Investing In Yourself

What do you wish you had learned earlier in life, and what do you do intentionally now to keep learning?

That program in particular is very near and dear to my heart. When I first moved from law firm to McKesson, I realized very quickly that it was a completely different role and that I needed some guidance. And I actually wasn’t a member of NAPABA before that.
I had a coach, an executive coach about three, maybe four years ago, who basically told me I was terrible at managing my time. And what he meant by…It was very frank feedback. He said, “You spend a lot of time on working, working with others, working on projects, thinking about what’s coming around the corner and planning for that. You don’t spend any time on your own professional development.” And he told me, “You really need to carve out some time to do that.” And so I did start to put time on my calendar every week to carve it out and to tackle a project, a skill.

What kind of skills have you worked on? I’m just curious, at other times when you did use that time to work on a skill, what kinds of skills?

Communicating with competence and confidence. Not in the large group setting, like not in front of an audience, but in meet settings, and in particular by video. And that was right about the time where I started to lead a team that was distributed across six locations. And so we started being either by phone or by video more.
That was one thing that I worked on. And just learning to read the room in a different way, read the screen.

That’s a tough skill. I hadn’t thought about that, even though I do so much screen work now. But it’s one-on-one interviews with you, for example, that’s a lot easier. How do you read a screen? What are some tips that you have for that? Because a lot of people, I would imagine, are up against those challenges in today’s remote and distributed workforce type of world.

Right. So, I use the gallery view quite a bit in Zoom or Webex or whatever format we’re using, so I can kind of scan the room, scan the virtual room. And to really pause and be intentional about asking, “Thuy, did you have something that you wanted to add?”
Or reading the cues when someone comes off mute and it looks like they’re about to say something. It’s challenging, of course, when you have people who aren’t on camera. When you have a mix of the on-camera and off-camera, it can be hard, for sure.