are you in the first years of your career and often sitting in meetings but you're often not really sure how can i contribute how can i join the conversation how can i really add value this is a feeling that many young professionals have and in this video i'm going to share a couple of tips and tricks based on my experience having worked in consulting at mckinsey for about six years on what you can do to succeed in meetings as a junior consultant or as a junior guy in corporate or in any other role similar to that so welcome to another coffee break here on my channel firm learning my name is heinrich and on my channel i want to help you to become successful in the first years of your career so we're gonna share three super tangible and actionable tips and tricks of what you can do to succeed in such a meeting as a junior and for every tip i will share a little very personal story based on what happened to me in my professional life to really illustrate these points and then based on these little stories i will always extract the learning which i trust will help you because for sure these were learnings which were really valuable and insightful to me but before we jump into it i want to introduce you to the sponsor of today's video and this sponsor is skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes for creative and curious people you can explore new skills deepen your passions and get lost in creativity there are classes on marketing personal branding presentation skills and many more all of these are topics that are highly applicable to a career in consulting banking or corporate and the best thing is that i made a slight writing class for skillshare so you can access and enjoy it as a skillshare member personally i recently took the class productivity masterclass principles and tools to boost your productivity from the fellow youtuber ali abdal it's a great class it taught me many new aspects of productivity and i very much enjoyed 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who was organizing it from the client side i discussed it with him a little bit i helped him draft some of the materials for the workshop but then it looked all good the workshop was prepared and then it was happening on the workshop day the client was the leading the workshop and i was pretty much just sitting there i was still a young associate he was presenting everything and i tried to make a couple of remarks and comments which i felt like were probably smart and were adding value but the truth also is that in this long workshop i didn't really add much to the conversation and this is then indeed also a point of feedback that i got from the project lead after the workshop and she was telling me well heinrich you were a bit too passive you were not active enough as an associate it should have been your role to shape the whole workshop a bit more so what i realized from this episode is that what i didn't do what i should have done is to clarify my role before the meeting this is indeed the first tip that i want to share with you make sure that you clarify your role and this is true both for external meetings but also for internal meetings so often you're sitting was in these internal meetings there are some partners some senior partners the project lead and then you are sitting there as a young associate as a young consultant and then often you are lost i mean what are you supposed to add to the conversation right and indeed then especially when also clients are present then it's often the task of the project leader maybe even the partner to moderate the discussion and often in these situations you are as the junior guy also not the deepest subject matter expert at the topic that is being discussed so on the content level you will also often struggle to really participate and to add value especially in these situations where all these other senior guys are present so my advice is that before these meetings are taking place talk to the responsible person so this might be your client counterpart or maybe your project lead if now you're walking into an internal meeting with all your partners and really ask them how can you at value what should your role be and maybe make some suggestions what you believe you could do and just some examples so what could you do so for instance if you present a larger document maybe you agree on a certain section in the document that you will present that you will lead maybe there will be a certain flip chart session during the workshop and then you can leave this little session collect all the questions steal the whole discussion maybe you will be the one who writes all the notes and then in the end writes the meeting minutes so all of these are little things that can increase your participation your activeness will also increase your visibility and if you are regular watcher of my channel you know how important in my opinion visibility is for your career success and i especially made one video about this topic of visibility i will link it somewhere above here it is also one of my older videos but i believe the messages in there are still very very valid now for tip number two let me share an additional story and this is something that happened to me when i was a project lead and probably a similar things also happened to me with reversed roads when i was a more junior guy on the team but at that instance i was a project lead i was sitting in a meeting with one of my associates and he also was a more junior associate he was only with the firm for a couple of months we were sitting in a meeting which was part of his module right so pretty much the meeting was in the end his responsibility in the sense that he was responsible to cover the topics that were discussed so then during the meeting i has appropriately tried to moderate the whole discussion to steer the conversation in the right direction but then there were occasional moments where people were asking us about data about fights that they sent us what certain numbers were how this all added up and my associate was just sitting there pretty quiet pretty shy didn't really say anything so then i ended up opening my laptop pulling out some files and pretty much sharing some pieces of information that i wanted to share back with the client and of course to some extent here my expectation would have been that this is something that the associate would do that as the module owner he would have all these files at hand would be able to share all these numbers in the meeting and this now leads me to tip number two and this is that especially as the junior guy in the room be the numbers guy so especially if this is a meeting that is about one of the topics that you are covering in these instances it actually will even be expected that of course you know all your data much better and much more in detail than the project lead also needs to manage other parts of the project in parallel to this specific part of course you will have all your files at hand of course you will know the most important numbers concerning this work probably even in your head you will not even need a file for that right so of course if questions are asked about these topics this is your moment this is your role where you can jump in and then share all this information that you have at hand so being the numbers guy is a straightforward and actually pretty easy little thing that you can do as the junior guy to add some value by providing the relevant data and i'd say even if it's a question which is not directly belonging to your area of responsibility don't let your project lead or your partner in a corporate context your boss or whatever look this stuff up if you have it then take this as your role you are the one who can quickly look this up ideally already come into the meeting with maybe your laptop opened with the most important files or spreadsheets which will likely be the focus of the discussion already open so that if such a question comes up you do not need to first look for this file where you have saved it open it and so on but you directly have it in front of you can directly tell them the numbers these are these little great moments where you can shine where you can add value and these are things that will be perceived by your team and also by the clients so tip number three and now again a little story from the perception of a project lead so often you will join meetings that your associates schedule that are with clients that are covered by your associates just because the topic is a bit sensitive or maybe the client is quite a personality then maybe the associate asked you to also jump in to sit in there to try to help him to steer the meeting into the right direction so one thing that i observed occasionally was that now i was sitting in these meetings i was trying to help and i thought it was a great meeting and then the meeting was over all the clients left and i was sitting there with the associate and then i asked him or her hey what do you think how did the meeting go and then the associate says well yes it went well but we didn't ask the question we didn't got this piece of information that we really needed and then this often confused me and then i asked the person well okay but if you know that this was important if you know that we needed to ask this question as well then why didn't you ask and this was something that i occasionally observed with more junior consultants that as soon as somebody more senior than them sits in the meeting sits in the room sometimes they feel like okay now the meeting isn't my responsibility anymore or maybe they are too shy and believe that well if this would be really important then probably my project lead or my partner would think of that but of course often it's the other way around right often the partner is the furthest away from what is actually going on in the project then the project lead will as well be already much further away than you as an associate so take this as your responsibility as well and this is my third tip so make sure that all the key results that all the next steps are really clear and defined and if you feel like for whatever reason something important is just not raised by the more senior people in the room but you know that it is important then raise it then ask that question then address it do not believe that this is not your role to ask this or that you're too intimidated to address this point that you know is so important of course be aware of politics maybe it's a very sensitive thing maybe there was a reason that the project lead or whoever was sitting in there with you didn't raise it so of course try to be sensitive for these types of things as well but in general i believe that it really rarely hurts if you as the junior guy really push for tangible results and next steps that i agreed in the meeting so hope that you find these three tips helpful so first clarify your role second be the number guy and third push for clear next steps and results if you do this i trust you will add lots of value to the meeting and this will give you a very clear sense of what you actually can do if you sit in these conversations so as always if you have any questions about all of this please leave me a comment below in the comment section as you know i will answer every single comment that you write and of course every comment that you write also helps me with the youtube systems if you took any value out of this video at all please hit the like button for the youtube algorithm and also subscribe to my channel to stay up to date on all my content if you want to see more from me also follow me on my instagram my handle is firm learning you can also reach out to me on linkedin or sign up for my mailing list both of these links you can find below in the video description if you want to start learning and claim that free trial use the link below in the video description 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