Kudos All Around – Job Performance

More good news: Callan just got a performance bonus at work. It was completely unexpected and very welcome. Congratulations, Callan!

John is also doing very well at work. He has been moved to a different section that better utilizes his skills and his relationships with some key customers. He got right to work and quickly discovered an early-stage proposal that could be greatly strengthened based on what he already knew about the customer’s needs, as well as information he had gathered researching his company’s other products. At his recommendation and direction, they rewrote the proposal to take it in a completely new and better direction. John was then the key technical presenter during a 2-day meeting with the potential customer.

John already personally knew the individuals representing the customer from work he had done in Albuquerque, and they were very glad to see him on this proposal. His management made note of all that, and have put through a request for a promotion. We’ll see if the promotion goes through, but even if it doesn’t, I don’t think I’m exaggerating by saying that John single-handedly saved this proposal. (John is too humble to ever say anything like that himself, but this is my blog and I can call it how I see it).

Laura also had a major work victory, and this time, all I have to do is quote her coworkers’ feedback, and nobody can accuse me of exaggerating. For context, Laura works at as a technical professional at a consultancy. Her usual tasks include data analysis as well as project management. And she’s a great public speaker.

Laura doesn’t do sales, but a sales team in her company needed a technical presenter in a hurry during a proposal presentation, and they reached out to her.

Here’s the situation, in Laura’s words: “Yesterday I was asked to join a sales call to answer one of the oral interview questions (provided to the pursuit team 15 min prior to the call), and I only had 5 min prior to the call warning plus 20 min during the call while the pursuit team presented their pitch deck to prepare my response.“

She goes on to explain, “While I was giving my response, the other folks [Laura’s coworkers in sales] were in one of our side chats sending these messages:”

“Laura is AWESOME”…”She really is. I have goosebumps.”

Laura’s company also has an excellent system for more formal reporting of positive feedback. A couple of days later, the feedback came in from three different coworkers on the sales team.

Her first coworker wrote, “Hi Laura, I want to give you a big shout out for coming into our presentation yesterday on 5 minutes notice to deliver a great answer to the client’s question yesterday. You stepped into a really difficult situation since you had no prior context of this proposal or presentation. You delivered a very thoughtful and professional client example to address the question. Our team really appreciates the great contribution on incredible short notice. THANK YOU!”

Her second coworker wrote, “The format for orals includes questions delivered fifteen minutes before the session begins. One of the questions was a bit unexpected and also hit an area that the proposal team felt less confident about. I reached out to a number of persons to help immediately. Laura answered the call. Having worked with Laura, I had great confidence that she would make our team look professional when talking about her data strategy and governance projects. She did so much more than that. She was calm, collected, detailed, and spoke with articulation and eloquence. She likely presented better than those of us who had prepared slides and stories. It was a tour de force performance and left the entire team feeling confident about winning this work. I was confident that Laura would be good. She was outstandingly excellent and I am so glad I asked for her help.“

Her third coworker wrote, “Laura, I just wanted to provide you huge Kudos for knocking it out of the par for our demo/question session. We pulled you out of whatever you were doing, gave you a 5 minutes update of the situation, asked you to answer a scenario with about 10 questions and be ready to present in only 20 minutes. When it was your turn, you shined! It was incredible. You were professional, articulate, thorough, clear, concise and delivered the answer as a resident expert! I think our client was so impressed as well that they did not have one question for you. It was definitely a “Wow” moment. If we win this deal, your contribution will have definitely been a deciding factor. Thank you!!”

All I can say is “Wow!”

To send me a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Life Coaching for Neurodiverse Professionals