After 5 years of consulting, I was terrified to get a J.O.B. To my surprise and delight, it was actually a really positive experience (especially the people I worked with) and a huge set of building blocks for my career.
S1E5: My First Real J.O.B
Tyler Small: The very thought of sitting in a cubicle all day by myself, gave me a sense of terror,
[00:00:09]Tyler Small, and this is hacking emotional intelligence. Yes. The first time I walked into Western governor's university for an interview, they had these cubicles that seemed super tall. The decor was like a dark wood look, super old school. And the logo was very academic looking. Just the whole brand looked very old fashioned and stuck in the eighties or nineties.
[00:00:43] I was absolutely terrified. It looked very old. The place looked very boring, very stuck in its ways. And I was not interested in being involved in such a culture. So I nearly broke into a cold sweat considering a future sitting all by myself all day long every day. In a cubicle.
[00:01:09]But there was something about Evan Pincus, the hiring manager. It was a Friday and he was wearing a plaid button down North face shirt. North face is a high end outdoor brand. Of course, I love the mountains. I love being in the mountains and also Evan's profile picture on LinkedIn showed him somewhere on a mountain.
[00:01:36] And I was thinking this guy might be all right. I was also interviewing at Amazon, for a similar role, but this one at WGU was more squarely positioned in the leadership development space where I had been thriving. And I decided to take it. Later, I found that the new president of WGU was. Actually from Amazon and it was, is definitely taking the culture to the next level, to a very good place. And wGU turned out to be a really great place to work. And I highly, I recommend applying there. If you're considering a job change.
[00:02:16] One thing between you and me, it's really tough to get in as an instructor. , so if you see a position. Make sure you look and see if they require a PhD for it. Even for those roles, even if you have a PhD, they have 500 PhD applicants for every opening. It's insane.
[00:02:37] But anyway, so there I was at WGU and Evan put together an amazing team. And for me, this was my first time working in a corporate environment, which was very different from all the previous consulting gigs I had done.
[00:02:54] This is a very high number of interpersonal relations that needed to occur because of the very cross organizational aspect of my work. And at first I really struggled. In some areas and this was a huge growing experience for me. I think my biggest strength has always been getting the work done and just accomplishing a huge amount of work.
[00:03:24] And that's where I shine. The tricky thing was now I had to do it on a team and I had to do it where there wasn't necessarily someone ,there to build these relationships for me and just plug and play the work. I had to get along. I had to be a good team player.
[00:03:42] So , this was new skill for me to develop. And I remember one of the early projects I did was to launch WGUs first set of organizational values. The executive team had handed over this list of what they call leadership principles. And I was asked to create an, execute, a strategy to weave these leadership principles throughout the whole employee life cycle.
[00:04:13] And it was really cool. It was a high profile project with tight deadlines and. Change management with thousands of people involved. we did the launch in town hall and a dozen or so other communication channels that we pushed it through. And I did two brand awareness surveys, , to see if people knew what these things were.
[00:04:35]It was at six months and 12 months after the launch. And at six months after the launch brand awareness was at 50%, 50% of people could say, Oh, those are the leadership principles. And that's what they use for our performance reviews. That's how they hire people , that's how that's those represent our culture or something to that effect.
[00:04:55]But by 12 months down the road, Brand awareness was at 95%. So I considered it a very successful project. I think everyone did. And then after two years, different groups within the university were creating their own initiatives. they were a 100% built in part of the employee experience , from A to Z.
[00:05:16] , it was super successful , and that's, , that's a credit to the President Pulsipher and everyone on down. So it was considered super successful by all. I think it was , very cool along the way though there were a few bumps .
[00:05:30]One of the early parts of this project was a video. I proposed , that 10 different executives would each talk about one of the, , leadership principles and why it was important to them. So we're excited to this video. , Evan, let me know that this was pretty much the first time that there had been a, really a formal creation of multimedia for the internal audience for the employees.
[00:05:57]They did lots of videos for the students that I think 80,000 or so students by that point But for the 4,000 or so employees at the time this was like the first time that, that they had done something like this. And so our vice-president Evan's boss said, Hey, I think it will be important for me to introduce this project.
[00:06:21]They all knew about the leadership principles. They had participated in picking them out and crafting the one sentence definition for each one that they handed to me. But they didn't know anything about the video or how they'd be launched. And so this being a really new sort of thing for the university, a university that was very much changing from just solely an academic organization to more of a, kind of a techie startup.
[00:06:45] It had always relied heavily on, on technology, but the culture was moving more to be a little bit more like a tech startup, at least in large parts of the organization. And so this shift and this healthy tension was taking place. And our VP said, I think I need to introduce this video and the feel of the video and everything to the other vice presidents.
[00:07:09] So I said, okay, great. And I thought she's going to send out email, or she's going to make some phone calls tonight and I'll be all beyond the timeline. Everything will go great. Come to find out, it took two weeks or more to to get ahold of all these.
[00:07:24] And it really started to weigh down the project timeline. And so I'll tell you my reflecting back at the end, but in the, in that time, it was, I made some pretty big errors. So what did I knew one of the vice presidents pretty well. And I reached out to her and I said, Hey, you're going to get a communication from my VP but I was wondering if we could get started on this and get this going so that I can finish this by the town hall lunch.
[00:07:52] And so we did, we recorded hers and it went very well. She's very photogenic video genic. And it went well, then that way we were able to, get the whole process going. Shifting over the data files, getting them on the machine of the video editor and getting him going with his setup. And so just getting the first files rolling into post-production was this really good thing.
[00:08:17] However that's what I wanted deep down but what it did ultimately is that, eventually as my VP went and talked to that VP it was not like, Oh, like we've already started.
[00:08:26]And so I was undercutting the trust of my VP in that situation. And so for a short time that undercut, our relationship. It was repaired. the relationship was repaired. By the end of my experience there, as I was leaving WGU, they threw me this huge party, there was probably a hundred people there from all these different departments and she told me, she said, Hey, I hope you'll be back.
[00:08:49] And I said, okay. Yeah, like maybe in 10 years. And she was like, I hope you'll consider us much sooner than that. Overall, of course the relationship was repaired, but the reason I tell you this story is that I want to help you avoid making that sort of mistake.
[00:09:03] And later on, I figured out how to avoid getting that kind of struggle. My main mistake, I think, was that I put the weight for this timeline and all of its components on myself. And I should have never done that. What I needed to do, as soon as my VP added that component to the timeline, I should have asked her this, this is. Great. And when will you be finished contacting these people? When will you have the first one contacted so that I can start getting on their calendar to film them, et cetera. Cause it's this long. Process, all the post-production et cetera.
[00:09:38]I Should have laid out an adjusted timeline and then I should have come up with contingencies. So if I need to have the first one by this date and if I don't get the first one by this date, we need to push the launch in the official town hall announcement we need to push it back a full month. And is that okay with you?
[00:09:59] And she probably would've said, I definitely don't want to push it back a month. Cause the whole town hall was being planned around this, was the problem. But what I should have done is, gone through that timeline. Okay. So we will not have enough time to do the video production, post production work and the filming and getting on executives, calendars if the first person is not contacted and I'm notified by this date. There's just not enough time. And so we will have to pull the video from the event or we'll have to push it to the next town hall and I should have made that crystal clear and made it clear also that this was a high risk.
[00:10:38] And then on a cadence, okay. So the first five will be contacted by this date and the last one will be contacted by this date no later. And if they're not, then we pull the video or we push it back to the next month and this would not have been the worst thing that could have happened.
[00:10:55] For me I was a contractor. I was used to work in really fast and I had been there for six weeks or something by that point. It would have seemed like the worst possible thing imaginable. However, I should have let that timeline and the things that the VP was responsible for rest on her shoulders. I should have let her know, look. This is not going to happen. If you don't let me know that you've contacted these people by these dates, it's nothing it's, you, it's nothing gets me. That's just the reality of how long it takes to get work done. And and instead, I let this ride on my shoulders.
[00:11:30] And the team members that I was working with to get this project done. And it was extremely stressful, it was like, are we going to get this done? I don't know I don't know how we're going to get this done. We'll try and figure it out. But I think going back and setting, those expectations would have been really beneficial to all parties.
[00:11:49] I would have maintained trust the whole time. I probably could have gotten to my promotion sooner, which I'll talk about in the next episode, but overall, the launch went well. It was a great learning experience. For me, I don't know if I could have known that beforehand. But looking back, I learned some really valuable lessons at WGU. I had a lot of really cool projects. That was the, I would say the first of many. And they became progressively complex and progressively a larger budgets and a bigger impact. And it was a very cool place to work.
[00:12:25] So, I'm Tyler Small and this is hacking emotional intelligence. I'll see you next time.