The Beauty of Building a Team

Moving from the consulting world to the “client side” in 2020 entailed all kinds of emotional travails, most of which centered on taking leave of the teams at Prophet I’d worked with and grown to love. I’ve heard stories of people being given a week to decide whether they want to take a job; those stories make me laugh out loud (even if just with or at myself). I took no less than a month and a half to make a decision to join Qualtrics – not because there wasn’t an amazing and compelling opportunity on the table, but because Prophet is such a distinctively inspiring place. It took a while for me to “un-imagine” myself in the company and culture I’d helped build for over a decade.

Two years on, I’ve changed my role a couple of times. As the Head of Brand for the company, I have set out the audacious team goal of building the most relevant, inclusive, and compelling global brand in tech. It’s an ambition for which we can never stop striving, because each of those dimensions – relevance, inclusivity, persuasion – must continually be pursued. This goal helps our teams organize their efforts, prioritize their days, and find inspiration in a common cause. It’s also a ton of fun. To be able to serve and learn from incredible creators on a Brand Team inside a SaaS business, partner with talented teams across the company to drive long-term growth, and work for a CMO whose character and leadership I admire is a pinch-me circumstance on a lot of days.

And, it turns out that if there’s one thing I enjoy more than building brands, it’s building teams that build brands. As I took some time to reflect on the past year in this role, I realized that I’ve been at my happiest when I’d been doing anything at all related to bringing talent onto the team or growing people already on the team. I mean it – scouring the web for inspiring role descriptions, reading Glassdoor reviews on our company, writing compelling JDs, searching LinkedIn for great candidates, having fun at sourcing jams with our recruiters, working with our incredible People team on the Qualtrics talent brand, getting on calls or Zooms to meet and learn about people at every stage of the candidate journey, interviewing people for roles on my colleagues’ teams, building diverse candidate slates for every role, persuading outstanding leader-doers to join us, onboarding people onto the team, and getting into listening-and-learning mode with them as soon as I can in order to up my own game.

The greatest joy over the past few months has been the time I’ve spent developing, cultivating, and building relationships with people as we engage in the dance of mutual discovery and explore the prospect of working together. Some people that have greatly compelled me have joined the team, and some have not – but doing at least 5 interviews a week so far in 2022 means I’ve met and had conversations with around 100 people that I otherwise never would have met. That alone would be incredible fuel for inspiration and innovation as a brand builder. As a Connector (in the Gladwellian sense), though, I value these chats just for the sake of enjoying them, and as a way of building nodes in our respective networks that could be of value in either a day or in a decade.

And – it’s simply incredible to learn what people are doing with their careers now that we are in a Great Reflection as to what comes next. People are dreaming big. There is a tremendous energy in the creative community that’s been unleashed by the easing of some of the strictures around location and time that used to constrain people. There’s an understanding that brand is more important than ever before, as people want to understand what companies believe and why they exist. There’s a sense that this is a moment to explore new avenues and take some risks.

And there’s a desire to link personal purpose with company purpose. The purest and most authentic connections have come when candidates and I are able to relate deeply to one another not just because we share a common career interest, but because we are each compelled by the ambition of building and stewarding a brand that’s all about improving the Human Experience.

Just as my greatest happiness in a 400-person consulting firm came from the energy generated by building brands in the context of high-trust, high-value client relationships, my most favorite times at this 5,000-person software company are coming as a result of building a brand and a brand team around a shared vision – and a vibrant, talented portfolio of diverse minds who enjoy, complement, push, and trust one another.

Love You, Team. Thanks for Everything. Let’s Do This!!