Want to Speak Up, Stand Out and Lead (2015)
• Rakshitha Arni Ravishankar, Finding The Right Mentor, Harvard Business Review (2023)