Remote Career Development: John Closson Of Unitil On How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely

An Interview With David Liu

Articulating the culture and identity of your company to employees — Without in-person events, office gatherings, holiday parties, etc., it’s difficult to teach culture. At Unitil, we have a very specific value system in place where everything we do points back towards it, but there is no replacement for in-person interaction and collaboration.

Career development is the ongoing process of choosing, improving, developing, and advancing your career. This involves learning, making decisions, collaboration with others and knowing yourself well enough to be able to continually assess your strengths and weaknesses. This can be challenging enough when you work in an office, but what if you work remotely? How does remote work affect your career development? How do you nurture and advance your career when you are working from home and away from other colleagues? How can you help your employees do this? To address these questions, we started an interview series called “How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely”. As a part of this interview series, I had the pleasure of interviewing John Closson.

John Closson is the Vice President of People, Shared Services and Organizational Effectiveness at Unitil a natural gas and electric utility serving northern New England. He started with the company in 2008 as a Manager, Procurement and Supply Chain and worked on various parts of the business including emergency planning, fleet and facilities. In his current role, Closson oversees the management of several centralized services including Human Resources.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. What is your “backstory”?

Thank you for this opportunity. My career journey has been nothing but fulfilling, and I was always very open to new challenges. I majored in Liberal Art/English at the University of New Hampshire. Up to that point, I was what you would call illiterate with anything computer related. It wasn’t until my twin brother insisted that I take computer science classes to help me “get with the times” that I began to explore new territory. I really liked what I was learning, which lead to an IT job after college. My first entry-level job was in IT at a global supply chain company, and after a few promotions, I went to work at National Grid. I eventually transitioned out of IT to focus more on the business side of the company, which lead me to Unitil, where I now serve as Vice President of People, Shared Services and Organizational Effectiveness.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

Having the opportunity to work in Birmingham, England was definitely a career highlight for me. I went into the experience thinking it’d be nearly identical to living and working in the U.S., but it was interesting to see the day-to-day interactions amongst colleagues. In America, we often pride ourselves on the 24/7, work late type of mentality, but in the U.K, the work culture was more like, if you can’t get all your work done in 8 hours and be out by 5pm, you’re just inefficient. It was interesting to be in an equally competitive yet different work environment. It definitely taught me the importance of humility and not making assumptions about other cultures, even when on the surface they seem similar to your own.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I wouldn’t classify this as the “funniest” mistake, and it wasn’t by me, but it taught me a lesson I think readers will appreciate hearing. Early on in my career, I was working on a team that handled email marketing campaigns for customers. We were working on a specific campaign for a customer that included several important executives on the distribution list, among others. There was a glitch when we ran an email blast that ended up hitting our customers’ and executives’ inboxes like 1,000 times. Our team quickly discovered the error was on us, but instead of being transparent with the customer and explaining our mistake, our boss chose to play dumb and lie about it. His lack of transparency and honestly lead to an investigation which determined the mistake was internal, and he was fired. The biggest lesson learned was not that people can’t make mistakes — because we do — but to always tell the truth and be transparent, no matter what.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

My favorite “Life Lesson Quote” stems from Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

I find this speech very impactful and significant for the workplace. I’ve worked in what I consider service roles for most of my career, and when you commit to the transparency mentioned above, there will always be critics. For me personally, this quote reminds me to take the critic out of my head and press on. It gives me motivation to keep going, especially during tough days.

What advice would you give to other business leaders to help their employees thrive and avoid burnout?

Burnout is very real, and it impacts all of us, including myself. Addressing that it exists is the first step. I think the volatility of the world since the pandemic has caused a lot of us to want to cling to any certainty we can, and this understandable need to maintain a status quo can lead to managers micro-managing employees. But, at the end of the day, you have to trust the talent you hired to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. A good leader will know what makes individuals successful and foster that. We all have different ways to be successful. My advice is to give your team the space to catch their breath when needed and cultivate an environment that your employees will succeed in. There is no “one size fits all” model here — it’s individual, and it’s up to the collective whole to keep what’s working and change the things that are not contributing to success.

Ok, let’s jump to the core of our interview. Working remotely can be very different than working with a team that is in front of you. This provides great opportunities, but it can also create unique challenges. To begin, can you articulate for our readers a few of the main benefits and opportunities of working remotely?

The last two years have brought a lot of challenges, changes, and opportunities to the workplace. From my perspective, we have a tremendous opportunity to set up an environment that is diverse, accessible, and flexible. Now that we know we can be successful away from the office, we’re able to recruit talent with different scheduling needs and from different locations. We have access to a more diverse pool of talent since physical office attendance and 9 to 5 hours are no longer a requirement for success.

At Unitil, we’ve seen great success in allowing our call center employees to go totally remote, for example. As a result, we put up some of our highest customer satisfaction scores in 2021 (92%!).

Can you articulate for our readers what the five main challenges are regarding working remotely?

• Articulating the culture and identity of your company to employees.
• Combatting proximity bias.
• Maintaining organic collaboration and on-the-spot learning opportunities.
• Recognizing employees and making them feel valued and seen remotely.
• Fostering a positive, forward-looking mindset around remote and asynchronous work.

Based on your experience, what can one do to address or redress each of those challenges? Can you give a story or example for each?

• Articulating the culture and identity of your company to employees — Without in-person events, office gatherings, holiday parties, etc., it’s difficult to teach culture. At Unitil, we have a very specific value system in place where everything we do points back towards it, but there is no replacement for in-person interaction and collaboration.
• Combatting proximity bias — It’s only natural to gravitate towards the people around you, which is why I’m always reinforcing how important it is for managers to reach out to all team members, near and far, so each individual can have face time or personalized attention, even if it isn’t in the office.
• Maintaining organic collaboration and on-the-spot learning opportunities — Create ad-hoc brainstorms, virtual team bonding opportunities, or weekly/daily check-ins to create an environment that will nurture collaboration outside the physical office space.
• Recognizing employees and making them feel valued and seen remotely — Be mindful of the cadence for praise and make sure you give recognition often and in real time. Whether it’s an email to a specific individual, his/her managers, or the entire organization, making employees feel good about doing good work is critical right now.
• Fostering a positive, forward-looking mindset around remote and asynchronous work — Change can feel jarring to employees. To make sure your teams are on board with new ways of working and collaborating, actively highlight places where nontraditional ways of getting things done are most effective.

Let’s talk about Career Development. Can you share a few ideas about how you can nurture and advance your career when you are working from home and away from other colleagues?

It’s important to view career development not as a destination, but as a journey. As employees, we should always seek out mentors and strive to learn new things, whether we’re an entry level employee or an executive. The learning should never grind to a halt. My advice is to advocate for yourself in your workplace, whatever it might look like, and have a plan for progression. Career development is a fundamental part of being successful, not something that’s tacked on in addition to success.

Can you share a few ideas about how employers or managers can help their team with career development?

Great managers know how to work with people on an individual level, challenge those individuals, and recognize and combat bias (especially proximity bias in this remote work world). They also know how far recognition goes. At Unitil, for example, we have world class cybersecurity and business continuity teams. I try to make sure they know how much they’re valued across the organization. Knowing you’re valued makes you want to advocate for your own growth and development more. Mentoring and succession planning are also top priorities for me in nurturing career development.

It’s also important to let employees grow their career in ways that work for them, whether it be by working remotely or working flexible hours. We’ve seen that companies have achieved major productivity and success within remote working environments. Leverage that success and create a nurturing work environment.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I would love to see more humility in the world. To me, humility leads to a never-ending path of learning. We’ve all been forced to grow and change due to the pandemic, and I believe we will be stronger for it both as individuals and as companies. In the new remote and asynchronous workplace, we were and continue to be challenged. We are learning, growing, and evolving. Success looks different today than it did years ago, but I believe this new chapter could be ever more powerful.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-closson-36a0051a/

Thank you for these great insights! We wish you continued success.