Always go over the top and chase excellence, success will follow. Truth be told, I’ve only been working for 8 months so
far, so it would seem early to suggest this, but like a quote from one of my favorite movies, “don’t chase success, chase
excellence, and success will follow.”
This section contains a few questions that have been chosen specifically for you based on your nominations. Answer
these questions in 1-3 sentences.
You were nominated for exemplifying the core value(s) of: Open Communication,Timeliness & Goal Orientation
Before I answer the questions below, I would like to thank whoever nominated me for these values. I cannot thank them
enough for their recognition and it is a privilege to be recognized among all the intelligent, hard-working, and incredibly
friendly people that I work with on a daily basis.
I think this question can be answered in two parts, one regarding the relationship with clients and the other with
colleagues. First and foremost, I believe the common integer for building rapport both externally with clients and
internally with colleagues is keeping their best interests in mind. For clients, as long as you keep their best interests in
mind, you will find yourself chasing the aforementioned “excellence”. When you’re chasing excellence and going over
the top for your client, although I cannot deny some taking it for granted, most would relate and resonate with your
passion and proactiveness in helping them. I feel like people are more likely to trust you and like you when they feel that
you are giving it your all. The same goes for colleagues. Not necessarily chasing “excellence”, but offering your skill,
knowledge, help, or simply noticing their hardship or their emotion is always helpful in building rapport with colleagues.
I do these not wanting anything in return, as I’ve mentioned above, I sometimes go out of the way to help others solve
their issue or offer any type or form of help, simply because I genuinely care and want to make their lives easier in any
way possible.
(I apologize for typing so much, I’ll provide a condensed version if needed)
There are two things that I keep in mind for my communications: being well-prepared and being respectful. Whenever I
try to communicate something to my team, I try to be as prepared as I can be. It is easy to question something, but hard
to provide solutions. People who were in correspondence or meetings with me will likely observe my page-long
responses and proposals. I like to document and relate my findings and thought processes to my colleagues or team so
that they can have the full picture of my concern and proposal.
The second thing is I try to be as respectful towards a person’s role and duties as I can be when communicating. For
instance, during my process of preparing and understanding automation potential for the different legal teams, I try to
understand and learn the existing processes of each team, instead of taking a top-down approach, where the legal
teams are asked to follow what I propose. I believe that the implementation of certain automation or tasks will have a
higher likelihood of success and will be smoother when the introduced ideas or proposal fits seamlessly and takes the
least amount of extra effort or changes to the existing processes.
Due to my position, I have two mindsets for getting things done:
(1) Scheduling the Work
When overwhelmed with work, I tend to keep a list of the work that needs to be done and schedule them ahead so that
no deadline will be missed or time will not be limited for work to be done. These tasks are separated into monthly tasks,
weekly tasks, and are ordered in terms of urgency.
(2) Automation Opportunities
Another mindset that I have is that if certain work takes a lot of time, I ask myself whether there’s an opportunity to
automate that work.
As an example, for the legal team, it takes quite some time to file the applications on the government website. In order
to free up more time for the team to work on things that are more intellectual and less repetition, that was when I
started to explore automation for legal automation. Through exploration and research, both for efficiency and accuracy,
the automation was able to free up plenty of time for the team to perform more intellectual and complex tasks.
