Reflections on the Impact of Requisite Organization On My Career

Speaker A One of the things that the theory or the approach really helped me with was reflecting back on my own career and career development. It helped me understand where I had some challenges along the way and I could look back and use theory to see how my work changed from position to position. And something that I had always done when I took on a new position was to set some time around how long I thought I needed to be in a particular role in order to accomplish certain things. So the theory really did help me understand what career development was all about at a gut level and also career transitions and the kinds of experiences or challenges that an individual can have in making a transition from one role to another. Which is more complex or level of work is more complex? When I started out in teaching, I was about 21 years of age. And I'd say that a teaching role. I was in the public school, high school level. But a teaching role is probably an entry level two role with time span or time frames around three to four months. We've often talked in Ro about the fact that Young University this is the level at which Young University grads, whether they be teachers, engineers, lawyers, tend to work at that level, entry level two. And from there I moved out of the public school system and into business and industry and training and development. My first position was as what they called a supervisor of training. And I remember there having to sit down and develop business plans or educational plans that went out over a twelve month period. So I not only had to do the planning, but also had to implement the plan and make necessary changes and evaluate it. So I'd say that the role that I took on in business and industry, that first role as a training supervisor was probably about a mid two to maybe a high, pushing toward a high two. After about a year in the company that I was working with, I was promoted to the head of the training department. This is a very different role. No longer individual contributor. I had five training supervisors and an administrative assistant reporting to me. May not have had the concepts and the language at that time to understand what was going on, but I can now look back and say, AHA, I had my own planning work to do. I had to integrate the work of the staff beneath me. There was lots of coaching to be done. So clearly this was a far more complex role in at least an entry level, let's say a high two or entry level three again required to develop business plans that extended out over a year and a half to in some cases two years. And as I said, I could feel the difference viscerally in the complexity of the work, how the work had changed not just in some surface sense, but in a very fundamental sense. So after Gimbals I went off and I joined another company and my challenge there was to build their management development function. I think that role was probably at about the same level as the role that I had previously, again at least a high two, to perhaps a mid three role, my level three roles. I had had a succession of level three roles probably starting at about the age of 30 and then moving up to about age 40. And I realized that at age 40 I made a career change. And at that point some questions were answered by Requisite Organization for me because I had started to feel not challenged or a bit bored. And then all of a sudden I had this opportunity in the pharmaceutical industry and again, given what was the changes that were going on in the industry and the company's needs in terms of adapting to those changes, it provided an opportunity to do far more challenging work. And I could feel the jump and certainly on the front end, it was a challenge for me, but one that I was able to handle and found very, very satisfying. I had taken gone through a number of career assessments or career discussions and what started to come out was the fact that I was probably working beneath my level of capability. How much of that had to do with being a woman or being a visible minority, I don't know. But clearly once I had the opportunity to move up, I grasped it and moved well with it. When I joined the pharmaceutical industry, I was probably in my, I think I was somewhere in my mid forty s. And as I look back at that experience, that was the time when I also met Elliot Jackson, the whole Requisite Organization approach. But I look at that ten year period because I was in the pharmaceutical industry for about ten years and I can really now sense plot how the work changed was becoming more complex because of the challenges in the industry, because of the initiatives that the company wanted to accomplish. So I can sense the real change in the complexity and also changes within myself, how I was growing and developing in order to be able to meet the challenges that was put in front of me. And a major support of course, was the whole Requisite organization approach. And meeting and working with someone like Elliot Jackson and the Nancy Lees of the world, it really helped solidify a lot of the knowledge that I needed not just about the organization, but about people and their capability and their growth and development. It solidified a lot of that knowledge and gave me a really strong foundation to stand on, as well as I think in many ways helping me make those developmental transitions. I found that one of the things that Requisite Organization did for me because of the clarity of the principles and the concepts, really helped me get better with what I would call not just confidence, but unmitigated communication. Sitting at the table with senior people, most of whom didn't look like me, they were different texts and a different color. But being able to sit at the table in the rough and tumble world of acquisitions and mergers and confidently put forward solutions and approaches, and once I had learned the Requisite organization approach, I had this leap in confidence about what I knew and the value of what I knew. And it not only helped in terms of actually doing the work, but also in being accepted and being able to handle the challenges in a male dominated environment, but to do that in a way that was constructive for myself and for others. Something that was very important to my being able to get along in life well or be successful, is the fact that I grew up in a home where I was taught how important it was to respect myself and respect others and what that truly meant. I had an opportunity to be raised by a father who believed that girls should have the same kind of opportunities that boys should have, that I should learn how to take care of myself. In addition to that, I think when I graduated from university as a young teacher, going to the front lines in the so called inner city was another opportunity to develop some skill and some awareness of how to get along well in the world. While intellect is important and what you know is important, being able to make contact with other people in a way that respects them and respects yourself is extremely important. And I had that foundation, and I think it's one of the reasons also that when Requisite came along, I was quite attracted to it because it seemed to fit already with who I was and what I wanted to be. The philosophies that my parents had and the way I was raised and many of my experiences put me in a position to be able to deal with a tough character like Elliot Jacks. It was very important to me, for obvious reasons, that once we got started with implementation at Roche, that Elliot be able to work well with the president and the senior managers. And many times he and I had to have conversations about the way he approached others, making sure that he was showing respect by listening to them and responding in positive ways, rather than what Elliot had a tendency to do was to quickly cut people off. Here's. Requisite, I found the truth. Here it is. Let's accept it and get on with it. Well, we know that that doesn't work too well, doesn't work well with children because they learn to say no at two. So you can imagine how obviously adults would respond to this. But Elliot and I had many and it know open, honest communications, unmitigated communications about how his approach or his style needed to change in order for not only him to be successful, but just as importantly, for this project to be successful.