Three Things I Learned at Microsoft (and didn't realize until I left)

About a year and a half ago, I made a big decision in my career.  I decided to leave Microsoft to pursue my dream job at Avanade – it was a big change, but an opportunity I just couldn’t pass up.  I haven’t looked back.

Except to reflect upon some of the really important stuff I learned while at Microsoft.

In my eight years at Microsoft, I had six different managers and five different roles. For about half the time, I was an individual contributor (IC) in a sales role, and for the second half I was a people manager (M1) for sales and for technical sales. We re-org’d pretty much every July - I hired people, I coached people, and, sadly, I had to manage some people out of the business.  But.  Not once in those eight years, did I feel that I was a faceless number, a cog in some great machine, or that I needed to entirely give up who I am to be successful in the eyes of the organization.  I always felt seen and appreciated, if not always understood.

And I learned.  I learned a lot.

After I left Microsoft, I realized that there were three big things I learned without even noticing until I found myself using those skills pretty much daily in my new role at Avanade.  I also noticed that there were a few common threads across all of them:  listening, pausing and humility.

Thing 1: How to Navigate Change

When you work in an environment that moves quickly and changes all the time, you have to learn to bob and weave not to be successful, but just to survive.  To be successful, you need to be able to “ski the bumps” as I like to describe it, a throw-back to my ski bum days in Park City, UT.  When you’re skiing a mogul field in deep powder, you can’t see the bumps as they come, and while you find your way down the run, you have to absorb the impact of the bumps you hit with your legs, keeping your torso steady, or else you fall down. Thriving in a constantly changing work environment is the same thing.  You never know when or from where the change is going to come.  You probably don’t know the entirety of the change and you certainly don’t know, yet, how it’s going to impact you and your team. But you can’t let it knock you over.  Especially if you are a leader.  You have to absorb the impact, process what it means, and remain steady and focused in order to lead through it.  Don’t get me wrong, change is daunting, but manageable IF you have a #GrowthMindset and are open to thinking about and doing things in new and different ways. What I learned at Microsoft was that when you listen to the reason for the change (even if you disagree with it), pause to really think about the change in a broader context and have the humility to know that some things are bigger than you and your comfort zone, it is possible to not only survive rapid and frequent change, but to learn how to use it to grow and thrive – professionally and personally.

Thing 2: How to Pick my Battles

This is a big one.  I remember getting some coaching while at Microsoft from my mentor, Jamie Tozzi , who reminded me (because most of the time we already know these things about ourselves) that I have a strong sense of right and wrong which meant that I had a tendency to always want to fight for or defend the thing I believed to be right.  Every. Single. Time.  And, well, this is neither practical nor healthy and, frankly, can become pretty annoying to people around you.  When you fight every battle, it erodes the value and credibility you bring when fighting the battles that really matter.  So, I learned to pick my battles.  I learned to ask myself if I was putting on my cape and jumping into the fray because it would make a material difference in a positive direction or because I just thought what was happening was “wrong”.  Over time, I learned the value of understanding that there are lots of ways to do things, lots of ways to see things and lots of ways to think about things – basically, I learned to live in the grey space.  When we do this, not only do we gain new perspectives, but we also make others feel valued and included because we listen to them.  I learned to really pause and give things the “so what” test and to have the humility to know that sometimes it’s more important to let someone else “win” because my sense of right and wrong is just that – mine…not everyone’s.

Thing 3: How to Lead (for real)

Finally, learning how to effectively navigate change (ski the bumps) and pick my battles (so what?) were critical in the growth of my leadership practice.  I intentionally call it my leadership practice, like a yoga practice, because I believe that true leaders never stop learning and growing.  We are never quite “there” – we always can learn more, be better, give more to our teams and those around us.  As a side note, in case you’ve forgotten, you don’t need to be in a leadership position to be a leader.  Everyone should think about having a leadership practice – personally and professionally – in my opinion.  For this one, I do have to share that Microsoft offered two incredible training programs that accelerated my practice – The High Performance Mindset by Michael Gervais and The Coaching Habit by 📚 Michael Bungay Stanier .  I often tell people that being a front line manager (M1) at Microsoft is akin to getting a PHD in Organizational Leadership.  This is probably the thing that my eight years at Microsoft gave me for which I am most grateful.  There are so many things I could share about my leadership journey at Microsoft, that continues today at Avanade – enough for its very own blog – but I’ll boil it down to this.  When I first became an M1, I asked several M1s I’d worked with and for whom I had great respect to give me one piece of advice as I moved into this new role.  One of them, from Bill Kerr really stuck with me.  Bill told me that the key to being a good leader was to always remember that the way I would do something is not the only way to do it and that a leader always listens to the people on their team, pauses to think about what they’ve said, and has the humility to learn from it.