Leadership Curveballs, Blind Spots and Black Holes, Episode 3

In this Episode:

00:45 – Curveball of the Week: How to respond to yet another reorganization in your company;

04:05 – Confidence Killer of the Week: What to do when your work is not valued

09:25 – In the Fire: Special guest, Customer Success Executive April Oman, shares what happened when she took a new job that didn’t work out

Podcast Transcript:

Hi everyone. This is Bobbie LaPorte, your host of Leadership Curveballs, Blind Spots, and Black Holes. Each week we help busy leaders navigate through complex and volatile times with practical solutions for real-life challenges.

Navigating Uncertainty Curveball of the Week: Responding to Reorganization

In this episode, we’ll talk about how to respond to yet another reorganization in your company.

What to do when your work is not valued. And what happened when our, in the fire, special guests, customer success, executive, April Oman took a new job that didn’t work out. So let’s get started with our curveball of the week. It seems like every day we see news of shakeups at the highest and broadest levels of the national businesses we know as well as those in our own hometowns.

Change in response to economic issues, market disruption, staying competitive and relevant. These and other challenges seem to be driving more and more frequent major reorganizations. The old guard is out the new kids are in. Let’s consider what’s likely a familiar scenario.

You’ve probably seen this movie before; your company seems to be moving along well, the businesses growing sure, you may not be dazzling Wall Street but right now, things feel good. People are working hard and progress is being made. Then there was a surprise management shakeup at the top that directly affects your organization.

You’re not sure what this specifically means for you and your team, but you’re pretty sure it won’t end there and you’re right. There was another change in announced more fallout than another. It feels like you just can’t get the ground to stop moving under you to feel some stability, some certainty, some foundation to plan how you regroup and respond.

You may be waiting a long time. In situations like this, things can change in an instant and you have little time to regroup. This is one of the lessons I’ve learned through my Ironman racing experience, and that’s the importance of quickly cutting the time to respond, to reduce potential derailment.

So how can you respond?

Well, in my experience, there’s two ways you can look at this.

Number one, you can look at this as a loss and basically say another change, a new direction, and fall back on your habitual reactions that create an,  “oh well business as usual” response. Or you can take a different approach and adopt a mindset that views change as possibility, not loss.

So my question to you would be, how can you make this turn of events an opportunity to find new ways to leverage your team’s strengths and give them purpose and focus? And how can you increase your visibility in the company to amplify your contribution, to show people what you’re really good at? This is also an opportunity to stand out from your peers. Most of whom are feeling wounded, worried, wondering what’s next and will soon find themselves on the sidelines wondering what happened.

There’s no question that uncertainty and change can be exhausting when you’re experiencing multiple reorganizations. At some point, you just give in and then you give up, but don’t let uncertainty put you on the defense instead of retrenching and avoiding risks, my suggestion would be to re-engage use this opportunity and put you and your team in a position to not just weather the next change, because there will be one, but embrace it and run like the wind with it.

That’s it for our curveball of the week. Next up in this episode is our confidence killer of the week, which starts in a few seconds.

This Week’s Confidence Killer: When You Feel Your Work Isn’t Valued

And we’re back with this week’s confidence killer. What do you do when you feel that you are working hard and contributing, but your work is not being seen as valued?

There’s no doubt, this can pose a real threat to your confidence to do your job. We all have a human need to be acknowledged and valued. In fact, the latest Gallup poll on employee engagement sites, that being acknowledged is the number one driver of employee engagement.

But the reality is that sometimes for many different reasons, what we are doing is not seen as valuable or important to the organization.

So here’s a scenario that happens all too often. One of my clients is a senior executive at a major software company. She joined the company to take on a new role, transforming an outdated, yet critically important part of their business. Her credentials to take on this key role as second to none having performed successfully in similar situations for other major software companies, she understood the task at hand, the challenges that represented. She knew the internal landscape. She knew who she would need to win over as supporters and what was necessary to rebuild her team.

She made great progress in her first year, in her role. And yet her boss had little acknowledgment of her efforts or contributions.

So how does this happen?

Someone does everything required to exceed the expectations of their role?

Well, whether it’s a mature organization or an early stage vendor, Competition dictates speed, disruption, constant change. And one of the consequences of this is that organizations become largely siloed focusing on their own goals and issues with little collaboration or shared platform for success.

Sometimes it seems like your peers are all working on more exciting things, getting visibility and attention. Your boss seems more interested in supportive of their work only casually in yours. So you start to read into this. Maybe you are slowly being pushed aside, maybe you’re are no longer relevant in the company.

What are your peers seeing and saying about you and your work? You like your work and your team. It just feels like what you are doing is not seen as important or having any impact on the business. So what can you do when it appears that you are not top of mind when it comes to key players and contributors?

In my experience, there are two key issues here.

The first one is, does your work connect in a meaningful way to the larger business strategy? I know this might seem obvious, but you know, we’re often busy and focused on what we’re doing and we don’t take the time to ask the question. What is the ROI of my team’s work?

How does it directly enable the success of the business? So when you ask yourself these questions, don’t sugar coat, the answer you discover. You may need to dig deeper to connect to what really matters to your boss in the organization.

Go right to the source. Talk to your boss, make it a point and you may have to drive this process yourself to check in regularly with your boss to see are you on track to understand how he or she sees your value to key into how you can help him or her succeed and watch for signs from your peers on how they are getting visibility and the recognition you are seeking.

Listen to how they and others describe what they’re working on for cues on what the organization values. The second factor at work here is are you actively promoting what you and your team are working on? Many of us shun for what we feel is shameless, self-promotion. I totally understand that, but it is a critical survival skill in today’s competitive event.

My definition of self-promotion is sharing your successes with people who matter.

As a leader, you have a responsibility to share your team’s successes. For their career advancement and yours. And also it’s very important to share examples with others in the organization who can learn from your success in a busy, competitive environment that we all operate in.

Successes helped buoy everyone in the organization during challenging times. And they also start to create an environment that supports everyone’s success. In our changing and uncertain environment, things can change in an instant. So don’t make any assumptions about your value based on what you’ve done in the past.

Be able to continuously question, rethink, adjust, and deliver new value every day. That’s the challenge of today’s leaders. So the next time you start questioning, if your work is valued, take the offense and assess what you can do to stay relevant in your company.

That’s it for a confidence killer of the week, but don’t go away in the fire is up next and starts in a few seconds, featuring our special guest customer success, executive April Oman, who shares with us what she did when she took a new job that didn’t work out.

Interview with April Oman on Finding the Right Company Fit and Failing Fast in a New Job

We’re back again within the fire today, we are joined by our special guest, April Oman, who is senior vice president of customer success and experience at D2 L a Global Ed Tech company based in Canada. April has held a number of customer service roles throughout her career, including at Salesforce and Zuora.

She is considered a thought leader in the customer success arena and a sought-after speaker on customer success, trends, and topics. So I’m very excited to have April join us for this week’s in the fire segment, and she’s going to share what happened when she took a job that didn’t work out. Hmm. So April, welcome to the podcast.

Bobbie, thank you so much for having me. We both know that job changes are happening more regularly. And so I really think this topic is both timely and relevant.

Absolutely.

And I hope by sharing my challenging career experience, it will help others in their career development and progression. I’ve always been very ambitious and thoughtful about managing my career over the years. And yet I made a mistake. Although I thought I had done sufficient due diligence, I joined a company that really wasn’t the right fit for me. And so after a few months of working there, I left and I spent a few months really reflecting. And here’s what I’ve learned.

Every company has its own unique culture, challenges and greatness.

And during the interview process, I think if I had spent a little bit more time really exploring all the dynamics of the company, I would have learned that it really wasn’t the right fit for me. I just got so inspired and attached to what the company did and what problems that they were trying to solve, that I really missed a lot of clues.

Failing Fast in a New Job

The second thing I learned is that failing fast is sometimes the better approach. It’s okay to leave an organization when the probability of success is low. And so this reflection really helped me assess what worked and didn’t work, and then how to more quickly recognize similar scenarios.

And so for me, the question really was how was I going to get past this challenging career, experience and to ensure that for the things that I thought didn’t work well in the previous company, how to ensure that I didn’t see those same things and joined the wrong company. So I’d like to share a few tips that I used during the transition that really helped me find the right role in a company to join.

Tips on Finding the Right Company Fit for You

The first thing that I did was I networked like crazy. I talked to a wide variety of people in different companies of different sizes, different industries, different sizes. I talked to a lot of connections that I had made at VCs. I reached back into my own personal network and just tried to really, connect with what different companies were doing floor different ideas about what I might do in my career.

I sought validation for what skills and competencies I could bring to an organization because we all know that the more people you know, the likelihood of you finding a role that is meaningful in an organization is likely higher.

The second thing I did was I created my own value prop statement and it included things like competencies, values, key accomplishments skills, but I took it one step further.

I decided to really focus on what I like to do and don’t like to do. And what types of environments and people and work that I like to do. So that I would have a greater probability of finding the right match and also thriving.

I also spent some time really thinking about what type of balance I desired and what I mean by that is really work-life balance.

How much time did I want to spend working, versus doing other things in my life that bring me joy or help make me a more healthy person?

After doing that, the third thing I did was start to identify the types of organizations that were of interest to me. And for me, the best place to start was what were my passion areas, because I felt like if I connected to the mission of a company, then I would be a better fit, and also I would find greater joy in the work that I did day to day because let’s think about it, we all spend hours and hours and hours working.

I’ve been in organizations where I haven’t felt very connected to the product. And I think in the end, I was successful, but I felt like I could be more successful again if I was connected to the mission and working with people that were also connected to the same mission.

Another thing that I really thought about was when you’re going through the interview process and you’re having rapid-fire questions thrown at you about your match to the respective company. I think for me, one of the things that was really telling was that if I had the opportunity to ask questions, then it felt like a more open environment.

So I was unapologetic in the number of questions that I asked. I asked about challenges day to day expectations. What does success or failure look like? In addition to, what’s the value of the company. Why did customers buy, what were they seeing out there in the market against competitors? In addition to standard metrics around, how I would be measured, how the team would be measured and what did customer experience and success actually look like?

And what I was doing through those questions is I was really trying to suss out, did I think I was going to be successful in this organization? Would I fit culturally, would I really buy into the problems that they were trying to solve.

The last thing is I feel so grateful that I really had the time to take a break and really reflect on what was important to me and to have the lessons learned from the organization that I left. And I think if anyone has the ability to do that financially, to take that break and be brave enough to walk away with your pride intact, that’s the best thing that you can possibly do.

So these are the things that really work for me. And, I’m happy to share that I recently passed my three-year anniversary at my current employer and got promoted. I was promoted to SVP a year ago. So I found the right place and I think, it took patients. It took a lot of reflection. It took connecting with people, to really validate for me, what was going to be the right next step for me and my career.

So that is how I got through my challenging career experience.

Well, you definitely have shared some really valuable lessons learned and, it sounds like you’ve successfully applied those to the transition you made into D2L, because you’ve obviously been there for three years now and you’ve been promoted and very successful.

So, there is life after leaving a job, that was not a good fit.

Yeah, absolutely.

One of the things I want to comment on, you mentioned, your network and I think that’s so important because so many, while we know that’s a critical currency for executives today, we’re so busy and people just don’t have time to reach out and keep the network fresh. And then when it comes to times like this when you’re in a job search or you need something and you feel like you have to go back out and rebuild or refresh your network.

So I know that maintaining a robust network, investing in that, is something that is really important to you and that you’re very good at. And so I think that’s another really important lesson for our listeners is that you need to keep those contacts and those connections fresh. You need to nurture them because there’s many other ways that your network pays off.

But in this case, in particular, when you need to make a transition, and as you pointed out in the beginning, it’s so much more common now in this dynamic and competitive workplace that we’re in that changing into another job and having a job, maybe not quite work out like yours is so much more common, I think, than people believe that it is.

I agree.

So I really, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate your advice and your insights and your willingness to share the lessons learned and to share your story. So thank you.

And thanks also to our listeners. We hope that this week’s episode of Leadership, Curveballs, Blind Spots and Black Holes provided you with some practical solutions and insights to the challenges you face as you navigate your own leadership.

So join us next time for another episode of Leadership, Curveballs, Blind Spots and Black Holes.