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Outage is a 4-letter Word

Kirsten Wolberg

11.08.21

High-tech is high-pressure. In this clip, Kirsten gives us an inside look at what it means to be on the leading edge of an industry, and some of the pressures that come with that crown.

Summary:

High-tech is high-pressure. In this clip, Kirsten gives us an inside look at what it means to be on the leading edge of an industry, and some of the pressures that come with that crown.

Thuy

At the various companies where you have held senior executive roles where there's certain performance factors across the board, regardless of whatever company you were at, that you always looked for and measured among your team members.
Kirsten_Wolberg

Kirsten Wolberg

So, one of the things that we always measured was a customer satisfaction metric of some sort, because ultimately we are all here -- if Chuck Schwab taught me anything, he taught me use the customer first, even before customer first language, customer centricity language, all of that didn't exist. Chuck understood fundamentally that if you were going to be successful in business, you had to start with a customer. You had to fundamentally understand that customer, what their needs are, and you need to sit on the same side of the table as that customer. And so I took that learning, just visceral learning to every single company that I was at in terms of making sure you're measuring whether that customer is external or external. How are we doing and how are we meeting your needs? So, that's a big one. Because I've always been in technology availability and performance of the technology that you are offering.

So, when I was being media trained at Salesforce, I learned, you cannot say outage - outage is like a four letter word in technology. You never talk about no, we had a service eruption. We did not have an outage. So, the fact that we are in and always on 24 by 7 and the technologies and the companies where I've worked, you can't have an outage. You can't be in a situation where the customer who is counting on you can't use your product. So, availability and performance were always really, really important measurements and metrics as well. And then employee kind of pulse, employee satisfaction. The Gallup study really talks about this concept of engagement. And so measuring the employee engagement, I talk about engagement as how much do you love your job, is the engagement factor. So, do you love it like you're going to stay late and work on something because you want to, not because you have to. Do you wake up in the morning, like, oh gosh, I dreamt about this. I can't wait to get to work so I can figure that out. Or I can't wait to get to my Zoom, to work with people to figure that out in the COVID era. Those are the kinds of measurements that I think are really important. So, you've got your customer, you've got kind of the performance of the technology and then how your employees are feeling and how happy they are to at work and how much they love their jobs.