Being You: A conversation about Brand, Ego and Tech — #3
A discussion with Jordan Jensen, Senior Director of Employee Experience at Concur in Bellevue WA, on building a personal-brand and recognizing ego. A special focus is given towards individuals just starting off their careers in tech.
Could you quickly introduce yourself, and tell us a couple of core values that you would absolutely never compromise on?
Sure, my name is Jordan Jensen and I work at Concur. I’m a senior director focusing on employee experience. I’ve been here for about 12 years, spending the majority of my time in Human Resources. I then moved into my current role which is somewhat complementary to HR. It’s been really cool to make that transition and know that we’re all in it together.
Values for me are really important, and they have definitely been tested in the past in some of the other jobs that I’ve had. I’d tell you that they’ve never been compromised here. If anything it’s about transitioning into motherhood, while also caring about my career and ensuring that I don’t put too little into that transition of parenthood and being a wife, as well as not compromising those things for work, which is sometimes a challenge.
Authenticity is huge, showing up as yourself is the most important thing you can do to ensure your life goes in a direction that you want. I think the quickest way for you to veer off the path, and towards a way you do not want to go, is when you are not true to who you are. When you forget to surround yourself with people that allow you to be that person. It’s really really important to not have versions of yourself, because then you get into a place where you forget who you are very quickly. It’s a fast way to forget your core because you’re unsure which one to be, it’s much easier to just be you. There are of course different elements and layers of who you are, but you have to always be true to what those are, instead of create new versions. That’s a big one. If I’m in a place and around people that don’t stay true to who they are, I feel really challenged. I don’t know how to show up to them. So I’ve noticed in situations, if I’m having a hard time reading somebody because they don’t know who they are or don’t know their values, I don’t know how to show up to them and it just feels inauthentic. So, I would say ‘authenticity’ in general is important.
The second thing is mix, I think some people, including myself in the past, prioritize looking for balance, but nothing in your life is balanced, you’ll never create a 50/50, or an 80/20, I think what’s important is that you’re always figuring out what is the right mix for you and it’s very dependent on what your priorities are. It’s important to keep in mind also that your priorities can shift, so depending on what’s going on in your life, your job may need more ‘you’ in the day or there may be things happening in your family and they need more of ‘you’. Perhaps you need more of ‘you’ because you’re unable to show up to those two things if you aren’t showing up to yourself. That mix is going to shift around all the time depending on where you are in your life. Whatever it is that you believe to be most important in that time, own that, and you’re going to be safe. The only person that should create boundaries for you is you. That said, if you don’t create those boundaries for yourself, someone else will.
What are the most important factors that contribute to positive employee experience, what tend to be the most overshadowed in the industry?
This statement keeps coming up, and I know it’s very cliche but I’ll try talking about it in a way that isn’t so cliche. People don’t leave jobs, they leave bosses. I’m a big believer that an organization has the ability to create several loyalty lines to an employee. So if you think about a given employee, there’s one line that could be very strong to their manager depending on their relationship. That manager leaves, that line isn’t enough to keep the employee. An organization is responsible for allowing an employee to create several loyalty lines. After the manager line, there is a peer network that can be strong. There’s also wellness — when an employee feels that they can take care of their well-being at that company. That can be a loyalty line. Senior leaderships’ connection to employees is a loyalty line. Let’s say that there’s a situation where an employee gets a recruiting call from a friend or former boss that went to another job at a new company. There are factors that will keep an employee, and there are factors that will push an employee away. I believe that the more loyalty lines we can connect to an individual employee, the better off we are at allowing them to be happier at work, and the greater chance they will stay at the company.
I think what’s overshadowed the most and what I’m really learning about is recognition. Recognition is really hard because people feel recognized in different ways. Some people like to be recognized in a front and center way, for example, pulled up on a stage and applauded. There are others who would absolutely hate that, who would find that anything but rewarding, perhaps they’d even find it embarrassing. Some people would prefer an email. Others a quiet gift-card. Some would just like a simple high-five. It may even be different depending on where that person is, in the world or even emotionally, at the time. Recognition is something complex and organizations, including us, need to get our arms around this so we can figure out what keeps people in place so that they feel ‘this place is worthy of my time’. Employee experience is about moments of truth for an employee in a job. A moment of truth could occur during their on-boarding, where they think ‘I either made the right decision or I didn’t’, ‘this on-boarding is great’ or ‘I feel the company isn’t even ready for me’. These moments of truth happen all the way through transitions in one’s life that happen while at work. How are they encouraged to honor the other parts of who they are outside of that place? This could be another component of their experience. If the employee is undergoing a transition and their manager doesn’t necessarily acknowledge, understand or respect that, that’s not a great experience for them, especially if they give so much of themselves to their job.
I think when we talk about employee experience it’s so many things. It’s about being strong partners with the other people in the business that are a part of what you would consider your “people strategy”. It’s multifaceted and not owned by any single person or team, but there are moments in an employee’s time at work that impacts how they perceive that place. Those moments are owned by all of us, at any given time. My boss, Jenn McColly recently put it this way: We can think of employee experience like Facebook, where there’s a heart, thumbs up, a happy face or a sad face, even an angry face. What would you give your experience in that moment? In the moment an employee is having lunch with peers, maybe it’s a heart… But there may be another moment that day, where it’s a frowning face. As influencers of employee experience, we hope that cumulatively you have more ‘hearts’ than you have ‘frowning faces’.
How is humility important for people just starting out in their careers within tech? Do you feel that this particular industry needs humility more than others?
You kind of have this fork in the road starting off in your career. You feel vulnerable, and you maybe have some insecurities. And you have a decision to make. You can either acknowledge those feelings for what they are and work towards feeling more confident by owning those feelings, or you can overcompensate for those things by showing arrogance or pretending to know when you don’t. Then you start digging yourself into this hole. It’s about realizing when you’re feeling those things and knowing that they are there for a reason, instead of ignoring them and overcompensating by doing something else that is not you, that’s inauthentic. It’s saying to yourself ‘I’m feeling these worries for a reason, so how can I feel more confident?’. The first step is to acknowledge that you are feeling those things, say that’s okay, and find your confidence. It’s there somewhere, and it’ll build from there. It’s much harder to do this when you start building from, let’s just call it the ‘overcompensating path’, when you truly don’t know what you are doing, but wanting everyone to believe that you do. The out come of that is in-authenticity and fear. Fear that that someone is going to catch on to you. That’s scary.
I think humility belongs everywhere, it is blind to industry, ego and intelligence. You can be confident and have humility. Not having the right answer, or acknowledging that you are wrong doesn’t mean that you lack confidence, it means that you have confidence. Being able to make decisions and remove your ego is a sign of humility, and it’s going to allow other people lean to into that and trust in you. You’ll be able to move further and further into your career when you start off with that humility, as opposed to ego. You’re not going to have to go as many steps backwards. You might have to take one or two steps backwards by admitting you are wrong or made a mistake, but the size of those steps are small in comparison to the steps you have to take when you don’t. It’s super easy to go down the path of ‘I know, I know, I know, I know’ when you don’t — faking it until you make it. But it’s so hard to come out of that when there is already an established perception about you, that ‘you know’. That’s now someone’s belief about you, how do you change it? From experience, just don’t do it in the first place. Just start off with the real you.
There’s a lot of talk about personal branding. I want to know what the relationship is between humility and building your own personal brand, where do they conflict? Where do they go well together? Is there a contradiction at times?
I don’t believe there is a contradiction with humility and brand, but I do think there can be conflict with authenticity and brand. Personal brand to me is how you want people to perceive you, or what you want to be known for. Those are the types of things that come to mind to me when we talk about personal brand. I would describe myself as someone who is vulnerable, transparent, doesn’t have secrets, has humility, and can be self-deprecating at times. I have no problems with saying I’m wrong, I actually have relief in those moments realizing it. Apologizing to me is not hard. Let’s imagine it’s your 100th birthday and you’re still alive, people are coming to your birthday, you might be in a walker or wheelchair sitting on the side in the audience. What do you want people to say about you when they get on stage? Do you want to be known as that jerk that got everything he wanted at work, or do you want people to say ‘he was a mentor to me?’ or ‘he taught me valuable lessons, and he created a safe-space for me to be who I was.’. It’s like that Maya Angelo quote, “… people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
I think about brand in that way. How do you make people feel when they interact with you? That is your brand. What do you want to be known for? It’s not about what do you want to have power over or control in. It’s not about what do you want to win, or what award you want. It’s about what do you want to be known for that makes you different, makes you unique or special. What do you want your family to think about when they hear your name? Your family could also be the people that you work with. I truly feel that way about the people I work with. I’ve been here a long time, and in that time they’ve seen me grow. If you can be around people that let you be yourself, they become chosen family to you. You may not be a person that likes or appreciates work relationships in that way, or feels safe doing, but you can at least start with being comfortable in being who you are by being around people that allow you to do that. Brand comes along with that. Brand shouldn’t be inauthentic, it shouldn’t be something that you have to control. If you create a brand that isn’t you, you’re going down this disingenuous place with people that are seeing you as someone you are not. Then, sadly, you’re trying to live up to this expectation to be somebody that you think they want you to be. But really, they just want you to be you so they can be them.
Could you share a story about a time where practicing humility gave a positive outcome you didn’t expect?
I had an internship in college, and when I showed up, I was eager and excited. There was an on-boarding event and all of that cool stuff, and I was hearing all about everything everyone else was doing and couldn’t wait to meet my manager and find out what I would be doing. I showed up, found my desk, met a few people, met my boss. She was excited to meet me, but she honestly told me ‘I don’t really have anything for you to do’, that she had been slammed and wasn’t prepared. I remember thinking at that moment to myself ‘it’s fine… it’s gonna be fine… she’s gonna figure something out… maybe I can do something for her today and then we’ll know what to do next’. I went to my desk, organized a few things, and looked through marketing materials. I did that for about 10 days, just showing up. I am sure I used to block my calendar to indicate ‘arrival: 8:00 O’clock, Noon: Lunch, 5:00pm Leave’ and there was pretty much nothing in between other than maybe making copies for some of the EA’s, looking through papers and faking busy, playing office. About 10 days in I thought ‘I cannot go back to school saying this is my internship’.
Obviously nothing was magically coming together, there was no solid internship project for me, so I decided to just kind of create one. I didn’t know much, really anything about the industry, but I knew that I could talk to people. I knew that it might be scary for me to initiate it, but once I started talking, that was a skill-set I knew I had. So I decided to just jump right in so I set up meetings with everyone I possibly could, I even setup a meeting with the CEO. At this point I was a bit confident as I set up so many meetings and was receiving so many accepts that I thought, I’m just going to send one to the CEO, I’ve got nothing to lose! His EA accepted for him. I’m sure I thought he had personally accepted my meeting at the time., I just created some questions and wanted to understand more about why people came to work, wanted to know more about their experience, what advice they would have for me, what would they tell me if I was their daughter, if they were to do things again and start where I was, asked them about their first mentor.
I remember going into those conversations thinking ‘I know nothing about this place and these guys know everything’. I felt so vulnerable, so vulnerable. I firmly believe that the best way to practice humility is to own your vulnerability. I’m so glad I did because I went into those talks thinking they knew everything, and came out with this realization that ‘Whoa, I’m so not the only one feeling vulnerable here, and not the only one finding courage everyday when I get to this place’. I was going down their memory lane with them, we were on the trip together. As vulnerable as I was walking into those meetings, as shaky as my hands and knees were walking in, most ended with a hug and a promise to keep in touch. I can think of one particular person that I’ve kept in touch with even 15 years later. The humility component of that was I didn’t know anything about where I was. I could have sat there and done nothing, but I kind of just took ownership of the situation, entering conversations not knowing very much, asking a lot of questions, together learning. I think it’s where I truly learned it’s okay to be vulnerable, it’s the most courageous way to really experience humility, because it’s scary, but I think that fear is there for a reason and I think it makes us human.
Last question, ‘fake it till you make it’, what are your views on that popular phase? There’s plenty of pressure on people all over, but particularly in tech to embrace that mindset in their career.
It’s super common advice and it works sometimes, in short stints. I don’t think it works in lifelong decisions or things that impact you forever. Definitely not great advice when you are going into your career. It perpetuates this epidemic of people pretending to be something they aren’t. Fake it till you make it is so dangerous, because if you go into a situation faking it till you make it, you aren’t going to make it because you are faking it. At the end of the day if you are faking it because you are afraid of failure, from experience, you will fail anyway! And it feels a hell of a lot worse. I got fired once in the past while trying to be someone I wasn’t. And looking back, I think they fired a version of me that I didn’t even like. That sucks! Faking it till you make it takes you down a really bad road. Like I talked about earlier, if you don’t know something and you continue moving on forward like you do know, you’re going down such a steep, steep hill that is so hard to climb back up. If I am being totally honest, I wouldn’t have known how to come out of that experience had I not been fired. Because I was so deep into it, into being this inaccurate version of me, I needed someone else to make that decision for me. Looking back, it was such a gift to be in that spot, but I do think that there are some serious consequences to taking that advice.
I think there’s a lot of pressure in tech, but there’s also a lot of pressure in general with social media. It’s changed so much about how we think things “should be” or “are”, creating these personas where people feel the need to define what they know about someone based on such a small sliver of what they post. It’s typically happy stuff, you want your stream to be a happy place, you want that picture to be framed, but what’s on the outside of that back-frame? I think there’s this unrealistic expectation that we put on ourselves and I do think it’s in work, in tech, outside of work, in the world. You think about the health of the economy right now and how all those things are showing up in social media, and it starts to drag some of those behaviors. When people feel vulnerable, sometimes the worst comes out. I think if we are not afraid of that feeling of vulnerability, then the best will come out.
By Ali Serag El-Din and Salman Alam
