This was one of the first career advice I received, "Son when you wear your uniform [ was working in a plant in India and we wore uniforms] ensure that you check two things, you take your balls to work [courage] and keep your dick at home" [Staying Humble].
Courage to say the truth, especially to power is the most liberating habit one can inculcate in their career. One way I've practiced this, is to view organizational relationships as horizontal rather than vertical. The culture, peers, urban legends and sometimes bosses may want to reinforce hierarchy and the pecking order in the organization but reinforcing that the power of the argument is more important than the power of the arguer helps to maintain equity and drive courage.
I once had an argument with a CFO who aggressively challenged me on an engagement data analysis I did for his team. He was known as someone who you don't mess with and more importantly he was the CFO, someone who's data skills is trusted by the entire company and he was challenging me, on data. Two thoughts came to my mind, one that I personally worked on this data and was very confident on the analysis and two if you get fired from the organization it would be a great story to say that you got fired because of an argument with the CFO. I pushed back and the analysis survived, but more importantly I gained the respect of the CFO.
Staying Humble - recently I read Think Again by Adam Grant which covers the Humility Cycle - Humility drives doubt which fuels curiosity, which then motivates discovery, which reinforces humility. Whereas pride in our existing knowledge leads to conviction and confirmation bias which leads us to validate what we already know.
This was natural when I started my career, but has become progressively difficult and requires conscious effort as I grew in the organization. One of the ways to naturally keep yourself humble is to take diverse roles. When I moved in my career from a corporate role to a role in labour it really grounded me. Another simple habit is to read, it helps you to see how much you don't know. Finally to extremely important to surround yourself with a really smart team.
The advice I got was probably a crude way to tell someone who just joined corporate life that one needs to stand up for oneself and needs to constantly be humble. But this stuck and has guided me for the past several years.
