In my late twenties, I was hired as a new leader in a brand new role, in a big FTSE100 company in the UK. The company was operating in a sector that I was really excited to join but didn’t know much about.

I joined because I was excited about the company, National Grid, a big regulated energy company with a lot of influence in the UK energy industry. I also joined because I was excited about the energy sector, which is - as we all know it - going through a massive and rapid transition to solve climate change, one of the Big Challenges of our time.

Basically, I joined because I wanted to work on really cool shit.

And it was the first time that I felt like I had the right amount of skills and experience in my back pocket as well as the right amount of challenge in front of me to really stretch me out of my comfort zone, make me learn loads while accelerating my career at the same time.

I wanted to show that I could lead some really cool projects that had a big impact on the company, the energy sector and society as a whole.

I wanted to impress.

Impress myself. Impress my family and friends.

And impress as many people as I could inside the company. Senior leaders. My team. My peers who’d been recruited at the same time and had impressive work backgrounds.

I wanted to get recognised as a high flyer who could solve any problem the company had, big or small, so I’d get to work on high-exposure and high-impact projects, one after the next.

I’d spent 4 years in a 200-people strategy consultancy in Paris, carrying out market research and strategy for big corporates in the energy sector. I then spent more than 2 years in the 20-people corporate headquarters of a 200-people oil & gas contractor, doing commercial analysis, business development and responding to tenders.

These are some of the skills that I had already managed to nail:

• making great slides
• finding and interviewing industry experts on niche topics
• doing high-quality market research and analysis
• building proposals in response to tenders
• presenting results to a senior audience
• mastering a second language (English) to professional fluency

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But that wasn’t enough to navigate a big corporate well.

Corporates are very different from small companies. And they’re also very different from consultancies. They function in a way that you don’t get to learn about until you are thrown into their world - and even once you understand one corporate fully, you’ll still have to do loads of work to understand the next should you choose to change employer.

I knew how to make great slides that followed a project structure that had been outlined by my consultancy client or my manager, but I didn’t know I’d often have to quickly whip up some good-enough slides on a weekly (if not daily) basis to communicate with people about my work. I didn’t know when to make them, who for and what to put in them.

I knew how to engage a corporate client, as a consultant, but didn’t understand the politics and interdependencies with other projects that they had to deal with within the company, and how managing those politics and interdependencies were just as - if not even more - important than coming up with the Right Answer.

I knew how to present results to a senior committee in 20 mins but I didn’t know I’d have to do 95% of the work to convince the corporate Executive Team offline before we even got to the presentation. Once I’d understood that, I wasn’t sure how to do it either.

I knew how to pull together a pitch perfect answer to a question that had been included in the initial consultancy project scope. But I didn’t understand just how much more important it was to figure out a Good-Enough Answer quickly to that question rather than to spend more time figuring out the Perfect Answer.

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So I got good.

I learned ‘how to corporate’ well.

I got good at engaging people in general and engaging senior leaders in particular. This meant getting good at structuring just documents and sessions to help people solve a problem or decide on a way forward. It meant getting good at engaging people in big bold presentations, but also (mostly) behind the scenes - and I also realised just how much the latter is absolutely critical to making the former a success.

I got good at getting shit done. Particularly the kind that had never been done before in the company, and that others don’t want to take on because it’s complex, or because it’s going to be scrutinised by the CEO, or because they have no idea how to do it. I got good at defining problems, prioritising work, asking for help. I took on difficult projects - the broader and the more complex, the better.

I got good at shaping strategy and strategic projects. I did this as a way to position myself at the centre of all the action. When you do strategy, you shape and participate in Executive Team discussions; you get to engage senior leaders across the entire business; and - importantly - you get to know what the Executive Team cares about most, which means you can position yourself to take on those projects.

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All these things got me known.

They got me known as someone who structures problems well - however complex they are, who cares about working with people and building a collaborative atmosphere, and - importantly - who gets stuff done. Important stuff. Complex stuff.

Two years in, when the company went through a re-organisation, I secured a fantastic role where I was made responsible for creating the first-ever long-term strategy for the company. The work I did with the Executive Team and leaders across the entire company meant I now knew many people in the business and understood their problems and their perspectives, I understood what the priorities for the business were going to be in the next five years, which meant I knew which pieces of the puzzle the Executive Team was most worried about. With the help of my peers, manager and mentor, I taught myself to navigate the politics at that level to scope out a new and more senior role for myself, to solve what had emerged as one of the company’s Big Challenges.

Ultimately, corporates are a fantastic place to do really impactful work. And if you play the game well, you will thrive.