Today was my first round interview for my promotion. I didn’t know there was more than one round until the end of the interview when they told me I passed, but that I still had to meet with Dan.
It was such a relief to pass the interview though. I had done so much to prepare, and God had done so much to clear the path for this to promotion to even be possible. I’d like to recount a few of the miracles that made this possible:
- One of the requirements to promotion (non-negotiable) was that I needed to get a 80% or higher on the survey that is sent to my team asking how often I do one-on-ones, forecast reviews, coaching sessions, quadrant reviews, career planning etc etc with them. I need to average 80% or higher across 2 surveys, and I was getting mid-70s. I had too many people on my team and it was hard to juggle everything, but there was no allowance in the survey for that fact. But, the survey broke, so they were temporarily not going to use it for promotion purposes. That created a narrow window for me to interview without using results from that survey. The survey was re-instated two days after my final interview with Dan Watkins.
- For 5 years at Qualtrics, I had never hired anyone into Qualtrics. But amazingly, I hired 2 people within the last 12 months. I’m graded on how many people I hire, so it’s a major gift that I had recent success right before my performance interview.
- Two months ago it was announced that for people in the role 2 years and longer, one could pass the interview with a 3.6 instead of a 3.8. As of Jan 1, I would be in the team lead II role for two years, so that now applied to me.
- One month ago, it was announced that because they are needing to promote people so desperately into leadership positions, anyone interviewing for promotion would now only be graded against their peers, not their peers plus the level above them, as it had been in the past.
- All of these things happened at the exact time that my team was having the best billing quarter we had ever had. I had already blown past my quota when I interviewed today and that made me look very very good.
- Lucas (my boss two levels up) apparently had a need to promote me, and had put me as a sales manager in his organizational plan, and said we would need to go through the interview process, but that it should be fine and he was planning on having me as a sales manager. In other words, he wanted to promote me. Perhaps he got to that point of expecting to promote me after my boss, Andrew, did a practice interview with me, and said I was lined up to pass. He probably told Lucas I was looking good to pass, so that helped shape expectations for the interview.
It is hard to express how much these conditions and miracles mean to me. At the beginning of the year, I called a dear friend Dean Richardson to tell him that I was afraid of the year ahead at work. My job as a player coach was so demanding, and I was worried that the wheels would come off the cart in terms of my performance, or my health (from exertion) or perhaps both. The most important thing Dean said to me is something I hope to never forget. He told me that if everything went to pot, and I didn’t perform well and I had to find another job, that I could survive that.
I internalized that very deeply, and used his words to help me get to a point of not being afraid. The year ahead was uncertain. The mountain looked impossible, but largely thanks to his words, I was able to approach the year knowing that I could endure anything, come what may. The year before was rough, and I didn’t know how much longer the business would keep me in that role if things didn’t turn around. I’m not exaggerating when I say things had been rough in 2018. That year I did a practice interview for promotion, and I got the lowest score across all team lead 2’s, meaning I was the lowest performing team lead 2 in Dan’s org. We had one quarter that year of billing under 50% of our team quota. I remember very difficult and stressful days. One day, I went on a walk, and the spirit of God whispered to me, “in you are fear and entitlement.” I was having my greatest experience with failure, and it forced me to confront and face how much fear and entitlement were in me. Then, at the beginning of 2019, I demonstrated just a little bit of growth. I wasn’t quite as fearful as I was in 2018. After talking to Dean, I felt a little bit more able to confront whatever came. And I did my best to not spin narratives about how I deserved more or about how others had it better. I made big strides in both my fear and my entitlement, things which I was so blessed to discover about myself during my failure.
Still though, this seemed like it had two possible paths. Either I could destroy my health trying to be perfect at everything, trying to line everything up for my 15 point interview, or I could just say, “to heck with the promotion” and cut the corners I needed to cut in order to stay happy and balanced.
I’d tried the route where I focused doggedly on success at the expense of almost all else, and I ended up, tired, stressed, checked out and not as connected with my family and friends. So, in 2019, I essentially made the decision to live in a way that would be balanced and happy and if it wasn’t good enough for promotion, that was ok, I could find a way to be happy as a team lead 2, even if I had to be a team lead 2 forever (while all my peers promoted around me) or I could just eventually leave Qualtrics. But it just wasn’t worth my health to obsess on promotion any more.
That mindset turned out to be critical, especially because of all the other stressors, events and changes 2019 brought to me, but right around early October, I realized that my team was poised to double our quota or more, and that things were starting to align for me to make another promotion run. Then I heard about the dropping the bar from 3.8 to 3.6 for me since I was going to be a Team Lead for two years and I started to get very encouraged. So starting about mid-October, I got focused on promotion again. But it was a very targeted purposeful focus, because I felt like I really had a shot. I was extremely nervous about it, both because of how much I wanted it and because of how hard it was to get. Even with the bar dropping to 3.6 average out of 5, if you get a 2 in any category it is very hard to overcome. There seemed like there were so many landmines. My forecasting wasn’t great lately and that was an area that I might get a 2. I also had a lot of work to do to prepare my deck presentation and make sure all of my metrics were perfectly presentable on the day of the interview. I drove my team to move right on the quadrant, button up their SNE rate, key in all their meddiccc notes, fix their flagged opportunities, be fully salesforce compliant, etc etc etc. There were so many land-mines. But as I focused on it, and spent about one evening per week as I got close to the interview to stay late and prepare my deck, things truly started to come together. When I then learned I would be graded against only my peers and not the level above me, I got even more courage. Then I hung out with Lucas when our families watched Frozen 2 together and he basically said he was planning on my being a Sales Manager before I even interviewed, so it all started to feel real even before the interview today, but I was still super nervous about it.
I got a 90 minute massage the day before the interview, and did multiple practice run-throughs. I was so prepared that my interview was like complete clockwork. I even scored a 3.8 with Lucas, which was .2 higher than what I needed. Still if I got even 2 points lower on any one of the 15 categories, that would be enough to knock me out, so it’s actually still a very narrow victory. Lucas was very complimentary in the interview and was especially impressed when I showed my last slide about the fact that after this quarter, I will have personally overseen 16 promotions as a team lead 2, which is an average of almost annual promotions for any rep who is on my team.
Just for the purpose of memory and a memorial to the body of work from when I was a team lead 2, I’m posting the slides to my interview here. These are actually the version that I used in Dan Watkin’s interview the following week, but they are only updated by a few business days:
A major tender mercy from God was that we had already scheduled a team ski day for the afternoon today. So after my interview with Lucas (and George, Andrew and Preston), I got to go blow off some steam while skiing. It was honestly a really great day.