How to achieve more with less: The Skewer experiment

In my last article I shared a tool that is helping me hack time and resources to live a more meaningful life. Today I want to share an example of how I am putting it to practice.

I had just accepted the role of Microsoft University Recruiting Leader. I knew that immense challenges were coming, and I was afraid that the ensuing work tsunami would make me completely lose sight of those passions for which I'd made the decision to switch from Engineering to Human Resources.

I wanted to have a side project that kept me learning, curious and passionate.

And so, we started thinking with Guillermo, my coach, how to integrate into my work my passion for music, philosophy, science and the desire to inspire thousands (among many other things).

Which one to choose? And, what was even more challenging, how to integrate them in a way that would strengthen my job performance?

Of course, I had several ideas in mind, but they all seemed to distance me too much from my “real job”, which is how we normally refer to work that is stripped of that personal touch provided by one's own diversity and eclectic passions. All those things than can potentially turn our job into a Dream Job.

The truth is, I felt uncomfortable just thinking about incorporating those passions into my work week. What would others think? Because, in short, what did all those personal things have to do with leading a large team or recruiting the best candidates for Microsoft?

It was then that Guillermo proposed applying the Skewer strategy. He told me that he had baptized it that way because it’s about identifying those tasty morsels that I want to be sure to savor in my week, my year or my life and then ask myself what project—or brochette—would allow me to capture more of those things that I like?

So, we drew circles—the morsels—on a blank sheet of paper and inside each one wrote one by one the things that mattered most to me:

• I want to achieve the business objectives of the area I lead - I wrote in the first circle.
• I want to motivate the University Recruiting team.
• I want to attract the best candidates to Microsoft.
• I want to build a good relationship with the “internal clients” of our team, meaning the different teams at Microsoft who receive the new employees we hire.
• I want to grow my leadership skills and become a role model of the new company culture.
• I want to inspire thousands of people to find more meaning in their lives through their work

This exercise was beginning to excite me and, encouraged by Guillermo, I started to include more “personal” goals:

• I want to spread my appreciation for science and art to others.
• I want to spend my days in a fun work environment.
• I want to enjoy music, and even sing! (I still had no idea what role music might play with my work as a tech recruiting leader)
• I want to spend more quality time with my family and do more things with my daughters.
• I want to find my way to fulfill Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's invitation to use Microsoft as a platform to realize my personal mission.

Then we started to evaluate the different projects that occurred to me according to the number of priority areas that they impacted.

Both Guillermo and I share a passion for books and music, so we really wanted to do some of that, but instead of getting carried away by the simple impulse of the desire, we took the time and trouble to find out how music and writing could impact on the most areas. Not only did we ask ourselves how a song or a book could impact the main areas, we also challenged ourselves to answer how we could modify that song and that book, so that it would impact on areas that at first sight seemed completely unrelated.

And so, we discovered that through a song, we could embody a more modern and warm corporate culture, that would encourage employees to experiment communicating things in a completely new way for the company.

We wanted to bet on the possibility that the song could motivate the University Recruiting team and -someday- even ease their work of attracting new talent to the company. In that sense, we sought for it to be useful in delivering an inspiring message to the candidates at the speaking events in which I participated and, as if that weren’t enough, we had to connect in some way with “internal clients” in areas like Windows, Skype, Azure, etc.

It seemed like we were asking too much from a song. But it's logical not to see too clearly at the beginning: we were creating something new. And I emphasize this, because it's possible when you find yourself building your own multi-impact brochette, that you’ll feel like you’re proposing something impossible. Looking back, what I value most is that we had the courage to ask ourselves those questions and the patience to wait for the juiciest answers to appear (the first answers are generally very poor, or very improvable in the best of cases).

What's so powerful about issuing a mental command is that it can be kept activated. It's accomplished by training your mind so that you never settle for the first answer and, instead, continue asking until your brain realizes that you're serious about that question. Only then is the search radar turned on.

The result of inputting all those premises into the mental processing unit was that one day we came up with a song that used Microsoft products - University Recruiting's internal clients - as verbs and nouns, along with Microsoft advertising slogans like the ones used in this 2014 Super Bowl commercial.

We named it Dream Makers, which is what I affectionately call our recruiters. And it's also how I see the candidates who dare to apply for their dream job in a company that has the mission to empower people and organizations around the world.

The truth is, another reason for choosing company products and slogans was betting that this way we'd encounter less resistance from my colleagues to accept the song as part of my job—don't forget we were composing a song on company time!

In addition, we designed the song lyrics in a way that would also be a message to the candidates about the attitude that is needed in an interview to get a job at the company (and I also took on the challenge of using the names of the Microsoft products to convey the key things that I had learned over the past 15 years).

But we did not stop there. We began to wonder how our song could impact on my family area. So, we decided to invite my daughters to learn it with the idea of later offering them to record the choirs and also sing it at the Bring Your Kids to Work events, which ended up actually happening. My daughters and I performed the song together in front of 3,000 employees and their kids.

The truth is that we ended up singing it hundreds of times as a family, each in his own room and even in the shower (we also had a game of inventing the most ridiculous lyrics). For two months my house became a merry-go-round in which someone was always singing the same old advertising jingle.

Excited by all the synergies that we were discovering, we encouraged ourselves to ask how the song could impact the book. First, the song became the example of what the book wanted to demonstrate: by integrating your passions you can turn your work into a Dream Job (AND improve your performance).

In addition, we had the idea of using the song's phrases in a chapter of the book in which I talk about the 10 things I learned while working at Microsoft. We also decided to convert the phrases into book section covers. And what better way to complete the brochette than asking my wife Natalia to design the initial book cover draft taking advantage of her skills as a graphic designer?

And that's also how this article was born, using the song to tell the world how the skewer tool had focused us to invest time and resources in what—if it hadn't been considered in this way—might have been a dangerous distraction instead of a multipurpose project. The question about how the Dream Makers song could impact the business continued and this was what encouraged me to suggest to Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft's Chief People Officer, if she would let me sing it live at the Microsoft Global Human Resources Conference.

Kathleen not only liked the idea, but she proposed that we sing it together in front of 2,000 Human Resources colleagues who traveled from different corners of the planet. And that's how the whole Microsoft HR leadership team (and even my daughters!) ended up singing it together on that stage.

Today I continue asking myself: How do we make the song project impact on as many of my priority areas as possible?

And I plan to continue asking this, because the possible synergies are endless when leave our old prejudices behind to look for powerful combinations among the things we value most.

Written by Diego Rejtman and Guillermo Echevarria