Salesforce Dreamforce

Dreamforce is an annual user conference hosted by Salesforce, where trailblazers, industry visionaries, and world-renowned speakers share insights on how emerging technologies will impact our future. The conference’s target audience is tech professionals. However, the conference has knowledge for everyone. As someone in the talent space, here’s what I’m bringing back…

A Seismic Shift in the Way I Think About Leadership

Carol Isozaki of Strategic Brand Intelligence spoke of two powerful concepts: Costco samples and Take Hands. As you may know, Costco sells food in bulk and thus, before buying some products, they serve samples. If you like the sample, you buy it. We as leaders are similar in that every interaction we have, we are giving out samples, which add or detract value – do others like the leadership sample we’re giving out and want to work with us?

Second, Carol talked about Take Hands. In basketball, players call for the ball from their teammates. Imagine a high stakes game, a minute left on the clock and you call for the ball to shoot. In business, not only do we have to call for the ball – the project, the promotion, the support for an idea. But we also must have our hands ready to take the ball, hence Take Hands. Once we have the project, people are testing us to see what we do with it, and we have to drive it to the basket.

Prior to Carol’s session, I believed leadership was about leading with love and enabling career-defining moments for people on my team. This is still true. However, I’m adding one more element, the notion that leadership is about delivering value to my organization and people.

People Operations is a Day One Function When Implementing New Processes

As one of my responsibilities is high volume inside sales recruiting, I attended the session, “What it Takes to Build and Scale a Successful Global Inside Sales Team.” Farhan Sarwar, Senior Business Architect of Autodesk explained how when they scaled their call centers in Denver, Barcelona, and Singapore, they introduced new tech processes to make the sales process easier for their agents. One of Autodesk’s lessons learned was that it’s never too early to think about change management.

Approximately 70 percent of change management initiatives fail – people resist the new process or ignore it. Thus, the partnership between Tech and People Operations is crucial. The Tech Department understands the tactical nuances of the process: the scope of the change, how it will be built out, how it interacts with system architecture, etc. People Operations provides the human psychology knowledge around the change.  At what point and why will people resist the new process? What is our roll out strategy to ensure maximum adoption? How do we communicate the story of why we are introducing the change? Through collaboration, both groups enable the change that the organization needs and wants.

Communicate Ideas on a Napkin

In meetings and presentations, you will now see me drawing pictures to communicate ideas. Why? Because according to Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, 66% of our brain is dedicated to processing imagery. Thus, it’s easier for our brains to  digest a concept visually.  In his presentation, Dan taught us how to communicate the who, what, when, why and how through pictures… It’s not the person with the idea who delivers value; it’s the person who can communicate the idea so that others understand that delivers value.

Flow Like Water

Magdalena Yesil’s Dreamtalk was inspirational. She was the first investor and founding Board Member of Salesforce and author of Power Up: How Smart Women Win in the New Economy.

When Magdalena was leaving Turkey to attend Stanford graduate school, her family threw a bucket of water down the river, saying no matter what comes before you, may you be like the water and have the power to flow. An example of this is when after working in the tech field for 20 years, she couldn’t find a job. At the time, there was a glass ceiling in Silicon Valley and she was older than the other women graduate students coming into the workforce. In response, she started her own venture capital firm, where she invested in Salesforce and founded the first companies dedicated to commercializing internet access, e-commerce infrastructure, and electronic payments.

In work and life, it’s inevitable that we’ll face periods when we’re in the desert. Magdalena’s story and metaphor of flowing like water serves as a mental cue in times when we need to be resilient.