4 Leadership Lessons from 7 Months at Slalom

I thought I was done with consulting. After 6+ years at Isobar, I’d reached a point in my career where my desire to focus on delivery rather than driving sales had become a ceiling in the consulting world that I knew. In my experience, leaders of consulting organizations were those who could bring in new clients, not those who could marshal a team to deliver complex projects on time and budget. So with some trepidation in the fall of 2016, I left a job and company that had been a terrific experience but that was simply no longer right for me with nothing lined up next.

I ended up working for almost a year with an entrepreneur armed with what I thought was a fantastic concept but no software industry experience. I defined his product strategy and vision, designed a static prototype, and built out a set of functional requirements and a high level conceptual architecture in preparation for his first funding round. Unfortunately, he and I were not a good fit as a founding team, so I found myself back in the job market in early 2018.

That’s when I found Slalom.

A friend and former colleague from Isobar was working for the Slalom Delivery Network, now known as Slalom Build. He couldn’t say enough good things about the company in terms of how they treat their employees and their view on the world of work in general. I also reached out to a woman with whom I had worked at Deloitte who had been at Slalom for a number of years, and she was equally if not more enthusiastic. And the best part – she described Slalom’s view on career growth as one that allows for a diversity of paths, including the option to focus on delivery rather than sales. I was hooked and eventually got hired to lead the Solution Ownership team for Slalom Build in Denver.

Unfortunately, my time at Slalom ended up being short-lived. While I liked the company and loved my job, I struggled to adapt to the culture there. I regularly found myself breaking norms I didn’t understand and crossing lines I hadn’t seen, sometimes even after they were pointed out to me. As my concern over these early missteps grew, I was assured not to worry. “You have a year to figure it out,” I was told. “Keep working on it.”

So I did. I threw myself into my leadership role and the company with all that I had, determined to learn “The Slalom Way” and what makes it such a great place to work. Here’s what I learned about leadership before my time there came to a very unexpected end.

Lesson 1: Invest in your people. All of them.

“I’ve gotten more leadership training in my first 8 months at Slalom than in the previous 20 years of my career,” I was told by one leader in the interview process. Any skepticism I may have had at that point was quickly erased once I joined the company. Slalom embraces multiple approaches to and modalities of training that are available to everyone. They offer not only a robust free online learning library covering a wide array of topics (career development, internal tools, technical topics, and more) but also regularly scheduled classroom-based training sessions at Slalom offices and funding for appropriate third-party trainings and certifications. They also provide multi-session, off-site, cohort-based leadership development programs for everyone in the company who is in a people or practice management role.

I’ve worked for companies that claim to offer training and career development, but I’ve never seen a company put their money where their mouth is in the way that Slalom does. It’s a no-strings-attached commitment that I think speaks volumes about how the company values its people “first as individuals, second as employees.”

Lesson 2: Cultivate emotional intelligence.

I never once heard the term “emotional intelligence” or the concept of “EQ” mentioned while I was at Slalom, but the handling of interpersonal – and client – relationships judiciously and empathetically is at the core of how Slalom operates. When you first start at Slalom, you begin hearing phrases with words you understand but whose meaning is not immediately clear.

“He’s a C, and I’m a high I.”

“You might be climbing the ladder a bit on that.”

At some point fairly early on, someone will notice your puzzled look, apologize for drifting into Slalom-speak, and explain. Everyone at Slalom is encouraged to take a DISC assessment and training. The goal is to create a greater awareness both of your own behavioral and communication tendencies and, perhaps more importantly, of those with whom you work on a daily basis. Additionally, cautionary awareness of the Ladder of Inference is another cornerstone of Slalom’s emotionally intelligent culture. “Lead with curiosity” is how my boss often phrased it. Don’t assume you understand what’s going on based on the limited observations you have made so far.

These two building blocks are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to emotional intelligence and how Slalom helps to build it from the moment you walk in the door. The point is that for a company whose success is built around the effective collaboration of teams, Slalom’s focus on increasing the average EQ of the organization pays dividends on a daily basis.

Lesson 3: Support multiple paths to leadership.

Unlike the traditional up-or-out model found in many (most? all other?) consulting companies in which there is a predefined ladder of advancement with time limits on each rung, Slalom employs what they call a wheel-and-spoke model. This approach recognizes that there is a wide array of skills that must be assembled to lead an organization, and not everyone will be good at or even have an interest in developing all of them. This option to focus on my delivery skills and my desire to lead and develop teams rather than focus more and more of my attention on sales and account management is what convinced me to give Slalom a try in the first place. From what I saw while I was there, there was no bait and switch involved. “Yeah, he’s not really into managing people so he just has a couple of direct reports, and they focus on the rest of the team,” I was told about one of the senior executives.

While all of the lessons I learned about what makes Slalom a great place to work are critical to its success, this one may be the most important. It opens a world of options that simply aren’t available elsewhere from what I have seen. Over time, people and their interests change. Sure, some folks are singularly minded and know exactly what they want to do for their entire work life. Others, like me, have taken more of a jungle-gym approach to their careers and continue to evolve. Having the flexibility to grow your skillset in areas of interest while saying “no thanks” to others builds a foundation for loyalty to an organization that transcends love of a job.

Lesson 4: Lean in to feedback.

This is a where the wheels of my career at Slalom fell off.

I screwed up. I was leading a remote team and failed to recognize that I had not just failed to manage team morale, an important responsibility for a Solution Owner, but I had also unwittingly contributed the problem. The worst part about my screw up is that I didn’t see it coming. I knew we’d had our challenges as a team, but I thought we had come through it all ok and mended fences in the end. Wow, was I wrong. The written feedback that came through Workday from one team members in particular painted an ugly picture of someone who exhibited no care whatsoever for his team and the work they were doing. I was floored and sincerely ashamed of myself. It was bad enough that someone on my team felt that way, but for me to be as oblivious to the situation as I was? There are no two ways about it – I had failed as a leader. That’s not where the wheels came off, though. As bad as that feedback was, that’s not why I got fired because I recognized and accepted that I had in fact failed – in that situation.

THAT’S where the wheels came off. Rather than simply accepting that I had failed and focusing on learning from that experience, I tried to put walls around it. I tried to point out that although I had screwed up with that remote project team, things were going great with my local team of direct reports and peers in Denver. I also tried to present evidence that another area feedback I’d received from my boss may not have been 100% justified. Rather than simply saying, “Yes, I screwed up,” I said “Yes, but what about this, and maybe not that.”

Leaders at Slalom – and everywhere – don’t say “Yes, but…” to negative feedback. They lean in. They make sure they understand, and they do whatever they can to learn from the mistake. As I was told by a friend and now former colleague at Slalom after my year to learn The Slalom Way came to a premature end, “leaders don’t look for justice for themselves.” They just lead and try hard to provide justice for their teams.

I had been looking forward to attending ILP, a development program Slalom provides to senior leaders, and picking my One Big Thing to focus on for the year. As it turns out, my One Big Thing was selected for me the day my boss told me that was my last day, and I’ll be a better leader in the future because of it.

Just, you know, not at Slalom.