Gratitude Monday: welcome

As I begin week four of my new job, I’m deeply grateful that I landed so well. Not only is the work rewarding and the compensation good, but my colleagues continually amaze me with their welcoming approach to me joining the team.

Even the fringes of the team—I’ll be on a con call, and someone from a product management-adjacent group will IM me to welcome me. Also—he’ll keep working until way late his time (Amsterdam) to give me access to GitLab.

Two immediate colleagues scheduled one-hour calls in week two to outline things I’ll need to know to function efficiently. One, the technical program manager MG, confided something extraordinary: the team interviewed several candidates for my position. I, she said, was the only one whom all five people said was their first choice.

First—I was unanimously first choice! Second—she wanted me to know that. That’s just amazing.

She also said that she knew within 15 seconds of the group phone interview (I spoke with her and the two other PMs) that she’d love working with me.

A couple of times on team calls, when something’s been mentioned, MG has IMed me to give me context. Also, on one call we were discussing one of the software products that will eventually be mine. The expectation is that this needs tweaking for user experience to work until it can be replaced. I wanted to clarify:

Me: “So—we need to put in enough effort to keep it going as an interim, for…six…18 months?”

As my manager in our conference room was starting to nod in a funny way, MG in Dallas interjected.

MG: “[Bas Bleu]—just so you know, ‘interim’ here probably means 36 months.”

Me: “Okay, then.”

At the first overall business unit weekly update meeting, my manager introduced me to the group. At the end of the meeting, the SVP came over, introduced herself to me and arranged to set up a 30-minute meeting with her, a get-to-know-one-another meeting.

So, the last time in my career that a global SVP did that for a regular worker bee was…never.

I do not by any means imagine this was particular to me; I expect she does it for anyone who joins her team. But during our chat, she said some things that were directly for me.

One: because I have no background in cyber security, she urged me (using her own experience as example) to make use of the company’s tuition reimbursement benefit. I’ve never had a senior executive say, “Here—we have this money and you should use it all up.” But she was also saying that they want to invest in me, they want me to be successful, and they’re thinking long-term.

Secondly, she told me how JN, the hiring VP, explained to her the team’s choice of me to join them. She took a yellow stickie and drew a circle (red in the following diagrams).

“This represents the team’s skillset and expertise.”

Then she drew another circle, like this black one:

“This is how the second-place candidate’s skills and experience mapped to the team’s.”

Then she drew a different intersecting set of circles (mine in green):

“This is what you bring to the team.”

Well, blow me if that’s not true. That’s pretty much been the case in every job I’ve had, and so I’ve worked extra hard to “fit in”, to become “more like” my colleagues. But they recognized the delta, and they value it.

This past week, I ran into her in the corridor outside the ladies’ loo. She was evidently showing her parents around, and she stopped and introduced me to both of them. Later on they passed my desk and she noticed that the light overhead was not, well, lighted. (This is some kind of Thing—when I get in around 0700, the entire area is blazing with lights. Then throughout the day, the one over my desk dims to the point that it feels like a cocktail bar. I can see the computer monitor fine, but if I want to read anything hard copy, I have to go to the break room.) She made a point of getting me to put in a Facilities request, and said if I needed a brighter work area, I could use her office the rest of the week, as she’d be traveling.

With colleagues at every level of this organization taking the time and making the effort to bring me in, I have an extraordinarily huge number of things to be grateful for today.