From Job to Dream Job: My way to live Satya Nadella’s vision

About six years ago I began to feel a kind of inner emptiness that kept on growing. It was strange because I had everything I'd ever dreamed of: A loving family, great friends and fifteen years of well-paid job at Microsoft as a Software Engineering Manager.

 I can't say that I wasn't happy. However, as I started approaching forty, from somewhere deep inside I began to hear a voice which would ask me with ever increasing frequency: what are you going to do in the second half of your career?

 And, although I was not yet 100% clear about what I was going to do, a passion for nurturing myself with inspiring quotes, books, movies, songs, and interesting thinkers had awakened in me.

 Every holiday season I traveled back to Argentina and returned loaded with a pile of new books. I was about to return to Redmond, when my friend Matías Duek strongly recommended that I buy Guillermo Echevarría's book How to Make Things Happen (instead of talking about what's happening).

 Chapter by chapter the book was captivating and inspiring me and when I finished I found myself saying: this is the kind of book I would like to write one day.

True to my habit of contacting the authors that inspired me, I decided to search for the author on Facebook and leave him a message. That's how we started talking and the following year he welcomed me and my daughters to his home in Argentina.

 What most captured my attention in the book was how the author had managed to combine music and coaching. His work with his hobby. The personal and the professional. Profession and Art.

 A while later, we started weekly coaching sessions via Skype in which we took advantage of the challenges I faced as an Xbox Engineering Team Manager to train my leadership, communication and teamwork skills. But gradually we also took time to challenge the integration of my different Diego’s.

 I felt that parts of me were neglected during my daily work. On the one hand, there was Diego the engineer who was passionate about technology, and on the other hand there was another Diego who dreamed of inspiring people through storytelling, music and other art forms.

 So, I started to take advantage of the opportunities to exercise my inspiring Diego and got support from my manager at Microsoft to dedicate 20% of my time to inspiring activities like partnering with Human Resources to host the annual Bring Your Kids to Work Day Keynote or lead the Team Xbox Latinos Employee Resource Group. But I felt that every minute I devoted to pursuing these passions subtracted from my real job.

 I was faced with a dilemma: how to grow Diego the Inspirer without losing the job of Diego the Engineer? Either I did one thing, or I did the other. Looking back, I can see I was completely submerged in the thinking mode of: Should I do this or that? (What Guillermo calls the Or Mindset)

 It's true, I had managed to combine the personal and the professional in a certain manner, but far from achieving that these two would create a positive synergy instead they were competing with one other. To find the synergy between my two Diego’s it was necessary to encourage myself to think in the And Mindset.

 So, I used the following bold question as a tool: How did being Diego the Inspirer make me a more productive engineering manager? And how did being an engineering manager empower me as an inspirational leader?

 I was advised to ask the question in the past tense. This would force my brain not to judge its likelihood by "assuming it already happened" and discover a way in which both these goals – to be inspiring or to be an engineer – that until then had appeared to be quite separate endeavors, could in fact become one and strengthen each other.

 Guillermo encouraged me to hold on to these seemingly counterintuitive questions until the answers began to appear. When I stopped seeing my personal yearnings as separate, and even opposite, from Microsoft's mission, I could begin to see how Microsoft could benefit from me living my personal mission. And I began to consider more seriously what until then would have seemed a crazy idea: joining the HR team.

 When a year later Kathleen Hogan and Chuck Edward invited me to join Microsoft HR as leader of the Global University Recruiting Team I again asked myself: How did being Diego the Inspirer and artist make me a better leader of University Recruiting? And how did being an excellent leader of University Recruiting empower me as an inspirer and artist?

 Where before my mind saw opposites now I could start to see the possible synergies: Developing my inspiring and artistic side could help me keep my team motivated so they can attract the best possible candidates. And being an engineer -the part of me that I originally saw as opposed to the inspiring Diego who was excited to be part of HR- now allows me to better connect with engineering candidates and engineering managers who receive those new employees on their teams.

 From these type of questions emerged the idea of writing my upcoming book to help people find synergies between passion and work.

 Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been encouraging employees to:

Seeking to carry out Satya’s vision, I discovered that instead of simply taking advantage of Microsoft as a platform to achieve my dreams, I could also find a way to make my dreams a platform that would make it easier for Microsoft to achieve its mission.

Then my passion projects would become more sustainable in the organization. Because not only would I be worrying about my own benefits, but also about the interests of the company that is giving me the benefit. In this way, the organization will probably be more willing to invest resources in "my", and now "our" project. That is, my project would shift from being an employee benefit or a subsidy, to becoming something sustainable: sustained by the value and synergy it brings to the organization.

For example, imagine how much more impactful I'll be as an inspirer and how much more I can contribute to Microsoft University Recruiting, if instead of writing a generic book on inspiration, I intentionally write a book that aids thousands of new and existing employees in the challenge of integrating their passion into their job, and help us further build together an exceptional place to work capable of attracting the best people?

It’s not so difficult to integrate our different passions. What’s most difficult is encouraging ourselves to ask and nurture the And Synergy Questions until we start to find powerful answers: 

How could I use Microsoft as a platform to pursue my passion? And in what way could my passion be a platform for Microsoft to take one more step in its mission to empower each person and each organization on the planet?

 As with our loved ones, our business partners, our customers, and even in the creation of videogames for a specific gaming system: success is more lasting and profound when it is based on a two-way platform where everybody wins.

Written by Diego Rejtman and Guillermo Echevarria

I want to dedicate this article to those brave Microsoft employees who have started to integrate their "other passions" into their job in a way that gives their lives more meaning AND also helps the company mission. Just as important, I also want to dedicate this article to the managers of those brave employees who are supporting them and saying: Go for it!