A Humble Recognition

Building and leading a team is more than checking boxes and executing deliverables.??In March 2021, I took on a people leader role at Cisco. It was the beginning of the pandemic with many unknowns and a scary time.?I took over managing a group of customer-facing engineers on the West Coast which consisted of about 12 individuals. ?At the time, many individuals did not realize they were on the same team because there was a mix of newcomers and existing ones.?The COVID-19 shutdown did not help the situation either.

I devoted my time and energy to this team. ?I came up with a creative virtual solution for us to get to know each other by implementing what I call “walk and talk” where we share our weekend stories and play “true and false” statements about each other. ?I invested my time in our one-on-one meetings, first getting to know each Engineer and customizing my coaching for each one of them. ?Soon we became a trusting team, where we had each other’s back. ?

Last year, my role expanded, and I took over the East Coast Engineers, adding six more individuals. For those who are familiar with Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development, our combined team went back to the 'Forming' Stage as our new East Coast members joined our team. ?However, we were able to move quickly through Storming, Norming again and became a very High-Performance team.

Recently, I discovered that I was nominated to be on Cisco Customer Experience (CX) Beacon Award and was selected to be a finalist.?

This is an award where the individual contributors nominate their managers with countless stories of the ways their managers inspired, encouraged, engaged, and developed them.?There were 1,100 nominations that represented 573 individual managers, across seven different functional departments within the global Cisco Customers Experience organization.

While I did not win, it is both an honor and humbling to be selected as one of the 40 Finalists in the Cisco Customer Experience (CX) Beacon Award!

I am sharing this to encourage other people leaders and remind us that doing right by your people will be rewarded.?There is nothing more powerful than being nominated by your own team members for such prestigious honors.?

#greatteam #highperformanceteams #people #developeothers #leadershipprinciples #greatplacetowork #greatleader