Month: December 2019

Promotion and Mary’s Christmas Concert

Promotion round 2 with Dan was way more messy psychologically than round 1. I had oriented a lot of my life to prepare for round 1. I postponed the move date until after my interview. I got a massage the night before and stayed late at work to prepare in peace. I felt completely prepared emotionally, mentally and physically heading into the interview. The second interview was not that way at all. Because I wasn’t expecting it, we had already scheduled to have our move be the weekend before my second interview with Dan. So the days leading up to the interview were extremely intense and disorienting. Lily had done an incredible job moving so many things even before the move, but I was still sleeping on the couch the nights leading into the interview, with many things still in boxes, and still not settled into my new environment.

I also was extremely stressed and nervous. I could barely concentrate that day. My interview was late in the day, at 3:40. I tried to work and prepare during the day, but I was very distracted and nervous. I went on multiple walks and prayed that I would show well and with integrity.  I hate interviews because I get very stressed out trying to walk that line between trying to make myself look as good as possible, while still holding to my integrity which matters so much to me. It is such a stressful process, especially when I feel like stakes are so high. I wanted to look as good as possible. But I wanted to promote with pure integrity.

Then, there was a crisis. Just out of curiosity, I looked into the company dashboard to see if the new employee engagement results were in.  They had not been announced or formally rolled out, but I figured I’d just look into the dashboard to see if the results were in there. The dashboards were not fully built out so I couldn’t see how my score compared to North America Sales region as a whole (they hadn’t calculated everything yet), but I could see that my score was much lower than my previous engagement score. In fact is was low enough to drop me a couple of points in my interview, which could disqualify me I thought. I started completely panicking, I actually started having a panic attack. I decided that the best thing to do was to just be 1000% honest and report on the latest results. Then after inserting the newest results in my deck, I felt like I was doing something very stupid. My common sense and reason just seemed to tell me that what I was doing was stupid and unnecessary. The results had not been formally announced. The results weren’t even fully calculated and tabulated for comparisons. Why would I go out of my way to present the most recent score when it could jeopardize a promotion? Still, I wanted to be transparent. I felt in my heart, I should stick with the higher September results I had used in previous interviews, but my panic, mind, integrity and anxiety couldn’t process how that was OK if I wanted to maintain perfect integrity. I went on a walk, feeling deeply panicked. And then, God sent a pure evidence of His/Her existence. In the parking lot, I bumped into probably the one co-worker that I would have felt comfortable sharing my burden with, Steve Harmon.  He is a dear friend and a perfect blend of honesty and not taking things too seriously. He seemed to have no problem with the idea of me using the September results.  He also pointed out, and I was already aware, that the new engagement survey was sent out the week that a lot of organizational changes were announced, so it might have just been a rough time in general for engagement results in Dan’s org.   I continued on my walk after bumping into Steve, feeling somewhat relieved, but still panicked and stressed.I prayed a lot.

Back in the office, I used a conference room to practice my interview. I called Lily (or she called me), and it was such a God send. I was melting down from worry, and I needed to hear her voice. She comforted me and affirmed me.  I decided that I would use the September results, but clearly label them as such, and even announce them as such, and then I would prepare a talk track for if he felt the need to bring up December. That way I would use the older results, but I would not in any way apply that they were from the most recent survey and I would be very straightforward with my presentation. This would give him opportunity if he felt the need or awareness to ask about the most recent results. But again, they weren’t fully announced yet so they may not have even been in his awareness.

I discussed my strategy with Lily and she affirmed me. I felt very good. It struck the right balance between honesty and strategically moving towards success. So the decision was the right one, but the stress-levels were so high that something snapped in my brain. It was a panic attack.

Lily ran through my interview with me almost two full times. It was so calming and helpful to have her be there on the phone with me while I was melting down from my anxiety.

Then I walked into my interview with Dan, and completely nailed it. I had practiced so much that despite my anxiety, all my talk-tracks were perfect. When I presented the September engagement results (and stated they were from September) he didn’t bat an eye, and we just kept rolling. The interview was only 20 minutes.  He was very complimentary, and laid back and at the end congratulated me for how I have developed. He told me on the spot that I passed the interview.

That should have been one of the happiest moments of my entire year, and the weeks to follow should have been pure elation. A final culmination after so much sweat, so many late nights, so much marrow-sucking joy working two jobs with so little affirmation, results and appreciation from management for so long, and now I climbed the mountain, I made it to the next level, and at a time when we could really use the money because of the new home. This is what I had dreamed of, to be pure management. This is what I had worked towards. This is what I thought might be impossible for me to attain. This should have been like the scene from “Pursuit of Happiness” where Chris Garderner (Will Smith) starts crying when he gets the job because he senses his dreams are coming true.

But it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like that at all. For a solid week and through the holidays I was plagued by my panic attack. I obsessed over the idea that I should have showed the new engagement results. I obsessed over my talk track about my explanation for why my engagement results were so high because even though I gave my best honest on-the-spot answer, in retrospect I realized my explanation may not have been accurate (although Dan didn’t even require an explanation because he just grades off of the scores, not the context), I also obsessed over the idea that my team might have graded me artificially high because they were wanting to help me in the interview (which is not honest), so I confirmed that I sent my team a message in July telling them not to grade me nicely because I cared about the learning and growth more than than the high scores. I stressed and obsessed about that portion of my interview. Something in my mind snapped.

When people asked me about my promotion, I found myself mentioning my continued stress around the engagement results section of my interview. Literally something snapped in my brain. I still think I made the right judgement call, but my anxiety and panic has been off the rails.

Unfortunately, that obsessive panic has only subsided because it has been replaced by something else I have been panicking obsessively about (I’m now writing this on the first of January).

When I got into work on Monday of this week, I realized that finance had not yet re-invoiced Solar Turbines. You see, prior to my interview, I wanted the billing from that deal to show in all my metrics for my interview, so even though it was a super complex invoicing split across multiple POs and I didn’t know how everything matched, I just matched my software portion with one of the POs and pushed it through figuring if there were issues, I would sort them out later because I just wanted to make sure the billing showed for my interview, and I was focused on interview preparation and didn’t want to take the time pre-interview to focus on all the gorey details of the invoicing, but that I would clean up any mess I made when the interview was over and I had more bandwidth to focus and things outside of my actual interview.

It actually was a major process to fix the invoicing. We ended up needing to re-invoice everything, and it took about 2.5 hours of my time to fix, and about an hour and a half of that time involved multiple people from finance helping me get it set up. Our systems are so rigid, and Solar Turbine’s needs were very nuanced. It was a stressful nightmare. I actually thought I might not be able to invoice it at all this quarter at one point, but I felt God saved the day. I wandered to our bullpen (staffed sales support hours) on the very last day of the year it was open, and there was no line and I was able to get all the help I needed But the process was crazy . Most of that time would have been necessary anyway even if I didn’t invoice it originally. It was just crazy hard to set up, and crazy complicated to figure out and Solar Turbines didn’t have all their ducks lined up, so I was also missing some POs and information to make it a perfectly smooth process on our side.

Anyway, I got everything teed up for invoicing the Friday before Christmas. But when I got into the office Monday December 30, I noticed it hadn’t invoiced yet, so I spent another 45 minutes or tracking down the issue and getting over the final hurdles to get it to invoice. I had another scare that the invoice wouldn’t go out because the previous invoice we sent plugged up their PO, so a credit needed to be issued and approved by one of their managers who was out of office, but finally it turned out that we could mark it as invoiced on our side so I could get credit even though we hadn’t input it into their system yet.

That was all great, but then my mind truly turned on me with this narrative:

Because you ended up re-invoicing, you never should have have been able to use the Solar Turbines Billing in your metrics and invoicing when you interviewed. Because of that, you are a fraud, you don’t deserve to promote. You did it dishonestly. You need to notify someone of this error. Even though you ended up billing it by the end of the quarter, other people have also billed things since your interview, so it is impossible to know where you truly would have stacked up on your billing and quadrant and team performance at that moment in time that you interviewed if you were to take solar turbines away. You are a fraud, a fake, you don’t deserve this promotion. You are evil, dishonest a fake. You don’t deserve the promotion. All is lost.

So here is what is crazy. I never internalized the possibility that I would need to re-invoice. I knew there might be some mess to clean up after invoicing, but I guess I didn’t fully process or know that re-invoicing was a possibility. What I can say is that when I interviewed, there was not a shadow of a thought in my mind or heart that I was doing anything dishonest by using Solar Turbines in my billing numbers.  I knew I pushed it through, and that it was sloppy, but as far as I was aware and concerned, it was invoiced and I was fine to use it. Also, I know that I was already slated to be a sales manager, that I performed high on my numbers, and I actually think in this case, most likely none of my metrics would have changed if we took solar turbines out. I think I got a 3 on my personal billing and quadrant which is the only category that could have had real impact, and I think I would have got a 3 without that deal anyway. Additionally, I could make the case, that reps have things cancel or re-invoice from time to time, and so the dashboard is not expected to be a perfect reflection of deals that pay and don’t cancel or re-invoiced, but is simply a reflection of invoiced deals, and truly, we had invoiced my deal. Even though we had to re-invoice it later, it actually was invoiced on the day that I interviewed. But to me the most important thing is that on the days of my interviews. there was no shadow, no awareness that I was doing anything sneaky, wrong, risky, or anything that could backfire. I was just trying to jam through as much business as I could before I needed to interview for my results.

It is hard to describe the level of panic I feel. I was on the phone with Lucas yesterday, and I almost brought this matter up to clear my conscience and stop feeling like an imposter that is cheating my way into a promotion. But my common sense stopped me. Our conversation centered around the great work that was done this quarter. My heart and common sense told me I was obsessing and panicking and I shouldn’t derail our wholesome conversation that was grounded in reality because of a panic attack I was facing in my brain that was centered in fear and not reality.  I also thought that discussing this would him would only 1) pawn off my ethical situations and burdens on to him when I should come to my own ethical conclusions 2) Cause him to affirm me that things were fine, but cause him to think I was a bit infirm mentally, or doubt my capabilities to some degree. 3) Waste his time on my neuroses when I didn’t think I was thinking clearly or stably. It seemed the discussion was more suited for a therapist than my boss. This panic is still consuming my brain today so I bumped forward my next meeting with my therapist.

It seems to make no sense to raise the matter to any of my superiors. It is so loud in my brain that it feels real and important and like something I need to shout to my superiors.

But the calmer, quieter relaxed and wiser part of me says, “Abe, you made it through the process. You did it through integrity. It wasn’t perfect. There is grey. Advocate for yourself, not against. There is mess, but you did it, and you did it well enough. Nice work. Enjoy the fruits. Give grace to yourself, and move forward doing good.”

It also just feels idiotic to try to upend my own promotion. I had a thousand things working against me it felt. It seems to work so hard against myself. Especially on an unintended technicality.

Honestly, this is still swirling in my brain. I don’t feel certainty. I don’t feel resolution. It feels stupid to raise any issue at work. Yet, I’m crying inside over the panic that I was dishonest. I feel so unhealthy each time I think about it that I know I’m not thinking straight. Maybe I was not dishonest at all. Maybe I was. Maybe I acted completely reasonably. Maybe I didn’t. I don’t actually trust my thoughts so I don’t really know which way is up, or what to think or believe. My best hope is what happens with every panic attack. It fades with time. Meanwhile, I am now a Sales Manager. At that fact doesn’t seem like it is changing.

I have a hypothesis that God gave me this panic attack as a gift, to help me be humble during my success. Something very similar happened regarding my getting into Wharton.  I really actually think this is the meaning behind all of this. But again, uncertainty is ever present.

At the end of the day, we went to Mary’s Christmas concert. We almost didn’t go to Mary’s Christmas concert because we were so busy with the move and my promotion interview prep, but she was very, very sad at the thought of not going. So I went with Georgia, and she was delighted!

The actual move

By the day of the move, most of the house was already set up. But somehow it still took the whole day and a ton of movers to move everything left over to the new house. They were a fun crew…even though they dropped my piano. Yikes! Thankfully it survived and was just fine.

The Kahlers hosted the kids and babysitters at their house while we moved. And in the afternoon Tom, Suzanne, and my mom took the kids to Frozen 2. It was their second time seeing it, and I think the showing just cemented their undying love for the movie.

Afterward the grandparents took the kids to the ward Christmas party, and everyone had fun there. Then they dropped them off at the new house and we had our first night at the new house!!

My Promotion Interview Round 1

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.

 

 

We start moving in

On Saturday we got a moving van and started moving ourselves in. We wanted to basically be moved before the movers came to move all the big and unnecessary stuff. Jill and Kenny stopped by on a walk and Kenny helped us move, as did Eli who came over at 7:30 and worked all day on helping us move.

The kids all followed his example and we basically had a moving team. The van was a bit troublesome to rent because it required an online check in which we didn’t know about until we got there. Abe’s phone died a couple times and I ended up going home, getting kids, and coming back to rescue him before he finally got the van.

We didn’t eat lunch until almost 4pm. The kids were SO patient even though they were starving.

And in the evening Michaelann came over to help us unpack. We got pizza to round out our junk food habits of the day. And then we sat around and visited for a while in our new house. It didn’t feel quite real or ours, honestly. But we were so thankful to everyone who helped us through this crazy day!!

We got our keys!!

On Friday Eli spent the afternoon and evening with us. We went to the BBQ place in the Riverwoods for dinner, met Santa, and played for a couple hours in the Provo Beach arcade. The dads (The Kahlers joined up with us at the arcade) and older kids did two rounds of laser tag. It was an energetic kick off to the holiday season. Also, we were in a celebratory mood because WE GOT OUR KEYS TO THE NEW HOUSE this day!!!

After all the festivities, Abe and I went over to the new house and got the keys from the old owners who told us about certain features and things we should know about the house. It was so exciting!

Christkindlmarkt

We drove up to Salt Lake for the Christkindlemarkt at This is the Place. It actually was pretty nice temperature wise, but the air was so bad you could see the particulates. We still had fun and tried not to think about the fact that we were all probably getting lung cancer from the outing…

Also earlier in the day Nana and Clarissa had a sweet moment. They are so cute!