Embrace the PAIN!!!!

My career has been defined as taking the hard path, by either building or creating new businesses.  This requires you to be 100% “ALL IN”, which upon writing is funny, because you can’t be 95% “ALL IN”, you simply are or you are not!  That said, building new businesses comes at a great cost of your time, attention, and focus.  Also, it is a guarantee that things will go wrong, and often.  This is why I chose “Pain is Inevitable, Suffering is Optional”!  Being a leader means knowing that you are being watched all the time, and your people are super tuned in to how you respond, and your attitude!  I often joke, that as a leader, you are signing up to be the topic of dinner conversation at your team’s homes!!

Early in my career, at my former employer, I was responsible for building their first Commercial Cloud business for Distribution in North America.  For a traditional technology company, this was a significant shift in mindset, as we were finally in the “Outcome” business, as companies were not only relying on us for the technology but also the delivery of the Services.  This was a massive shift!  The technology needed to catch up to the ambitions and while the software worked, the delivery of the Services was very challenged.  We were having weekly & daily outages for months, and when the Service wasn’t down, it was slow!  Like, really slow and our teams used our Online Services for demo’s and so while in front of prospective clients, many times it was taking up to 18 seconds for a page to load!  In one month alone, we had over a 100 outages, and performance impacts! 

Now, one of my core values is accountability, and I take it very seriously that Salespeople need to have all the tools available to be successful, because their success is how they support their family (This is how I think about Accountability)!  Also, our Customers relied on our business to run their business, and when over 3,000 businesses have a mission-critical system go down over 100 times, you are going to have some difficult conversations!  So, I had a choice to make on how to respond?  How did I want to show up for our teams?  How was I going to navigate the business?  Was I going to put my brand behind a challenged product?  The answer was simple, because I was “ALL IN”.  I kept my head down, I was relentless in reaching out to Customers, I over-communicated to our Partners, I partnered with my technology Partners to build a plan to get stable and I was fully transparent to my Sales teams on the steps I was taking to fix the problem, thereby instilling confidence that this was temporary and to keep focused on the big picture/importance of this shift to the Cloud. Now, what I deliberately chose not to do was blame our Technology team (They were working their tails off), I didn’t let our distribution team off the hook from selling this product, I spoke to every Partner that this was a direction we were taking and to double down on the business.  I used every issue to “Build Trust” and demonstrate that we were a World Class organization that was learning from each issue and that we were not going to shy away from any “Painful” conversation.  

During this crisis, I had a 1:1 with our North America Sales Leader, who was well aware of the challenges that we were facing.  He asked in the middle of this crisis, how I did it?  How did I keep a positive, upbeat attitude during this massive crisis?  Why didn’t I just throw in the towel… I didn’t have a good answer at the time, but I now know it was because I was “ALL IN” and if I allowed myself to “Suffer”, then the entire business was going to suffer.  As the ultimate leader of this business, the organization was going to follow my lead and organizations are just a reflection of their leaders!  My confidence that we would overcome, coupled with relentless execution, was a source of inspiration and belief for our teams.  Despite the pain from all the product challenges,  we ended up with our “Best Ever” revenue results and learnings that helped drive “Cloud Transformation” for years afterward.  This experience was a cornerstone of my career and despite the pain, I am forever grateful to have experienced!