Hello… Goodbye
January 2024
Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Every journey has the same. I’ve had the privilege of having many great journeys and enjoyed many amazing professional spaces where I’ve learned, contributed, and had major growth across government, retail, and technology.
My HP journey has come to an end and here are some of the things I've learned along the way:
1. Be open to doing things differently: every company, role, and level of leadership requires something new or different than what landed you in that space. Be open enough to learn how to be successful in the newness. What can you add or augment to show up as a trusted leader and make an impact? How can you inspire the humans you’ve been trusted to lead? How can you build trust, credibility, and the right relationships early?
2. Be comfortable with the uncomfortable: when creating something that has never been done before in your new space, you must become best friends with ambiguity. Remember if at your company or business you are trying to do something that has never been done before, the company likely doesn’t have the answer internally to how or what to do because if they did—they (likely) would have already done it. Sit back, grab a snack, and get comfortable on the journey of discovery, ideation, testing, learning, reengineering, and scaling.
3. Make friends fast: Take time to meet people because you don’t know when or how you are going to need to engage different parts of the organization to realize your mission. Spend time engaging people across all levels and offering help to them to solve some of their problems. It is something people remember and when you need their help, you already developed relationships to help you realize the goal. Also be clear on business partners that are responsible for helping you or need you to be successful. These can include sales teams, marketing, engineering, supply chain/procurement, and even HR teams.
4. Ground yourself in the customer’s shoes: So many opinions will hit you from all directions—from other executives, peers, partners, your team, you name it. You can spend a lot of time, energy, and resources chasing after solutions that address these opinions, but does it really enable you to create and sell a product? At the end of the day, we need to be close to and understand our customers deeply. Who is the customer? What are the customer’s needs? What are their pain points? What are they trying to realize (jobs to be done)? How can you(r product) help?
5. Cultivate and care for your team: It may seem cliché, but you are only as good as the people on your team. No matter how hard you try, you cannot achieve organizational success without the organization and people you lead being successful too. Spend time getting to know the humans that report to you one on one. Yes—it takes a lot of time, but being human and getting to know them as humans will go a long way. It will give you energy and familiarity to know them beyond just what they do, and start the journey of getting to know the whole person, their family, what energizes them, what demotivates them, how they like to be managed, what their history has been like within the company, what external experiences they bring etc. Knowing your team is imperative and it’s the first step in being able to advocate for them and help them grow to realize their ambitions. Remember their success is your success IRL.
6. Know your numbers: I’m not talking about understanding these for your health benefits plan, although that is important… but I’m pushing for you to understand the P&L for your company and the business you run. Understand the product specific revenue, margin, contribution margins, etc. Understand the costs of the products and services and understand the metrics that matter. How does your business accrete to the overall profitability of the company? How does your division/product/segment performance play into the performance incentives of your leadership? How does the market perceive your company? How do partners/peers etc. impact your costs and revenues? What other teams do you “pay for” in the company? Who or what products “pay” for you? Who are your competitors and how are they both performing and pushing for optimization? If you don’t know your numbers, you cannot understand the drivers of the business and how the pain-points you are solving through the products you create for customers accrete to the overall value to the company.
7. Take care of yourself: This is a big one that we often say and don’t do. When leading teams, pouring from an empty pitcher is not only impossible but it doesn’t really get us anywhere. Part of your job must be to spend time focusing on how to improve and maintain your mental, physical, and emotional health. I’ve spent years of my career pushing my team to focus on these areas without focusing on them myself. Guess what happened? My team members didn’t ultimately focus on them for long because they saw they weren’t a personal priority for me. When I started being consistent about going to the gym regularly, took vacations and actually unplugged, had the surgery I put off for years, or took six weeks off to heal—my team could see me as a follower of my own doctrine and began to focus on all these things for themselves. It made for a healthier, happier, more productive team.
The last learning “taking care of yourself” is where I am focusing now. During my last weeks at HP, a lot of people asked me what was next for me. My answer to that is simple—that everything has its season and while my HP season has ended, I am looking forward to the next season of rest and focusing on mom-ing and me-ing adventures. I’ve been a full-time, working professional for more than half my life—over 24 years. It’s been almost 13 years since I’ve had more than 6 weeks off to reflect, care for myself, and care for my child. I prayed—literally eyes closed talking to God—years ago that when the time came and my daughter needed me to be more present than I may have been at that moment, that God would afford me the opportunity to truly be there in the moment she needed extra care and support. I had the privilege of caring for my daughter full time for the first year of her life before I joined Microsoft. Now as she approaches her 13th birthday, I’m taking a little time to do that again. We are in the valley of the middle school beast and for those who have not experienced it as a parent, middle school—especially 7th grade—is ghetto! Each day is filled with ups and downs—these days way more ups thankfully.
I also prayed that that moment would afford me the opportunity to do the things I’ve always said I wanted to do, but never really had time for. So, I’m spending my days training (my body) for training sake, making the outline to my cuisine and conversations project (also known as a cookbook), writing stories, studying, talking to God, meditating, reading, and enjoying jumping into the deep end to learn about tech topics that I previously only had time to go knee deep in.
I am open to my next work adventure as well. I’m focusing on work adventures that help fill my cup, that tie to my passions (consumers, technology, product), and that accept all of Tylitha and allow me to be the complete her she is meant to be. I plan to keep you all posted on my journey in various forms of content. Feel free to follow me on all platforms if you are interested and share with others who might benefit
