I’m Paula and I run the Global Sales Incentives Center in Brazil. I started at IBM as a temporary system administrator analyst. When I joined I just had left university, so my professional experience was almost ZERO! I faced several challenges: lack of knowledge on how the system worked, lack of knowledge on IBM culture and values, high pressure from the end users every month and so on. After few months of failure, I stop, took a deep breath, and made a decision: this was a great opportunity for me to grow as a person and as a professional in a great Tech Company and I was not going to loose it. 💪
So, I embraced this challenge with all of my soul and mindset, asked for feedback and started to learn. Learn not only thru formal courses but talking to the experienced tech team and the end users to understand their pain. After that I built a mental development plan and with the support of my manager, I started my journey. Was there failure? Of course!!! I failed several times, but in the next time I started over stronger and more experienced. As a result, in 6 months operating the system, we got excellent feedback from our end users, we stablished a partnership with the technical team improving the time spent to solve issues and reducing the stress to the end users.
And guess what: after almost 1 year I was hired as a formal IBMer and this was one of the happiest days of my life! Was that because of my technical skills running the system? Noooo. At least not in the beginning 😊 . The main reason was because of my strong growth mindset, embracing challenges as true opportunities to learn and my client focused behavior, dealing with empathy with our internal clients. This enabled me to learn fast and grow my skills. After this episode, I take the growth mindset philosophy as a “mantra” in everything I do, in my professional and personal life.
So, never give up, even in the hardest times you can always learn something new. 😄