7 Ways to Leverage Leadership Skills as A Coop, Lessons from RBC and TU20

Last Thursday, Logan and I hosted a RBC Café Virtual office hours to share some of the things we learned about using our extracurricular experience when working at RBC.

Our goal was to provide some context and tips on how we felt going from leading initiatives, to being entry level workers at a big company. We chose to focus on 7 different themes and share some TU20 and RBC experiences along the way.

1. Taking Initiative 

Every journey needs to start with a first step. Some are more formal, like opening a “how to start coding” website, others we forget because they just happened.

It’s often difficult to take initiative in new environments because we don’t feel as comfortable or know the boundaries.

“If I speak up, will my manager support my thoughts, or will I be graced with silence?”

It often takes experience transferring skills and initiative into a new environment. Those who were leading students groups to take action may find themselves unable to speak up on their first day at a new job.

For everyone who attended our office hours, it’s a great first step on finding a strong peer group and learning from others. Or maybe it was step 14 for many of you, and you used it as a soundboard to validate some of the great things you’ve been doing this summer.

During the office hours we shared some stories about the initiative we took at RBC and at TU20 to compare and contrast our experiences. During my second year as part of TU20, I noticed that there was a gap in opportunities for technology and business students to work together on a long-term focused project. After some light planning, we launched the TU20 cup late in 2016 and the competition is still going strong to this day.

During 2016 I also had my first coop term at RBC and was working as part of the Wealth Management Technology team. I was interested in learning more about backend development during the time and joined an internal side project called study group, which had a goal to have students work on a small project for a business stakeholder. We worked on a small full stack app over the course of two months and I learned how to build a simple API as a result.

 These two experiences did not make me an expert in either topic but did help me learn more about event planning and backed end development, things that would become important to my career later on. 

2. Networking and Community Building

At this point, most students have heard about the benefits of networking, but often there isn’t a coherent vision on why it’s important. Getting a job is what most people think initially, but a single job or internship is just a short part of your career, so it’s important to think about how the people you meet and work with will impact your longer term plans.

At the office hours we discussed three “groups” of people you network with; Peers, Mentors and Sponsors.

Peers are often overlooked, but learning the stories of people who were or are in a similar position as you is a great way to gain perspective and learn key skills. Your peers will have valuable lessons to share, and even if they don’t have the wisdom to help solve your problems, they can be a friend who joins you on your journey. Growing TU20 would have been impossible without the help of peers, and navigating a large company like RBC is very challenging without a group of peers and friends who are in similar life stages as you are.

Mentors and Sponsors have different roles, but frequently are the same people. Mentors help provide coaching, context and guidance on some of the challenges you are facing or might face. They are typically people with more experience than you in a certain domain, which can mean they are older, but that shouldn’t stop you from learning from brilliant younger folks. Sponsors can often be mentors as these are people you ask to support an initiative you are undertaking. They can help surface an idea to other or directly support you, and I’ve often found that your successfully sponsors are those who have mentored you in the past and formed a trusting relationship.

Mentors and Sponsors have been crucial to my experience within RBC and TU20, as a second person who validates your idea is the one who starts a movement. I’ve had many great experience speaking to mentors within different parts of the bank, including my team (Cloud Architecture), HR (one of my interests and degree minors), Business focused teams and various other technology teams within the bank. Each mentor provides a different perspective and has helped me understand a little more with each conversation how to make a difference within a large company.

At TU20 we would have never been successful without immense support from the Silicon Halton Cofounders, our many event mentors and corporate sponsors. Without the dozens of people who have dedicated their evenings and weekends to speak with TU20 participants or the executive team, the organization would never be where it is today. A couple weeks ago we had mentors who mock interviewed 17 students for 3.5 hours straight, a marathon and exhausting task, but made all the difference to those students. 

To be successful in your goals, you need a diverse group of people to support the projects you are working on, but you must also be supportive of others. Community is about reciprocity and working towards a common goal, regardless of who is leading. 

3. Self Learning and Measuring impact

After my 1st year of university, I realized the importance of networking and learning about new topics through discussions. The problem was that I was deeply uncomfortable in speaking to strangers so going to events wasn’t an exciting experience. But eventually I attended TechTO as my first large networking event. The experience had it’s ups and downs, and it took me dozens of events and coffee chats to be comfortable with these kinds of events.

But the impact has been immense. After 30+ events and 100+ coffee chats I know significantly more about technology, marketing and sales. Sales was an area I chose to focus on since selling and building partnerships is essential to building a successful team or business, and without the events I attended and conversations, it would have been very challenging to grow TU20 to our current size and receive the support we have. Some of those partners and employers were initially contacted via a cold call, others took 18 months to formalize their support, but without knowing how to navigate that space, it would be very challenging to be successful. 

Another example relates to my current job. I currently work with cloud technologies, something that isn’t taught in university and usually is an area people enter later in their careers. So getting hired for a cloud focused role out of university required learning more during my internships, watching a steady flow of conference talks on youtube and playing around with tech itself. 

Both of these have been formative to my career and have come identifying a personal growth need and taking action. 

4. Building Credibility + Recognizing Your “Foreign Credentials”

One of the challenges I and other young folks have faced is transferring leadership skills from side or student projects to the workforce. Almost no one gets hired to manage people or projects straight out of university. Even if you led large teams or delivered on awesome initiatives, unless you’ve held a formal employment role before, you won’t be hired to perform similar duties. So what do you do? 

Everything that’s been mentioned before. If you take initiative, build a community and continue to self learning, opportunities will open up!

Eventually you will build a reputation of being a strong performer and take on larger projects. One of the approaches I’ve used is replicating some of the success that I’ve outside of RBC. I’ve programmed fairly complicated things before, so I can continue doing that in my job. I’ve created events and mentored students before, I can continue doing that. I’ve identified gaps and problems, I can keep doing that.

You’ll build a strong case for yourself to garner more responsibility because you now have concrete examples and success stories. At the end of the day, companies want to balance risk and reward, and as young “inexperienced” person, giving you more responsibility, may be seen as high. With demonstrated success, the risk decreases, and more opportunities can open up.

5. Asking Questions And Breaking Down Complexity

One of the challenges many students face is working with ambiguity. In school or rigid extracurriculars, you get small tasks and a rubric and that’s what you have to deliver on. When scaling an organization or joining a company, often you are given problems and find ways to solve them without clear directions. Sometimes, you aren’t even given a problem, you have to foresee problems and look for opportunities!

These lead to challenges that are quite complex and you often need others help to be successful. This is why it’s essential to ask good questions so you can break down complexity. Questions help you learn about things, from subject matter experts or the people experiencing the problem. Often answers aren’t far away, but you just need to ask where to look.

When working at a company whether it’s at RBC or startup, you will make your manager’s and peers lives much easier by being proactive and asking good questions. It doesn’t make sense to work on something with no direction for a week without asking for clarification, there will often be a miscommunication on the first time around and you’ll need to adjust; it’s a reality of life.  

On top of asking good questions, asking for an example or giving your own example is a great way to make sure you are solving the right problem. If your manager asks you for something that walks on two legs and quacks, responding with:

“Ok if I make a duck appear that is grey, has a bill, can fly and weighs 5 kilos, is that you expect?”

With a vivid example you’ll very quickly clarify if your boss wanted a duck, goose or even a chicken and it help clear up any understandings. 

6. Returning As A Co-op

The decision of whether or not to return to a company for another coop/internship can be a tough decision. On one hand, if you’ve had a great experience, then it’s logical to return to a place that’s treated you well. On the other hand, you have a limited number of work terms to figure out what you want to do and where you want to work.

 A great frame work that Logan mentioned (and uses personally) is Impact + Challenge + Trajectory. By looking at the results you can produce, how much you will learn, and if this directs you closer to your goals, you can determine if the position being offered is a good fit.

Some of my thoughts on returning for a coop include:

Pros of returning to RBC

1. You will know how to navigate the bank and can accomplish more
2. You’ve built your reputation and personal brand and are more likely to get more challenging and interesting work
3. RBC is a massive place with wide selection of different roles
4. You likely have a community of mentors and friends
5. It takes at least a month to be on boarded elsewhere, and often longer to be productive

Pros of working a coop somewhere else:

1.  Learn different work cultures and approaches
2. Work with different people
3. Smaller companies often move more quickly and have fewer regulatory and legacy restrictions to think about
4. Work on non finance focused problems
5. The opportunity to return later is often available later.

Personally, I worked 3 internships outside of RBC, but returned for my last one to be part of the Amplify program.

7. Work from home lessons learned

Given the current work situation at RBC and many other companies, we also shared some tips for working from home. TU20 has been running for 5 years of as distributed team working primarily through Google drive and Discord, so we have some tips to share!

1. Keep social activities going - We all enjoy having fun, so lighten the mood with some fun activities with your colleagues and peers.
2. In meetings ask everyone to offer ideas - make sure that everyone has had a chance to contribute, it helps bring out better ideas and encourages people to speak up later on.
3. Don’t stop small group convos - small group convos are often the most and insightful, don't forget to keep them up!
4. Make use of saved time - we're communing less, so enjoy!
5.  Do non-computer things - Screen burn is draining and the world has many exciting things to offer 

Bonus - How To Get Involved

•  RBC Future Launch's website has a number of supported programs and resources - https://www.rbc.com/dms/enterprise/futurelaunch/programs.html
• Reach out to RBC student ambassadors - they are often aware of many great RBC and external opportunities
• Discuss some of the missing opportunities with other students, act!
• Visit TechUnderTwenty.com - We have a variety of year round programs, including our summer TU20 Fellowships and a soon to be announced summer program!
• Join our next Leadership As A Coop series! We’ll be organizing a follow up brainstorming session for students interested in forming a peer group to work on their ideas and discuss ways to make a difference.