Episode 301 - Have you been working hard but feel stuck in your career? "That Career Coach" Kendall Berg shares insights on the hidden rules of the corporate game that no one taught you, but everyone expects you to know.

Renata Bernarde (01:06)
My guest today is Kendall Berg, the founder of That Korea Coach and the author of Secrets of the Korea Game. With over 500 followers across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, she helps people understand the hidden rules of the corporate world and how to thrive in it. Before launching her own company, Kendall held senior roles in technology strategy at Capital One, JP Morgan Chase, Samsung and AT &T.

where she led initiative supporting career progression for thousands of employees. Her insights have been featured in Newsweek, Boss Babes and Business Insider. And of course, she has amazing work at TikTok and Instagram on her own account. And I urge you to go and follow her. She is fantastic. It’s very rare for me to have another career coach here with me on the podcast. So I think for you, the listener, this is just such a treat.

to have two people having a conversation about the work that they do and how they help their clients and what is happening right now in their world as career coaches, supporting clients and having listeners. She also has a podcast. She also has, of course, an audience on social media platforms. I’m bigger on LinkedIn, but of course, I’d love to grow on Instagram, on TikTok as well. I think it’s a great platform to be in.

I’d love for you to listen to what we say and please participate by subscribing to our social media accounts, leaving us comments and giving us more to think about. You your questions really influence the work that Kendall and I do. So we really appreciate you being here and listening to us today. Enjoy the conversation. Take as much advice and tips from us as you can and good luck with your job search.

Renata Bernarde (02:55)
Kenda, we were just talking before I pressed record and I said how much I enjoyed reading parts of your book. I haven’t finished it yet, but once I do, I want to add my review on Amazon because I really think it’s a great book. Congratulations. And the way that you opened the book by saying that most people are playing a game they don’t even know they’re in, I thought was really what…

made me want to interview you because I tell this to people all the time, not as eloquently as you, but I do. And I wanted to know what was your first wake up call that made you realize that you were in the game yourself.

Kendall Berg (03:37)
So it’s a great question and I

appreciate the nice words about the book. My goal is always to give tactical advice and I feel like the game can be very ambiguous. for me, it’s been almost eight, 10 years now, I had hit a level in my career. I was working really hard, I was delivering great work and I wasn’t seeing the upward trajectory that I wanted. And I met with a VP who I really respected, who I thought really highly of and I said,

What do I need to do to get promoted? You guys keep saying that I’m performing and it’s not happening. And he said, everybody wants you on their team because you are so great and so efficient and nobody likes working with you. And he said, until you fix that everybody doesn’t like working with you, you’re not going to see the next level. And

Renata Bernarde (04:22)
Wow.

Kendall Berg (04:31)
I look back on that and I’m so thankful for that direct and open conversation. Like I said, I had a lot of respect for him. It was delivered in a very constructive way of like, I want you to get promoted, but this is what I’m up against and trying to advocate for you. And it showed me how much of my job was the things that I didn’t consider to be my job. It wasn’t delivering the best analysis. wasn’t delivering the best models. wasn’t.

working late or logging on early, it was building relationships where people would advocate for me and I was awful at it. And so that’s when I really realized that there was more of this unspoken part of your job that nobody taught and nobody showed you and nobody communicated. And I had to figure out how to play it. And I was lucky. I had some great mentors at the time who gave me great advice.

I had a VP looking out for me who was telling me like, we really need to fix this issue. And a lot of people don’t get that. They get, hey, you’re great at your job, just keep going, keep going. And then it never works out. And so that’s when I was like, I have got to start learning how to play this game, figure out what it is and what the rules are so that I can decide how I want to play as my career progresses.

Renata Bernarde (05:51)
Yeah, that’s so true. ⁓ It makes me really curious about your upbringing and the sort of ⁓ education that you receive because so many of us, know, my clients, I’m a generation X, you look much younger than me, but we were raised to believe that hard work would speak for itself, right? And I find out so that when my clients are first in the family, so they were the first to go to university, the first to have a white collar job.

They’re the first to live in a big city. They might come from regional areas, regional towns. They don’t have as much of that education that happens informally and organically because the parents also wear suits. The parents also go to corporate worlds and lose their jobs and get promotions and et cetera. So it’s a next layer of

challenge that I face as a coach when my clients don’t have that upbringing that informs them in a casual way how to work operate diplomatically in a work environment. So I’d love to hear a little bit more about, you know, how you were raised, were you raised to believe that hard work would speak to as it for itself?

Kendall Berg (07:12)
I definitely was. And I think a lot of this comes back to the education system as well. You’re right. I think there are some people whose parents navigated this career ladder very successfully and they impart some of that wisdom on or there’s generational wealth and they’re teaching their children these relationship things. But I think the education system specifically teaches you, you work hard, you study hard, you get an A. You don’t work hard, you don’t study, you don’t get an A. And there’s this very output

orientation of if you put in effort, you get the output that you want. And that follows us all the way through college. It follows us all the way through higher education, your master’s degree. At no point do they say, well, your professor doesn’t like you, so your grades going to be worse. Right? It doesn’t work that way in the academic system. And so I was raised, I had one white collar parent.

where my dad was a VP of sales, worked in a traditional corporate environment, built relationships all the time. And my mother was more entrepreneurial, ran her own businesses. And while both of them taught me many things, it was never explicitly communicated like, hey, you need to invest in people, invest in relationships, build these connections, because I don’t know that they even knew they were doing it. It was a very subconscious act, which…

I’m sure you see as a coach all the time. I see it. Some people come to me and without intention have gotten very good at playing the game. They just accidentally were very naturally attuned to it. And I have other clients who come to me and they’re like, I don’t understand. I’m doing all the things on the piece of paper that I was given and I’m not seeing the results. ⁓ I think my, my, well, I had great examples in my parents. They didn’t even know really what they were doing.

And my education was like, you just study more. And you’re like, okay, great. And then you get in corporate and studying is not enough. so, ⁓ to your point about your upbringing, definitely think it’s ways how you address some of these things. And I tend to be a very direct communicator, which there are some corporate environments that really appreciate that. And there are some corporate environments that don’t. And learning to navigate that was part of my personal struggle of, okay,

Renata Bernarde (09:10)
You

Kendall Berg (09:34)
I still want to share my opinion. How do I do that in a way that’s more palatable, more collaborative, more appropriate for my audience without losing who I am as part of that? And I think that’s where some of the complexity with the game gets introduced as well.

Renata Bernarde (09:49)
I love everything that you said. I really like the point you made about education. I’m interested to know, I mean, even though you are taking it as a champ now, I’m assuming the feedback you received must have really hurt at the time. And I am wondering here, how did you change? Were you able to change by yourself? Did you get a coach? How did that evolution happen for you?

Kendall Berg (10:16)
Yeah, so it definitely stung, ⁓ right? I think I’d be lying to be like, it was fine. And I knew exactly what he meant. And then I just fixed it. And that’s not at all how it happened. ⁓ And even in that conversation, he and I left on very positive terms. He actually is one of the people mentioned in the shout out of my book because I do so I am so thankful for that conversation. But I immediately was like, okay, who do I talk to to fix this?

And he said, there’s another woman in our organization. She’s a VP. She used to have the nickname, the Ice Queen. And I want you to meet with her because she fixed it. So she must know what to do. Go spend some time. I remember I met with her in like an abandoned cafeteria on campus and we sat down and I said, I just don’t understand what I’m doing wrong. And she said, how often do you make small talk? And I was like, why would I, why would I make small talk?

It’s such a waste of time. just want to get things done. And she goes, that. So that right there is your problem. She goes, there’s nothing I can do to help you until you start spending two to three minutes at the start of every call doing small talk. And I was like, that seems like such a waste of time. It’s so inefficient. And she said, nothing I say to you is going to help.

until you start doing this. So I start doing it four weeks later, she and I get back together and I’m like, why did that work? She’s like, I know, I know it’s annoying. She goes, I also hate small talk. I don’t want to know about your brother’s sister’s cat who has a cough. It’s not helpful. She goes, but now you see the importance of cultivating that relationship. And I was like, I do. So she was very helpful in opening my eyes to how much I was getting in my own way.

of like this small thing that’s common knowledge that everybody tells you to do. just was so against at my core. And she was right until I started doing that, I wasn’t going to listen to any other feedback. wasn’t going to get any stronger. So that helped open my eyes. And then after that, because I am a math person, I’m a tactical person, like instructions. I started paying attention to what people were doing who were successful at building relationships, who

wrote nice emails, who sounded smart in meetings, who were getting promoted quickly. And I started, I had a notebook and I would write all of them down in meetings. this person said this and I really liked the way that sounded. Or this person did this and it really helped deescalate a conversation. And I started writing them all down over and over and over again, until I started to see patterns. And then I turned those patterns into templates. Okay, here’s how you write an email. It follows these steps. Here’s how you deescalate a meeting. It follows these steps. Here’s how you run a meeting.

follows these steps. And so for me, I very much templatized it and then started applying it. And as I started to apply it, then I got five promotions in six years. And so this issue that had been holding me back was very quickly remedied. And then I’m like, I have to tell people like, this, is so simple. Look at this five steps that you could do that would make it easier. And that’s how I got into coaching in the first place. But to your point about the conversation,

Yes, it hurt, but because we had respect, because I appreciate direct communication, I took it with the spirit of which it was intended and was like, great, who can do this? Like, who can teach me this? And they put me in touch with this female VP, her name was Allison. And she really opened my eyes to what I could do. And then that gave me kind of the kick in the behind to be like, okay, this really is a.

problem and now I can understand why it’s been holding me back and I have to fix it.

Renata Bernarde (14:04)
Yeah. So what you’re describing here is a great example of a growth mindset because somebody in the same situation could have received that feedback and spiral down and you spiraled up and that’s a really wonderful thing to do. And when we say feedback is a gift and you need to be thankful and all of that, that’s exactly what we mean. So if you’re listening and you’ve received feedback and you’re unhappy with the feedback you received,

and you’re putting blame elsewhere and not on yourself. There is usually a two way situation here. I’m talking to the listeners now, Kendall, where you can really use that information. I love what you said about identifying the patterns. I think that that’s something that good coaches always do is, you know, recognizing the patterns that their clients are doing well and showing it to them.

Kendall Berg (14:40)
Yes.

Renata Bernarde (14:58)
So sometimes you’re halfway through a job search and you don’t get the job, know, our recruitment and selection process and you don’t get the job. But there has been so many great patterns during the start of this process that people forget when they get a no, right? And you have to remind them, look, but you converted from application to an interview. You converted from an interview to an assessment center. You converted to a final interview.

those are patterns of success and you have to always remember because they won’t necessarily always lead to the ideal result, but there are still patterns that you can replicate over and over again and get better and better at. So well done.

Kendall Berg (15:41)
Yes. And what I would add to what you were saying to the listeners of if you’re getting feedback,

we want to be defensive. I want it to be defensive, right? I wanted to say, but I’m so nice, right? I want to argue. I’m super likable, right? Everybody is to themselves. And I think a big part of feedback is looking past the words that a leader may use to the spirit of what they’re trying to convey.

And a lot of the time I feel we get really stuck on language, right? Your boss told you that you’re not very good at communication. And instead of going, okay, give me examples, is this written communication verbal? Instead of going into the tactical of how do I get better, we go, my communication’s great, I just did this presentation. We get stuck on the language instead of they’re trying to help you.

They’re trying to put into words the issues and patterns they’re recognizing. And if you can look past the word, you can get to the heart of what needs to be fixed. And I’ll give just a really quick example. A year before this incident where I was told I needed to learn to get along with people, I had a boss tell me that I was a diva. And that’s the exact language that was used. Now, not the best word choice. Okay. And at that time I was like,

take my lunch break and we’ll have to figure this out later because I was so frustrated and I was so annoyed and I was so hyper fixated on this word choice to describe me that I couldn’t see the spirit of what he was trying to communicate and I went and I ate my lunch and I went to the mall and I walked around I cleared my head and I came back to work and I went to the same VP who later told me I needed to work on relationships and I said okay I need to know what this means

And so I’m not telling you this because I’m upset. I’m telling you this because I don’t know how to translate into something I can work on. I was told I’m a diva and I don’t know what that is in the context of work. And he said, he means that you talk too much in meetings. And I was like, cool, that’s super helpful. Like that’s what I needed. Now the word, the language.

I wanted to react so poorly to that. wanted to be defensive and argumentative. was on the verge of tears. I was texting my now husband like, I hate this guy, right? Like you’re so frustrated. But the spirit of what he was trying to communicate was like, I need you to listen more. I need you to talk less in meetings. And if you can put your pride aside enough to get to that heart of what somebody’s saying.

Oftentimes to your point, there’s, there’s a kernel of truth. There’s something true about you that you need to evolve and grow from to get that result. Even if your boss is not communicating it well, and even if your boss is not tactical enough to give you constructive feedback, kind of looking through the mud to find the diamond somewhere in there is really, I think, key to what a lot of people can benefit from feedback, even when it feels a little painful in the moment.

Renata Bernarde (18:46)
Yeah, absolutely right. ⁓ The thing is people are not trained on how to give feedback. Not usually, it’s very uncommon for HR to develop training for managers like that. So it comes out really, they stumble on it. It’s not really ideal, but if you can read between the lines and interpret it like you’ve done, you can really find what the issue is. And you seem to have resolved it because…

Kendall Berg (19:03)
Hmm.

Renata Bernarde (19:15)
One of the things that happened in your career was that you were offered a CFO role in your 30s, I think. So that is not really common. So you must have really solved your problems quite quickly. And I wanted to know what was really going on behind the scenes that allowed you to have that ⁓ career progression so quickly.

Kendall Berg (19:42)
So I always give him a shout out. My spouse is wonderful. ⁓ I find that especially for high performing women, high performing men as well, but it’s really hard to have very fast career progression without a supportive significant other. I just believe that to be true. So he gets a lot of credit for listening to me complain at 2 a.m. about some meeting that I had earlier that day that’s still bothering me. So kudos to my husband. ⁓ But I would say as far as internal development and growth, what was…

I was not aware that career coaches were a thing, just to be totally candid. It wasn’t something common that people I worked with did. I didn’t know anybody with a leadership coach. And it wasn’t until I really stepped into coaching that I realized this world existed, which is why I’m so passionate about it now, because I’m like, man, I could have saved myself so much heartache.

So what I would say is during that time, I was working on building those templates. mentioned earlier, these, these consistent ways of delivering information so that I could communicate my thoughts effectively, but also receive thoughts in a good way. think, especially when we’re a high performer, you, I always say you’re on many steps ahead, right? The high performers on step 11 while everybody else in the room is on step two. But what happens then is when somebody brings up something related to step five, a high performer shuts it down.

because they’re like, no, I’ve already thought about that and at step eight, it’s gonna fall apart. like, that’s not important. And it tends to make people around them feel very discounted because they haven’t gone on that same thought journey to step 11 that the high performer has. And so rather than bringing people with them, the high performer tend to be like, hey, just leave it to me. You guys stop.

I’ll do my job, I’ll bring it back to you and it’ll work. And that’s not very conducive to progression. It’s not conducive to leadership. It’s not conducive to collaboration or effective teamwork. And so what I spent a lot of time doing in the years following my feedback was how do I ensure other people are feeling heard when they interact with me and that I can successfully lead them on the thought process that I’m on, whether we ultimately end up going with my idea or not.

How do I bring them to where I’m at first before I shut things down? And so a lot of it was very much trial and error. There were a lot of very bad meetings still. So if you’re listening to this and you’re like, she got this feedback and she just woke up and she knew how to communicate. She did not, she did not. She still had many a bad meeting where she said something dumb and then chastised herself for it afterwards. But what I learned was a lot of asking the right questions.

explaining people on your thought process slowly enough and carefully enough that they followed and felt like they were connected to your idea. So not just, hey, that’s not important. Listen to this. It’s going to be better. It’s, hey, I want you to explain to me how that’s going to work in this situation. And they start to explain, they go, you’re right. It’s not going to work. And you say, okay, so that was one of my concerns. But I had the same thought process. I was thinking the same thing you were. But what I found is that this is what tripped it up.

So I started thinking maybe this route, would that work? And doing that circular thinking of like, hey, let’s problem solve this together. Because sometimes my ideas aren’t the best one. I always think they’re the best. It’s me. You probably always think your ideas are the best Renata, because it’s you, right? But doing this circular thought process, this give and take I found was much more helpful. So I started doing a lot of that. It helped me grow immensely in not being so emotionally attached to my own idea. I think that’s a big struggle as well.

for individuals who want to move quickly, we get very emotionally tied to our job, our recommendations, our ideas, our innovations. And then when they don’t go our way or when somebody shoots it down or when leadership picks a different direction, we crumble and we become very defensive and very emotional and very reactive. And so putting a lot of emotional distance in, building these circular thought processes to bring people on my thought journey, trial and erroring, a lot of different things and meetings.

And then what I found was as I was put into a position of leadership, because I had taught myself these things and built these patterns, managing was much easier because I could take the thing I had taught myself and I could teach it to somebody else. And it made my team scale very quickly. Now my first team, like any manager, was I the best boss ever? No. Did I still make mistakes? Yes. I probably gave way too much autonomy early on in my career because I expected everybody to operate like I did.

doesn’t really work that way. So there’s definitely learnings there. But as I started leading teams, all of these problem teams, people kept going, ooh, we’ll just give them to Kendall, because she was a problem child and she fixed it. She can probably fix all these other problem children. And that became a very sweet spot for me of like going into areas that were struggling, fixing them, getting them running smoothly and moving on to the next. So when the CFO ship was offered to me, it was very similar.

Company had been growing much faster than they were prepared for. Their CEO was acting as CFO. They had a big team, but they were working nights. They were working weekends. There was no structure and they needed somebody to come in and clean it up and provide a little more stability and a little more direction. And I went through the whole interview process. I met with the board. I met with the investors, the whole gambit. And they offered it to me and I came home and my husband had champagne ready. And he’s like, you got it. And I was like, I said no.

And my husband was like, what? Years we’ve been working towards this and late nights and all the effort and the coaching all these teams and the moving around and you said no. And I was like, yeah, it wasn’t the right fit. I think I’m going to go into tech. And my husband was like, cool. I’m going to drink this. So it was definitely an evolution, but it was a lot of

Renata Bernarde (25:44)
You

Kendall Berg (25:49)
self-teaching, a lot of trial and error. think if you have listeners who are interested in coaching or who are struggling with similar issues, I tell all of my clients that you have to give yourself some grace. You are not going to wake up tomorrow and always say the right thing and always do the right thing and always handle every situation perfectly. I’ve been doing this a long time and there are still meetings where I’m like,

Renata Bernarde (26:00)
Mm.

Kendall Berg (26:12)
Okay, we’ve tried all the things I know how, but I still don’t like you and it’s still not going the way I want, right? There are still times. giving yourself some grace and some peace and some time to learn and develop these skills and then making sure you have resources like Renata, like myself, like the VP who is my mentor, who are willing to tell you the truth in a constructive way and support you as you navigate it. I feel like it’s so key.

to that growth. And I was lucky that I had so many mentors internally who were willing to help me and wanted to support my growth. But the company I went to after that, I immediately had an external mentor. So it’s really navigating that and finding what’s going to work best for you at that stage in your career.

Renata Bernarde (26:55)
Yeah.

So many hard relates to all the things that you’ve just said. And I think that even if you had not received that feedback, it’s really hard to ⁓ enable career advancement when you are in an expert role and then you want to be an executive managing teams and projects and functions because you have to move

away from that level of personal expertise to managing and leading. And that transition is very hard to do, you know, and that’s why so many managers become micro managers, because it’s so much easier for them to remain stuck in the past and stuck in their expertise, rather than evolve into the leader that they need to be to embody that new ⁓ role.

So I have gone through the same and I’ve learned by doing mistakes. In fact, ⁓ one of the things that sometimes bothers me is that some of the people that worked for me in the past will now see that I’m a career coach and say, but she was a horrible manager. So sorry, guys.

Kendall Berg (28:09)
As I say, the first team, if you didn’t search for me, no you didn’t. No you didn’t. Young 20s

Kendall who had no idea what she was doing and I’m so sorry that I did not receive training at that time. Yes, but I 1000 % empathize with that.

Renata Bernarde (28:19)
Yeah.

Yeah,

I keep thinking about this. Like they will see me on LinkedIn and think, what is she on about? You know, she wasn’t that good. But we learned, unlike you, however, you you mentioned you hadn’t heard about career coaches. I grew up knowing I wanted to be a career coach, would you believe? Like from like from nine years old onwards, I knew I wanted to do this, which is crazy. Yeah, yeah. It’s just because we had a family friend who

Kendall Berg (28:33)
Please.

I it.

Renata Bernarde (28:52)
was a career coach and I just looked up to her and I thought she was the cat’s pajamas. So I knew I wanted to do this. So I did a lot of ⁓ writing and putting things down into paper as I went through my career, just like you did. You you did it for yourself and I did it for myself as well. But also because I knew that towards the end of my career, I wanted to be, you know, helping others and mentoring and coaching. I just brought it forward a little bit.

sooner. And I think something that you said in passing, but I would just want to bring back ⁓ to light because I think it’s such a privilege, but also such a great example of being in control of the outcomes of your career to be offered something and to have the power of saying no, because you know you can do something else. You are not afraid.

of moving towards some, in another direction, right? And I think a lot of people that listen to my podcast are not there yet. And that’s where you and I probably want them to go towards, know, to go towards this ability to have an amazing control of your career, which I know a lot of people don’t feel they have. Would you agree?

Kendall Berg (30:14)
Yes, and I tell people constantly that you are the CEO of your job. You may feel like a dog in a machine, but I am the CEO of Kendall Inc. You are the CEO of Renata Inc. And you can decide what clients you take, which is your company. You can decide what work you choose to do. You can decide how much you want to be paid.

Renata Bernarde (30:19)
Yes, you did say that.

Kendall Berg (30:38)
You can decide all of these different factors of your career because you do have control. Now there are outside influences. I call them the influencers in my book, right? And these are the people who decide whether or not you get promoted. They decide whether or not you get put on that big project. They decide what your team is structured like.

but you have the control and the power to change at any time. And I agree with you or not, I see so often clients will come to me and they say, I’m miserable in my job, I just want to get another one. And when I get to the heart of why we’re miserable in our job, very rarely is it the job. A lot of the time it’s people, but when it is the job, jumping to another company to do that same job,

is not going to make that situation better. It’s the same job, different context. And people feel like, but I’ve done this for so long. This is my path. This is what I do. And I trained for years to be a CFO. I took every job strategically so that I could cover all areas of finance. I had done data science. I sat in a control or ship. did all these things so that I was the perfect CFO candidate. And then I got the CFO job and realized I actually didn’t want that.

And that the time and the hours away from my family was not in line with what I needed at that point. I had just had my first child. I think she was about four months old when I was offered the CFO ship. And I was unknowingly to me, six weeks pregnant with my son, who would then be born a year later. And so I didn’t want time away from my young kids and my husband more than I needed to. I didn’t want to be sitting in front of the board every single week for six months while I got this team in the shape that it needed to be in. And so.

Being able to be honest with yourself too, that this job isn’t the right fit, this manager isn’t the right fit, this company culture isn’t the right fit. All the time we’re jumping from a sinking cruise ship to a safety boat and from that instead of saying, ⁓ look if I just wait in the distance there’s a yacht. I’d probably like to take the yacht to my next destination. We just we jump out of fear.

and out of financial security reasons, which I completely understand and empathize with. But if you take that ownership and that stuff back and say, here’s really what I want to do next, you’ll feel so empowered and the version of yourself that you’ll bring to work will be so much stronger and you’ll be so much more fulfilled. So I 1000 % agree with you, Renata, that the decision to say no was not easy. Did I want to turn it down? Did I want those three letters on my LinkedIn? yeah, did, but…

it wasn’t the right move for me. And I was willing to accept that to create the future that I wanted. And if you’re able to take a step back and think, most people who take toxic jobs or bad roles, they go, well, this one thing did happen in the interview, but I overlooked it because I wanted to get out of my job so bad. Or I overlooked it because the pay was so high. Or I overlooked it because of the title.

Usually we know we have that gut feeling and we just ignore it. And so really listening to that inner voice, figuring out what it is you ultimately want. just as a quick aside, I don’t believe in a dream job. I always joke like my dream job would be sitting on a beach, sipping my ties and reading novels. It’s that time, this time, all around me, I will take it tomorrow. But finding something that’s a good alignment for your life.

Renata Bernarde (33:58)
I love that.

Kendall Berg (34:07)
I still

feel as important, even if there’s no dream passion job that everybody needs to be striving for.

Renata Bernarde (34:13)
You will not find the word dream anywhere on my website. You can go through the website and every single blog and there won’t be the word dream in there. you and I are having said that if you listen to Mac Pritchett’s ⁓ podcast, My Dream Job, it’s a great podcast, everyone. No shame.

I really like your podcast and I know he sometimes listens to my podcast as well. So it’s a great podcast. Go listen to it. And it’s a good name, you know, marketing wise, because people do talk about dream jobs a lot. But career coaches often don’t like to use the word dream job for obvious reasons. There isn’t such a thing. So thank you for bringing it up.

Kendall Berg (34:44)
you

Renata Bernarde (35:02)
Now, okay, so let’s be, you like to be tactical. I like to be tactical. People are listening. If they’re listening today and they feel like they have been loyal to their employers for way too long, they’re unhappy. They don’t want to do what you just said, which is to jump ship, just to land on an awful roll. Where do they start? What do you often recommend?

Kendall Berg (35:26)
So I’ll give three pieces and I’ll try to keep it somewhat short. First is give your company the chance to do the right thing. If you have not asked for the promotion, if you have not asked for that internal transfer, if you have not asked for a team, give them a chance to do it, right? I see so many people coming to me and they’re like, I’m miserable. I’m like, well, what did your boss say when you asked for it? And they’re like, well, I didn’t ask. They should just know. They don’t know. Okay, so number one.

Give your company a chance to do the right thing by you and give them a reasonable amount of time to make that happen. Give them six months. Don’t say, I’m quitting in 10 days. If I don’t get promoted in a team, be reasonable with your expectations. Now, if you’ve been doing that in three, four or five years have gone by and you’re not seeing that to fruition, then number two is invest in your network. So people you have worked with over the course of your career who have moved on people on LinkedIn that inspire you or that you respect or that

have a career progression you aspire to. That’s one of my favorite ways to build connection is, Renata, saw you got promoted six times in seven years. You’re a VP of marketing in this division. I’m so inspired by your journey. Would you be willing to talk to me about it? A lot of times, people are much more amenable to that than, hey, Renata, I saw you have a job posting for a marketing generalist.

Here’s my resume, would you send it to the recruiter? They’re not gonna do that. So building authentic connection, warming up your network, connecting with people. Also when you have authentic relationships, they’re more likely to tell you if a job has a toxic work environment, if a hiring manager is difficult, if they don’t think you should take the job. And so again, avoiding those life rafts that might not actually be very stable. We wanna start with authentic connection and then go to job market. So that’s the second piece.

And then the third piece is take a step back and think about what it is that you actually like about work. So an exercise I do with all of my clients is I have them write out three passion statements that are non-technical. So I don’t want your passion statement to be, I love V lookups in Excel. You’re technical, okay. But things like I’m passionate about leading a team. I’m passionate about seeing the outcome of the effort that I put in at work.

I’m passionate about building relationships with lots of different groups, right? Figure out what it is you like about your job from a soft skills perspective, okay? Technical, you have a technical acumen, that’s great, but focus on the soft piece. Because those three statements then become your criteria to take a job, right? I always tell my clients, I’m not a title coach. I won’t get you CEO in six years or anything ridiculous like that.

but I will help you figure out where your alignment needs to be so that you take roles that are going to be good fits for you as you go on your journey. So if you start with those three passion statements and then you look at jobs from that lens and you say, okay, this job is interesting, the title is interesting, the pay is great. Do I feel like I’d be able to see the output of my time and investment? Seems like it. Does it manage a team? Yes. And then you also have your questions to ask at the end of an interview.

Renata Bernarde (38:45)
Thank

Kendall Berg (38:46)
What does progression in this role look like? know, tie two or three passion statements, ask them questions about that to make sure the role is going to be a good fit. And what that will do is it will, it’ll reframe your perspective. ⁓ and to share a quick anecdote on this, I have a client recently, I worked with him. The start of the year was looking to find him a role had been laid off, was looking to do the same thing you’d done before. We reconnected last week and I said, I’m going to be honest. I don’t think you actually like your job. And he was like,

Renata Bernarde (39:15)
Yeah.

Kendall Berg (39:16)
I was like, okay, why are we looking for another one of these jobs? Because the reason you’re not getting these roles is because you don’t really want them. You’re not interested. And so the employers can feel that because you’re doing all the checklist things, you’re getting to the final round, but they don’t feel that excitement from you. So what are some things you’re passionate about? Just like name them. And he starts naming stuff and he’s very into music. And I’m like, great. What if we looked for a role similar to what your experience is in?

Renata Bernarde (39:17)
Yeah.

Kendall Berg (39:44)
but add a company related to music or music production or music sales or music equipment so that you could combine the two. And he’s like, that would make me so excited. Is that a thing? And I was like, it can be, let’s find it. So I signed 15 jobs and he was like, my God, this is everything I wanted. All of a sudden in final rounds for three jobs because there’s that better alignment of these are the things I like at work. What he likes is selling a product he believes in.

Renata Bernarde (39:54)
Yeah.

Kendall Berg (40:09)
but he’s working for an insurance agency where he doesn’t care about the product. So let’s move you to where you are caring. finding out that passion alignment, warming up your network because I don’t, sure you would agree Renata, but Forbes gave an interview, 83 % of roles right now are filled by referral. And so we want to be in that 83 % and not in the 17 climbing an uphill battle, just cold applying. And then if you haven’t given your company the chance to do the right thing for you, give them that chance. And then you don’t leave with regret.

You don’t wonder what if you don’t struggle to get opportunities because you’re leveraging your network and you don’t end up in a hole where the ship is sinking and you’re just sinking with it, paddling as fast as you can, planning to jump to another ship six months later. So those would be my three biggest pieces of advice just to get yourself out of that rut and moving in a positive direction.

Renata Bernarde (41:00)
I love that. That’s excellent. ⁓ You and I work very similarly. ⁓ One thing that I was going to say for the listeners who are a little bit more cynical about things that they listen on the podcast, which is totally normal. I would be as well if I didn’t have the knowledge that you and I have is this, you know, I’ve tried, you know, so many times to get promoted. How did you do it? The reason why I say this is because I have worked with clients and I’m sure you have as well that

tell you that they have tried, you know, to get the promotion, to get career advancement internally, but it’s the way you do it that needs, that needs tweaking. ⁓ Or if you’ve reached out and you know that referrals are important and if you reached out to people on LinkedIn or by message or by email, how was that met? I want to see the examples of the messages that you sent out. So coaches like Kendall and myself can work with you to

help you, I mean, remember what Kendall just said before, the fact that she learned how to do nice emails, right? So those things, sometimes when you are an expert in your field and you’re so focused on outcomes and outputs, you forget that the way that you position yourself, the way that you write to somebody, the way that you communicate yourself ⁓ verbally in writing,

your body language, all of that matters. If you’re applying for a job that you don’t like, that you don’t want to do, there is no way you’re going to get that job because you’re competing with people that really want that job. And the way that they communicate, their energy level changes. You probably noticed this, Kendall, even when you’re talking to people on Zoom, I don’t know if you use Zoom or Teams to do your coaching, but you can tell the energy even…

in the video format, right? In the sort of digital format. Because they will talk about something they like and it’s, you know, that there’s so much energy in their tone, in their voice, in their body language. And when they’re talking about a job or an employer that they don’t like, the energy completely changes, right? How come people don’t realize that that will come across in a job interview?

that we’ll come across in a job interview. So working with coaches to just fine tune that is such a good investment, right?

Kendall Berg (43:29)
Yeah, and you know, with AI, the AI elephant in the room, people are like, chat GPT’d it, and I’m like, okay, how did you say it? What was your tone? What was your body language? How did you deliver it? Did it sound rehearsed? Because to your point, even saying the right thing the wrong way is not going to land.

Renata Bernarde (43:34)
Yeah.

Kendall Berg (43:54)
And I work with clients all the time. I’ve been working on for this promotion for years. They just won’t give it to me. I’m like, great. And they’re like, see, I just asked about it this week. I’m like, OK, what did you say? So I asked what the status of my promotion was. I said, OK, did you ask them what gaps there are between your current performance and performing at the next level? They’re like, no. I’m like, OK, well, that’s probably what’s holding the promotion back, right? So let’s start with getting the answer to that question.

Then we can focus on closing those gaps and proving we’ve closed those gaps and then we can revisit. They’re like, but I’ve asked 10 times, they haven’t said anything. I’m like, okay, but what did we ask? So to your point, I, I a thousand percent agree. There’s a lot of good intention behind bad delivery. And I always say, you know, people think that CEOs like came out of the womb in a three piece suit, ready to take on the board, like ready to deliver a keynote speech. And it’s not true. It’s not accurate.

Renata Bernarde (44:46)
Yeah.

Kendall Berg (44:47)
You know, there are some exceptions today that you could look at and say, these are founders and CEOs who they’re not great at soft skills, are not great at people skills. They just made it because they were exceptionally smart. Right. And so yes, there will always be exceptions, but for the most part, people want to work with people they like.

People want to promote people they like. People want to promote people who their teams like them, right? These are all things that go into that decision because nobody wants to work for the boss who’s really great at their job technically, but sucks at leading. I don’t want to work for that boss. Renata doesn’t want to work for that boss. if you’re, I hear this all the time, so I’m just going to say it it’s my biggest pet peeve. People come and they go, it shouldn’t matter. It should only matter if I’m good at the job.

And I’ll say, okay, would you want to work for a boss who was a terrible leader but was really good at their job? Who micromanaged, who didn’t give you feedback, who never got you promoted, who didn’t advocate for you, who threw you under the bus in meetings but who was really, really good at their job? Is that your ideal boss? They’re like, no. I’m like, okay. So why would someone want to work for you if you’re not a good leader? If you’re not a good communicator? If you’re not good at giving feedback? And they’re like, ⁓

Renata Bernarde (45:51)
Mm.

Kendall Berg (46:03)
Yeah, that sounds bad. And it’s that kind of thinking of like getting out of your own perspective, your own shoes, look at it from somebody else’s and say, would you want to work with you? And a lot of the time clients will go, maybe not. Maybe that one meeting wasn’t my best, my best show. ⁓ So being retrospective, being open to that feedback, I just think is so important to your point of it’s not what you’re saying and doing the things it’s how you’re doing them with authenticity and with.

Renata Bernarde (46:16)
Thank

Yeah.

Kendall Berg (46:32)
genuine care and interest in other people.

Renata Bernarde (46:35)
Yeah, yeah, I love what you said, but I have some sort of thoughts about this that are sort of counter to this that I think just people need to keep in mind. Sometimes you go through a recruitment and selection process and people love you and you don’t get the job. You can tell that they like you very much. Sometimes the recruiter comes across as somebody that could be your friend, even like you’re so happy ⁓ with how you’re performing and you don’t get the job.

And it’s because it is about likeability, but it’s also about trust. And I don’t mean to say this so that you then start thinking, gosh, people don’t trust me. But that’s the way people make decisions. It’s a mix of trust and likeability, right? So if you come from a different industry, but then there is another candidate that is from the same industry.

and is more aligned with the services or products that that company sells. Trust beats likeability, so they might love you and feel really bad about letting you go. And that’s how I want people to walk out of their interviews. I want you to ⁓ leave everything on the table and make them feel really bad to say no to you if they have to, right?

But in a tight market, because we’re in 2025, July 2025, this is not a very good job market for job seekers, right? It’s a terrible year for job seekers. So in that situation, we have just to be careful with that sort of over-emphasizing likeability when trust will beat likeability. Especially there will be industries as well or jobs, where expertise is really important.

where you and company cultures where you’re still hiring the assholes because they’re geniuses. So depending on your, your industry and you’re the expert in your industry. So reflect on this and think, will people still hire a genius, even though he’s an asshole because he’s good at AI, because he’s good at coding, because he’s good. If the answer is yes, then that’s your industry and you need to evaluate likeability plus trust.

as the equation that will get you a job. And I think that that’s just an important message. But then next year could be different. Next year could be all about, okay, we are in a much better position. That jerk that we just hired, let’s let him go because we can’t stand him anymore. Let’s find somebody better to work with. Right. So when the business sentiment changes, usually we get rid of the people we don’t like, even if they’re good at their jobs and we hire better people to.

you know, have a better company culture and a better work environment.

Kendall Berg (49:25)
Yes. And I love the contrarian thought here because in an interview, I 1000 % agree with you. It is a balance of trust and capability and likeability, proving you’re capable of the job. have the experience, you have the knowledge, or you have a plan on how to get the knowledge and time to be successful. Absolutely. In the interview to your exact point.

where I find that starts to break down is post-interview in job. When you’re your who’s very good at their job, you may never get promoted again. And in fact, you may get laid off or eliminated as a result of that lack of collaboration. And I keep using the phrase likeability and I want to be really clear. Likeability does not mean like, we have all the same hobbies and we wear the same clothes. I mean,

Renata Bernarde (50:11)
Yeah.

Kendall Berg (50:13)
We can collaborate together effectively. You hear my opinion and I hear yours. There’s mutual respect or communication is clear and open. I can tell you feedback without fearing for negative consequences. That’s what I I say likeability. And so I agree with what you’re saying or not in an interview that must be balanced with technical capability and execution in your job. If you want to progress and get promoted, you cannot do one without the other. You cannot just be the work who’s good at their job.

and be horrible to everyone around you and expect to get to senior levels of leadership. You might make it to mid management, just coasting our expertise, but then you’re going to get stuck because nobody wants to put a director over division who’s horrible, right? Sometimes it happens on accident, but they’re usually very good at managing up. They’re just very bad at managing down. ⁓ building that skill, that communication, I agree with you, can be more important post interview.

Renata Bernarde (51:09)
Yeah.

Kendall Berg (51:11)
But in interview, having a balance of both. And I had an executive tell me this once and I always liked it. He said, at some point in your seniority, it becomes more important to have good chemistry than it does to have expert capability. But until you’re at that point, we pick capability over chemistry. And I do really like that. And I believe I quote that in my book as well, because it is, you’re a CEO level, it’s going to be a chemistry thing.

Renata Bernarde (51:30)
Yeah.

Kendall Berg (51:40)
Right, you have to be able to make decisions, you have to be likable, you have to be able to deal with the board and investors. You’re a mid-level manager over a coding team, you gotta have some technical expertise to do that job effectively, right? And so there’s definitely this trade-off point at a certain level of seniority, ⁓ but to your point, it also is very dependent on the job market.

Renata Bernarde (51:59)
Yeah. And Kendall,

it goes both ways as well, unless you’re absolutely desperate for income and money, accepting a job from somebody you don’t like, and you can tell by the interview that it’s not going to be a good fit for you, is lethal. It can be so bad for you because there are red flags during the recruitment process, right? So that likeability factor really goes both ways. I have a client who accepted a job. She didn’t need to accept the job.

She actually had something else going on that was really exciting and she was happy with the work, but the job title and the salary, everything about the other opportunity was grandiose. So she accepted it, but she’s being very concerned about the fact that she never actually liked her now manager during the entire recruitment process. And already I’m seeing the situation. ⁓

unfold in a very negative way. I don’t think that she’ll be able to stay there for not even 12 months because she doesn’t like the manager. And it’s not to say that the manager is unlikable. It’s just not a good fit for her. And yeah, and I think people sometimes need to remember this, you know, myself included. I’ve committed that mistake a few times in my career. And I know that people listening might relate to this as well.

It’s been so wonderful to talk to you. I wish we could go on forever. But if people had to do one step, if you had to give people one thing to do after they finished listening to this episode. OK, subscribe to your accounts. I will link them below. ⁓ What else?

Kendall Berg (53:39)
Ha ha!

So I’m gonna break the rules, I’m gonna give two. If you are in the job market, I want you to work on writing five different scripts that sound authentic to who you are, that you can send people in different situations, whether that’s somebody whose career progression you aspire to, or they work for a company that’s a target company of yours, or they went to the same school as you, or you worked together in the past. I want you to come up with scripts that feel real to you.

Renata Bernarde (53:49)
Okay. ⁓

good.

Kendall Berg (54:12)
not asking for something, not sending a resume, but building authentic connection and start leading with those scripts rather than I’m Kendall and I 15 years experience in financial services and I would like to interview with your company and I’ve attached my resume. Focus on building real authentic relationship building scripts that you can use and starting to feel those out. That would be my job search tip number one. If you’re in a job and you love it,

but it’s not moving fast enough, I want you to find five people who are more senior than you that you can start meeting with on at least a quarterly basis. So this could be your boss’s peers, this could be your skip level, this could be some of your peers that are maybe more senior than you, this could be individuals who work in your broader organization but not in your team.

and start building those relationships, asking them about what they do, asking them about their background, asking them about their families, getting to know them as people and build those relationships because in the end, promotion conversations happen when you’re not there and those people are. So we’d rather have a robust network of people in that promotion room who think Renata is amazing.

Renata Bernarde (55:16)
Mm.

Kendall Berg (55:22)
then have Renata’s manager the only person who can say nice things about her. So if you’re in your job looking to move up, start with the network. If you’re in the job hunt looking for that next job, start figuring out what authentic connection looks like to you and start building those types of relationships instead of just the job search.

Renata Bernarde (55:39)
Awesome, Kendall, I love that. I’m going to leave people with one, one tip here. And it’s something that has been coming up on previous episodes since Troy Salton. So if you go back Troy Salton and then you watch Priya from Indeed last week and Kurt and you the week before, everybody’s saying that the work that you’re doing on ChatTPT is not cutting it. Right. So

The about sections on LinkedIn and the executive summaries on your resumes are sounding more and more generic. People cannot figure out what you do anymore because you’re using chat to be taken away where they don’t really know what to say about you. There may not be enough content that you’re putting in your input to provide a good output, good drafts for you. So please, please work on.

making your about sections on LinkedIn and your executive summaries on your resumes more understandable for the recruiters and the bots in the software system so that they know what you’re good at. So doing that exercise that Kendall has suggested may really help you write things that actually make sense to us. Thank you. We really appreciate it.

Kendall Berg (57:00)
I’m sick of resumes that look like a bot wrote them and tell me nothing about a person. Please stop sending me…

Renata Bernarde (57:05)
It yes, it got to the stage when people book discovery calls with me now and I check their LinkedIn profiles. I cannot make heads or tail of what they’re doing. I think because of the fact that they’re job seeking and they’re updating their about sections and their resumes. I can’t, I don’t know what they do. I, you know, it’s too generic. I’m like, what is it that you actually do? Um, so it’s, it’s quite funny. And I think it’s chat to be related.

or cloud or whatever AI tool you’re using. Kendall, thank you so much for being on the podcast. You can come back anytime. If you write another book, please come back. If you have anything important to say, we would welcome you with open arms. Thank you so much.

Kendall Berg (57:48)
I appreciate it, Renata. This was a great chat. Thank you so much for having me.