Stand Out – My Journey

Way back in January I wrote about my participation in Stand Out @ Shop Direct, Shop Direct’s career development acceleration programme. A couple of weeks ago the programme officially came to an end after we presented our recommendations to the Board, I wanted to share what I’ve learned during the last 9 months..

Public Speaking isn’t that scary…when you get used to it

My biggest fear and quite a common one as we all know. With the exception of a couple of people on the programme who were already quite comfortable in front of an audience, the majority of us had very little experience and shuddered at the thought of presenting.

However, when I signed up for this programme I knew full well I’d be signing up for spending a lot of time outside of my comfort zone.

Our first presentation, to a mere 150 colleagues. Talking about jumping in at the deep end! It was scary as hell. But we did it, and over following months we presented pretty much weekly, whether that was to smaller crowds, the Board or the final balcony brief last week to about a thousand colleagues.

I’m not claiming to now be an awesome presenter, I’m far from it, but you know what, I’m not as bad as I once thought I was and I definitely feel much more comfortable getting up and speaking in front of an audience.

The key overcoming the fear, just keep doing it. But we also did have a little help…

L&D can be fun

Most people’s perception of a learning & development course probably involves PowerPoint, a stuffy room and some binders to take away.  

To help get us more comfortable with public speaking and also to refine our presentation skills we had a two day course with Laughology and the hilarious Stephanie Davies, a former stand-up comedian, who shared with us how the pro’s prepare themselves to wow a crowd.

We learned a stack of techniques to not only make us feel more confident when we present but also how important it is to engage your audience, memory tricks to make sure you don’t forget your key points and that a Curly Wurly can work wonders. We also had a great laugh doing it.

We also spent some time with The So Team who opened our eyes to new ways of thinking and working together. They are some of the most passionate, creative and perhaps overly energetic people I’ve ever met – if you ever get the chance to work with them then you definitely should.

The ‘higher-ups’ are people too

During Stand Out we met with a lot of people in the business, a lot of them at Director or Head Of level. Rightly or wrongly, there can sometimes be a perception that more senior colleagues (in all businesses) are unapproachable and just too important to want to talk to little ol’ me.

How wrong was I!? Every single person in this business, regardless of their title, seniority or role were more than happy to talk to us, spend time with us, coach and guide us. Responsibilities and focus may change as people move up the ladder, but they’re still people – just like the rest of us.

Trust & Autonomy are everything

The biggest takeaway for me from this whole experience. We were given problems to solve during this programme, we weren’t told how to solve them, what we should be looking at, what we could or couldn’t do nor micromanaged.

We were put together into teams, given a problem along with the trust and autonomy to go and fix it. Failure was fine, as long as we did it quickly and learned from it.

We did just that, we tried things they didn’t work, we learned and pivoted taking those learnings with us.

Is Stand Out over?

Hell no! The programme may officially be over but the journey is just beginning, watch this space to see the impact of our recommendations to the Board and how they evolve over the coming months.

I’ll take the learnings from Stand Out throughout the rest of my career, I’ve also met a stack of people from right across the business that I’d never have come across in my day to day, people I’ve learned from and people that have opened the door to new projects for me to get involved in.

If any of my Shop Direct colleagues are reading this and haven’t yet decided whether they’ll sign up for next year’s Stand Out – do it, you definitely won’t regret it.