Teamwork Makes The Dream Work
As we celebrate Women’s History Month, I spent a lot of time reflecting on my life, my career, my friendships, and my family. I am not a ‘big blogger’ but I do tend to give a lot of advice to my daughter (she will probably blog about that!) so she inspired me to write down a few reflections on life lessons I have learned over the years.
First and foremost, I have thoroughly enjoyed my 35+ years working in the male-dominated high-tech industry. I did not set out to work in high-tech, I simply wanted a job that allowed me to pay my bills. I graduated from LSU with a bachelor’s degree in quantitative business analysis/QBA (fancy label for statistics) and took one computer science class (Cobal), which I hated. Hence, my first job out of college was working for Exxon as a Cobal computer programmer! From there I quickly moved on to yet another computer programming gig working for Motorola – and that is where I fell in love with technology products. I spent 11 years learning and growing in my career at Motorola and I will forever be indebted to everyone I worked with at this company.
Flash forward 20 years after my first taste of high-tech and I now work for a much smaller security software company (Absolute Software) as their SVP of worldwide channel partners. I learned a lot about myself at Motorola, and then at Dell, and I decided my passion while working at both companies was software. So, I took the plunge 10 years ago from ‘big company’ to ‘smaller company’ and have never looked back.
Here are a few key points I would like to make about my career which may hopefully inspire young women on their career journey:
Use that first job to learn – ask questions, make mistakes, find mentors, watch others who do things well but more importantly, watch others you do not want to emulate in your career. Take a lot of notes and learn how to organize your thoughts. This first job is about building fundamental skills – technical, non-technical, communication skills, and organizational skills.
As you advance in your career, you will build on that first job in many ways. You will discover what you are passionate about and most importantly you will find a company culture you admire – a place where you can continue to learn but also spread your wings and grow. It may take a while to find that fit, but keep trying, it is that important. In the ‘middle part’ of your career, you will shift from building fundamental personal skills to learning how to apply those skills while working with others. This is the fun part as you may have a lot of knowledge (and shiny new skills) that take you nowhere unless you learn how to work well with others. My best advice here is to take time and reflect on how you communicate and what impact you have on how others communicate – this will be time well spent. The key point here – practice and polish those soft skills.
And finally, if you decide that management of others is the best path for you, this is where you learn how to work through other people. In my current role as a second-line leader, I focus on coaching others and helping them achieve their goals – for me to be successful, others need to succeed. Many people think that leadership is about telling other people what to do and owning every decision. In practice, leadership is quite the opposite – successful leaders hire smart people capable of making good decisions. Your job as a leader is to create an environment where your team maximizes their potential and functions effectively without you.
In reading these 3 key points, I would be remiss if I did not point out that applying these practices in the world today is complicated by working in a distributed workforce environment. Namely, learning from others (hard skills and soft skills) is much more challenging remotely. So, for all of you ‘freshly minted’ college graduates out there, look for a job(s) that provides a hybrid work environment where you can learn, apply and ultimately work through others in person and remotely.
In closing, one of my favorite corny phrases is ‘Teamwork makes the dream work’ – it took a while for me in my career to realize what that really means. Life is about learning, applying what you learn, and working well with others – it is not always about that next promotion. The most successful people I admire are admired equally by their team. Ultimately, that is the dream…..