Top 5 Things I Learned from 5 Years at IBM:
I am so grateful for my IBM experience because I’ve learned a great deal about how to drive organizational transformation with an analytical approach and lead cross-functional teams towards greater innovation.
My work at IBM gave me opportunities to become a better leader and manager by allowing me to combine my caring, positive energy to bond people together as a team with my analytical reasoning and quantitative analysis to drive results and improve performance.
I’m also thankful that IBM has encouraged and supported my pursuit of the arts and social justice, such as working on pro bono projects for the Clinton Foundation and giving me the opportunity to serve on the IBM Diversity Committee.
To express my gratitude, I wanted to record the top 5 things I’ve learned from my 5 years at IBM that I think others at IBM or starting off in their career can find helpful.
Top 5 things I learned from 5 years at IBM:
- Move your body every day
- Hugs are an important part of remote cultures and distributed teams
- Make your colleagues and managers’ job easier
- Recognize individuals, celebrate teamwork
- Use every success as a seed for the next
1. Move your body every day
For the first six months as an IBM consultant, I woke up at 5am every day to workout at the IBM Learning Center gym in Armonk before getting on my first call with the client at 7am. The engagement manager, associate partner, and partner on the project led the agenda and took minutes for this morning meeting. I was just expected to attend so that I could absorb the context for my action items that came in the last minutes of the call, which saved the engagement manager from having to explain to me later.
I realized that I actually was just on those 7am calls to listen and learn, which meant I could sleep a bit more and exercise for a bit longer in the mornings.
Now that I’ve earned enough seniority to control my own calendar, I block 5am-7:45am every day to make sure I exercise before I go to work.
When an early meeting is necessary, I will block an “apt” on my calendar to ensure I can get to the gym at some point that day.
Also, I walk to vendor meetings across town, even if it’s 45 minutes away. This got way easier when I moved to San Francisco two years ago… doesn’t get nearly as humid and hot as NYC here!
In turn, I absolutely don’t mind taking calls or having meetings with my colleagues as they’re biking home or walking around. If it’s too loud, there’s nothing so urgent that can’t wait till we’ve taken care of our bodies.
2. Hugs are an important part of remote cultures and distributed teams
At dinner last week, I told a friend, who shuttles to work daily with a collocated team, that I hugged my colleagues after they went home to Foster City, Boston, NYC, and Austin. She was shocked, “I can’t even imagine giving my colleagues a hug. That’s so weird.”
It probably sounds strange that hugs are a prevalent cultural norm at a traditional company, like IBM — stereotyped as a business professional (some say IBM stands for identical blue suits) and formal place to work.
First, most negative stereotypes about IBM (as with any other stereotypes) are not true. Second, when I meet IBMers from around the world, they are always really friendly, intelligent, helpful, and creative.
I’ve made lifelong friendships with colleagues whom I’ve only met in-person once or twice. How? Hours of phone calls and Sametime/Slack messaging and a hug hello/goodbye whenever we get the rare opportunity to meet face-to-face.
There are lots of studies that emphasize the benefit of touch in establishing relationships. A hug gives a lot of information.
I have a lot of creative difference with one of my teammates, who visited from Boston last month. I respect and admire her a lot. I love working with her because she always challenges my ideas and gives a lot of feedback for how I could improve. I couldn’t really tell if she enjoyed working with me as much as I did with her UNTIL, as she was leaving San Francisco to fly home after a particularly long and hard week, she gave me a long, strong hug filled with warmth and respect.
Since then, I feel much more comfortable with talking to her more informally over Slack and having meetings 1:1 with her just to get her advice and shoot the shit.
3. Make your colleagues and managers’ job easier
I learned that it’s really helpful to have regular informal meetings 1:1 with my colleagues, who are on my immediate team and on other teams, as well as weekly 1:1’s with my manager.
With my colleagues, I ask questions about how they feel about what they’re working on, how we get things done, what work they want to do, and their career and goals. I usually walk away with a better perspective on what’s going well and where I could improve as a leader. Making my colleagues work lives easier, better, or more fulfilling has made it possible for us to be more productive, creative, and successful.
When I worked on SPSS (IBM’s predictive modeling software) as a Growth Strategist and ScrumMaster, I saw how improving our process to make it easier to work together and work on things that excited people motivated my teammates to perform tasks and deliver projects that were above and beyond their formal job responsibilities. One person on the team stayed on the phone with me till 11pm on Friday before Labor Day weekend to collect and analyze the demand gen campaign data in order to convince executives to invest more in our experiments based on the attribution of improvement in sales pipeline win rate (and revenue).
Both of us felt more fulfilled even though it was hard because we were both passionate about experimentation and using data to make better business decisions.
With my managers, I always make a point to ask or infer what’s hard or painful about their role to try to find ways that I can help. I learn from their answers:
- Context — what’s going on with the broader organization that could affect my projects and colleagues, which makes it easier for me to make decisions or offer deliverables to improve the overall situation
- Opportunity — where I can improve or offer information to make their (and my) job easier
- Connections — where or how I could offer to connect disparate projects or people to have better outcomes if we worked together instead of in parallel
4. Recognize individuals and celebrate teamwork
At big and complex companies, like IBM, no one wants to feel like a cog in the machine. But, realistically, no single individual can influence overall shareholder value, except for maybe our CXO’s.
However, when there’s an ambitious yet worthwhile goal that people work hard to achieve, they want to know that their contribution mattered and was seen by someone, especially if that person is a leader, manager, or executive.
Recognizing individuals makes the individuals called out feel valued and motivated to tackle the next, ambitious goal. Also, as a leader of many projects, big and small, I’ve learned that shining a light on the unique skill or specific contribution that an individual had on the project lets everyone else begin to understand and see the value that that individual brings to the team as a whole. Best of all, the person who’s is recognized for something specific and memorable feels renewed confidence in themselves and, potentially, sees new abilities or skills that they didn’t realize they had before they were called out for their contributions.
An added bonus for the person recognizing their peers or reports, I’ve learned that individuals don’t forget what you wrote or said to recognize them and celebrate their contributions in front of their peers and managers, specifically if what you wrote or said is sincere and specific. At companies, like IBM, you don’t forget the people who make you feel like more than a cog in the wheel.
Example of what I posted in our Slack channel after we finished our last ambition project of migrating marketing automation and user engagement platforms of hundreds of campaigns and thousands of users in less than a month:
@channel: EVERYTHING IS LIVE AND WORKING!!!!! MIGRATION IS DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The diligence, optimism, and creativity this team has applied to several unexpected small to large issues we’ve encountered along the way is extraordinary. This team has been exceptional at taking advantage of each others’ strengths, having the humility to know their limits, and the perseverance to push past their limits and expand their skills.
@Suraj — kudos for pairing with @Laurie as the “Ben clone” while he was debugging Segment-[marketing automation tool] integration and testing the chat campaigns
@Shanqing — thank you for working so closely with @Teddy, the CMaaS team, and owning the Segment tag injector/[marketing automation tool] implementation updates while Ben was fixing Segment
@Laurie — so much gratitude for your patience and making the stakeholders comfortable and excited about their campaigns launching (also, you’re an amazing sounding board for all things)
@Teddy — thank you for stepping up at the bottom of the ninth, you more than filled the gap with your humor and dedication
@Linda — thanks for managing us
@Hunter — for incredible precision and tireless hours laying the plan and foundation for us to follow (FYI — any issues we encountered, we immediately thought, “oh, Hunter must’ve had a solution for this, which gave us hope that we could find a way through it”)
@Ben — no words would be sufficient to describe your contribution (“you’re alright)
@Michele — thanks for going well outside your job description to help @Jazmin and team bring chat migration to fruition. (PS: appreciate your jokes and calm infusions during this very intense week)
@Jazmin — I have NO IDEA how we could’ve completed this migration without you and don’t know how we’ll carry on once you’re gone. in 6 incredibly short weeks, you are an essential pillar to this team.
_special mention to @Arjun @Chloe @Cameron @Kaitlin — for lending a hand whenever we reached out_
@management_team — thank you for your confidence in the team, especially in the last 5 days where communication was sparse as we were heads-down, racing towards the finish line.
5. Use every success as a seed for the next
Every success, big or small, is an opportunity to get more funding or more influence.
Much like the world of startups, doing anything new at IBM takes a great idea, a few smart people, and lots of hard work to earn each round of funding and grow your influence (i.e. internal customer base).
I like to think of myself as the first employee at the startup that is Peter Ikladious. We now call ourselves “Growth and User Engagement”, but it was a long road over the past 3 years to get to the 36 people covering 450+ products today.
First, we generated 4X improvement on current SPSS trial downloads, which led to improvements in revenue YoY. We leveraged this win to hire 2 more growth strategists. After that, we launched Watson Studio in 2017 as we acquired A LOT of trial users, improved NPS by 200%, and increased billable usage by 2–4x in the first 4 months. A cascade of subsequent victories led us from begging and pleading to work with a single product to being demanded by all 450+ products of IBM’s global business.
Let’s recap:
- Move your body every day — Getting exercise regularly means there will be more focus during the day
- Hugs are an important part of remote cultures and distributed teams — Form bonds virtual, fortify them when you get to be in-person
- Make your colleagues and managers’ job easier — People work above and beyond their formal job description if you make it easier for them to work hard either by inspiring their passions or making the process simpler
- Recognize individuals, celebrate teamwork — Making people feel seen for their contributions makes them more likely to continue contributing positively or grow in that area
- Use every success as a seed for the next — Remember and measure your accomplishments and leverage them to gain more influence and funding
